Russia (32 page)

Russia’s new system of regional administration, proclaimed in 1775, was
applied to Ukraine. However, this obliged the government to recognize the Cossack elite as nobles on a par with the Russian nobility, and in 1783 serfdom was introduced into Ukraine. These measures mollified the Ukrainian elite, who were landowners as well as Cossack officers, so that when Ukraine’s own indigenous institutions were abolished, as they were in the 1780s, protest was muted. Indeed it was Ukrainians on the Russian governor-general’s staff who installed and administered the new regime. Although the Ukrainian elite continued to take pride in their Cossack past, most of them accepted the new order, and in time many of them were to become Russian patriots.
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The processes by which differences in wealth within a community increased, and the officer class was accorded both the privileges of noblemen and the right to keep serfs, took place in other Cossack communities which had previously been rebelliously inclined. In 1773 the Don Cossacks had produced in Pugachev the most terrifying rebel of all, but another development also helped to break them in. This was the emergence of an ethos of pride in loyal service which the state helped to shape. The ethos related conveniently both to a sense of social privilege and to pride in military glory.

The later eighteenth century saw an almost uninterrupted series of campaigns in which Cossacks were involved. The imperial citations, awards of decorations for bravery and donations of colours combined to create a patriotism that was gradually to blot out any will to assert a collective independence. Indeed, when the government needed to establish a new Cossack community to build and guard the Kuban river line, former Zaporozhian veterans who had served as marines in the Second Turkish War of 1787—92 were allowed, as a reward for their valued service, to kneel down before the Empress and petition for a grant of land in the area on which they could settle. The petition was, of course, granted, the purpose of the ceremony having been achieved. In an age when glory could inspire both pride and awe, the state now possessed a means other than suppression to fend off thoughts of protest and manipulate its subjects. That is how the Cossacks came to be psychologically enslaved.
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The Baltic provinces constituted a quite different case. The great majority of the population there were peasant serfs whose horizons extended very little further than their village and who spoke local Baltic dialects (the modern literary languages had not yet been constructed). Russian rule made little difference to such people, except that men in Russian rather than Swedish uniforms garrisoned the towns and when necessary patrolled the countryside. Authority was represented by the same lord that they had
had before. The lords themselves were predominately German-speaking, and, as we have seen, they had been co-opted into the Russian elite. Every governor-general in the eighteenth century was a Baltic German except one, and he, George Browne, was an Irishman married to a Baltic German.

The dependence of government on educated Germans became so pervasive from the 1730s that many a provincial governor would put his signatures to reports that were actually written in German.
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So long as the Baltic Germans preserved their right to use German in the local courts and in correspondence with the imperial government they had little incentive to learn Russian unless they aspired to very high office. Indeed, until the middle of the century German was the principal language of the imperial court, as subsequently French would become the favoured medium. Furthermore, in the later eighteenth century Baltic Germans held a far higher number of senior positions than their numbers warranted in the imperial administration, the judicial service and the military. They were content with Russian rule. The honeymoon ended only when, in August 1796, the terms of Catherine’s Charter of the Nobility of 1785 were applied to them. The charter deliberately ignored the noble traditions and institutions of the Baltic Germans. Its introduction prompted polite remonstrance, and then protest. But Catherine — a German herself — was adamant. The protestors, she said, did ‘not appreciate the advantages offered to them, but [clung] to traditional habits … The disposition of rulers’, she warned, ‘should at all times be accepted with respect and obeyed without demur.’
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The sword of the enlightened improver cut evenly against ancient constitutions and the habits of savages alike.

As ever, there was less restlessness among the peoples of the north and west than in the southern provinces of the Empire. In part this was due to rising affluence, in part to a measured combination of firmness and concession. Indifference and inertia also counted. But, if there was little opposition to Russian rule, there was little inclination to assimilate either. Religious toleration — another principle of enlightened government — helped reinforce the distinctiveness of Catholic Poles, German Protestants and Jews. So did the preservation of serfdom and the persistence of private law. The state was beginning to encroach on privilege and localism, though decades were to pass before the effects were very visible. Had these reforms been implemented earlier and been more widespread, a far higher proportion of the population would have been Russified and there would have been less scope for the nationalism of an age yet to come.

