The first challenge to the European order of the time came from the youthful new king of Prussia, Frederick II, who seized the opportunity of the death of Emperor Charles VI in May 1740 to invade and conquer the rich Habsburg province of Silesia, thus precipitating the War of Austrian Succession (17408). Europe at once divided into its two traditional warring camps, Prussia and France against Austria and Britain, and Bestuzhev continued the spirit of Ostermann's policy in the form of the Austrian alliance. Thus he naturally listed Prussia among Russia's enemies and Austrian ally Britain among Russia's friends. The bulk of Bestuzhev's activity during this war consisted not of genuine foreign policy, however, but rather of combating the plethora of intrigues mounted by the foreign powers in St Petersburg for the favours of Russian diplomatic and military assistance. Inparticular, a strong and well-financed French party appealed with some success to the sentiments of Empress Elizabeth, who had as a child entertained romantic illusions, fostered by Peter I, of marrying Louis XV of France. Bestuzhev succeeded in maintaining an independent Russian policy, but the intrigue and counter-intrigue confined that policy largely to an awkward neutrality such that Russia took little part in the war and none in the peace settlement. The only power to profit by the war was Prussia, which maintained its conquest of Silesia (Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle).
Two new factors weighed heavily in the political calculations that followed. The simpler was the conviction of Empress Elizabeth that the newly expanded power of Prussia was dangerous primarily to Russia and hence must be radically diminished or preferably eliminated. The second was the dissatisfaction of all of the major combatants of the previous war with their allies. The British and the French had pursued chiefly their own maritime interests, leaving their continental allies unsupported. What followed, then, was that celebrated reshuffling of the alliance system known as the Diplomatic Revolution. Hence in the wake of the war, the allies changed sides, and the next war found an Anglo-Prussian alliance against a Franco-Austrian alliance. As Russia was already the ally of Austria, and France had now become the antagonist of Prussia, it seemed logical enough for the court of Elizabeth to pursue its own vendetta against Prussia by extending its alliance system to France, which it did in January 1756 (Treaty of Versailles). The consummation of this series of realignments left Prussia as the smallest of the continental great powers - and supported only by maritime Britain - facing the three large continental powers, France, Austria and Russia together. It was a mortal threat, to say the least.
Frederick fought with characteristic genius, exploiting the opportunities that ramshackle coalitions always provide their enemies, but it was an awesome and daunting challenge that he confronted. The Russian army in particular administered him damaging defeats at Gross-Jagersdorf in 1757 and at Zorndorf in 1758, and an Austro-Russian army dealt him another serious blow at Kunersdorf in 1759. The Russians occupied Konigsberg and East Prussia in 1758 and Berlin in 1760. Frederick despaired of victory and actually sought an honourable death fighting in the front lines of battle. He was saved, however, by fortunes beyond his influence.
The heir to the Russian throne was Elizabeth's nephew, Grand Duke Peter, Duke of Holstein, an enthusiastic admirer of Frederick. The commanders of the Russian armies all dreaded the consequences of dealing to Frederick's armies a death-blow only to discover on the morrow the demise of Elizabeth, who was well known to be aged and ailing, and the accession to the Russian throne of Frederick's protector, Peter III. Hence they refused to press their campaign with the customary vigour and opportunism. Bestuzhev himself was not above the suspicion of being caught in this net of intrigue, as he was on close terms with some of the Russian field commanders and was necessarily sensitive to opinion at the 'young court'. He was consequently relieved of his duties in 1758. In these circumstances, the war dragged on until Elizabeth's death obliged her enemies in January 1762, and what had been anticipated materialised: Peter III left the coalition and offered Frederick both peace and an alliance. Peter was himself, however, one of those royal transients of the era of palace revolutions. He ruled a mere half year before being overturned and murdered. In the Peace of Hubertusburg, Frederick retained Silesia, and Russia acquired nothing.
Russian foreign policy of the era of palace revolutions, then, had cost the country a good deal and gained it little but unrealised potential influence.
Catherine II
In the eighteenth century, the real sport of kings - of despots enlightened or not - was the aggrandisement of power. Enlightened despotism as a paradigm of modernisation conceived and driven by the state was as unpopular in eighteenth-century Russia as it was imperative. According to a celebrated European witticism of the age, the government of Russia in the era was a despotism tempered by assassination. No idle joke, assassination and the threat of it were a persistent means of intimidating progressive governments all over Europe in the eighteenth century - the age of the nobles' revolt.[101]Catherine II discovered early the force of conservative reaction - it spoiled her Legislative Assembly and her plans to improve the lot of the serfs. Her successor Paul paid for it with his life, and his successor Alexander was made to fear for his own. In the words of Catherine's most ambitious historian, V A. Bil'basov: 'It is a big mistake to think that there is no public opinion in Russia. Because there are no proper forms ofthe expression of public opinion, it is manifested in improper ways, by fits and starts, solely at crucial historical junctures, with a force that is all the greater and in forms that are all the more peculiar.'[102] The nobles' revolt weighed especially heavily on politics at home, but, as we shall see, foreign policy was not utterly immune to its influence either.
Catherine soon emerged as one of the master diplomats of the time and perhaps, in terms of material achievements, the grand champion of the competition for aggrandisement in her era. Proceeding evidently neither by a blueprint nor without some distinct conception ofRussian interests, she was a consummate opportunist, not always without mistakes certainly. All politics, she famously observed, were reduced to three words, 'circumstance, conjecture, and conjuncture',[103] and her diplomacy would be a monument to the principle, if principle is what it was.
If Peter I's achievements in Sweden and Poland had been considerable, there had been some backsliding, some lost ground, in both areas during the era of palace revolutions, and Catherine was to address herself to articulation and repair. In both Poland and Sweden, she would meddle in constitutional questions, as different as they were in the two environments, bribing and supporting political parties in Sweden with money, in Poland supporting or suppressing them with arms. The Turkish challenge she left for the presentation of opportunity.
In the meantime, Catherine evidently appreciated what her neighbouring great powers demonstrably did also, that the geographical position of Russia in Europe enabled it to combine effectively with or against both the weak border states and the more imposing great powers beyond them, while it was difficult for the other powers to bring their strength to bear effectively against Russia. She exploited these advantages artfully.
The first serious issue to arise was Polish. The Polish constitution was notorious for the vulnerability of its vagaries: elective monarchy, liberum veto and the armed confederacies that nourished seemingly perpetual civil war. In this instance, August II was growing old and ill, suggesting a succession crisis. Austria would support a Saxon candidate, because he would be hostile to Prussia. Catherine had her own favourite, a genuine Piast, her own former lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski, acceptable also to Frederick II. Catherine then chose to arrange an alliance with Prussia addressed chiefly to the Polish issue. When Augustus died in October 1763, Catherine and Frederick signed a treaty to support Poniatowski and to maintain unchanged the anarchical Polish constitutional arrangements (April 1764).
There were gains and losses here. If the gains were obvious, this was the first time that Russia had shared power with a German state in Poland, an area formerly a nearly exclusive Russian sphere of influence. Catherine's chief adviser in foreign policy, Nikita Panin, regarded the arrangement as the foundation of his 'Northern System', a series of alliances in which he intended to include Britain, Sweden and Denmark, a system dedicated to keeping the peace of the North and preventing the intrusion of disturbing influences from the most conspicuous south European system of Austria, France and Spain. The Northern System gave Russia little leverage against the Turks, but so long as Austria was allied with France and France continued to support the Turks, Russian alliance with Austria made little sense. On the other hand, an alliance with Denmark in March 1765 and the manipulation of the triumph of the pro-Russian Cap Party in the Swedish Riksdag at the same time enhanced the Northern System.
Catherine then turned her attention in good Enlightenment fashion to the rights of the religious dissidents in Poland, and in this question she overplayed her hand. She and Panin were willing to countenance limited constitutional reforms in Poland - though Frederick was not - but only in exchange for rights of toleration for religious minorities, while the Poles were largely adamant on the issue of Catholic supremacy, and so the prospects of reform on both issues soon foundered. Orthodox and Catholic confederacies formed, the former supported by Russian military intervention, and the conflict dragged on for years, opening up just such nefarious prospects as the conflict with the Turks that soon ensued.
It was perhaps predictable that a protracted Russian military engagement in Poland would draw into the maelstrom of East European politics a conflict with the other two border states, Turkey and Sweden, as well. The Turks reacted first. Alarmed at the portended shift of the balance of power in their part of the world and encouraged by the powers that shared their fears, the French and the Austrians, they responded to a cross-border raid of Cossack irregulars in summer 1768 and declared war.
The Russian military campaign may be characterised as distinguished and difficult at once. A variety of able commanders, Petr Rumiantsev, Aleksandr Suvorov, Grigorii Potemkin, dealt the Turks serious blows. Meantime, however, the situation grew immensely complicated as a variety of new factors intruded.
The first was Catherine's astonishingly stubborn and ambitious pretentions. She was determined to pursue the campaign to a glorious conclusion, to diminish the Turks if not ruin them and drive them out of Europe. These aspirations could only raise apprehensions elsewhere. The French were naturally committed to the Turks. The Austrians were threatened by Russian successes. The alliance of small and indigent Prussia with St Petersburg required Frederick to pay throughout the war subsidies that he could ill afford. The Swedes naturally found in Russian involvement in two fronts already an opportunity that they could scarcely overlook. In August 1772, the young Gustav III executed a coup d'etat to scrap the constitution of 1720, which had placed power in the hands of the four estates of the Riksdag (the Age of Freedom), enabling Russia (and other powers) to manipulate Swedish party politics advantageously. Gustav thus restored constitutional absolutism while Catherine was too engaged elsewhere to do anything about it. In fact, this development portended a new war on yet another front, and Catherine apprehensively deployed troops to deal with it, though it did not actually happen. At the same time, the plague broke out in Moscow (1771), and the stresses and strains of the war in the form of tax and recruitment burdens on the population provoked the infamous Pugachev rebellion (September 1773). This accumulation of liabilities would have undermined the resolve of a pantheon of heroes, but it did not move Catherine, and the longer she persisted, the more the powers of Europe moved to persuade her.
The resolution ofwhat appearedto be an adamantine stalemate of Catherine against Europe was one that had long been bruited about the chanceries of the continent, and it was recommended in this instance by the imaginative covetousness of Frederick: the partition of Poland. The Poles were helpless to resist, their territory would substitute for at least some of the sacrifices that Catherine might demand of the Turks, and the acquisitions that Austria and Prussia would share would reconcile them to Catherine's gains in the south. And so in August 1772 the deal was struck. Meantime, the Russo-Turkish War continued until the Turks, finally exhausted, conceded the essence of defeat and signed with St Petersburg the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi (July 1774), one of the most signal Russian military and diplomatic achievements of the era. It stipulated - ominously - the independence of the Crimea; the right of free commercial navigation on the Black Sea and through the straits; a large Turkish indemnity; the right to fortify Azov and Taganrog; annexation of the Black Sea coast between the Dnieper and the Bug; and ill-defined, controversial rights to some kind of protection of Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
The turning of the 1770s to the 1780s marks a watershed in the nature and aspirations of Catherine's foreign policy. The new orientation is explained by several factors; in fact, by several developments of simple good fortune that came Catherine's way quite without any effort on her part.
The first of these was the by-product of the constant rivalry between Austria and Prussia. Joseph II, relentlessly restless, had long harboured the scheme of the so-called Bavarian Exchange. He wished to acquire large parts of Bavaria for Austria, compensating the Bavarian dynasty by the cession of the Austrian Netherlands. Opportunity arose in December 1777, when the Bavarian branch of the Wittelsbach family died without heirs, leaving a complicated and disputed succession. Joseph struck an agreement with the legitimate heir in a cadet branch of the family, the Elector Palatine, and thereupon decided to execute his claims to Bavarian dominions. Naturally, Frederick II objected to uncompensated Austrian aggrandisement, and he called upon his ally Catherine for support and for mediation of the conflict. In the meantime, Joseph similarly called upon his ally in Paris. Catherine was most reluctant to be involved in a war in Germany, as tension with the Turks threatened to renew the conflict in the south of Russia. At the same time, the French, on the verge of entering the American War of Independence, were similarly determined not to be encumbered by a war in Germany. As the crisis played out, the French and the Russians agreed to mediate jointly between the two German powers. The result was the signature of the Treaty of Teschen (May 1779), whereby Joseph acquired modest portions of Bavaria while promising to support comparable Prussian acquisitions elsewhere in Germany. For St Petersburg, the most significant feature of the problem was the acquisition by Russia of the status as guarantor of the German constitution, a serious gain in prestige as well as an instrument for legitimate participation in German politics.
The second such opportunity to come Catherine's way was the American War of Independence. In February 1778, France entered the war in alliance with the rebellious colonies. Virtually simultaneously, then, the two great land powers of Central Europe and the two great maritime powers of Western Europe had entered traditional conflicts with each other such as to divert all their attention away from that increasingly Russian sphere ofinfluence, Eastern Europe. Catherine did not hesitate to see her opportunity or to exploit it.
A British war always entailed the issue of neutral trade, in particular the neutrals' doctrine of 'free ships, free goods'. The British maintained that if trade in neutral ships between a mother country and its colonies was illegal in peacetime - the rules of mercantilism - then it was illegal in wartime. To put the matter another way, London insisted that neutral shipping had no right to deliver a combatant country from the pressure of its enemy's hostilities. The neutrals, on the other hand, invariably attempted to step into the breach that the British navy inflicted on trade between French colonies and the mother country. The American war simply revived an ancient issue.
In these circumstances, the British brought pressure against the Scandinavian neutrals and the Dutch. In this instance, the northern neutrals appealed to Catherine to support their cause. Catherine saw her opportunity and announced first her principles and subsequently the treaties of the League of Armed Neutrality (August-September 1780): no paper blockades; freedom of neutrals to trade along the coasts of belligerents; free ships, free goods; and a narrow definition of contraband. Eventually supported by Prussia and Austria as well, the league brought considerable pressure against British maritime practice. Wherein lay Catherine's advantage? It helped to free Russia from excessive dependence on British shipping. It enabled the neutrals to carry Russian trade formerly carried by British shipping. The force of the League of Armed Neutrality persuaded the British to make serious adjustments for a time in their cherished maritime practices. It won Catherine considerable diplomatic favour all over northern Europe, and in the wake ofthe lustre of her triumph at Teschen, it enhanced yet more Catherine's and Russia's prestige. It was a victory of considerable significance for Catherine.
These developments enabled Catherine to reorient her foreign policy from the formerly northern European impetus of Panin's system onto the increasingly promising direction of the south. The turn towards the south made a good deal of sense from the viewpoint of the economic development of the empire. Peter I's incorporation of the Baltic coast had paid off in handsome commercial opportunities. In the south, moreover, the land was richer, it was sparsely settled, the growing season was longer, and the ancient Greekports in the area illustrated clearly enough the commercial possibilities of the region.
In the meantime, a struggle for influence at the Russian court climaxed such as to serve the new orientation of Russian policy. Nikita Panin lost the struggle to Prince Grigorii Potemkin and his associate in Catherine's foreign chancery, A. A. Bezborodko. What the change portended was the abandonment of the Prussian alliance and Panin's favoured Northern System, its emphasis on peace and the status quo, and a turn towards the grander ambitions of Potemkin in south Russia at the expense of the Turks. The project of driving the Turks out of the Balkans was the kind of affair that appealed to Catherine's vanity.
The new outlook was soon embodied in an exchange of notes between Catherine and Joseph II, an exchange that stipulated the notorious grand design known as the 'Greek Project'. It envisioned a partitioning of the Ottoman dominions of the Balkans between Russia and Austria; the establishment of an independent kingdom of Dacia in Romania, presumably for Prince Potemkin; and, in the event of sufficient military success, the complete destruction of Turkey and the restoration of the ancient Byzantine Empire under Catherine's grandson, appropriately named Constantine.
In the wake of the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi, the Crimea had degenerated into civil war between the Russian and the Turkish parties. In April 1783, the last native puppet ruler of the territory abdicated in favour of the Russian crown, and the annexation of the territory to Russia was proclaimed. It is possible that Catherine was thus trying to provoke a renewal of the Turkish war, but the Turks prudently held their fire.
The war was nevertheless not long in coming. Catherine's new ally, Joseph II, paid her a visit, and together they took a spectacular and provocative trip to New Russia in the south in summer 1787. By this time a Russian Black Sea fleet graced the harbour of Sebastopol. The visit itself was a tangible symbol of the widely rumoured Greek Project, and it sufficed to provoke a Turkish declaration of war. Swedish and Polish responses to the opportunity were not long in coming. Gustav III of Sweden declared war on Russia in July 1788. Fortunately for Russia, his campaign was handicapped by the revolt of some of his officers, and he was forced to conclude the Treaty of Verela (August 1790) on the basis of the territorial status quo ante bellum.
The campaign against the Turks was hampered by a revolt in the Austrian Netherlands, the death ofJoseph II and the diversion of Austrian attention to the challenge of the French Revolution. Catherine thus had to content herself with much less than her dreams of the Greek Project. The Treaty of Jassy (January 1792) enabled Russia to annex Ochakov and the territory between the Dniester and the Bug and recognised the annexation of the Crimea. Catherine did not, however, surrender the Greek Project, which was written explicitly into the Austro-Russian treaty of January 1795.
Neither had the Poles neglected the opportunity provided by Russian war with both the Turks and the Swedes. Unfortunately for them, they were engaged by the intrigues of King Frederick William II of Prussia in a series of illusions both foreign and domestic. Counting on the support of a new alliance with Prussia, the Poles devoted themselves belatedly to constitutional reform, scrapping elective monarchy, the liberum veto and the practice of confederations alike (the constitution of 3 May 1791). Succession to the throne was settled on a hereditary basis in the House of Saxony. These noble efforts soon fell victim to characteristically Polish ill fortune, however, as the Russians made peace with Sweden and Turkey, and the coming of the French Revolution turned the attention of Prussia and Austria westwards. Catherine had in these circumstances no trouble sponsoring a party of her own in Poland and sent an army to support it. In the face ofthis challenge, Frederick William shamelessly deserted his new Polish ally and consummated an alliance with Russia for a new partition of Poland (January 1793). The second partition provoked a patriotic revolt led by the hero of the American Revolution, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, but the combined actions of the armies of Russia, Prussia and Austria condemned it to fail, and the third partition consummated the oblivion of Poland (several treaties of 1795-7).
By reference to the standards prevailing in the age, the foreign policy of Catherine was a great success. She conquered 200,000 square miles of new territory and expanded the Russian population from 19,000,000 to 36,000,000.
Yet there is here another element of this story, one taken too little into account. If the opposition of the Russian nobility to the reforming aspirations of the monarchy is well known, its opposition to Russian foreign policy is less familiar.
