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Russian foreign policy: 1815–1917

david schimmelpenninck van der oye

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.1 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

1The five Great Powers of the nineteenth century were Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia (after 1871, Germany) and Russia. As one standard textbook explains, ‘a Power has such rank when acknowledged by others to have it. The fact of a Power belonging in that category makes it what has been called a Power with general interests, meaning by this one which has automatically a voice in all affairs’ (R. Albrecht-Carrie,´ A Diplomatic History of Europe since the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), pp. 21–2).

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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 of the Romanovs, two such confrontations led to 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, nineteenthcentury 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,

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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,2 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 of the 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,

2In contrast to Prussia, which also took advantage from the Congress of Vienna to make major territorial gains.

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which would remain one of the 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 of the 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 Greek rising that erupted in 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

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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’.3 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 Munchengr¨atz,¨ 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

3P. K. Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), p. 277.

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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’.4 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 graceˆ. 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’.5

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

4In Albrecht-Carrie,´ Diplomatic History, p. 73.

5In William C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia 1 600–1 91 4 (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 222.

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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.

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