Russian foreign policy, 1815–1917

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, or the avoidance of foreign 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 Constantin de Grunwald, Trois siecles` de diplomatie russe (Paris: Callman-Levi,´ 1945), p. 198.

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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 1860 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 of security of borders and of commercial 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

7Not to be confused with Eastern Turkestan, as the Islamic western Chinese region of Xinjiang was then known.

8A. 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.

9G. N. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1 889 and the Anglo-Russian Question (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889), p. 14.

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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’.10 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’.11

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.12 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

10D. Fromkin, ‘The Great Game in Asia’, Foreign Affairs (Spring 1980): 951.

11M. Edwardes, Playing the Great Game: A Victorian Cold War (London: Hamish Hamilton,

1975), p. viii.

12 Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1 860– 1 91 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 205.

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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 12 (24) February 1881. 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 AlvenslebenErxleben, 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

13Petr Aleksandrovich Valuev, Dnevnik, ed. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1961), vol. II, pp. 60–1.

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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

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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’.14 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 1881. 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’.15 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 15 (27) December 1893. 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

14In David MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Panslavism, 1 87 5 –1 87 8 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 327.

15V. N. Lamsdorff, ‘Obzor vneshnei politiki Rossii za vremia tsarstvovaniia Aleksandra III’, GARF, Fond 568, op. 1, d. 53, l. 1.

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