The Greek Project, for example, provoked dissent even in the inner circle of Catherine's government. As the French ambassador reported in 1786, 'the Russian ministers' loathed the plans of Potemkin.
Their secret wishes are for peace; war and conquests do not offer them any personal advantage; each of them sees in [war and conquests].. .complications for their departments [of government] and fatal possibilities for the empire. [Alexander] Vorontsov fears the stagnation of commerce; Bezborodko, numerous obstacles in the course of diplomacy; all of them [fear] the growth of the power of Prince Potemkin, [but] everyone dissimulates his opinions for fear of losing the favor of the empress.5
The Austrian ambassador, Louis de Cobenzl, reported the same attitudes in 1795: 'The entire Russian ministry, without exception, disapproves this project of the empress.'6 The second partition of Poland exhibits the same conflict. The opposition gathered around Alexander Vorontsov, but it was the expansionist party around Potemkin and the Zubovs that triumphed.
In fact, the phenomenon was far older and broader than we have appreciated. We may recall the division of Russian society over Ivan IV's Livonian War or the Dolgorukiis and Golitsyns who transferred the capital briefly back to Moscow in I727. An English diplomat characterised the nobility's attitude typically in the 1740s:
5 Louis-Philippe de Segur, Memoires, 3 vols. (Paris: Eymery 1827), vol. II, pp. 293-4.
6 Cobenzl to Thugut, 5 January 1795; Alfred von Arneth (ed.), 'Thugut und sein politisches System', Archivfur osterreichische Geschichte, 42 (1870): 442.
There is not one among [them] who does not wish St Petersburg at the bottom of the sea and all the conquered provinces gone to the devil; then they could all move back to Moscow, where, in the vicinity of their estates, they could all live better and cheaper. Moreover, they are convinced that it would in general be much better for Russia to have no more to do with the affairs of Europe than it formerly did but to limit itself to the defense of its own [traditional] old territories.[104]
The nobility wished in particular to limit the burden of armaments as much as possible.
And yet the remarkable nineteenth-century commercial progress of the newly founded port city of Odessa does speak pointedly to the breadth of Catherine's vision.[105] In any event, Catherine was obviously able to master dissent in foreign policy as she was not able to do in reform at home. And yet, the social dynamic of protest in foreign policy continued. It was clearly present in the reign of Tsar Paul, though it may not have been the chief motivation behind the tragedy of his demise. It was more important, yet still rarely decisive, in the reign of Alexander.
The metamorphosis of the 1790s
The notoriously expansionist nature of Catherine's foreign policy underwent decisive changes in the decade of the 1790s. The new policy was explained in part by alterations in the geopolitical environment.
First, Russian power by the end of Catherine's reign had acquired a secure hold on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. It thus abutted there on something as nearly like natural frontiers as it is possible to imagine in the circumstances of the time and place. The two seacoasts were of great economic advantage, and as Russia was not a major sea power, it is not easy to imagine its expansion beyond these seas.
Second, Russia had acquired the bulk of Poland, and the disappearance of an independent Poland both removed a source of instability in East European politics and brought Russia to the frontier of two more stable and more formidable states, Austria and Prussia.
The third factor was the most obvious, the grandest international phenomenon of the age, the ravages of the traditional international order by the French Revolution; or French imperialism in the ideological guise of the war of peoples against kings (the notorious Propaganda Decrees of November and December 1792).
And yet a fourth factor of quite another kind was probably both the most volatile and the most influential. It was simply the personality and values of the new sovereigns, Paul and Alexander.
If Catherine was a masterful opportunist, if her most stable principles were 'circumstance, conjecture, and conjuncture', Paul was her polar opposite. Notoriously motivated by antagonism to his mother and her policies and characterised by some remarkably spastic impulses, Paul was also motivated by the respectable ideas of the age, the ideas of the Panin party, in particular the idea that Russia needed peace, good order and development of its domestic resources. The most basic elements of Paul's unusual personality were moral- ism and dedication to political and social stability. Even the axiom oflegitimacy yielded in his outlook to considerations of political order. In most questions of principle, however, Paul was a literal-minded iconodule.[106]
The contrast with Catherine could not be clearer. Paul said that he regretted the partitions of Poland, and he released Tadeusz Kosciuszko from the Peter and Paul Fortress. He negotiated in 1797 with the French Republic in hopes of persuading it to moderate its foreign policy of conquest - but failed. He extended his protection to the Knights of Malta, whose principles of religion and morality he admired. Similarly, he offered the protection of Russia to the vulnerable German and Italian powers subject to the ravages of the French Revolution. From 1797-9, he three times summoned the powers of Europe to a general peace conference, but there was no response. When Bonaparte invaded Egypt, Paul signed an alliance with the Turks. Eventually convinced that the French Revolution threatened the entire order of Europe, he joined the Second Coalition. Subsequently convinced that the ambitions ofhis Coalition allies, the Austrians and the British, were as subversive of good order as those of the French, he demonstratively denounced them and left the coalition:
I united with the powers that appealed to me for aid against the common enemy. Guided by honour, I have come to the assistance ofhumanity . . . But, having taken the decision to destroy the present government of France, I have never wished to tolerate another power's taking its place and becoming in its turn the terror of the neighbouring Princes . . . the revolution of France, having overturned all the equilibrium of Europe, it is essential to re-establish it, but in a common accord.[107]
He added that he sought the pacification of Europe, the general wellbeing, that honour was his only guide. If these documents display a kind of school-marm mentality, was the Alexander of the seances with Julie Kriidener and the Holy Alliance altogether different?
Disappointed in his British allies of the Second Coalition and offended by British naval and commercial policy, he renewed the Armed Neutrality. More ambitiously, he attempted to make it the nucleus of a project that he called the Northern League, designed to include Russia, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Saxony and Hanover. The purpose of this constellation of powers was to achieve the pacification of Europe by the instrument of armed mediation. In particular, it was intended to restrain the ambitions of both Austria and France and to preserve the integrity of the German constitution. The Prussians, alas, lacked the heart for so bold a move, and so it failed. The Northern League, then, was reduced to the League of Armed Neutrality, and when the Prussians hesitated to perform Paul's conception of their duty by occupying Hanover, he sent an ultimatum demanding it within twenty-four hours. They complied on 30 March 1801.
By this time, the new First Consul of the French Republic undertook to charm and seduce the reputedly volatile Paul. He dispatched overtures and gifts to St Petersburg, and Paul is supposed to have swooned and fallen prey to Bonaparte's conniving schemes. In fact, Paul was interested in co-operating with any government in France that conducted itself with responsible restraint. Hence he dispatched his terms to Paris: if Bonaparte would respect the legitimate old order in Italy and Germany, then Paul suggested that he should take the crown of France on a hereditary basis 'as the only means of establishing a stable government in France and of transforming the revolutionary principles that have armed all of Europe against her'.[108] This last suggestion was evidently premature, and Bonaparte had no intention of forswearing French conquests. Paul's antagonism towards London was plain to see, however, and Bonaparte was able to manage the appearance of it sufficiently to create the false impression of a Franco-Russian alliance. As a British fleet entered the Baltic to deal with the Armed Neutrality, a conspiracy of assassins did their work in St Petersburg, and Paris soon faced a quite different government in Russia.
Only one contemporary seems to have understood the foreign policy of Russia in this reign, the Bavarian minister at the court of St Petersburg, the Chevalier Francois-Gabriel de Bray:
Russia has no system, the whims of its sovereign are its whole policy . . .
His intentions, however, are always the same. Perhaps no prince has been more constantly occupied with the same idea, more imbued with the same sentiment; and itis... not a little extraordinary to see this instability of actions joined so intimately to this constancy of principle.
A scrupulous probity, the sincere desire to see each one comeinto possession of his own legitimate rights, an innate penchant for despotism, a certain chivalrous turn of spirit, which makes him capable of the most generous resolutions, or the most rash, have constantly guided Paul in his relations with the other powers. He placed himself at the head of the Coalition by sentiment and not by interest . . .
This Monarch wanted to make himself the restorer of Europe, the one to redress all wrongs. He believed that in declaring that he had no designs of ambition, no interests [to pursue], he would prompt the others to do as much. . .[109]
Roderick McGrew comes to similar conclusions. 'Paul was a moralist rather than a politician; it was this which gave a utopian cast to those projects which were nearest to his heart, and a totalitarian tone to the ensemble of his poli- cies.'[110] A good example is his fascination with the Knights of Malta.
The knights of Malta, reformed and revived . . . were integral to his plans for confronting and defeating revolutionary Jacobinism. He . . . had invited Europe's displaced nobility to come to Russia where he was building a bastion against the destructive forces of the modern world ... It was for this great enterprise that he was taking over the knights, mobilizing the emigres, and inviting the pope's participation . . . From Paul's perspective, the knights would [also] . . . serve as a model for raising the moral consciousness of the Russian nobility . . . another means to further Paul's moral revolution.[111]
McGrew finds - as did the Chevalier de Bray - the fundamental elements of Paul's foreign policy to be stable and consistent. Paul found Russia's vital interests in a stable and lasting peace in Europe. He preferred hereditary monarchy, but the form of government was less important than its behaviour. It was the expansionist policy of the Directory rather than its republican nature that provoked Paul's hostility. Aggressive states were objectionable whether republican or monarchical.
His principles, in foreign as well as domestic policy, marked out the Russian future ... he attempted to open new directions in Russian foreign policy. In all of his efforts, he showed himself to be disinterested. He had no territorial claims to make; he offered himself as a mediator and ... a guardian [of the smaller powers]. The Europe Paul wanted to see was one in which each state would be safe, in which there was justice for the smaller principalities as well as protection . . . The ideas he pursued became the writ of post- Napoleonic Europe; what he failed to create at the end of the eighteenth century, Metternich finally realized between 1815 and 1848.[112]
Alexander I
As Alexander assumed power, the most urgent issue was the approach of the English fleet, which, having left the wreck of Copenhagen (2 April 1801) in its wake, was sailing for St Petersburg. Alexander assured his allies of the Armed Neutrality that he would not forsake them and their common principles, but he warned that these principles were subject to some accommodation with London. In the maritime convention embodying that accommodation, the English surrendered paper blockades, and the Russians surrendered everything else, including the issue of'free ships, free goods' as well as English rights of search of vessels under convoy. Denmark and Sweden adhered with obvious reluctance to the Anglo-Russian settlement. In the meantime, the British fleet left the Baltic, and Alexander lifted the Russian embargo on British trade.
There was irony in the Russian position in this conflict. According to the observation of a rather canny American diplomat on temporary assignment in Berlin, John Quincy Adams, 'the question whether free ships shall make free goods is to the empire of Russia, in point of interests, ofthe same importance that the question whether the seventh commandment is conformable to the law of Nature would be to the guardian of a Turkish Haram'.[113] Two sovereigns as different as Catherine and Paul had, however, subscribed to the same principle, and as Alexander wrote to his ambassador in Stockholm before the convention was signed, 'The pretensions of the English are absurd . . . their conduct is revolting, the exclusive dominion of the seas to which they presume is an outrage to the sovereigns of the commercial states and an offense to the rights of all peoples.'[114] Alexander was disgusted by the new British attack on Copenhagen, and he would repeat this whole set of attitudes both before and after Tilsit.
Once the crisis of conflict with Britain had passed, Alexander circulated to Russian embassies abroad his first general exposition of foreign policy. In traditionally familiar fashion, he announced the withdrawal of Russia from European affairs as formerly argued by N. I. Panin and represented in Alexander's own reign by V P. Kochubei. Aggrandisement, Alexander said, was inappropriate for so vast a state as Russia. He wanted no part of the 'intestine dissensions' of Europe and was indifferent to the question of the forms of foreign governments, as Paul obviously had been. His aim, rather, was to give his people the blessing of peace. In other words, he was at this point isolationist, non-interventionist. Yet even here there was a hint of ambivalence. If he took up arms, Alexander said, it would only be to protect his people or the victims of aggrandisement threatening the security of Europe.
As Alexander turned to the next major item of unfinished business inherited from his father, the negotiation with the First Consul, he found that he was, on the one hand, obliged by the treaties and other commitments of the previous reign; and, on the other hand, he was embarrassed by many of them. Though he admitted that his obligations in Italian questions were awkward, Alexander continued to solicit generous treatment for the kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia. In fact, Bonaparte, as soon as he learned of the death of Paul, hastened in both principalities to make pre-emptive arrangements - closing of ports, stationing of French troops in Naples, preparations for annexations in Sardinia - before Alexander could intervene, and Alexander was left with little choice in questions about which at the time he did not seem deeply to care. When the treaty of peace and the accompanying political convention were signed, they reflected French wishes. As in the treaty of Teschen, the two powers would mediate German indemnities. Russia was to mediate French peace with the Turks. Bonaparte engaged himselfto maintain the integrity of Naples as stipulated in the treaty that French troops had just imposed on it (28 March 1801), and French troops were to remain there until the fate of Egypt was settled. The reference to Sardinia was a gossamer gloss leaving the French army fully in charge there.
In the reorganisation of Germany, Alexander's wishes were simple: to alter the German constitution as little as possible and to strengthen Germany such as to avoid revolutionary anarchy and make it more capable of resisting French aggression. What happened here was that Bonaparte was able to use the principle of secularisation of ecclesiastical estates - how many divisions had the pope? - and the proximity and the power of France to reward and seduce the south German states, thus converting them from Russian clients into French satellites.
In the lull of 1801-5 between the two storms of the Second and Third Coalitions, Alexander found a respite for deliberate reflection on the issues of foreign affairs, and here we find a rare and genuinely interesting effort to enunciate something like an official doctrine of Russian foreign policy. The first compelling conception to emerge was the presentation ofV P. Kochubei to the Unofficial Committee in summer 1801. It envisaged a remarkable harmony of domestic and foreign policy, and its basic principles were clear and persuasive.
Russia had two natural enemies, Kochubei maintained, Sweden and Turkey, and two natural rivals, Austria and Prussia. Both Sweden and Turkey were weak, unable to challenge Russia dangerously, and the best policy was simply to maintain them in their present condition, weak enough to be harmless, not so weak as to require the protection of Russia from the designs of another great power. The notorious antagonism of Prussia and Austria required both to solicit the favour of Russia, a state of affairs that easily enabled Russia to preserve a constructive sphere of influence in the German Empire. Russia, Kochubei observed, was sufficiently great both in population and in geographical extent to enjoy extraordinary national security. It had little to fear from other powers so long as it did not interfere in their affairs; yet it had too often entered the quarrels of Europe that affected Russia only indirectly, entailing costly and useless wars. In so far as possible, Russia needed to remain aloof from European alliances and alignments, to establish a long period of peace and prudent administration.
There was, however, even in the midst of these pacific sentiments, one jarring note. It was agreed in a fashion reminiscent of Alexander's foreign- policy manifesto of 17 July 1801 that surrendering the continent to the inordinate ambition of Bonaparte was not an acceptable option.
Unfortunately, the First Consul ofthe French Republic declined Alexander's pleas for moderation and peace and challenged the order of Europe in a fashion that could not be ignored. Bonaparte annexed Piedmont (April 1801), imposed satellite regimes in the Netherlands (October 1801) and Switzerland (February 1802), made himself First Consul for life (August 1802), then Emperor (May/December 1804), president of the new Italian Republic (February 1802) and subseqently King of Italy (May 1805), manipulated the Imperial Recess to his advantage (1803 ff.), seized the Duc d'Enghien in Baden, the home of the Tsaritsa Elizabeth of Russia, executed him (February 1804) and annexed Genoa (June 1805). The Third Coalition was naturally soon in the making.
By this time, Alexander had come under the influence of a remarkable friendship and the very different foreign-policy ideas that it engendered. As a young man of only nineteen years, Alexander had made the acquaintance of the Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The two shared a passion for liberal ideas of statecraft and justice, and Alexander confessed emotionally to Czartoryski his embarrassment at his grandmother's partitions of Poland. There were hints of Alexander's intention to rectify the injustice, and it was clearly not a transient idea. In 1812 he was still writing about it to Czartoryski: 'Quel est le moment le plus propre pour prononcer la regeneration de la Pologne?'[115] Scarcely any sentiment could have brought the two men more nearly together. As the brief honeymoon of concord with the French Republic dissipated and a new conflict loomed, Czartoryski had become in 1803-4 de facto and then actual minister of foreign affairs. At this point, a new foreign- policy programme was formed.
While V P. Kochubei had argued that strategic invulnerability conferred upon Russia the good fortune of being able to follow an isolationist foreign policy, Czartoryski argued on the contrary that it imposed on Russia the obligation to follow an activist policy. Russia, he insisted, would most easily find its own peace by leading the continent to a peaceful condition. Obviously the biggest threat to the peace of Europe at the time was the expansionist policy of France, and that fact made it natural for Great Britain and Russia to seek each other's alliance against the threat. Once French power were curtailed, they agreed, it could best be contained by restoring the independence of the Italian states and forming a confederation of western German states on the French frontier.
As Kochubei had also observed, the antagonism of Austria and Prussia would naturally force them to follow Russia's lead. Russia might well undertake a kind of Pan-Slav drive to liberate the Balkan Slavs from the Turks, sharing some of the spoils with Austria if necessary, especially if there were a threat of French imperialism in that area. Moreover, it made sense for Russia to redress the injustice ofthe Polishpartitions, the more so as sharing those spoils with the neighbouring German states worked to Russia's disadvantage. Russia could easily win her Slavic brethren the Poles to her cause by re-establishing the kingdom under Russian Grand Duke Constantine.
The policy of Russia must be grand, benevolent and disinterested ... It must assure the tranquillity of all of Europe in order to assure its own and in order not to be distracted from its civilizing concerns [in developing] its own interior. Russia wants each power to have the advantages that justice confers on it, . . . the surest means of assuring the general equilibrium. But it will oppose with force any excessive ambition.[116]
This paper forms the background of the mission of N. N. Novosil'tsev to London in November 1804. Czartoryski drafted Novosil'tsev's instructions. If Russia should overstep the bounds of her own national interests - an important point - and mix in the affairs of Europe, he wrote, it should be for the purpose of establishing a benign and peaceful order of affairs on the continent of Europe, a permanent peace. The ascendancy of Bonaparte in Europe threatened, he said, to supplant all notions of justice, of right, and of morality in international affairs by the triumph of crime and iniquity and thus to suspend the security of the continent in general. Proceeding from these principles, he set out Alexander's particular aims: to return France to its ancient borders; to give it a new government; to liberate Sardinia, Switzerland and the Netherlands; to force the French evacuation of Naples and of Germany; to preserve the Turks - always a volatile and slippery issue - and to form larger states or a federation of states on the French frontiers as a barrier to French expansion.