Yet no thoroughgoing Russification policy was applied consistently, even in the mid-Volga region, one of the earlier scenes of Russian
empire-building. If Russians came to predominate in that region, this was because of demographic expansion rather than policies of absorption. Russians had formed the majority of the population at least from Peter I’s time. In the 1790s the Chuvash in the region numbered 310,000, the Cheremis 140,000 and the Votiaks only 127,000, but there were more than 250,000 Mordvs and 400,000 Tatars. Some of these minorities, as well as Russians, moved into the Bashkir areas of the southern Urals. The Kalmyks, about 200,000 strong, found they had to share their part
of
the steppe with Ukrainian, Tatar, Mordv and German as well as Russian colonists. Again, no great effort was made to Russify these elements, although between 1740 and 1755 the Church did mount a missionary campaign directed at animists, and groups whose co-operation the government particularly valued were offered inducements to convert to Christianity. Kazakhs and, later, Crimean Tatars and others who did so were granted three years’ remission of taxes and allowed to own Christian serfs. Yet no attempt was made to make even the patriarchate of Moscow a Russian preserve. Of the 127 Orthodox bishops installed in the Empire between 1700 and 1762, no fewer than 75 were Ukrainians and only
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Russians.
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And there was no policy to promote ethnic homogenization.

Russia’s laws, policies and institutions — including Catherine’s ‘enlightened’ rationalizing measures — came to apply to the new provinces as well as to the old, to the Crimea as well as to Livonia and Ukraine and Moscow Province. Not only did they arouse understandable resentment, however, they sometimes resulted in anomaly rather than standardization. In 1795, thanks to the partitions and the age-old policy of co-opting elites, there were some 600,000 registered noblemen (
szlachta)
in Russia’s Polish provinces — four times as many as in Russia proper. Many of them, however, were devoid of resources — in effect they were the servants of noblemen with means.
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And, although the local-government reforms of 1775 were applied throughout the Empire, their norms regarding the administration of justice in particular remained a dead letter in Siberia, because the new laws had allotted various administrative functions to members of the nobility, and the Siberians had no noble class.
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The Second Turkish War, which formed the backdrop to these developments, confirmed Russia’s superiority over Ottoman Turkey, and established its power in the Black Sea and the northern Caucasus. Success in that war was achieved through a succession of brilliant victories in hard-fought battles - the defence of Kinburn, the battle of the Rymnik, the
storming of Ismail. At the same time Russia was able to sustain successful operations, chiefly by sea, against a hostile Sweden. The gains resulting from this triumphant progress were only half digested when another southern project got under way. In 1796, 30,000 troops moved down the Caspian coast to take Derbent and Baku and to prepare for an advance into the heartland of Persia. The ultimate objective of this ‘Oriental Project’, led by the brother of the last of Catherine’s lovers, Platon Zubov, was to seize Tibet and the roads into India.

Already alarmed by the build-up of Russian sea power in the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, Britain was spared further concern by Catherine’s death later the same year. But, although the Oriental Project was called off and British interests in India became safe for the moment, the progress of Russian arms was not to end there. Suddenly, in November 1798, the Knights of St John - based on Malta, the pivotal point in the Mediterranean — elected Catherine’s son and successor, the Emperor Paul, grand master of the order, so Malta in effect became a Russian protectorate.
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Yet there was to be no clash between the Russian fleet and the British who had helped to create it. Indeed, they were soon united by a common enemy: revolutionary France. Thanks to Russia’s alliance with Britain, Napoleon Bonaparte was to be denied Malta and Egypt, but Russia’s Mediterranean plans were also to come to nothing.

