Russian foreign policy, 1725–1815

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.7

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.8 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.

7Robert E. Jones, ‘The Nobility and Russian Foreign Policy, 1560–1811’, CMRS 34 (1993): 159–70, and Robert E. Jones, ‘Opposition to War and Expansion in Late Eighteenth Century Russia’, JfGO 32 (1984): 34–51. Quotation in Walther Mediger, Moskaus Weg nach Europa: der Aufstieg Russlands zum europaischen¨ Machtstaat im Zeitalter Friedrichs des Grossen

(Braunschweig: Goerg Westermann Verlag, 1952), pp. 108, 295.

8Odessa, founded in 1794, was in 1900 the third largest city in Russia (excluding Warsaw), the conduit of 45 per cent of the foreign trade of the Russian Empire, including 40 per cent of the grain trade. Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1 7 94–1 91 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); I. M. Kulisher, Ocherk istorii russkoi torgovli (St Petersburg: Atenei,

1993); S. A. Pokrovskii, Vneshniaia torgovlia i vneshniaia torgovaia politika Rossii (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnaia kniga, 1947).

515

Foreign policy and the armed forces

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 moralism and dedication to political and social stability. Even the axiom of legitimacy yielded in his outlook to considerations of political order. In most questions of principle, however, Paul was a literal-minded iconodule.9

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 of his 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:

9The following account is quite contrary to more traditional ones, and I have no space here to elaborate it and document it. See Hugh Ragsdale, ‘Russia, Prussia, and Europe in the Policy of Paul I’, JfGO 31 (1983): 81–118.

516

Russian foreign policy, 1725–1815

I united with the powers that appealed to me for aid against the common enemy. Guided by honour, I have come to the assistance of humanity . . . 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.10

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 Krudener¨ 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’.11 This last suggestion was evidently premature, and Bonaparte had no intention of forswearing French

10D. A. Miliutin, Istoriia voiny 1 7 99 goda mezhdu Rossieii Frantsiei v tsarstvovanie imperatora Pavla I, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk, 1857), vol. II, pp. 553–8, vol. III, pp. 444–5.

11Russkii arkhiv, 1874, no. 2, columns 961–6.

517

Foreign policy and the armed forces

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 Franc¸ois-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 it is . . . 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 come into 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 . . .12

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 policies.’13 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 emigr´es´, 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.14

12F.-G. de Bray, ‘La Russie sous Paul I’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 23 (1909): 594–6.

13R. E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 1 7 5 4–1 801 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 16.

14McGrew, Paul, pp. 276–7.

518