In order to make success in the war as sure as possible, Alexander contemplated an imitation of Paul's policy of forcing a reluctant Prussia to take part in the coalition (Alexander's so-called Mordplan). In the peace to follow, Alexander imagined calling for something like national frontiers drawn along clearly recognisable lines of nationality and/or natural frontiers (a concept which would have disintegrated his own kingdom). Finally,
Alexander proposed a kind of concert system to sustain the peace after the war was won. He professed to be motivated by nothing more than the 'general wellbeing'.
Meantime, never mind the fact that Alexander had conspired on war aims and peace terms with the British in advance; he nevertheless represented his plans of 1805 as an armed mediation! That is, he would present to the French and British governments alike the Anglo-Russian terms as those of a coalition of Russia and Austria - and Prussia if possible - in an effort to mediate the conflict between Britain and France.
Here is a most reasonable facsimile of the politics of crazy Paul, who was seeking to use his Russo-Prussian Northern League of the winter of 1800-1 for the same kind of armed mediation between the French on the one hand and the Anglo-Austrian alliance on the other. The idea of the Concert of Europe as it grew out of Vienna is more fully developed than anything that Paul had in mind, but he was notably congress-prone. Short of the concert, and with the exception of the extravagances of the last two to three weeks of his life, it is essentially Paul's kind of plan, subject merely to the changes that the course of events had worked in political geography and alliances: that is, Bavaria and Wurttemberg had been indemnified sufficiently handsomely by Bonaparte to cease to look to Russia for protection, and while Paul had not stipulated in Paris in favour of Switzerland and the Netherlands, he had sent armies to liberate them. About the same time, Alexander renewed Paul's treaty of alliance with the Turks (11/23 September 1805).
Meantime, as implausible as it seems, Alexander did not hesitate, during his negotiations with the British, to urge their evacuation of the island of Malta, and he continued to defend the cause of neutral trade, both of which issues almost cost him the alliance ofLondon. Takingthe similarities ofthepolicies of the two sovereigns into account, either Alexander and his allies were under the spell of Paul - a ludicrous suggestion - or there was method in Paul's madness. Or there was something in the context of Russian foreign policy driving very different personalities to similar geopolitical conceptions. That context was very likely the product of the educational values of the Enlightenment and the challenge that the French Revolution posed to conceptions of political order in Europe.
In any event, the awkward alliance - a compromise version of it - was made, and the Austrians adhered to it. War aims stipulated the French evacuation of north Germany (including Hanover), the Netherlands, Switzerland and Piedmont-Sardinia, as well as the augmentation of these territories such as to constitute in future a barrier to French expansion.
Of course, all of these grand plans went terribly awry. The Austro-Russian armies were crushed at the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, whereupon Austria, deserted briefly by a panicked Alexander, made peace (Pressburg). Prussia, having persisted in the most undignified neutrality since 1795, rallied to the cause too late, and with equal lack of dignity, only to be routed utterly at Jena and Auerstadt in October 1806. Whereupon Russia, after extensive tergiversations, returned to the fray in the most inauspicious circumstances imaginable, carrying on the fight virtually alone until the lost battle of Fried- land in June 1807, whereupon it, too, made peace.
By this time, Alexander was thoroughly disgusted with his former allies. As the Baron deJomini remarked after the costly but indecisive battle of Eylau - February 1807, on the wintry plains of Poland, nearly a thousand miles from Paris - 'Ah, if only I were the Archduke Charles!' In Alexander's opinion, the British were worse than the Austrians. The great wartime prime minister, William Pitt, had died in January 1806, and the Ministry of All the Talents that followed him - Lord Grenville and Charles James Fox - was a vain misnomer. Until the coming of Viscount Castlereagh to the Foreign Office in March 1812, British foreign policy was simply adrift in demoralising, defeatist incompetence, and Alexander's grievances against London were multiple: Russia was bearing a disproportionate burden of the war; the British were niggardly with loans and subsidies; they might have but did not open in Western Europe something like a second front; their navy's enforcement of the British code of maritime commerce was an offence both to Russia and the neutrals. Finally, the Russians had stumbled imprudently into a war with Turkey for fear of Napoleon's designs on the Balkans, and London, always suspicious of the Russians' own designs in the East Mediterranean, stubbornly refused to assist them.
The war had ceased to be popular in Russia, and Alexander's frustration disposed him to a change of front. Here was the celebrated peace of Tilsit and the Franco-Russian alliance attached to it. It recognised the whole of the Napoleonic order of Europe, the Bonaparte dynasty in Naples, the Netherlands and Westphalia; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; the Confederation of the Rhine; French possession of Cattaro and the Ionian Islands. Russia would mediate peace between France and Britain; France would mediate between Russia and Turkey; and, failing peace, each power would join the other at war. The ancient idea of the partition of the Ottoman Europe was stipulated. Russia would join the Continental System to bar British trade from the continent, and Portugal, Denmark and Sweden would be forced to join it as well.
Of course, this new system, so contrary to Czartoryski's, naturally had to be embodied in a new Russian foreign minister, Count N. P. Rumiantsev. Rumiantsev identified with it naturally, as he was the son of Field Marshal Petr A. Rumiantsev, who had led Catherine's successful campaigns against the Turks. Rumiantsev stood for a division of Europe into eastern/Russian and western/French spheres. Hence he represented one of two traditional variants of Russian foreign policy, the isolationist impulse that we formerly saw in V P. Kochubei. If the peace was popular in Petersburg, however, the alliance was not. Alexander hoped in vain that the promised partition of the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Swedish Finland would compensate for the substantial obligations and burdens of the alliance.
And now Alexander turned fondly again to his pet projects of liberal reform at home. This time, his whole 'secret committee' was concentrated in a single person, arguably the most able civil servant in the history of Russia, a priest's son who had married an English woman, Mikhail Speranskii. Alexander asked for the project of a constitution, and Speranskii drafted a prudently progressive document. The French alliance and the Speranskii constitution alike provoked the problem of public opinion again. Napoleon's emissaries carefully monitored the massive Russian discontent with the French alliance. General Savary reported that France had only two friends in Russia, the emperor and his foreign minister. One of Alexander's courtiers allegedly warned him bluntly, 'Take care, Sire, you will finish as your father did!'[117] Speranskii's constitution was naturally never implemented, but the mere drafting of it provoked consternation, and when the war of 1812 approached, Alexander, in deference to the good Russian sentiments that the nation at war would require, dismissed the unpopular Francophile Speranskii and the constitution with him. When another of his intimates questioned the dismissal of so devoted a public servant as Speranskii, Alexander responded, 'You are right, . . . only current circumstances could force me to make this sacrifice to public opinion.'[118]
In fact, the arrangements of Tilsit almost predictably contained irreconcilable elements of conflict. The most conspicuous factor here was the unlimited ambition of Napoleon. As Napoleon later remarked after his meeting with Alexander at Erfurt, Alexander expected to be treated as an equal, and it was not Napoleon's habit to deal with others as equals. Particular issues abounded. There was the persistent suspicion of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Moreover, Napoleon stubbornly refused to evacuate his troops from the
Prussian territory of Alexander's friend, King Frederick William of Prussia. Here were two offensive encroachments on Russian sensitivities in Eastern Europe. In addition, the Continental System was a burden: Britain was a natural commercial ally of Russia; France was not. Finally, Napoleon clearly had no intention of sharing what might have been the most ostentatious Russian benefit of the alliance, the Ottoman possessions of the Balkans. In December 1810, Alexander, thoroughly disillusioned now of the raptures of Tilsit, repudiated the Continental System, and the coming of war was only a matter of time.
The defeat of Napoleon in Russia faced Alexander with a dramatic foreign- policy choice. His commander of the armies, Field Marshal M. I. Kutuzov, stood shoulder to shoulder with Foreign Minister Rumiantsev: Russia was rid of Napoleon, and there was no need to send the armies into Europe. Alexander, however, perhaps predictably, followed the system formerly laid out by Czartoryski.
The Russo-Prussian Treaty of Kalisch (27 February 1813) stipulated an alliance to deliver the nations of the continent from the French yoke and the restoration of Prussia to its possessions of 1806. The Russo-Austro-Prussian Treaty of Toeplitz (9 September 1813) stipulated the restoration of the Austrian Empire, dissolution of Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, and an arrangement of the future fate of the Duchy of Warsaw agreeable to the three courts of Russia, Prussia and Austria. This last point, of course, was soon to become a subject of contention. The British joined the coalition in the treaty of Reichenbach (27 June 1813), which stipulated the restoration of Hanover to the British monarchy and, of course, subsidies for the continental powers.
By this time, the outline of the treaties of Vienna was emerging. The treaty of Chaumont (1 March 1814) committed the allies to a German confederation robust enough to sustain its independence; the restoration of an independent Switzerland; independent Italian states between Austria and France; the restoration of Ferdinand VI of Spain; an augmentation of the Netherlands under the sovereignty of the Prince of Orange; the accession of Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands to the treaty; and a concert among the powers to maintain these peace terms for twenty years.
The first Treaty of Paris (30 May 1814) recognised Louis XVIII as king of France, reduced France to its frontiers of 1792, restored Malta to Great Britain and stipulated French recognition of the terms of Chaumont. The second Treaty of Paris (20 November 1815) - after Napoleon's return and the battle of Waterloo (18 June) - reduced France to the borders of 1790, assessed an indemnity of 700,000,000 francs and provided an allied army of occupation of 150,000 men supported by France for a period of three to five years.
The treaties of Vienna (9 June 1815) largely ratified the provisions of the preceding treaties with one large exception. By this date, however, Alexander had succumbed, contrary to the stipulations of Kalisch and Toeplitz, to Czartoryski's blandishments on the future of Poland. His wish to restore the Kingdom of Poland under his own auspices and to compensate Prussia for its consequent Polish sacrifices in the Kingdom of Saxony nearly provoked a war with Austria, Britain and France. Alexander compromised, chiefly at the expense of Prussia in Saxony, and peace was made.
Conclusion
One of the grand ironies of the history of Russian foreign policy related here is that foreign-born Catherine exerted herselfin foreign affairs for strictly Russian interests, while native-born Paul and Alexander extended Russian protection to the interests of the continent as a whole. This fact is a product of the revolution in foreign-policy outlook that took place in Russia in the 1790s.[119]
In the murky record of Russian foreign-policy programmes and ideas, it is sometimes customary to identify two relatively distinct camps or lobbies. One is known variously as Russian, national, or Eastern; the other, as German, European, or Western.[120] These terms are so poorly documented, especially before the latter part ofthe nineteenth century, as to make generalisation about them a bit hazardous. Somehow, however, the first party is semi-isolationist. It is sometimes associated with the term svoboda ruk - carte-blanche more or less.[121] Catherine's policy, whether in the heyday of Panin or in that of the Greek Project, while first in alliance with Prussia and later with Austria, appears to have used these alliances to divide central Europe, and sometimes all of Europe, against itself in order to leave Russia a free hand in imperial enterprise. Her heavily European involvement in the Armed Neutrality of 1780 served this purpose. The policy of Paul and Alexander, on the other hand, one of congress and concert, was distinctly Europhile. They wished to make of Russia the arbiter of the peace of Europe. Some day we may understand these categories, and the way in which they expressed Russian interests, better than we do today. For the moment, they must remain merely intriguing.
If the European extensions of the foreign policy of Paul and Alexander had more benign consequences for the continent than West Europeans realised,[122]their consequences for Russia were less fortunate. As Russian foreign policy adopted a distinctly Europhile outlook, domestic policy just as distinctly repudiated it. Thus the burden of foreign policy increased, while the strength of the empire that supported it succumbed to obsolescence such as to be in the long run unequal to the challenge of supporting the ambitiously conservative task of preserving social and political peace on a continent in the throes of the multiple revolutions of the nineteenth century. The long-term consequences were seen in the First World War. The policy that was good for Europe in 1815 also raised Russia to the pinnacle of its imperial power, but it was in the long run fatal for the empire.
The imperial army
WILLIAM c. FULLER, JR
It is difficult to exaggerate the centrality of the army to the history of the Russian Empire. After all, it was due to the army that the empire came into existence in the first place. It was the army that conquered the territories of the empire, defended them, policed them and maintained internal security all at the same time. It was the army that transformed Russia into a great power, for it was the army that built the Russian state.
Yet if the army built the state, the state also built the army, and there was a symbiotic relationship between these two processes. By any reckoning the creation of a strong army was an extraordinary achievement, for in the middle of the seventeenth century Russia did not enjoy many advantages when it came to the generation of military power. To be sure, comprising over 15 million square kilometres in the 1680s, Muscovy was extensive in land area, but the population of the country, probably less than 7 million persons, was relatively small, and widely dispersed. Distances were vast, roads were execrable, the climate was insalubrious and much of the soil was of poor agricultural quality. Total state income amounted to a paltry 1.2 million roubles per annum and the country as a whole was undergoverned.[123] Industry was underdeveloped, and Muscovy had to import both iron and firearms.[124]Still worse, Russia lacked any natural, defensible frontiers and was hemmed in from the south, west and north by formidable enemies - the Ottoman Empire, the Khanate of the Crimea, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kingdom of Sweden.
In view of its numerous weaknesses and vulnerabilities, it is not surprising that Muscovy generally fared poorly in military confrontations with its neighbours during the seventeenth century, enduring defeat after defeat at the hands of the Swedes, Poles and Tatars. Of course, Russia did manage some successful expansion in this period, such as the acquisition of left-bank Ukraine by the terms of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667). However, this gain owed more to the Cossack rebellions and Swedish invasion that had crippled Poland than it did to any conspicuous Russian military prowess. While Russia did engage in military modernisation during the century, for example by augmenting the traditional cavalry levy with Western-style infantry units, the problem was that the state was capable of mobilising for discrete campaigns only and lacked the resources and stamina necessary for protracted war.
Slightly more than 140 years later, towards the end of the reign of Alexander I, the picture was completely different, for a succession of impressive military victories had resulted in the dramatic expansion in the political influence, population and size of the Russian state. In 1825 Russia's standing army of 750,000 men was the largest in the Western world. By that point Russia's land area had grown to 18.5 million square miles, and her population to 40 million. A full third of that population growth was directly attributable to conquest and annexation.
Understanding Russian military success, 1700-1825
The key element in Russia's transition from military debility to military capability was learning how better to mobilise both material resources and, even more importantly, human beings in the service of the army. This involved a frightening intensification of the coercive exploitation of all classes of people in Russia society from top to bottom. It was Peter the Great who was responsible for inaugurating the change. In 1700 in combination with Saxon and Danish allies, Peter launched what he thought would be a short and easy war against Sweden. In September of that same year, however, King Charles XII of Sweden annihilated Peter's army at Narva, capturing almost its entire artillery park. Over twenty years of war between Russia and Sweden ensued.
Needing to reconstitute his forces under the pressure of military emergency and protracted war, Peter invented a set of institutions to recruit, officer, equip, finance and administer his army that laid the foundation for the upsurge of Russia's military power during the eighteenth century. Although these new arrangements did not operate precisely as intended in Peter's lifetime, in the decades after his death they put down deep roots. There evolved a hybrid military system with both 'Western' and peculiarly 'Russian' characteristics. Partly by design and partly by improvisation, Russia devised a unique military system that represented a brilliant (if costly) adaptation to the realities of warfare in eastern, central and southern Europe.
A reliable source of military manpower was a central feature of that system. In 1705 Peter introduced a new approach to conscription that, with modifications, was to endure until 1874. The country was divided into blocks of twenty peasant households, and in every year each was required to supply a man who was drafted for life into the army's ranks. Serf owners, and in some cases village communities themselves, were to make the selection. Of course, Peter soon ignored the limits that the law of 1705 placed on military reinforcement, and on numerous occasions both arbitrarily raised the numbers of draftees called up and decreed additional special levies in response to the progress of the war.[125] The recruiting procedures laid down in 1705 (as well as the frantic deviations from them) resulted in the induction of over 300,000 men over the next twenty years.[126] Despite its unfair and capricious implementation, this method of recruitment stabilised under Peter's successors. In 1775 Catherine the Great changed the basic unit of conscription to the block of 500 peasant males from which one recruit per year was exacted in peace, but as many as five in wartime. In 1793 she also capped a private soldier's military service at twenty-five years, a measure that produced only a tiny class of retired veterans, as the majority of recruits died or were disabled long before then. The basic concept of the Petrine draft - compelling predetermined units of peasants to replenish the army's ranks on a crudely regular schedule - remained in place. The system worked well enough to furnish the Russian army with more than 2 million soldiers between 1725 and 1801.[127] Because of the dramatic increase in the population of the empire over the century, even larger intakes were possible in times of crisis.
The recruitment system not only made it feasible for Russia to raise a large army but also gave that army some qualities that differentiated it from armies in the West. The first of these was the simple fact that it was wholly conscripted, not partially hired. Until the French Revolution, most of the great European powers maintained armies that included large proportions of highly trained professional mercenaries. And mercenaries, however skilled, manifested an alarming propensity to desert. The military manuals of the day strongly advised against marching forces by night, or moving in the immediate vicinity of swamps and dense forests, in order to diminish the risk of mass flight. By contrast, Russia's post-Petrine commanders routinely engaged in all of these manoeuvres, since the rates of desertion from the Russian army were considerably lower than those that obtained in the French, Prussian or Austrian ones.[128]
This ought not to be taken to suggest that military service was popular in rural Russia. Although a serf became legally 'free' when he entered the army, conscription was a species of death. The recruit was torn away from his native village, severed from the company of his family and his friends, and was well aware that the chances were that he would never return to them. Indeed, it became the custom for village women to lament the departure of the recruits with the singing of funeral dirges.[129] Once a soldier had completed his preliminary training and joined his regiment, he entered a milieu in which irregular pay, shortage of supplies, epidemic disease and brutal discipline were all too common.