By the end of the century the Empire covered well over 2 million square miles, more than a fifth of them in Europe. Just before the turn of the century a Russian—American Company was founded to exploit the trading possibilities in the north-eastern Pacific and to administer territories on the eastern side of the Bering straits ‘belonging to Russia by right of discovery’. Russian explorers had already been burying inscribed copper plates in new-found lands and erecting crosses over them declaring them to be ‘imperial Russian territory’. The company was empowered to make new discoveries south as well as north of the 55th Parallel, and to exploit them.
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This had all been achieved with relatively modest military resources, given how great a power Russia had become. Of a total military establishment of 435,000 in 1782, more than half were garrison troops, labour battalions (of convicts, rebel tribesmen and the like) and frontier troops such as the Cossacks. There were only 118,000 regular infantry, 52,000 regular cavalry and 29,000 artillerymen. The cost, according to the reliable Le Clerc, was 5,173,000 rubles a year. The navy cost a further 1,226,999 a year, compared with 1,588,747 for the court and a mere 73,000 for the Academy of Sciences.
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Richard Hellie has estimated that the army cost one-eighth of all Russia’s productive resources in the eighteenth century.
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Russia lost
653,000 men in its eighteenth-century wars, nearly a third of them in the Turkish wars. High as these costs were, they were not an excessive price to pay for the immense assets gained — territorial and human — and it has been calculated that between 1719 and 1795 the male population had grown by almost 7 million, not counting the population of the new territories.
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Russia was incontestably a world power now, and, as powers do, it attracted opposition. Not only traditional rivals like the Ottoman Turks and France, but former allies now harboured misgivings. Britain was concerned at possible Russian threats to its interests in the Mediterranean and India; Habsburg Austria, long Russia’s closest ally, was now worried that a collapse of the Turkish Empire, previously unimaginable, might precipitate serious problems for it in the Balkans. In the natural way of things, these powers would have been expected to club together with France against Russia in order to restore a balance of power in Europe — but this did not happen. A new factor had intruded itself: the rise of revolutionary ideology. Concern about France’s radically new form of imperialism with its weapons of mass mobilization, democratic populism and subversion was ultimately to mobilize a new, nationalist, form of opposition to it. But in the meantime the disruption of Europe in the Napoleonic Wars was to facilitate the further expansion of Russia’s traditional empire.

T
HE LATE EIGHTEENTH
and early nineteenth centuries were not a propitious age for empires. It was the age when Britain lost most of North America, Spain her vast possessions in Latin America, and Portugal Brazil. France’s empire shrank too, and by then the Dutch were already out of the reckoning as an imperial power of world scale. Yet, against the current, Russia’s empire grew, and, as if to symbolize its world role and continuing ambitions, in 1803—4 a Russian ship circumnavigated the globe for the first time.

The prospects had not seemed so bright even a short while before. In 1800 Russian forces had to make a difficult withdrawal from Italy through Switzerland. The Malta project was abandoned, and Russian ships were forced out of the Mediterranean altogether. Finally, in 1812, Russia lost not only Poland but western Russia and indeed Moscow itself to Napoleon’s army. Despite these dramatic reverses, however, the nineteenth century then saw Russia bound back to become master of half of Europe and a third of Asia again and to make significant additional imperial gains.
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Paradoxically, both the reverses and the advances were precipitated by the same factor: the impact of revolutionary France.

Napoleon destroyed the strategic balance in Europe, and persuaded powers which might otherwise have been hostile to Russia to co-operate with it, against France. When Napoleon crushed the allied armies in a series of brilliant campaigns in central Europe, the Emperor Alexander, who met him on a raft near Tilsit, reluctantly contrived a deal with him in 1807. This effectively divided Europe into French and Russian spheres, though it was not to hold beyond 1811. France’s embargo on Britain hurt Russia’s trading interests, its threat of reviving an independent Poland threatened to destabilize Russia’s western frontier again, and Alexander would not be treated as a satellite. In the meantime, however, he made the most of the opportunities which Tilsit had presented to him. In 1808-9 Finland was annexed from Sweden and in 1811 Bessarabia was taken from the Turks. Meanwhile the advance in the Caucasus had been resumed.

The figure who symbolized this, the most romantic, phase in the conquest of the Caucasus was General Pavel Tsitsianov, commander of the entire Caucasian front from the Cossack lines of the Terek and Kuban in the north to Georgia in the south. Although middle-aged, Tsitsianov was a romantic sort of hero: proud, brave and cruel, a dashing man of action, subservient to no one — not even the Tsar. Arguing that St Petersburg was too far away to dictate policy and approve decisions, he insisted on wide discretionary powers — and got them. Young Tsar Alexander agreed that central-government policies should be submitted to the general for approval, and that Tsitsianov need report significant actions only once they had been taken.

Tsitsianov strengthened Russia’s hold on Georgia, and set out to push the frontiers south through Azerbaydzhan to Persia — and as far as Tabriz if he could. With this in mind, he decided to upgrade the rough road that Potemkin had built over the mountains to Tiflis (Tbilisi), the so-called Georgian Military Highway. This strategic link between southern Russian and Georgia cut across Europe’s highest mountains and past the homes of some of Europe’s most troublesome peoples. Tsitsianov’s policy towards them was uncompromising, especially if they were Muslims (treacherous, he called them, and some of them were). Though many resented his rule, he was largely successful. He conquered Ganjeh, subdued Shirvan, and then tried to take Yerevan, the chief city of Armenia, but was diverted by rebellions in Georgia, the Kabarda and Ossetia as well as Chechnya. He answered resistance with firmness, blood with blood, opposition with retribution. ‘I tremble with eagerness to water your land with your criminal blood,’ he declared. He would impose order, he warned, ‘with bayonets and grapeshot until your blood flows in rivers’.
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He burned villages and took hostages, and his punitive measures succeeded in quietening the Ossetians and the Kabardinians. Even the Chechens lay low for a time. Before he could complete his programme, however, the feisty, arrogant satrap met his nemesis.

