Foreign policy and the armed forces

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 herself in 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.22

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.23 These terms are so poorly documented, especially before the latter part of the 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

22One of the most striking documents on the virtues of Russian foreign policy as well as the continuity of it between 1796 and 1856 was the long instruction for Tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich composed in 1838 by Nesselrode’s assistant, Baron E. P. von Brunnow, an assistant to Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode, ‘Aperc¸u des principales transactions du Cabinet de Russie sous les regnes` de Catherine II, Paul I et Alexander I.’ Sbornik russkago istoricheskago obshchestva, 148 vols. (St Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1867–1916), vol. XXXI, pp. 197–416. It is a frank condemnation of the acquisitiveness of Catherine and an endorsement of the moral qualities of the policies of Paul and Alexander. At the other end of the political spectrum of the age was the outlook of Viscount Castlereagh and the British policy that he represented: ‘When the Territorial Balance of Europe is disturbed [Great Britain] can interfere with effect, but She is the last Government in Europe, which can be expected, or can venture to commit Herself on any question of an abstract Character. . . . We shall be found in our place when actual danger menaces the System of Europe, but this Country cannot, and will not, act upon abstract and speculative Principles of Precaution’ (P. Langford, Modern British Foreign Policy: The Eighteenth Century,

1 688–1 81 5 (New York: St Martin’s, 1976), p. 238).

23For a brief exposition, see Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy’, in Ragsdale and Ponomarev, Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, pp. 351–2.

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or less.24 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,25 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.

24The most prominent use of the term svoboda ruk is in V. G. Sirotkin, Duel’ dvukh diplomatii (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), but the authors of the first of five projected volumes to appear in a new and unprecedentedly authoritative history of Russian foreign policy also rely heavily on it (in my opinion excessively and without defining it properly): O. V. Orlik (ed.), Istoriia vneshnei politiki Rossii: pervaia polovina XIX veka (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1995), pp. 27–135 passim.

25This is the argument of Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1 7 63 – 1 848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

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