Yet to enter military service was also in a sense to be reborn, for in the soldier's artel the Russian army possessed a powerful instrument for socialising recruits and building group cohesion. Every unit in the army was subdivided into artels, communal associations of eight to ten men who trained, messed, worked and fought together. The artel functioned both as a military and economic organisation, for it held the money its members acquired from plunder, extra pay and hiring themselves out as labourers. In a sense, the artel became a soldier's new family, and it is significant that in the event of his death it was his comrades in the artel, rather than his kinfolk, who inherited his share of the property. Artels, which also functioned at the company and regimental level, were reminiscent of the peasant associations back home with which the recruit was already familiar, and consequently assisted his adjustment to the rigours of his new environment and helped persuade him that the state's military system was legitimate. [130]
The homogeneity of the army also facilitated a soldier's identification with military life. The overwhelming majority of private soldiers in the army were Great Russian by ethnicity and Orthodox by confession. This was so because the bulk of the empire's non-Russian subjects were either excused from service in exchange for tribute, or organised in special formations of their own. This was another respect in which the Russian army contrasted strikingly with the armies of the West. At various points in the eighteenth century more than half the troops in the service of the kings of Prussia and France were foreign mercenaries. Since ethnic and religious homogeneity promoted cohesion, and cohesion could translate into superior combat performance, contemporary observers understandably viewed the homogeneity of the Russian army as one of its greatest assets. A government commission of 1764 hailed the sense of unity created in the army by a 'common language, faith, set of customs and birth'.[131] Certainly on many occasions Russia's eighteenth-century troops did perform outstandingly in battle, not merely against the forces of the Crimean Khan and Ottoman Sultan, but even when matched against such first-class Western opponents as Prussia. At Zorndorf (August 1758) during the Seven Years War, the Russians killed or wounded over a third of the troops Frederick the Great committed to the field and earned the awedplaudits of an eye-witness for their 'extraordinary steadiness and intrepidity'.[132]
Of course an army must not only be recruited but also led. Peter I initially sought to engage capable military specialists abroad, but soon ordered all males of the gentry estate into permanent service in the army, navy or bureaucracy in his effort to ensure an adequate domestic supply of officers and civil administrators. Moreover, in a series of decrees culminating in the promulgation of the Table of Ranks in 1722, he established the principle that acquisition of an officer's rank conferred nobiliary status even on commoners. Yet the bulk of the officers continued to be drawn from the nobility, and the officer corps became even more 'noble' as the century proceeded, despite the fact that Peter III freed the nobility from the legal obligation to serve in 1762. Over 90 per cent of all officers who fought at Borodino in 1812 were of noble birth.[133] As for the nobles themselves, while the calling of the officer had acquired the cachet of prestige among the wealthy strata of the elite, it was also the case that there were large numbers of impecunious noblemen who had no choice but to rely on government salaries for their livings.
Incompetence, mediocrity, peculation and even sadism were to be met with within Russia's eighteenth-century officer corps. An analysis of military- judicial cases has revealed that the most typical grievances the soldiers voiced about their commanders had to do with cruelty in the imposition of corporal punishment on the one hand, and such economic abuses as withholding pay or purloining artel funds on the other.[134] There were, however, also officers who distinguished themselves by their honesty, fairness and paternalistic concern for the wellbeing of their men. In any event, educational standards were low. Certainly, there were the handful of military-technical academies that Peter I had established, as well as some exclusive institutions of later foundation, such as the Noble Land Cadet Corps. But there were not enough places in such schools to accommodate more than a few hundred aspiring officers.
At the highest levels of military authority there was much to criticise, for patronage and court politics were frequently decisive in the bestowal of a general's epaulettes, with predictable results. Yet eighteenth-century Russia also benefited from the masterly leadership of some truly outstanding commanders. Confronted by foreign invasion in 1708-9 and 1812 respectively, Peter I and M. I. Kutuzov figured out how to turn Russia itself, in all its immensity, emptiness and poverty, into a weapon to grind down the enemy. Other figures, including B. C. Miinnich, P. A. Rumiantsev, Z. G. Chernyshev and A. V Suvorov, led the army to impressive victories over Tatars, Turks, Poles, Swedes, Prussians and Frenchmen alike. Munnich smashed the Ottomans at Stavuchany (1739) and was the first Russian commander ever to breech the Tatar defences on the Crimean peninsula. Rumiantsev, a brilliant logistician and tactician, routed the Turks at Kagul (1770) although outnumbered by over four to one. Chernyshev, a talented military administrator no less than a strategist, was instrumental in the capture of Berlin (1760). And in the course of his extraordinary military career, the peerless Suvorov overwhelmed the Turks at Rymnik and Focsani (both 1789), stormed Izmail (1790), forced the surrender ofWarsaw (1794) and defeated France's armies in northern Italy (1799). His last great military accomplishment - his fighting retreat through Switzerland - became the capstone of his legend.
Yet even military commanders of genius cannot win wars unless their armies are paid, fed, clothed and supplied. All of this requires money, and money had been a commodity in relatively short supply in seventeenth-century Muscovy. It was once again Peter the Great who devised expedients to extract more cash from his oppressed subjects than ever before by saddling them with all manner of new taxes. Here one of his most important innovations was the poll (or soul) tax of 1718 that required every male peasant as well as most of the male residents of Russia's cities and towns to pay to the state an annual sum of 74 (later 70) kopecks. Owing to such fiscal reforms, as well as to the growth in the size of the taxable population during his reign, he was able to push state income up to 8.7 million roubles by the close of his reign. Whereas military outlays had constituted roughly 60 per cent of state expenditure in old Muscovy, under Peter they may have consumed between 70 and 80 per cent of the state budget.[135] The army and navy continued to account for about half of the Russian state's expenses throughout the century until the 1790s, when the empire's territorial, economic and demographic growth combined to whittle this figure down to roughly 35 per cent. By that point, net state revenues exceeded 40 million roubles per annum, although it bears noting that there had been considerable inflation over the previous seventy years.[136]
The Russian army ofthe eighteenth century, then, evolved into a remarkably effective instrument of state power. It won the overwhelming majority of Russia's wars during the period and was the reliable bulwark of the state against internal disorder, as in 1774 when it was employed to suppress the massive peasant and Cossack insurrection of Emelian Pugachev.
The joists that supported Russian military success in this era were precisely the Russian Empire's political and social backwardness by comparison to Western Europe. Because Russia was an autocracy, and the country lacked an independent Church or an ancient feudal nobility there were few impediments to the ruthless exercise of governmental authority, which could be used to requisition huge quantities of men, money and labour for the military effort despite the meagreness of the resource base. In 1756 the Russian army, if irregulars are included, was larger than the army of France, despite the fact that the revenue of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna was probably less than one-fifth that of Louis XV[137] It helped enormously that Russia was a society organised in hereditary orders where institutions like serfdom and peasant bondage of all kinds persisted long after they had been discarded in the West. The subjugation of the peasants made it possible to count, tax and draft them, as well as hold them (or their masters) collectively accountable if they failed to perform any of their obligations. All of this meant that the Russian state could more easily reenforce the ranks of the army with new draftees than could its Western neighbours, particularly as the population of the empire increased. This was no small matter, because Russian military casualties - as a result of combat but even more so from disease - tended to be extremely high. If the
Russian army was militarily effective, it was not necessarily militarily efficient. Russia may have lost as many as 300,000 men during the Great Northern War and may have taken another quarter of a million casualties during the Seven Years War of 1756-63, a figure equal to two-thirds of the troops who saw service in those years.[138] The military system also enabled the Russian state, in a pinch, to make military efforts that were more robust than its Western rivals. In the later stage of the Seven Years War after 1760, as France, Austria and Prussia began to totter from acute military exhaustion, the growth in size of Russia's field armies in Germany did not abate.[139] And in 1812 a series of extraordinary levies permitted Russia both to make good its losses and even enlarge the forces it pitted against Napoleon. It has been calculated that 1.5 million men, or 4 per cent of the empire's total population, served in the army during the reign of Alexander I.[140] Other than in Prussia, a military participation rate like this one was inconceivable anywhere else in Europe.
For all of its success, however, the Russian military system had some weaknesses, which were already grave by the end of the eighteenth century and became critically so in the next. To begin with, there was the issue of the army's size. Russia's autocrats believed that they had to maintain a large army, not only to support their geopolitical ambitions, but also as a matter of simple security. Russia's borders were longer than those of any other polity, and Russia confronted potential enemies in Asia as well as in Europe. Moreover, there was the question of the internal stability of the empire to consider. It was the army that protected the autocracy from servile rebellion, and the deployment oftroops had to take into account domestic threats to the empire, no less than foreign ones. The problem was that the larger the army grew, the harder it became to foot the bill. As the Russian treasury was in constant financial dire straits, tsarist statesmen were always preoccupied with finding economies in the military budget.
One expedient was to make the soldiers themselves responsible for part of their own upkeep. The state supplied the regiments with such materials as leather and woollen cloth and then commanded them to manufacture their own boots, uniforms and other articles of kit. It also authorised the soldiers' artels to engage in 'free work' (that is, paid labour) on nearby estates. Despite the fact that this arrangement diverted the troops away from military exercises and opened egregious opportunities for larceny to dishonest regimental colonels, 'self maintenance' (also known as the 'regimental economy') endured within the army in one form or another until 1906.
Another tactic that the state employed to save money concerned housing. In peacetime, for up to eight months of the year the army dispersed and was quartered on the rural peasantry. Since the army therefore only 'stood' during the four months it slept under canvas at summer bivouacs, the government was relieved of the duty to construct (or rent) permanent barracks. This practice naturally led to degeneration in the combat readiness of the armed forces, a situation that was only ameliorated gradually as barracks accommodation became more common in the early nineteenth century.
A final cost-cutting device involved settling a significant proportion of the troops on farms where they would grow their own victuals as well as drill and where their sons could be brought up to join the ranks as soon as they came of military age. Using 'land-militias' to colonise (and thus to secure) dangerous borderlands had longbeen practised in Russia, as well as in such other European countries as Austria. But Alexander I established an extensive network of internal military colonies, which in 1826 were populated by 160,000 soldiers and their families. [141] However, this experiment was an execrable failure: living and working conditions were intolerable, and soldiers hated the harsh and intrusive regimentation of every aspect of their lives. The massive uprisings in the north-western military colonies of 1831 forced the government to institute reforms that (inter alia) excused the 'farming soldiers' from the obligation of military training.
A penultimate deficiency in the Russian military system was its inflexibility. The imperial state often found it hard to concentrate its military strength in the most crucial theatre when it went to war. Although the 1830 /1 insurrection in Poland assumed the character ofa full-blown war, Russia was able to deploy no more than 430,000 of its 850,000 troops there, in view of the magnitude of the other foreign and domestic threats it felt it had to deter.[142] The optimal solution to this problem would have been the introduction of military reserve programme. This would have entailed a deep cut in the recruit's term of military service and a simultaneous increase in the percentage of draft-eligible men taken into the army every year. In that event Russia might have been able to diminish the number of troops it kept on active duty while building up a large reservoir of trained reservists on which it could draw in an emergency. Yet the peculiarities of the Russian military system made a proper reserve programme inconceivable. The Russian army had originally been designed as a closed corporation, set apart from Russian society, that swallowed up the peasants inducted into its ranks for good. There was no way in which a civil society defined by hereditary estates and serfdom could have absorbed or even survived an influx of a 100,000 or more juridically free demobilised soldiers every year. Measures to assemble a class of reservists gradually (such as the introduction of 'unlimited furloughs' in 1834) were only palliatives. If serfdom and autocracy were the floor beneath Russian military power, they also constituted its ceiling.
Finally, there is the question ofmilitary technology. The logic ofthe Russian military system presupposed a low rate of military-technical innovation, and the system consequently functioned best in an era when that held true. Over time governmental decrees and entrepreneurial energy had made eighteenth- century Russia mostly self-sufficient in the production of armaments. Russia's rich deposits of minerals were an advantage here, and for several decades in the eighteenth century Russia led Europe in the output of iron. Although improvements were made in the quality and performance of weapons, particularly artillery, during this period, overall the technology of combat remained remarkably stable. The smooth bore musket was the standard infantry arm under Alexander I just as it had been under Peter the Great. The relatively long useful life of muskets - forty years was deemed the norm - obviously made it easier for Russia to bear the cost of equipping its ground forces with them. In fact, in 1800 the Russian state had issued at least some of its regiments with muskets that had been in its arsenals since Peter's time.[143]
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the Industrial Revolution was making a major impact on the technology ofwar. Countries that neglected to invest in the latest weaponry courted military disaster, as Russia herself was to discover during the Crimean War. Unfortunately, Russia was a poor country that could ill afford expensive rearmament drives. Her industrial sector was insufficiently developed to manufacture the new ordnance, rifles and munitions on a large scale. And the social, economic and political institutions generated by autocracy were not particularly hospitable to modern industrial capitalism either. [144]
Accounting for Russian military failure, 1854-1917
If it was military success that built up the Russian Empire, it was military defeat that helped to bring the empire down. Russia's great victory over Napoleon seemingly validated the military system as it was and had closed the eyes of many to its defects. Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) was personally devoted to the army, desired to impose military order and discipline on his country as a whole, and frequently turned to military officers to fill the most important posts in the civil administration. Yet the army suffered from his neurotic obsession with petty details and his penchant for staging massive parades and reviews, which, though impressive, did little to enhance combat readiness. Nicholas did manage to beat the Persians in 1828, the Ottomans in 1829 and the Poles in 1831. Then, too, his Caucasian Corps fought credibly if unimaginatively and indecisively in its interminable campaigns against the Muslim guerrillas in Chechnia and Daghestan.23 But when Russia had to battle Britain, France, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War of 1853-6 the upshot was a military and political debacle. In its struggle with this powerful coalition, the imperial government fell back on the methods of 1812 and by means of extraordinary levies inundated the 980,000-man regular army with over a million newly mobilised Cossacks, militia and raw recruits. But Russia found it hard to bring more than a fraction of this strength to bear against the enemy since hundreds of thousands of troops were pinned down in Poland, campaigning in the Caucasus, guarding the Baltic frontier or garrisoning the vast expanses of the empire. For much of the time, allied forces on the Crimea peninsula were actually numerically superior to Russia's. Russia's principal Black Sea Fortress, Sebastopol, fell in large measure due to the unremitting pressure of the allies' technologically superior siege artillery. During the conflict, which was the empire's most sanguinary war of the nineteenth century, that of 1812 excepted, 450,000 Russian soldiers and sailors lost their lives.24 The terms of the Peace of Paris of 1856, with their ban on Russian warships in the Black Sea, were a humiliating infringement of Russia's sovereignty, and left her southern ports and trade perpetual hostages to the French and British fleets. The Crimean War exploded one of the principle justifications for autocracy - its ability to beget military power and security. The Crimean defeat not only discredited the Russian military system but also destroyed confidence in the empire's entire panoply of political, social and economic structures.
23 See Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Dagestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994).
24 John Shelton Curtiss, Russia's Crimean War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979),
pp. 455, 471.
Under the new emperor Alexander II (r. 1855-81) fundamental domestic reform was complemented by a policy of recueillement in foreign affairs. Russia's military leadership took advantage of the respite from major war to attempt an overhaul of the entire military system. However, the army still did have to cope with 'small wars' on the empire's periphery. Although the capture of imam Shamil in 1859 facilitated the eventual pacification of the Caucasus, in 1863 the Poles rose in a serious rebellion that could only be suppressed by brute force. There were also several campaigns in central Asia during the 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s. These solidified the military reputations of such prominent generals as M. G. Cherniaev and M. D. Skobelev and effected the submission to St Petersburg of Kokand, Bukhara, Khiva, Transcaspia and Merv. The motivations behind this central Asian imperialism were complex and confused, and ranged from a desire for more defensible frontiers, to a concern for enlarging Russian trade, to a perceived need to concoct a paper threat against Britain in India.[145] But a great deal of the impetus behind the advance came from Russia's ambitious military commanders there, who often sparked off armed clashes with the Muslims in contravention of their orders.
When Russia's next large-scale war erupted in 1877 against the Ottomans, her military reforms had not yet come to fruition. Yet the protracted eastern crisis that preceded its outbreak did permit the Russian military leadership to develop its mobilisation, concentration and campaign plans with greater than usual care.[146] Although Russia won the war, its military performance was mixed. In the hands of excellent commanders, Russian forces were capable of such magnificent actions as the seizure and defence of Shipka Pass and the astounding Balkan winter offensive that brought the Russian army within fifteen kilometres of Constantinople by January 1879.[147] But these triumphs were to some extent counterbalanced by the failure of the three bloody attempts to storm Plevna, the epidemic of typhus and cholera on the Caucasus front, the total breakdown in army logistics and the appalling dimensions of the butcher's bill. Still worse, the other European powers, led by Germany, colluded to prevent Russia from realising her entire set of war aims.
Germany was already the power that Russia feared the most. Since the establishment of Bismarck's Reich at the close of the Franco-Prussian War,
Russia had been alarmed by the growth in Germany's power and worried that Berlin had designs for European hegemony. How best to defend the empire from an attack by Germany, perhaps supported by Austria, swiftly became the chief preoccupation of Russia's military leadership, and was to remain so until 1914. This was the reason that Russia's venture into east Asian imperialism at the turn of the century so disquieted senior generals. Russia's acquisition of Port Arthur, its lodgement in Manchuria and its intrigues in Korea were attended by the risk of war with Japan. In the view of such influential figures as War Minister A. N. Kuropatkin, Russia did not have either the military budget or the manpower to protect her new acquisitions in the Far East, confronted as she was by a much more dangerous threat to her security in Europe.
When in February 1904 Japan opened hostilities against Russia by launching a surprise attack on Russia's Pacific fleet at Port Arthur, the Russian armed forces in the Far East were caught unprepared. Initially outnumbered, her troops dependent for their reinforcement and supply on the attenuated umbilical cord of the Trans-Siberian railway, Russia endured one military reverse after another in the land war. Port Arthur capitulated to the Japanese in January 1905 after a seven-month siege, and in central Manchuria Russia suffered serious defeats at Liaoyang, the Sha-Ho, Sandepu and Mukden. Nor did the war at sea produce any news more welcome. Dispatched to the Pacific to engage the Japanese in their home waters, Russia's Baltic fleet was spectacularly annihilated in the battle of Tsushima Straits (May 1905). Negotiations resulted in the Peace of Portsmouth, which stripped Russia of Port Arthur, her position in Manchuria and half of Sakhalin island.
Russia's loss of the Japanese war of 1904-5 was not preordained, for she might have won it had she made better operational and strategic decisions during the ground war and had made more offensive use of her naval assets in the Pacific.[148] Indeed, despite all of her flagrant military blunders, arguably Russia would have won the war if the revolution of 1905 had not intervened to cripple the military effort. By the time the peace treaty was signed, Russia's forces outnumbered Japan's in Manchuria, while Tokyo had run out of reserves and was precariously close to fiscal collapse besides.
The revolution of 1905-7 brought two dire consequences for the Russian army in its train. First, the contagion of rebellion not only blanketed the towns and villages of the empire but also penetrated into the ranks of the army itself. In late 1905 and throughout 1906 (particularly after April) there occurred over 400 military mutinies, in which soldiers defied the orders of their officers and issued economic and political demands.[149] Second, the government answered the mass strikes, protests and agrarian disorders with an unprecedented application of military force: on more than 8,000 occasions between 1905-7 military units were called upon to assist in the restoration of order.[150] Failed war, revolution and repressive service demoralised the army, disrupted its training and made a shambles of the empire's external defence posture. It would take the Russian army considerable time, money and intellectual energy to recover. Military defeat engendered introspection and reform, just as it had after 1856, and although by 1914 the reform process still had some years to run, the Russian army was in good enough condition to wage what most assumed would be a short, general conflict in Europe. But neither the Russian army nor Russian society was up to the strain of the protracted, total, industrial conflict that the First World War quickly became. The War offered conclusive proof that neither the army nor the empire as a whole had adequately modernised since the middle of the nineteenth century.