The Khan of Baku was affronted by Tsitsianov’s high-handedness, but nevertheless tried to strike a deal. No doubt regarding the Khan as another untrustworthy Asiatic, the general refused to treat, and demanded the city’s submission. With characteristic bravado, he rode up to the walls attended only by an aide-de-camp and a solitary Cossack. The Khan’s men shot him dead together with his aide, then cut off his head and both his hands. The Cossack got away to deliver his gruesome report.
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Tsitsianov’s proconsular style was by no means typical of Russian imperialism. In the less turbulent countries of Finland and Bessarabia, which also came under the imperial wing in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the government’s approach was markedly different. Thanks to a Finnish officer in its service, the Russian government was briefed and prepared to cope with the Finns. Colonel G. M. Sprengtporten had drafted rules for an autonomous Finland under Russia’s protection twenty years before the provinces were seized from Sweden in the war of 1808. When Russian troops invaded that February, care was taken to reassure the population: ‘We do not come to you as enemies, but as your friends and protectors, and to render you more prosperous and happy … [Affairs will be conducted] according to your ancient laws and customs … [and] prompt payment shall be made for all provisions and refreshments required for the troops.’ The caring Tsar Alexander had even arranged to set up storehouses to feed indigent Finns.
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In March 1809, when a Finnish Diet was summoned for the first time ever and its members’ freely gave oaths of allegiance, the Tsar confirmed ‘the preservation of their [Protestant] religion and fundamental law, together with the liberties and rights enjoyed by each individual estate and by the inhabitants of Finland collectively’. In effect, his edict gave the Finns greater autonomy than they had enjoyed under Sweden. They were exempted from military obligations, given control of their own currency, and administered by their own officials. Indeed, their only link with Russia was to be the person of the Tsar, their grand duke. Most Finns had no problem dedicating their loyalty to him on those terms.
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The acquisition of Bessarabia occurred in the context of another war with the Ottoman Turks. In fact Russia had been minded to acquire not only Bessarabia but the other Romanian-speaking Ottoman properties, Moldavia and Wallachia, too, and sentiment in the Balkans was favourable to the Russian cause. As a young man had explained to the French consul in Moldavia’s capital, Iasi, in 1806, ‘Russia has been good to us. It is to her that we owe our political emancipation [from the Turks], our limited duties and our part in the country’s administration … Russia protects us. Her armies are here.’ The consul felt that, were the French in occupation, the young man’s loyalty might readily be transferred to them. However, though young people with some education were beginning to embrace revolutionary ideas alongside their traditional Orthodox religion, Napoleonic France still supported their Ottoman overlords, whose enemy was Russia. Most, therefore, continued to look on Russia as their potential saviour. It became a question of how far its forces could advance in the Balkans before
Napoleonic France, having paused for breath after its devastating victories over Austria and Prussia, would resume its advance eastward. As soon as Napoleon struck — which everyone knew could not be long — all Russia’s strength would have to be concentrated on the defence of the fatherland.

The man entrusted with the difficult Balkan mission was General of Infantry Prince M. I. Kutuzov, a wise, hard-headed veteran of Turkish wars, remarkable for his acute strategic judgement and strong sense of timing. Knowing that his army was likely to be recalled at any moment, in 1811 Kutuzov managed to make enough ground militarily to force the Turks to the peace table. Kutuzov himself led the Russian side in the negotiations; the outcome was the annexation of Bessarabia. This might seem but a modest triumph judged against the scale of Russia’s earlier gains in the two great Turkish wars of the later eighteenth century, and given that the Romanian elite of Moldavia and Wallachia would at that time gladly have accepted Russian rule. In the fraught context, however, it was a signal success. The fact that the Ottoman negotiators were subsequently executed confirms this view.

Since the new territories were seriously underpopulated, the mandarins in St Peterburg immediately extended the Empire’s enlightened settlement policies, previously applied in New Russia, to Bessarabia.
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But Napoleon was already leading his great army eastward across the Russian frontier. At the end of May 1812 Kutuzov and his troops were ordered home at once to help meet the threat.