With respect to the army, one source of inertia was the inherent difficulty of commanding, supplying and managing military units so numerous and so widely dispersed. Centralisation and decentralisation both had administrative advantages and disadvantages, and Russia's military leadership was never able to reconcile the tension among them. One figure who tried to do so was D. A. Miliutin, Russia's most eminent and energetic nineteenth-century military reformer. As war minister for almost the entire reign of Alexander II, Miliutin was responsible for substantive innovation in the army's force structure, schools, hospitals and courts, and presided over the introduction of the breechloading rifle and other up-to-date weapons.[151] But he also sought to streamline the operations of his ministry by creating eight glavnye upravleniia (or main administrations), with functional supervision over artillery, cavalry, engineering, intendence (supply and logistics), medicine, law, staff work and so forth. At the same time he divided the empire into fourteen (later fifteen) military districts, each with its own headquarters and staff and sub-departments, that mirrored the organisation of the War Ministry back in St Petersburg. Miliutin's administrative restructuring thus combined the principles of centralisation and decentralisation, for while the various military agencies and bureaux at the centre were brought firmly under his thumb, the military district commanders were invested with considerable autonomy. No one denied that this new organisation represented a considerable improvement over its predecessor, for it reduced red tape and permitted the elimination of 1,000 redundant jobs in St Petersburg alone.[152] Yet it had its drawbacks notwithstanding. It has, for example, been argued that perhaps the most important of the main administrations - the Main Staff - was statutorily burdened with so many secondary responsibilities that authentic general staff work suffered in consequence.[153] And the military district system, although a salutary antidote to the rigidity and paralysis of the military administration of the previous decades, led in the end to the fragmentation of intelligence collection and strategic planning.
A second impediment to military progress in the late imperial period was that vital reforms were often inconsistent, incomplete or distorted in implementation. The military conscription reform provides a good illustration. Miliutin clearly saw that Russia's traditional approach to military recruitment had become dangerously obsolete in an era of mass politics and mass armies and had to be scrapped. By dint of arduous political struggle Miliutin and his supporters were able to secure the promulgation in 1874 of a law that instituted a universal military service obligation in Russia. Henceforth the majority of the empire's young men would be eligible to be drafted into the army as private soldiers, regardless of the estate or social class to which they belonged. Miliutin was intent on accomplishing three goals with the statute of 1874. First, since it involved simultaneously widening the pool of prospective draftees and cutting the term of active service, it would give the army the modern system of military reserves that Miliutin regarded as an indispensable precondition for victory in any future European war. Second, Miliutin anticipated that the act would indirectly promote literacy and an elevation in the cultural level of the empire's population, for it also decreased the term of service required of any draftee in accordance with his education. Although the standard period of service was set at seven years, a man with a university degree had to spend only six months with the colours, and a secondary school graduate only a year and a half. Even the most rudimentary primary education shaved three years off the term of active duty. Third, because the law proclaimed military service to be a universal obligation, Miliutin hoped that the new system would eventually produce a culture of citizenship in Russia. The common experience of service was supposed to break down the distinctions of estate, class and rank, thus stimulating dynastic loyalty, unity and patriotism. He strongly believed that an army that evinced those traits would be immeasurably superior to one remarkable chiefly for its bovine obedience.
The statute of 1874, and its subsequent modifications, clearly did ameliorate the Russian Empire's military manpower problem. In 1881 the active army comprised 844,000 troops and in 1904 in excess of a million.[154] By 1914 the active army numbered 1.4 million men and the active reserve 2.6 million, while over 6 million more were enrolled in the various classes of the territorial 'militia' (opolchenie). But it nonetheless deserves emphasis that the overwhelming majority of young men in the empire never received military training at all under the 1874 conscription system. The 1874 law had introduced a universal obligation to serve, not universal military service, and contained articles granting exemptions for nationality, profession and family circumstances that were more liberal than those that obtained in any other major European country. There were several reasons for this, but as a partial upshot, while in late- nineteenth-century France four-fifths of those draft eligible passed through the army's ranks, and in Germany, over half, in Russia barely 25 per cent- 30 per cent of any given age cohort of 21-year-old males received military training.[155] This meant that in Russia it was impossible for the army to act as a 'school for the nation' in the same way as armies are said to have done elsewhere in Europe. Nor was the concept of equal citizenship well served by the radically reduced length of service awarded to men with educational qualifications. Moreover, when the casualties started to mount in the First World War the empire experienced an authentic military manpower crisis.
It was true that the post-reform army was more heterogeneous than the army of the eighteenth century had ever been, and not just from the standpoint of social class or 'estate'. Despite the 1874 law's grant of exemptions to a variety of national minorities, as time passed the army increasingly became a multiethnic force. In addition to Russians, Jews, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, Georgians, Baskhirs and Tatars were all represented in its ranks, as were men from the Northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia after 1887. The government tried to mitigate the effects of ethnic dilution by decreeing that 75 per cent of the personnel in the combat unit had to be Great Russians, but that target could not have been met without counting Ukrainians and Belorussians as such.[156] In any event, it is clear that military service in the post-reform era did not build unity across ethnic lines any more successfully than it did across the boundaries of juridical class. Ethnic minorities met with considerable discrimination within the army, and it did not help much when in the 1890s the state adopted a policy of Russification in the borderlands, particularly Poland and Finland.[157] Given the temporary nature of military service, as well as the heterogeneity within the ranks, the soldier's artel could no longer perform the integrative function as well as it had prior to the Crimean War.
A third obstacle to the modernisation of the army in the post-reform era had to do with its leadership. The Russian army consistently experienced more difficulty in attracting and retaining capable non-commissioned officers than did any other first-class army in Europe. In 1882 the army had only 25 per cent of the senior NCOs it needed, and in 1903 there was still a deficit of 54 per cent.[158] With respect to the officer corps, the problem was not so much quantity as quality. Nobles continued to dominate the highest echelons of command, and at the turn of the century over 90 per cent of the empire's generals came from hereditary noble families. Yet of the 42,777 officers then on duty almost half had been born commoners.[159] While this statistic may reveal something about social mobility in late Imperial Russia, it also reflects a much more ominous trend: the relative deterioration in the officer corps' pay, perquisites and status that occurred over the last decades of the ancien regime. The salary schedule for regular Russian army officers was set by law in 1859 and changed little over the next forty years, with two unpleasant results. First, the purchasing power of an officer's compensation tended to erode with the passage of time. But second, by the 1890s Russian army officers not only found themselves underpaid by comparison with their counterparts abroad, but also lagging behind civilian bureaucrats at home. In these circumstances, and given the opportunities available in the growing private sector, is it any wonder that the army began to lose out in the competition to recruit the most talented, and best-educated young men for its officer corps? Of course, there still remained wealthy aristocrats for whom a posting to one of the prestigious guard regiments was socially de rigueur. Yet in the non-exclusive regiments, especially those of the army infantry, the proportion of officers who were both humbly born and poorly schooled rose steeply. Of the 1,072 men holding commissions in 1895 whose fathers had been peasants, 997 or over 93 per cent were clustered in the army infantry.[160]
A decline in the prestige of the officer corps accompanied its social dilution and economic distress. But this development was also in part attributable to the burgeoning hostility of the intelligentsia towards the regime and its organs of coercion, the army and the police. Certainly a decay in the image ofthe officer is observable in the pages of Russian literature. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, novels, essays and stories by such popular writers as Garshin, Kuprin, Andreev and Korolenko disseminated negative stereotypes of army officers, depicting them as lazy, ignorant, uncouth, homicidal and frequently drunk. [161]
Compounding these woes was the inner factiousness of the officer corps. Imperial army officers were united by their antipathy towards the outer civilian world but by not much else. Officers in one branch of the service typically disdained those who belonged to the others, while the graduates of the most prestigious and specialised military academies were inclined to sneer at all who lacked their educational attainments. This deficiency in cohesion meant that the officer corps as a whole was poorly situated to develop a strong corporate spirit or articulate its collective interests. Naturally enough, the government did make attempts to heal the divisions within the corps by legislation. But such laws as the statute of May 1894 that required officers to duel over points of honour or be cashiered were wrongheaded and ineffective remedies.
Nonetheless, the imperial officer corps did contain a thin stratum of military professionals, of whom the majority were so-called 'general staff officers' (GSOs). To gain entry into this prestigious fraternity, an officer had to win admission to the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, and complete its full academic programme with distinction. Thereafter he was entitled to be known for the rest of his career as an 'officer of the general staff regardless of actual military assignment. A true intellectual elite, the GSOs occupied the most important staff billets and had a monopoly on intelligence work.
But they also received a disproportionate share of army commands. Although they constituted no more than 2 per cent of the entire officer corps, in 1913 the GSOs were in command of over a third of the army's infantry regiments and over three-quarters of its infantry divisions.[162]
In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Russia's military professionals, including many GSOs, agonised over the declining quality of the officer corps, advocated the raising of standards and tirelessly preached that a young officer's best use of free time was education, rather than dissipation. After the icy shock of the Japanese defeat there were military professionals who concluded that the entire military system had to be regenerated, and that the empire's population had to be militarised and readied for total war. Such people, whom their opponents sometimes labelled 'young turks', argued that the ultimate pledge of future victory would be Russia's transformation into a true 'nation in arms'. Some, like A. A. Neznamov, demanded that Russian adopt a unified military doctrine, that is, a set of binding principles to govern military preparations in peace and the conduct of operations in war. In 1912, however, Emperor Nicholas II announced that 'military doctrine consists in doing everything that I order' and thereby stifled any further discussion.[163]
Nicholas's interference on this occasion may have stemmed from awareness that the vision of a Russian 'nation in arms' profoundly contradicted the political idea of autocracy. Russia was not a nation, but a multinational empire, and the glue that held it together was supposed to be allegiance to the Romanov dynasty, not veneration of some national abstraction. But what this episode also highlights is another chronic problem besetting higher military leadership in the twilight of the old regime: that of imperial meddling. This came in several forms. There were, for example, grand dukes whose positions as heads of army inspectorates permitted them to exert enormous influence on military decision-making, whether they were qualified to do so or not. Yet the most noisome way in which the court retarded military progress had to do with the distribution ofpromotions and appointments. Russia's last autocrats, and Nicholas II in particular, were often prone to select (and remove) military bureaucrats and field commanders more on the basis of personal loyalty than competence. This lamentable practice occurred even during times of military emergency, such as the First World War. General A. A. Polivanov may have been a ruthless, vindictive opportunist but he was also a masterly administrator who, after taking charge of the War Ministry in the summer of 1915, made immeasurable contributions to the revival of the army after the catastrophic defeats it suffered in Poland that spring. Yet despite this outstanding performance, when Nicholas II became displeased at Polivanov's co-operation with such 'social' organisations as the War Industries Committees, he abruptly dismissed his war minister after barely nine months in office. Polivanov's successor, although honest and straightforward, was considerably his inferior in ability.
A fourth and final drag on the Russian army's capability to adapt to change was financial. Traditionally, the majority of the army's budget had gone to 'subsistence costs' - the expenses of feeding, clothing and housing its troops.[164]But in the second half of the nineteenth century the rapid pace of military- technological change demanded heavy investments in new armaments. Still worse, by the late 1860s it grew apparent to Russia's military elite that a country's transportation infrastructure was indisputably crucial to military power. It was widely believed that Prussia had won the three wars of German unification in large measure owing to her skilful exploitation of railways to mobilise and concentrate her forces. Indeed, victory in future war might hinge entirely on the speed with which an army mobilised, for the war might be decided in its early battles, and the outcome of those would depend on the quantity of troops committed. Russia, however, was a poor country disadvantaged by its enormous size and its relatively sparse railway network.
The Russian Ministry of War consistently applied for extra appropriations to fund both upgrades in weaponry and strategic railway construction, but just as consistently met stiff opposition from the Ministry of Finance, where it was held that solvency and economic growth were only possible if military spending was restrained. Although Miliutin and his brilliant assistant N. N. Obruchev did pry loose enough money to pay for some rearmament, in 1873 Finance Minister Reutern blocked their plan for the development of Russia's western defences on fiscal grounds. Since the Russo-Turkish War left the empire 4.9 billion roubles in debt, there was little sunshine for the army in the state budgets of the 1880s and 1890s. The government did authorise the War Ministry's purchase of magazine rifles in 1888, but the army's share of state expenditures fell below 20 per cent by the mid-1890s and was to remain there for almost a decade. The boom in state-subsidised railway construction during this period did not profit the army very much either, because commercial considerations usually trumped strategic ones in decisions about where to lay down track.[165]
Deprived of the wherewithal to build railroads and fortresses to check a German or Austrian attack, the War Ministry redeployed the army so as to concentrate a higher proportion of its active strength close to the western frontiers. By 1892,45 per cent of the army was billeted in the empire's westernmost military districts. This measure was, however, an inadequate substitute for a thorough technological preparation of the likely theatre of war. The signing of the alliance with France that same year did bring the army some breathing space and rescued the military leadership from the nightmarish prospect of having to fight the Germans solo. Yet new fiscal woes cropped up at the turn of the century, for reckless imperialism in East Asia gave the army new territories to defend and sorely taxed the military budget. Underfunding and overextension produced a situation in which Russia was fully ready for war neither in the East nor in the West. When the Russo-Japanese War began, six of the forts that were supposed to guard Port Arthur from the landward side were still under construction, and none of them boasted any heavy ordnance.
The Japanese war and repressive service in the revolution had drained the strength ofthe Russian army, and it was imperative that it be reconstituted. The first signs of military recovery manifested themselves in the summer of 1908 when the general staff issued a comprehensive report that detailed ten years' worth of essential reforms and improvements. Some of this plan was actually implemented under the supervision of the controversial V A. Sukhomlinov (war minister 1909-15). Sukhomlinov reorganised the army, shifted the centre of gravity of its deployment back to the east, introduced a territorial cadre reserve system, augmented Russia's stocks of machine guns and artillery, and purchased the empire's first military aircraft. He was able to pay for these innovations in part because of the enthusiasm of influential Duma politicians for the cause of national security, in part because of the support ofthe emperor, and in part because of the upsurge in Russian economic growth that began in 1910. The empire's revenues increased by a billion roubles between 1910 and 1914, and the army was a principal beneficiary. In October 1913 Nicholas II approved the 'Big Programme' of extraordinary defence expenditure, which mandated an increase in the size of the peacetime army by nearly 40 per cent.[166] Army appropriations totalled 709 million roubles in 1913, and by that point Russia was spending more on her army than any other state in Europe.
Yet it is important to put these developments in context. Russia's plans for military modernisation may have been impressive, but they were not designed to be complete until 1917 at the earliest and were overtaken by the premature commencement of the general European war. Indeed, there is evidence that one reason Germany chose war in 1914 was the awareness that it would be easier to defeat Russia before her military reforms had taken full effect. Moreover, although the increase in army spending in the last few years ofpeace was dramatic, it was not ample enough to fund all of the War Ministry's initiatives, including some regarded as urgent. For example, while in 1909 Sukhomlinov made a persuasive case that Russia needed to double the number of heavy artillery pieces in her inventory, he did not succeed in obtaining the 110 million roubles this would have cost. The problem here was the army's resource competition with the navy. Beginning in 1907, the imperial government adopted one expensive and unnecessary naval construction programme after another. The state lavished millions on its fleet primarily for considerations ofinternational prestige, but as subsequent events were to prove, ocean-going dreadnoughts were luxuries that Russia could ill afford.[167]
Conclusion: the World War
The First World War confronted Russia with the full implications of her backwardness. To begin with, her Central Power opponents outclassed her both in transportation infrastructure and in military technology. Germany's railway network was twelve times as dense as Russia's, while even Austria-Hungary's was seven times as dense.[168] Then, too, Russian artillery was inferior to German, and Germany held a crucial advantage over Russia in heavy artillery. By the end of 1914, the unanticipated tempo of combat operations had nearly depleted Russia's pre-war stockpile of artillery shells. This happened in other belligerent countries as well, but most of them were positioned to reorganise their industrial sectors for war production more quickly than Russia could. To be sure, Russia had the fifth largest industrial economy in the world in 1914, but that economy was unevenly developed and not self-sufficient. The chemical industry was in its infancy, and German imports supplied most of Russia's machine tools prior to the outbreak of the war. Russia did eventually manage to achieve an extraordinary expansion in the military output of her factories, so great in fact that by November of 1917 the provisional government had amassed a reserve of 18 million artillery shells.[169] Most of these, however, were rounds for the army's 3" field piece, whose utility in trench warfare was severely limited. Russia was never able to manufacture heavy mortars, howitzers and high explosive shell in adequate enough quantities. Despite the growth in war production, the Russian army remained poorly supplied by comparison with its enemies. Germany fired 272 million artillery rounds of all calibre during the war, Austria, 70 million and Russia, only 50 million.[170] For much of the war, the Russian army suffered from a deficiency in materiel.
The war also occasioned a military manpower crisis, for the army's losses were unprecedented. Germany virtually destroyed five entire Russian army corps during the battles of August and September 1914. In the same period the forces of the Russian south-west front experienced a casualty rate of 40 per cent. By early 1915, in addition to the dead, there were 1 million Russian troops in enemy captivity or missing in action, and another 4 million who were hors de combat owing to sickness or wounds. In the end at least 1.3 million of Russia's soldiers would die in the war; some estimates put the figure at twice that.[171]
Military attrition ground down the officer corps, too. Over 90,000 officers had become casualties by the end of 1916, including a very high proportion of those who had earned their commissions before the war. The War Ministry improvised special short-term training courses to fill officer vacancies, whose graduates streamed to the army in such quantities that the character of military leadership was altered permanently. By 1917 the typical Russian junior officer was a commoner who had completed no more than four years of formal education.[172]
All of this had implications for Russia's military performance. So too did transportation bottlenecks, the excessive independence of front commanders, political turmoil back in Petrograd and sheer command error. The list of Russian defeats in the First World War is a long one and includes Tannenberg (1914), the winter battle of Masuria (1915), Gorlice-Tarnow (1915) and Naroch (1916) among other disasters. Yet the operational picture was not unrelievedly bleak, for from 1914 to 1916 the army chalked up some remarkable successes, particularly against the Ottomans and Austrians. The most significant of these was the summer 1916 offensive conducted by General A. A. Brusilov, which inflicted a million casualties on the Austrians and Germans, and overran 576,000 square kilometres of territory before its impetus was spent.
Despite everything, Russia's loss of the First World War was not preordained. It was, after all, the Revolution, not hostile military action that took Russia out of the war. But although Russia's backwardness did not guarantee her defeat in the great war, it nonetheless severely reduced her chances of achieving victory. At the dawn of the imperial era Russia was able to devise a military system that capitalised on backwardness to give rise to military power. By the time of the Crimean War, backwardness was no longer a military blessing, but a curse. The imperial government then endeavoured to reshape the military system and bring it into conformity with the demands of modern war. Success was only partial, for enough vestiges of the old system remained to stymie progress. The Russian army in the late imperial period was therefore something like a butterfly, struggling in vain to free itself completely from its chrysalis. Tsarist military reformers had envisioned an army suitable for an industrial age of mass politics, but it would be up to the Soviets to translate that vision into reality.
Russian foreign policy: 1815-1917
DAVID SCHIMMELPENNINCK VAN DER QYE
During the final century of Romanov rule, Russian foreign policy was motivated above all by the need to preserve the empire's hard-won status as a European Great Power.[173] The campaigns and diplomacy of Peter I, Catherine II and the other emperors and empresses of the eighteenth century had raised their realm's prestige to the first rank among the states that mattered in the West. The stunning victories in the French revolutionary wars at the turn of the nineteenth century marked the apogee of tsarist global might. By defeating Napoleon's designs for continental dominion in 1812, Tsar Alexander I won an admiration and respect for Russia unparalleled in any other age. The difficult challenge for his heirs would be to keep Alexander's legacy intact.
Despite a reputation for aggression and adventurism, nineteenth-century tsarist diplomacy was essentially conservative. In the West, Russian territorial appetites were sated. Having recently absorbed most of Poland, one traditional foe, and won Finland from its erstwhile Swedish rival, the empire kept its European borders unchanged until the dynasty's demise in 1917. The imperative here was to protect these frontiers, especially the Polish salient. Surrounded on three sides by the Central European powers of Austria and Prussia, Poland never reconciled itself to Russian rule, and the restive nation seemed particularly vulnerable to foreign military aggression and revolutionary agitation. Maintaining the continental status quo therefore appeared to be the best guarantee for securing Russia's western border. For much of the nineteenth century, the Romanovs would strive to maintain stability in close partnership with Europe's other leading conservative autocracies, the Prussian Hohenzollerns and the Austrian Habsburgs.
The strategic landscape on Russia's south-western frontier was more unsettled. The neighbour there was Ottoman Turkey, an empire very much in decline by the reign of Alexander I. There were still some lands to be won in this region if the occasion presented itself, especially earlier in the century. At the same time, many Russians sympathised with Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Yet in the main, St Petersburg preferred order to opportunity in Turkey as well. A very basic strategic calculus dictated caution: Ottoman instability might well invite involvement by European rivals, thereby possibly jeopardising the Turkish Straits and the Black Sea, whose waters washed south-western Russia. Tsars did go to war against Turkey four times during the nineteenth century, albeit with increasing reluctance. While the senescent Ottomans could never match the comparatively stronger military ofthe Romanovs, two such confrontations ledto severe humiliations for Russia when other powers intervened to support Turkey.
The only real arena for Russian expansion after 1815 was in Asia. To the east of Turkey, the empire bordered on states of varying cohesion. Like the Ottomans, the ruling dynasties of Persia and China were also well past their prime. Despite growing internal stresses, both of these governments managed to avert territorial disintegration. Nevertheless, St Petersburg benefited from occasional weakness in Tehran and Peking to improve its position in Asia to the latter's detriment. Between Persia and China, Russia's frontier was even less stable. The steppes that lay in this region were peopled by antiquated khanates and fragile nomadic confederations, whose medieval cavalry proved no match for European rifle and artillery. As in Africa and the American West during this era of colonial expansion, these Central Asian lands were ripe for absorption by a more developed power.
To respond to these divergent imperatives along its vast borders, nineteenth- century St Petersburg basically divided the world beyond into three parts and acted with each according to a distinct strategy. To its west, Russia aspired to maintain its dignity as a leading power and therefore championed the status quo. With regard to Turkey, motivated by anxiety over the Straits, tsarist officials jockeyed for position among European rivals. And in Central and East Asia, they pursued a policy of cautious opportunism, occasionally expanding the realm where and when possible. St Petersburg understood that these three regions did not exist in isolation. Developments in Central Asia, for example a conquest near the Afghan border, might well have implications in the West, by straining ties with a European power like Great Britain. Nevertheless, until the turn of the twentieth century tsarist foreign policy maintained this diplomatic trinity with remarkable consistency. Despite two major setbacks, both involving Turkey, the Russian Empire was able to achieve its primary international imperatives along all three lines. However, when Nicholas II acceded to the throne in 1894, unsteadier hands began to guide Russian foreign affairs, with fatal consequences for both dynasty and empire.
From Holy Alliance to Crimean isolation
The Vienna Conference of 1814-15 set the European diplomatic order of the nineteenth century. Summoned in the wake of Napoleon's defeat, statesmen of the leading powers and a host of lesser monarchies assembled in the Austrian capital to rebuild the peace. After a quarter of a century of revolution and war, the victorious allies - Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia - sought enduring stability rather than revenge. They hoped to achieve this by restoring the map to a semblance of what it had been before the storming of the Bastille in 1789, as well as setting up a mechanism for jointly resolving major disputes. On the whole, the outcome was successful. The four allies, soon rejoined by France, maintained a relative balance of power for the following century, and Europe avoided another major continental conflagration until 1914.
One of the most contentious issues at Vienna was the fate of Poland. Partitioned by Catherine II in the late eighteenth century between her empire, Austria and Prussia, the nation had regained a semblance of independence under Napoleon. Alexander now proposed to join most of Poland to his own realm as a semi-autonomous kingdom. Reflecting his earlier liberal inclinations, the tsar offered to grant his new possession a constitution and other privileges. Despite strong opposition from Austria and Britain,[174] Alexander won the conference's consent. He also convinced the other delegates to join his 'Holy Alliance', a vague, idealistic appeal to all Christian princes to live together in harmony. Bereft of any concrete apparatus to enforce it and scorned by cynical diplomats, this utopian initiative had little lasting effect, serving more as a reflection ofthe emperor's withdrawal into otherworldly concerns. During the coming years, the diplomatic initiative on the continent was effectively ceded to Austria's conservative foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich.
The disagreement between Russia and Britain in Vienna over Poland augured deeper differences. Both geopolitics and ideology drove this rivalry, which would remain one ofthe most enduring constants of nineteenth-century tsarist diplomacy. Loyal to its tradition of maintaining a balance of power on the continent, the British Foreign Office inevitably sought to counterpoise the strongest European state. To London, the Russian Empire seemed particularly menacing, since its enormous Eurasian landmass seemed to have the potential to affect British interests both at home and in its colonies overseas. This strategic competition was exacerbated by a strong distaste among many in the British public for the repressive ways of the Romanov autocracy. Meanwhile, the anti-Napoleonic alliance inevitably weakened in the absence of a common foe. Already within seven years of the negotiations at Vienna, the conference system foundered over Britain's reluctance to intervene against revolutions in Europe. This difference of opinion only drove St Petersburg closer to the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, whose conservative politics were more reassuring.
The increasingly reactionary turn of Alexander I's final decade determined Russia's approach to a Greek revolt against Turkish rule in the early 1820s, the first important manifestation of the Eastern Question that would vex Europe's chancelleries with nagging regularity until the Great War. The Eastern Question asked what would happen to the Ottoman sultan's European possessions as his dynasty's grip weakened. Aside from Berlin (until the turn of the twentieth century, at any rate) all of the leading powers considered themselves to be vitally concerned with the fate of the Porte. Vienna, which also ruled over Orthodox minorities in the region, feared that successful emancipation from Turkish dominion of Balkan Christians might contaminate its own Slav subjects with the virus of nationalism. As naval powers, Britain and, to a lesser extent, France worried about the Turkish Straits, the maritime passage from Constantinople to the Dardanelles that linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. St Petersburg was similarly concerned about the security ofthe Straits, 'the key to the Russian house', lest Russia's Black Sea shores become vulnerable to hostile warships. But there were also important elements of Russian opinion that sympathised with the plight of Orthodox co-religionists in European Turkey.
These contradictory elements of tsarist Balkan diplomacy confronted each other during the Greekrisingthat eruptedin spring 1821. Alexander was initially shocked by Turkey's draconian repression of the insurgency, but, with some prodding from Prince Metternich, he gradually became more concerned about maintaining the status quo. Even if it involved a Muslim sultan, the principle of monarchical legitimacy overrode the rights of national minorities. To yield to subversion anywhere, the tsar feared, might open the floodgates to regicide and anarchy throughout the continent, not to mention shattering the post-war alliance system. A mutiny in his own Semenovskii Guards regiment in 1820 had only deepened Alexander's pessimism about a ubiquitous revolutionary 'empire of evil... more powerful than the might of Napoleon'.[175] Appeals from the insurgents for support against Turkey fell on deaf ears, and in 1822 the emperor sidelined a leading official in his own Foreign Ministry sympathetic to the revolt, the Ionian Count Ionnes Kapodistrias.
Nicholas I, who inherited the throne in 1825, tended to be equally loyal to the diplomatic status quo, despite some Near Eastern temptations early in his reign. At the same time, he kept on his older brother's foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode. More forceful and direct than Alexander and thoroughly immune to any idealistic temptations, Nicholas unambiguously opposed any challenges to the authority of his fellow sovereigns. Such tests were not long in coming. His own reign had begun inauspiciously with the Decembrist revolt, an attempted coup by Guards' officers with constitutionalist aspirations. Five years later, in 1830, a wave of revolutions beginning in France convulsed the continent. When Belgians rose against Dutch rule that year, Nicholas prepared to send troops to support King William I of Orange, who also happened to be his brother-in-law's father. However, such plans were cut short when a separatist revolt erupted in Poland, whose suppression required more immediate attention.
Deeply shaken by these and other disturbances, the tsar resolved to cooperate more closely with the other conservative powers to preserve the political order in Europe. In 1833 he met with the Austrian emperor, Francis II and Prussia's Crown Prince at the Bohemian town of Miinchengratz, where among other matters he signed a treaty on 6 (18) September offering to intervene in support of any sovereign threatened by internal disturbances. It was on the basis of this agreement that Nicholas intervened in Hungary to help the Habsburgs restore their rule in the waning days of a revolt that had begun during the European revolutions of 1848.
At mid-century, Russia still seemed to be the continent's dominant state. Unlike 1830, the disturbances of 1848 had not even touched Nicholas's empire, and his autocratic allies had successfully weathered the recent political storms. The only on-going military challenge was Imam Shamil's lengthy rebellion in the Caucasus Mountains. While it would take nearly another decade to pacify the region, the Islamic insurgency was largely dismissed as a colonial small war by the other powers and hardly diminished Russia's martial reputation. Yet his seeming invincibility began to cloud Nicholas's judgement. At the same time, the zeal of the 'Gendarme of Europe' to root out all enemies of monarchism, wherever they might lurk, earned him the almost universal dislike of his contemporaries abroad. Even the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, darkly muttered after Russia's Hungarian intervention that 'Europe would be astonished by the extent of Austria's ingratitude'.[176]When complications arose once again in Turkey in the early 1850s, Nicholas discovered to his cost that Machiavelli's celebrated maxim about the advantages of being feared was not always valid.
The Greek crisis had remained unresolved at the time of Alexander's death in 1825. Although Nicholas shared his brother's distaste for the rising, he negotiated with London and Paris to seek a solution. After a series of clashes, including an Anglo-French naval intervention and a brief, albeit difficult war with Turkey, by 1829 the Eastern Mediterranean was again at peace. According to the Treaty of Adrianople that Nicholas concluded with the sultan on September 2 (14) of that year, the Ottomans formally ceded Georgia, confirmed Greek as well as Serbian autonomy and granted substantial concessions in the Danubian principalities (the core of the future Romania), which became a virtual tsarist satellite. Meanwhile, St Petersburg also won important strategic gains, including control of the Danube River's mouth.
Impressive as they were, Nicholas's gains belied considerable restraint, given the magnitude of the Turkish rout. Although his forces were within striking distance of Constantinople, the tsar refrained from dealing the coup de grace. Order and legitimacy continued to be paramount in his considerations. A commission Nicholas convened that year to consider the Eastern Question unequivocally declared, 'that the advantages of the preservation of the Ottoman Empire in Europe outweigh the disadvantages and that, as a result, its destruction would be contrary to the interests of Russia'.[177]
Preserving the Ottoman Empire in Europe did not necessarily imply foregoing any advantages that St Petersburg might be able to extract from the Porte. Thus four years after Adrianople, Nicholas negotiated an even more favourable pact with the Ottomans, the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi on 26 June (8 July) 1833, in return for assistance in putting down a rebellion by the latter's Egyptian vassal. But the tsarist ascent in Turkey led to considerable alarm in
Britain, which saw a great outburst of Russophobia in the press. Yet another Turkish crisis in 1839 once again invited foreign intervention, now by Russia acting together with Britain and Austria. The outcome of this action was the Straits Convention of 1 (13) June 1841, which forced Russia to backtrack from its demands at Unkiar-Skelessi eight years earlier. For the next decade the Eastern Mediterranean remained relatively calm.
The origins of the Crimean War, Russia's most catastrophic entanglement in the Eastern Question, remain a source of lively controversy. What is clear is that the conflict began, almost innocuously, over a French attempt in 1850 to extend the Catholic Church's rights to maintain the Holy Places, sacred sites of Christendom in Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Motivated by President Louis Napoleon's effort to court domestic political support, the ploy elicited a strong response from Nicholas, who insisted on the prerogatives of the Orthodox Church. Although none of the powers sought war, the tsar's clumsy diplomacy, the intransigence of the sultan and the machinations of Stratford Canning, Britain's Russophobe minister to Constantinople, all helped transform a 'quarrel of monks' into the first major clash among the powers since Waterloo.
The Crimean War itself was more a diplomatic than a military defeat for Russia. The fighting, which eventually focused on the Black Sea naval bastion of Sebastopol, was marked by colossal inefficiency, blunders and incompetence among all combatants. Although Sebastopol eventually fell to the combined forces of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia, the siege had taken nearly a year, and logistics made further action against Russia exceedingly difficult. It was only when Austria sided with the allies towards the end of 1855 that St Petersburg was forced to sue for peace.
The moderate terms of the Peace of Paris, which the combatants concluded on 18 (30) March 1856, reflected the relatively inconclusive nature of the Crimean campaign. St Petersburg was forced to return the Danubian region of Bessarabia, annexed in 1812, to the Porte and generally saw its influence in the Balkans decline. More galling were the so-called Black Sea clauses that demilitarised these waters, severely restricting tsarist freedom of action on its south-western frontier. Yet if the allies refrained from exacting a heavy penalty on their foe, Russia's setback in the Crimea was a devastating blow to Romanov prestige. Nicholas's army, feared by many as the mailed fist of Europe's most formidable autocracy, had proven to be a paper tiger. Not for nearly another century, and then under a very different regime, would Russia regain its pre-eminent standing on the continent.
Recueillement
Defeat in the Crimea broke both Nicholas's order and its creator. Profoundly depressed by the humiliations inflicted on his beloved military, the emperor easily succumbed to a cold in February 1855 and was succeeded by his son, Alexander II. The new tsar clearly understood the link between backwardness at home and weakness abroad, and largely withdrew from European affairs to concentrate on reforming his empire. As his foreign minister, Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov, famously put it, 'La Russie ne boude pas, elle se recueille' (Russia is not sulking, it is recovering its strength).6 Rather than battling the chimera of revolution, Alexander II's diplomacy endeavoured to repair the damage done by the recent war. In Europe, this amounted to ending St Petersburg's isolation and abrogating the distasteful Black Sea clauses.
Recueillement, orthe avoidance offoreign complications to focus on domestic renewal, did not apply to all of the empire's frontiers. To the east Alexander II oversaw dramatic advances on the Pacific and in Central Asia. Already in the waning years of Nicholas I's reign, the ambitious governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Count Nikolai Murav'ev, had begun to take advantage of the Qing dynasty's growing infirmity to penetrate its northern Manchurian marches. As would often prove the case in Central Asia during the coming decades, the count was acting on his own, but his master turned a blind eye to his colonial ambitions.
When in 1858 Peking suffered defeat during the Second Opium War with Britain and France, Count Nikolai Ignat'ev, a skilled diplomat who fully shared Murav'ev's enthusiastic imperialism, benefited from the Middle Kingdom's malaise to negotiate vast annexations of the latter's territory. The Treaties of Aigun and Peking, signed on 28 May (9 June) 1858 and 2 (14) November 1860, respectively, ceded the right bank of the Amur River and the area east of the Ussuri River, thereby expanding Russian rule southwards to the north-eastern tip of Korea. Count Murav'ev modestly named a port he founded in his new acquisition Vladivostok (ruler of the East).
Russian gains in Central Asia were no less spectacular. In the early nineteenth century, a string of fortifications, stretching from the northern tip of the Caspian Sea to the fortress of Semipalatinsk on the border with the northwestern Chinese territories of Xinjiang, marked the southward extent of Russia's march into Central Asia. The arid plains beyond were ruled by the archaic khanates of Kokand, Khiva and Bokhara. Collectively known to Russians as
6 Constantinde Grunwald, Troissiecles de diplomatie russe (Paris: Callman-Levi, 1945), p. 198.
Turkestan7 together with the Kazakh Steppe, this troika of Islamic fiefdoms had prospered as transit points for caravans traversing the Great Silk Road in an earlier age. However, they had long since degenerated into internecine strife, and now seemed to derive the bulk of their wealth from raiding overland commerce and taking Russian subjects as slaves.
The final defeat of Shamil in 1859 and the 'pacification' of the Caucasus had freed a large army for action elsewhere. At the same time, martial glory in Central Asia promised to restore some lustre to Russia's badly tarnished military prestige. In i860 tsarist troops began to engage the Khanate of Kokand. The first major city to fall was Tashkent, which a force led by General Mikhail Cherniaev took in 1865. Three years later General Konstantin von Kaufmann marched through the gates of Tamerlane's fabled capital of Samarkand and within short order Kokand and Bokhara submitted to Russian protection. Finally, in 1873 Kaufmann also subdued the remaining Khanate of Khiva. Rather than being annexed outright, Khiva and Bokhara were made protectorates and retained internal autonomy under their traditional rulers.
During the Central Asian campaigns, Prince Gorchakov sought to reassure the other European powers that his sovereign's Asian policy was largely defensive and aimed primarily to establish a border secure against the restive tribes beyond. In an oft-quoted circular of 1864, Prince Gorchakov stated:
The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilised states which find themselves in contact with half-savage, nomadic populations... In such cases, it always happens that interests ofsecurity ofborders and ofcommercial relations demand of the more civilised state that it asserts a certain dominion over others, who with their nomadic and turbulent customs are most uncomfortable neighbours.
He went on to promise that Russia's frontier would be fixed in order to avoid 'the danger of being carried away, as is almost inevitable, by a series of repressive measures and reprisals, into an unlimited extension of territory'.8
London remained unconvinced by Gorchakov's logic. Many of its strategists feared that the Russian advance into Central Asia threatened India, and until the early twentieth century, halting what appeared to be Russia's inexorable advance on 'the most splendid appanage of the British Crown'9 was
7 Not to be confused with Eastern Turkestan, as the Islamic western Chinese region of Xinjiang was then known.
8 A. M. Gorchakov, memorandum, 21 November 1864, in D. C. B. Lieven (ed.), British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print (University Press of America, 1983-9), part I, series A, 1, p. 287.
9 G. N. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889), p. 14.
a prime directive of Whitehall's foreign policy. To the British, this conflict came to be known as the Great Game, whose stakes, in the words of Queen Victoria, were nothing less than 'a question of Russian or British supremacy in the world'.[178] Like the Cold War waged in the latter half of the twentieth century between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Great Game involved very little direct combat between the adversaries. Instead, the conflict was largely waged through proxies and involved considerable intrigue and espionage. Count Nesselrode aptly described the rivalry as a 'tournament of shadows'.[179]
The Pamir Mountains, at the intersection of Turkestan, Afghanistan, British India and Xinjiang, marked Imperial Russia's furthest advance into Central Asia. As long as tsarist territory abutted onto small, independent fiefdoms such as the khanates, Russian armies pressed forward. By the 1890s, its borders had reached those of the more established states of Afghanistan and China. In the case of the former, England's interest in maintaining buffers between Russia and India effectively precluded further advances, and the borders remained fixed.
Alexander II's dramatic conquests in Asia marked the culmination of a process that had begun over three centuries earlier with Ivan IV's storm of the Khanate of Kazan. Because these lands were contiguous to Russia's own territory, because the advance seemed so inexorable and because it was carried out by a somewhat exotic autocracy, Western contemporaries often imputed sinister motives to tsarist expansion. Yet Russian imperialism in Asia was nothing more than a manifestation of the global European drive to impose colonial hegemony over nations with less effective armed forces, a process that had begun in the era of Christopher Columbus.
As with the broader phenomenon of modern imperialism, there have been many explanations for Alexander II's small wars. These include an apocryphal testament by Peter the Great, orthodox Marxist logic involving Central Asian cotton fields, and the German historian Dietrich Geyer's hypothesis about a 'compensatory psychological need' as balm for the wounds inflicted on national pride by the Crimean debacle.[180] Perhaps the most creative conjecture was offered by Interior Minister Petr Valuev in 1865, 'General Cherniaev took Tashkent. No one knows why or to what end . . . There is something erotic about our goings on at the distant periphery of the empire. On the Amur, the Ussuri, and now Tashkent.'13
Whatever its parentage, it is clear that the push into Asia under Alexander II did not follow some nefarious master plan. Much of it was carried out by ambitious officers eager to advance their careers, even to the point of insubordination. When successful, Oriental conquest often brought glory and imperial favour. At the same time, tsarist diplomats remained attentive to the wider international implications of Russia's actions on the frontier. Thus, after a ten-year occupation of the Ili River valley in Xinjiang, ostensibly to help suppress a Muslim rising against Qing rule, Russia returned part of the territory to China according to the Treaty of St Petersburg on i2 (24) February i88i. Meanwhile, the prospect of British aggression, not to mention its increasing economic burden, had already led the emperor to sell his North American colony of Alaska to the United States in 1867.
In Europe, the first priority of Alexander II's diplomacy was to extricate his empire from its Crimean isolation. Even as the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, there were overtures from the French Emperor Napoleon III for a rapprochement with his former combatant. In September 1857 the two sovereigns met in Stuttgart and informally agreed to co-operate on various European questions. The Franco-Russian entente was motivated by mutual antipathy to Austria. Alexander II felt deeply betrayed by Vienna's decision to back his enemies during the Crimean War, while Napoleon III hoped to diminish Habsburg influence in Italy, where that dynasty's possessions were becoming increasingly tenuous. The dalliance came to an abrupt end, however, when the Catholic Second Empire emotionally supported a second Polish revolt against tsarist rule in 1863.
Prussia's Protestant King Wilhelm I, whose subjects also included Poles, harboured no such sympathies for the Catholic insurgents. As the rising gained momentum, he sent a trusted general, Count Albert von Alvensleben- Erxleben, to St Petersburg to offer his kingdom's military co-operation. The resultant Alvensleben Convention of 27 January (8 February) 1863 was not a major factor in restoring order. Yet it provided an important boost to Russian prestige and helped Gorchakov head off efforts by Paris, London and Vienna to intervene in the crisis. Over the coming years, Berlin also proved to be the most stalwart supporter of the foreign minister's efforts to repeal the Black Sea clauses. Prince Gorchakov finally succeeded in this ambition in 1870, during the confusion of the Franco-Prussian War. In return, Russia maintained a
13 Petr Aleksandrovich Valuev, Dnevnik, ed. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1961), vol. II, pp. 60-1.
benevolent neutrality during Prussia's campaigns against Austria of 1866 and France four years later. Tsarist diplomacy thereby helped Wilhelm I realise his dream of uniting Germany into an empire in 1871, a development whose strategic implications soon became apparent to the Russian General Staff.
The two autocracies were bound by more than pure self-interest. Ideology and dynastic ties (Wilhelm I was Alexander II's uncle) also helped foster cordiality between the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns. As a couple the union was relatively harmonious. The efforts of the new German Empire's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to establish a menage a trois with the Habsburgs proved less successful. Endeavouring to secure Germany's eastern flank, Bismarck negotiated a Dreikaiserbund (three emperors' league) in 1873. Neither an alliance nor a formal treaty, the coalition was nothing more than a vague statement of intent to co-operate along the lines of the old Holy Alliance. Too much had changed in the intervening decades for a full restoration of pre-Crimean solidarity between the three empires. Whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century Russia had been the continent's dominant power, after 1871 Germany had a more valid claim to that distinction. More important, the two junior partners had very divergent aims in the Balkans. When forced to choose, Berlin invariably favoured Teutonic Vienna over Slavic St Petersburg.
Alexander II's reign ended, as it had begun, with a major setback in the Near East. Russia's fourth war with Turkey in the nineteenth century erupted over another anti-Turkish rising among its restive Slavic subjects in 1875. Harsh repression in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria horrified the Christian powers, but there was considerable reluctance to become involved once again in a Balkan conflict. For the first time, public opinion in Russia was also making an impact on tsarist policy, as Pan-Slavs noisily agitated in the press for military support to emancipate the sultan's Orthodox subjects. Gorchakov, now close to his eightieth birthday and in failing health, tried to head off a confrontation through the Dreikaiserbund, but more bellicose passions among his compatriots and the Porte's refusal to compromise forced Alexander's hand. Despite some misgivings, the tsar declared war on Turkey on 12 (24) April 1877. After an unexpectedly arduous march through the Bulgarian highlands, in February 1878 Russian troops reached San Stefano, virtually at the gates of Constantinople.
As in 1829, the Ottoman capital was for the taking. However, on this occasion it was the threat of British intervention, underscored by the presence of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Squadron at anchor in nearby Turkish waters, that discouraged Russian troops from completing their advance. Count Ignat'ev, now ambassador to the Porte, therefore negotiated an end to the conflict with the Treaty of San Stefano on 19 February (3 March) 1878. Although it halted the fighting, the agreement failed to placate London or Vienna. Most alarming to them was the provision of a large Bulgarian state, presumably a Russian satellite, which would dominate the Balkans. Within a few months the European powers met in neutral Germany to negotiate a more acceptable settlement.
The Treaty of Berlin, concluded on 1 (13) July 1878, satisfied none of the signatories, least of all Prince Gorchakov. While the new pact yielded some territorial gains in the Caucasus and in Bessarabia, Russians regarded it as a humiliating setback. Gorchakov declared that Berlin was 'the darkest page of [his] life'.[181] Much like the Congress of Paris twenty-four years earlier, St Petersburg once again found itself diplomatically isolated. But this time there was a different scapegoat. Bismarck, who had hosted the powers as 'honest broker', bore the brunt of Russian resentment because of his failure to support his partner. In the coming years Alexander II would nevertheless instinctively look back to Germany for a new combination, culminating in a secret Three Emperor's Alliance in i88i. But over the longer term the damage to Russo-German relations proved to be irreparable.
Alexander III, who became emperor upon his father's assassination in March 1881, clearly understood the need to keep his realm at peace. A senior diplomat described the priority of the new tsar's foreign policy as 'establishing Russia in an international position that will permit it to restore order at home, to recover from its dreadful injury and then channel all of its strength towards a national restoration'.[182] Under his foreign minister, Nikolai Giers, Alexander III's diplomacy even more steadfastly pursued a course of recueillement. Tsarist caution even extended into Central Asia, where the threat of a confrontation in 1885 with Britain at Panjdeh on the Afghan border was quickly defused. Although his contemporaries regarded him as reactionary and unimaginative, Alexander III achieved his goal, and during his thirteen-year reign Russian guns remained at rest.
The most dramatic development of Alexander's comparatively brief rule was a definitive break with Germany in favour of a military alliance with France, which he ratified on i5 (27) December i893. Despite the tsar's ideological distaste for French republicanism, there were many sound reasons for the new alignment. Relations with the Hohenzollerns had already taken a distinct turn for the worse in the late 1880s over a German grain tariff and a boycott of Russian bonds. The rift between the two autocracies became inevitable when in 1890 Germany's new Kaiser Wilhelm II offended Alexander by refusing to renew a secret promise of neutrality, the Reinsurance Treaty. There were also dynastic considerations. Whereas Alexander II's fondness for his uncle, Kaiser Wilhelm I, had sustained friendship with Berlin, Alexander III had married a princess of Denmark, which still bore the scars of defeat by Prussia four decades earlier. But the basic reason for the Franco-Russian alliance was geopolitical logic. Russian generals understood that the German Empire, aggressive and militarily powerful, posed the most serious threat to its strategic security. Furthermore, Berlin's growing intimacy with Vienna seriously complicated St Petersburg's position in the Balkans. For its part, France also smarted from its more recent humiliation by German arms. To the Third Republic, alliance with Russia seemed the best guarantee of support in a revanchist war.
When Alexander III died in 1894 (of natural causes), contemporaries commemorated him as the 'Tsar Peacemaker' (Tsar' mirotvorets). With the exception of a few short-lived monarchs in the eighteenth century, he was the only Romanov whose reign had been unsullied by war. Alexander was also faithful to a nineteenth-century diplomatic traditionthat favoured consistency, caution and stability. Despite setbacks in the Crimea and at Berlin, over the past eighty years St Petersburg had largely steered a steady course in its international relations. During the reign of the last tsar, Nicholas II, the empire entered into distinctly stormier waters.
Decline and fall
Young and relatively unprepared to assume the responsibilities of autocrat, Nicholas was also subject to a much more restless and contradictory temperament than his immediate ancestors. The clearest sign of the unsettled diplomacy that characterised Nicholas's reign is the simple fact that, whereas three foreign ministers had served since 1815, no less than nine men held the post between 1894 and the dynasty's collapse in 1917.[183] However, to be fair to this oft-maligned monarch, the turn of the twentieth century was a time of fevered instability throughout much of Europe, ultimately leading to a catastrophic world war that also claimed three other imperial houses.
The first decade of Nicholas Il's rule was dominated by events on the Pacific. Much as the continuing decline of Europe's 'sick man', Ottoman Turkey, continued to attract the involvement of more vigorous powers, China, the sick man of Asia, increasingly also became the object of foreign ambitions at century's end. The immediate catalyst was the Qing military's defeat in a war with Japan over Korea during the first year of his reign. After debating the merits of joining Japan in 'slicing the melon' of China or supporting the Middle Kingdom's territorial integrity, Nicholas's ministers opted for the latter. Together with Germany and France, Russia pressed the Japanese into returning the Liaotung (Liaodong) Peninsula, with its strategically important naval base of Port Arthur (Liishun), near Peking.
The tsarist intervention against Tokyo in 1895 set in motion a chain of events that led to a disastrous war with the Asian empire within a decade. Like the Crimean debacle half a century earlier, confrontation with Japan was neither inevitable nor desired. However, bickering among his councillors, both official and unofficial, severely hampered Nicholas's ability to pursue a coherent policy in the Far East. At first, the tsar benefited from Peking's gratitude by concluding a secret defensive alliance with the Qing on 22 May (3 June) 1896. In August of that year he secured a more concrete reward in the form of a 1,500-kilometre railway concession through Manchuria, which considerably shortened the last stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway then nearing completion. Then, toward the end of 1897 the new foreign minister, Count Mikhail Murav'ev, tricked his master into seizing Port Arthur shortly after the German navy had taken another valuable harbour in northern China, on Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) Bay. While Nicholas's move did not technically violate the previous year's agreement, it effectively killed the friendship with the Middle Kingdom. At the same time, by acquiring the very port that its diplomats had forced Japan to hand back to China in 1895, Russia aroused the unyielding enmity of the Meiji government.
The more immediate cause of the Russo-Japanese War was the tsar's reluctance to evacuate Manchuria, which his troops had occupied in 1900 in concert with an international intervention to suppress the xenophobic 'Boxer' rising in north-east China that summer. Although Russia had formally pledged to withdraw its forces from the region in spring 1902, it failed to live up to the final phase of the agreement, scheduled for autumn 1903. Japan had already become alarmed when Nicholas appointed a viceroy for the Far East two months earlier, an action that seemed to signal a stronger tsarist presence on the Pacific. On 24 January (6 February) 1904, Tokyo recalled its minister to St Petersburg and two days later Japanese torpedo boats launched a surprise nighttime raid on Russia's Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur.
The combat itself eventually became a war of attrition involving increasing numbers of troops in Manchuria. As the fighting wore on, Russian public opinion began to oppose the distant war. An attempt to regain the initiative on the waves by sending the powerful Baltic Fleet around the world to the northern Pacific ended catastrophically when much of it was sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Straits of Tsushima in May 1905. Humiliated at sea, unable to halt the adversary's advance into the Manchurian interior, financially exhausted and beset by revolutionary unrest on the home front, Nicholas readily accepted an American offer that summer to mediate an end to the conflict. Thanks to the brilliant diplomacy of the former finance minister, Sergei Witte, who headed the tsar's delegation to the peace talks in New Hampshire, Russia's penalty for defeat was comparatively light. Nevertheless, the Treaty of Portsmouth, which was concluded on 23 August (5 September) 1905, marked an end to Nicholas's dreams of Oriental
glory.
As in 1855, the consequences of Russian military failure abroad had a major impact on politics at home. Facing mounting opposition from nearly all elements of society, in October 1905 the tsar announced the creation of an elected legislature, the Duma, and broader civil rights. While this concession did not convert the empire into a full parliamentary democracy, it did impose important limitations on the autocracy's prerogatives. More important, Nicholas's October Manifesto appeased many of his critics, thereby bringing his realm much needed domestic quiet.
Over the coming years, Foreign Minister Aleksandr Izvol'skii resolved most of the outstanding quarrels with other powers in East and Inner Asia. Thus on 21 June (4 July) 1907 he authorised an agreement with Japan, which, along with a treaty in 1910, recognised respective spheres of influence on the Pacific. More important, Izvol'skii also responded favourably to a British proposal to negotiate an end to the long-standing Asian rivalry. According to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 18 (31) August 1907, the two signatories accorded London influence over Afghanistan and southern Persia, while St Petersburg won dominance in Persia's more populous north. Although the pact did not entirely end the Great Game, it did much to improve relations between its two players. The convention also facilitated France's goal of forming an anti- German Triple Entente.
Russia's rebuff in the Far East redirected its attention back to the Near East. By now a number of Orthodox monarchies had gained independence from the Ottoman Sultan, while control over his much-diminished European inheritance was becoming increasingly tenuous. Meanwhile, the bacillus of nationalism had also begun to infect Austria-Hungary, whose Slavic minorities were becoming increasingly restive as well. Among the Dual Monarchy's subjects most vulnerable to separatist tendencies were Serbians, Croatians and Slovenes, many of whom yearned to join the Kingdom of Serbia into a 'jugoslav' or South Slavic federation. Belgrade, which was closely aligned with St Petersburg, naturally did little to discourage such aspirations. As a result, relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia grew increasingly strained in the twentieth century's first decade. By the same token, the Eastern Question continued to be a source of friction between the Habsburgs and the Romanovs.
It was against this backdrop of mutual suspicion that Izvol'skii similarly attempted to fashion a deal with Russia's Balkan antagonist. In September i908, the tsar's foreign minister secretly met with his Austrian counterpart, Count Alois von Aerenthal, at Buchlau Castle in Moravia. Accounts of the conversation between the two men differ, but their discussion focused on trading Austrian consent in re-opening the Turkish Straits to Russian warships in exchange for Russian recognition of the former's rule over the former Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thinking that he had scored a brilliant diplomatic coup, Izvol'skii instead was horrified when Aerenthal soon publicised his consent to the Bosnian question without mentioning the Straits. Berlin's quick pledge of support for Vienna effectively forced the chastened official to accept the count's fait accompli.
Izvol'skii's 'diplomatic Tsushima' eventually led to his replacement as foreign minister by the relatively ineffectual Sergei Sazonov. But the Bosnian Crisis also had more serious consequences. On the one hand, Austria's absorption of a province with a large Serbian population inflamed nationalist passions in Belgrade. Meanwhile, Aerenthal's apparent duplicity along with German bullying over the matter only further aroused Russian hostility to the Teutonic partners. Along with other growing international stresses and strains, this animosity helped to divide the continent into two mutually hostile coalitions, pitting the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Triple Entente of France, Britain and Russia. Armed conflict between the two groups was by no means inevitable. Nevertheless, preserving the peace grew increasingly complicated.
Over the next few years, the Balkans would be convulsed by a number of other crises, including two regional wars between 1911 and 1913. Both conflicts were localised as the powers largely kept to the sidelines. But when in June 1914 a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, during a visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Vienna was provoked into drastic measures against Belgrade. Despite determined efforts over the next month among the continent's chancelleries to head off a clash, in late July negotiations gave way to ultimata, mobilisations and finally the outbreak of the First World War.
With the possible exception of Austria-Hungary, which hoped for an isolated campaign to crush Serbia, none of the combatants sought a confrontation in July 1914. Nicholas was particularly reluctant to take up arms. Although his military had largely recovered from the recent defeat in East Asia, he knew that it was still no match for the Central Powers. Nevertheless, the tsar and many of his ministers were even more fearful of the penalty of not supporting Serbia, its partner, against an assault by the Dual Monarchy. Within the past forty years Russia had twice been forced to yield to Austria in the Balkans, at Berlin in 1878 and over the Bosnian question in 1908. A third capitulation might irreparably harm the empire's prestige, with fatal consequences for the Romanovs' standing as a great power.
The start of war did not end tsarist diplomacy. At first, much of Sazonov's attention was directed to securing the agreement of his allies for acquiring German and Austrian territory in a peace settlement. When Turkey entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in October 1914, the minister quickly began to focus on the Straits. Already in early 1915 he gained the consent of Britain and France for Russian control of the passage. Of course, to realise its expansive ambitions in Central Europe and the Near East, Russia needed to defeat its enemies. After two Russian armies were routed in East Prussia in August 1914, the likelihood of victory became increasingly remote. And a year later Poland and part of the Baltic provinces were in enemy hands. Although by 1916 tsarist forces had managed to stabilise their positions, once again the home front ultimately decided the outcome of the Russian war effort. Severe economic dislocation in the cities andpoor political leadership severely discredited the dynasty, ultimately resulting in Nicholas's abdication in March 1917.
The character of tsarist diplomacy
More than in any other era, between 1815 and 1917 Russia was firmly anchored in the European state system. As one of the founders of the Concert of Europe, St Petersburg fully subscribed to the values that shaped thinking about international relations on the continent. If anything, nineteenth-century Russians were even more scrupulous in their observance of diplomatic protocol than some of the other powers. Fully equating civilisation with Europe, tsarist diplomats and their imperial masters understood that relations among the continent's states were carried out according to a strict code of conduct, which respected honour and the sanctity of national sovereignty.[184]
Despite occasionally being branded as 'Asiatic' in the West, senior officials at the Choristers' Bridge[185] shared an outlook common throughout the European diplomatic corps. Often educated by foreign tutors, speaking French more easily than their native tongue, and sharing the same aristocratic tastes as their colleagues in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, the elite that shaped Russian diplomacy consciously identified with a cosmopolitan European upper strata that often still valued class over nation. Indeed, other Russians occasionally criticised the Foreign Ministry as an alien preserve, and not without reason. Because of the rarefied skills required of an ambassador, most important a familiarity with the social milieu of foreign courts, tsarist diplomats often bore distinctly non- Slavic surnames, such as Cassini, Stackelberg, Tuyll van Serooskerken, Pozzo di Borgo and Mohrenheim.
While Russia was an integral member of the continent's exclusive club of great powers, its foreign policy did exhibit some distinctive features. Contemporary Western observers were often struck by the concentration of authority in the hands of the sovereign. It was not unusual even in parliamentary regimes for the monarch to be closely involved in diplomacy. Great Britain's Queen Victoria was an active player in her kingdom's foreign affairs, while Hohen- zollerns and Habsburgs often took an even stronger part in such matters. But right up to the reign of Nicholas II, Russia's tsars saw the relations of their empire with other nations as their exclusive preserve. Even the Fundamental Laws of 1906, which established the Duma, declared, 'Our Sovereign the Emperor is the supreme leader of all external relations of the Russian state with foreign powers. He likewise sets the course of the international policy of the Russian state.' The statute explicitly forbade legislators from debating
foreign policy, a provision unknown in any other European constitution at the
time.[186]
This did not mean that Romanovs were reluctant to delegate authority to their foreign ministers. When the Choristers' Bridge was headed by a trusted and competent individual, as it was duringmuch ofthe nineteenth century, that official naturally came to exercise a great deal of influence on tsarist diplomacy. One indication ofthe minister's prestige was the fact that Russia's highest civil service chin (level on the Table of Ranks), chancellor, was typically bestowed on only distinguished holders of that post. Prince Gorchakov once explained, 'in Russia there are only two people who know the politics of the Russian cabinet: The emperor, who sets its course, and I, who prepare and execute it'.[187] Nevertheless, as in many governments, the foreign minister's authority could be eclipsed by others. This was particularly true during Nicholas II's reign, when at various times Finance Minister Sergei Witte or a shadowy group of imperial intimates had a much stronger say in Russian diplomacy.
Even when the Foreign Ministry was firmly in charge of the empire's relations with other states, it did not always speak with one voice. Officials at the Asian Department, which had officially been established in 1819 to deal with Eastern states (including former Ottoman possessions in south-eastern Europe), had a very different outlook on the world than their colleagues who dealt with Western and Central Europe. Unlike the latter, who tended to be well-born, cosmopolitan dilettantes, the Asian Department was largely staffed by ethnic Russians, often with special training in Oriental languages. Caution and aristocratic etiquette were alien to its modus operandi. Acting as a semi- autonomous institution, the Asian Department at times conducted a policy at odds with the broader lines of tsarist diplomacy. This had particularly unfortunate consequences in the Balkans, where more enthusiastic patriots like Count Ignat'ev could frustrate his minister's efforts to defuse tensions.
Despite the autocratic nature of the tsarist regime, by the second half of the nineteenth century public opinion increasingly began to play a role in Russian diplomacy. As throughout Europe, the development of an assertive press and the rise of nationalism began to involve educated Russians in what had hitherto been regarded as the sovereign's exclusive preserve. During Nicholas II's reign, the St Petersburg daily Novoe vremia (the New Times) had an authority roughly analogous to The Times. Read at the Winter Palace and at the Chorister's Bridge, Novoe Vremia advocated a pro-entente line, largely reflecting the sentiments of most literate Russians. The creation of the Duma, an elected legislature, in 1907 further involved civil society in foreign policy. Although according to the Fundamental Laws, deputies could not discuss such matters, they nevertheless used their right to approve the Foreign Ministry's annual budget to impose their views on its policies. The relatively liberal Izvol'skii understood the importance of a favourable public and was careful to court the Duma's more moderate members.
But the most dramatic feature of nineteenth-century tsarist diplomacy was its relative success, at least until 1894. During the eight decades that followed the Congress of Vienna, Russian foreign policy displayed a remarkable degree of consistency and, with two major exceptions in the Near East, it achieved the empire's principal geopolitical objectives. It was only under Nicholas II, when impatience and excessive ambition replaced realism, that the achievements of earlier Romanovs came undone.
The navy in 1900: imperialism, technology and class war
NIKOLAIAFQNIN
At the turn of the twentieth century the Russian navy was in a difficult position. Traditionally, its main theatre of operations was the Baltic Sea. Since the first halfofthe nineteenth century Russia had been the leading naval power among the countries bordering on this sea. Its main enemy had been the British. The Royal Navy could easily block Russian access to the open ocean by patrolling the Sound, in other words the passage between Denmark and Sweden. As was shown in both the Napoleonic and Crimean wars, not only could it also blockade Russian ports and thereby stop Russia's seaborne trade, it could also mount a realistic threat against Kronstadt and the security of St Petersburg, the imperial capital.[188]
From the early 1880s a new threat emerged on the Baltic Sea as newly united Germany began to build its High Seas Fleet. To some extent this was a worse danger than the British navy had been, since a German fleet enjoying superiority over Russia in the Baltic theatre would be able to operate in conjunction with Europe's most formidable land forces - in other words the German army. Given the right circumstances, joint operations by the German army and fleet could pose a major threat to the security of Russia's capital and her Baltic provinces.[189]
Meanwhile the situation in Russia's second theatre of maritime operations, namely the Black Sea, was also difficult. In the early twentieth century 37 per cent of all Russian exports and the overwhelming majority of her crucially important grain exports went through the Straits at Constantinople. On these exports depended Russia's trade balance, the stability of the rouble, and therefore Russia's credit-worthiness and her ability to attract foreign capital. The Ottoman government could block this trade at any time by closing the Straits.
As was shown in the Crimean War, in alliance with a major naval power the Ottomans could also allow in foreign fleets which could blockade and capture Russia's Black Sea ports. So long as the weak Ottoman regime controlled Constantinople and the Straits it was unlikely to use its geopolitical advantage against Russia except in wartime. But the Ottoman Empire was in steep decline. In the decades before the First World War it was a recurring nightmare for the Russians that a rival great power might come to dominate the Straits either directly or by exercising a dominant influence over the Ottoman government. Should there arise any immediate threat of Ottoman collapse, the Russians were determined at least to seize and fortify the eastern end of the Straits in order to deny access to the Black Sea to the navies of rival great powers.[190]
Faced with these threats, in 1881 the Russian government stated in the prologue to its twenty-year naval construction programme that Russia 'must be able to challenge the enemy beyond the limits of Russian coastal waters both in the Baltic and Black seas'.[191] The financial implications of this decision to build major fleets in both seas to meet possible British or German challenges were daunting. Partly for that reason, in 1885 the twenty-year programme was somewhat reduced. Nevertheless by 1896, fourteen modern battleships and many other vessels were in service or nearing completion in the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. Meanwhile the new 1895-1902 construction programme envisaged the building of still more units. The additional cost just of the ships designated for the Baltic fleet would be almost 149 million roubles. One gains some sense ofthe enormous pressure of military budgets on Russia's economic development when one compares this sum (devoted to just one fleet of Russia's junior military service) to the 33.6 million roubles which comprised the budget of the Russian Ministry of Education in 1900.
By 1896, however, a new threat and a new potential theatre of naval operations had emerged in the Pacific. In this period competition for empire was reaching its peak. Between 1876 and 1915 roughly one-quarter of the world's land surface was annexed by the European imperialist powers and the United States. The 'Scramble for Africa' was completed in 1899-1902 by the British conquest ofthe Boer republics. Meanwhile the centre of imperialist competition had moved to East Asia, where the Ching Empire's days seemed clearly numbered. In 1898 the Americans annexed the Philippines. In 1900 the Boxer rebellion threatened the Ching dynasty's survival and resulted in Great Power military intervention in China.
Russia had a long border with China and was a near neighbour too ofJapan, whose military and economic power was growing rapidly. Saint Petersburg neither could nor wished to stand outside imperialist competition in East Asia, on which the whole future global balance of power seemed likely to depend. However, by taking the lead first in 1895 in blocking Japanese annexation of Port Arthur and then three years later in taking the port herself, Russia made herself Japan's potential enemy. The large-scale Japanese 1895 naval programme, funded partly by the proceeds of victory over China in 1894, made clear the potential threat to Russian security. A conference summoned to consider this threat by Nicholas II noted that 'in comparison to 1881 circumstances in the Far East have changed radically and not at all in our favour'. The emperor himself correctly commented that 'our misfortune is that Russia has to build and maintain three independent fleets'.[192]
The main reason why this was the case was the enormous distances between the three theatres in which the Russian navy operated. In addition, however, until the Montreux agreement of 1936 warships had no right of passage through the Straits at Constantinople. The Black Sea fleet was therefore entirely isolated. When Russia wished to send ships even to the Mediterranean they had to come from the Baltic fleet. Russia's Pacific squadron was also made up of ships built in and despatched from the Baltic. Not merely was the voyage to the Far East very long but Russia had no bases between Libau and Port Arthur. This caused difficulties even in peacetime. In wartime, with neutral ports closed, it was a huge problem. Meanwhile the need to create a new infrastructure to sustain the Pacific fleet in Vladivostok and Port Arthur was extremely difficult and expensive, given their geographical remoteness from industrial centres and their dependence on the carrying capacity of the single-track Siberian and East-Chinese railways. Though finances were the main problem surrounding the creation of three independent fleets they were not, however, the only one. The types of ships suitable for war against Germany in the confined coastal waters of the Baltic were wholly unsuitable for long-distance raids against British commerce in the Atlantic or Pacific. A battleship squadron capable of contestingJapanese domination of the Yellow Sea had still other requirements.
The Russian government attempted to prioritise the East Asian theatre. In December 1897 it was decided to limit the Baltic fleet to a purely defensive role. Though the build-up of the Black Sea fleet was to continue, most of the available naval forces were to be concentrated in the Far East. For this purpose a new construction programme ('For the Requirements of the Far East') was agreed in 1898 in addition to the existing 1895 programme. It aimed to add a further five battleships and numerous smaller ships to the Pacific fleet by 1905.[193]
The new programme was very expensive. In total the navy was allocated 732 million roubles between 1895 and 1903. This was more than three times the Japanese naval budget and it also shifted the share of the navy in overall Russian military expenditure from 17 per cent in 1895 to 25 per cent in 1902.[194]
The Russian Ministry of Finance insisted that the new naval construction programme should be completed in 1905, although the rival Japanese programme was intended to reach fruition significantly earlier. Finance Minister Witte claimed both that it was impossible for Russia to afford such vast sums for shipbuilding in a shorter period and that the Japanese would never be able to finance the completion of their naval programme before 1908. The finance minister proved mistaken. The Japanese programme was completed by 1903.[195]Moreover, awareness that Japan possessed a window of opportunity before the completion of the Russian shipbuilding programme was a major incentive for the Japanese to go to war in 1904. Meanwhile, however, the Russian government was convinced that its build-up of naval forces in the Pacific had checkmated the Japanese. Its attention was returning to Europe and particularly to the Straits, where crisis loomed and the Ottoman regime's survival seemed ever more doubtful. In 1903 a vast new twenty-year naval construction programme was agreed for the Baltic and Black seas. Russia's unexpected involvement in war with Japan changed all these plans.
Within the Naval Ministry responsibility for the design, construction, operation and repair of ships lay with the Naval Technical Committee (MTK), whose basic job was to ensure that the fleet was fully up-to-date in technical terms. However, in the 1890s the committee was too understaffed to do its job properly, which caused much delay and many mismatched and unco-ordinated requirements for new ships. As regards the 1898 programme the MTK only defined requirements for the draught, speed, cruising range and armament of the new ships. This resulted in ships supposedly of the same class which were built in different factories having significantly different features, which complicated future operations.
The MTK in any case had no control over money: the realisation of all its plans depended on the release of funds by the so-called Chief Administration of Shipbuilding and Supply (GUKiC). Even department chiefs in the GUKiC had no engineering background and little grasp of shipbuilding, however. In the light of spiralling naval budgets, the GUKiC put much effort into enforcing economies in many aspects of naval life. Areas hardest hit included provision of effective modern shells instead of the existing poor explosives; adequate shooting practice; training at sea in order to practise squadron manoeuvres and bring ships and their companies up to a high state of readiness. These economies were a key cause of Russia's defeat in the war against Japan.
Inevitably, the overall economic and technological backwardness of Russia had an impact on the shipbuilding industry. Matters were worsened by the government's reliance on state-owned works (Baltic, Admiralty, Obukhov, Izhorsk, etc.) to build most of its ships. Management of these works at that time was usually very bureaucratic, with little conception of profit, costs or productivity. The naval officers who ran these works also frequently had limited engineering knowledge. As a result, ship-construction in Russia was expensive by international standards and slow.[196] At a time when naval technology was improving rapidly slow construction times were particularly dangerous, since even new ships risked being obsolescent on completion. The MTK itself often introduced changes while construction was already under way. This caused further delay and confusion, and could result in errors in design. One solution to Russia's problems would have been greater reliance on private industry, as occurred after 1906, when the government privatised some works and gave many orders to private firms (especially for non-capital ships), thus attracting large-scale private injection of capital into the Russian shipbuilding industry. Before 1905, however, Russia had only five private works even partially engaged in shipbuilding: these firms operated at a loss, partly because when forced to give orders to private firms the naval ministry preferred to place them abroad.[197]
As a result of the naval construction programmes, by the first years of the twentieth century Russia had moved into third place among the world's navies, with 229 ships as against Britain's 460 and France's 391.[198] Many new types of ships were built, including Russia's first submarine, Delfin, which was launched in 1903. Among the classes of ships built were armoured coastal defence ships (Admiral Ushakov class of 4,127 tons) whose obvious theatre was the Baltic Sea; Poltava class battleships (10,960 tons) which followed the normal European model and the three faster battleships of the Peresvet class (12,674 tons), designed to operate for long periods at sea. A few battleships were ordered abroad but their design was closely supervised by the MTK and in the case of the Tsesarevich (12,912 tons), built in France, served as a model for a class of five battleships subsequently built in Russia (Borodino class of 13,516 tons).[199]
During these years a major shift occurred in the design and proposed deployment of armoured cruisers. The earlier cruisers (Rurik, Rossiia and Gro- moboi) were designed as long-distance commerce raiders, with British trade as their obvious target. Equal in size to battleships and incorporating many new technologies, they initially aroused exaggerated fears in Britain which resulted in a very expensive class of British armoured cruisers being built to match them.[200] The armoured cruisers of the Bayan class (the Bayan itself was launched in 1900) were, however, designed to operate in more limited waters and to fight alongside battleships if necessary.[201] Their likeliest enemy was seen as Japan, which had already built a number of similar armoured cruisers. For this reason, in comparison to the earlier commerce-raiders the new cruisers sacrificed long-range cruising capability in order to maximise armour and guns for fleet actions. A similar evolution was evident among Russia's lighter ('protected') cruisers with earlier ships (e.g. the Diana class of the 1895 programme) being seen primarily as commerce-raiders and later ships (e.g.
Variag, Askold, Bogatyr and Novik) being designed to operate together with the battle-fleet.
The structure and governance of the fleet and the Naval Ministry were defined by the laws of 1885 and 1888. The ministry was comprised of a number of chief administrations (e.g. medical: hydrographic) and committees (e.g. the MTK) but its most important core institution was the Main Naval Staff, which was responsible for the navy's preparedness for war. The Main Naval Staff, however, was swamped in various day-to-day administrative responsibilities. Like many other navies at the time, Russia lacked a true naval general staff, responsible for pre-war strategic planning and overall control of wartime operations. A proposal to establish such a staff was rejected at the end of the nineteenth century and the small (twelve-man) strategic unit established within the Main Naval Staff on the eve of the Japanese war had no chance of seriously affecting wartime operations. The annual war games at the Nicholas Naval Academy had some impact on strategic thinking but although Admiral Makarov had intelligent and aggressive ideas about strategy, the dominant tendency among Russia's senior admirals was defensive - stressing the defence of key positions (e.g. Port Arthur during the war with Japan) and seeing naval assistance to the army largely in terms of the secondment of personnel and weapons. The staffs of the individual fleets saw themselves as mere advisory bodies and showed little initiative.[202]
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