Napoleon’s invading
Grand Armée
was massive by the standards of the age — more than 350,000 men. It was also international, including Spaniards, Dutch, Swiss and citizens from many states in Germany and Italy, in addition to Frenchmen. The Russians could muster barely half that number to confront them.
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Moreover, Napoleon was at the height of his powers and supported by a formidable array of talented, battle-hardened generals who knew his mind — Davoust, Ney, Saint-Cyr, Murat and Mortier among them. They marched directly into the Empire’s heartland. Towards the end of August the ageing, portly Kutuzov was given command of the Russian forces on the western front, and early in September he tried to do what was expected of him: stop the invaders before they reached Moscow. The ensuing battle of Borodino was fiercely fought but indecisive. Kutuzov’s next actions confounded amateur strategists: he gave orders to withdraw, and continued to fall back beyond Moscow, abandoning the ancient capital to the invader.

Kutuzov’s reasoning was sound, however. Napoleon had sent out columns to threaten his lines of communication, and the move had to be countered. The abandonment of Moscow, for all its religious and symbolic importance, mattered less than the desperate need to frustrate the enemy. As Kutuzov explained in a letter to Tsar Alexander, ‘So long as Your Imperial Majesty’s army is intact … the loss of Moscow is not the loss of our fatherland.’ He had had no hesitation in choosing to preserve the army rather than risk it in the defence of Moscow. But, as he hastened to assure his commander-in-chief, his strategy was by no means passive. Indeed, he was already launching an operation of which he had high hopes. He had ordered a new order of battle, ‘with all our forces in a line extending from the Tula and Kaluga roads. From these positions units will be able to break into the enemy’s line of communications which stretch from Smolensk to Moscow. This would stop all support the enemy army might receive from its rear, and at the same time draw its attention. By these means I hope to compel him to leave Moscow.’
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The effect on morale might have been expected to be catastrophic, however, and much of Russia’s elite was indeed terrified - not only of the invaders, but also that their peasant serfs might seize the opportunity to rise against them. Yet the morale of the Russian troops held up rather better than that of the French and their allies, and it soon transpired that the peasantry hated the invaders more than their own masters. By the time Napoleon had been in Moscow a week or two he must have suspected that he was lost. He had confidently expected emissaries to arrive from Alexander, begging for peace and the return of the city. Yet no one came. Alexander had set his face against any dealings with the upstart intruder. As day after day passed without word from St Petersburg, Napoleon’s suspicion hardened into the sombre realization that he was doomed.

It was not the intervention of the Russian winter that had decided the matter, however. As a contemporary pointed out, ‘People still talk of “General Frost”, forgetting that the autumn of that year was warmer than in France … [and that as early as October] entire brigades and divisions had already begun to disappear from the enemy army.’
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Confirmation comes from the great military theorist Clausewitz, who was serving with the Russian staff. The French army, he wrote in an assessment of the campaign, had lost no less than a third of its strength even before it reached Smolensk, and another third before it got to Moscow, chiefly through desertions. By that time it was ‘already too much weakened for the attainment of the end of its enterprise.’
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Kutuzov also knew this, and that, by cleverly withdrawing to the south-west in order to keep his own lines of
supply open while threatening to intercept the enemy’s, he had placed Napoleon in an untenable position. At last, on 19 October, five weeks after he had arrived in Moscow, Napoleon decided to abandon the city. By then, however, it was too late to save what was left of his
Grande Armée.

What, then, had eroded the invader’s strength? In part it was the time-honoured Russian strategy of denying the enemy food and provender and stretching his lines of communication; in part the Russian army’s reluctance after Borodino to offer battle, its sharp surprise attacks, its blocking movements and harrying tactics. These methods combined to wear the invaders down, though what broke Napoleon’s own morale was Alexander’s unexpected and adamant refusal to come to terms after the occupation of Moscow. Kutuzov’s contribution was significant too - his brilliant manoeuvring, his strategy of pursuit without engaging in set-piece battles, his patience. And the enterprise was also aided by a surge of patriotism which embraced the peasant serfs, who might well have rebelled had Napoleon proclaimed their emancipation. As it was, when groups of the enemy seemed vulnerable, peasants often proceeded to slaughter them. Some 40,000 Poles, including emigres from the 1790s, had joined Napoleon, but for the most part the subject peoples had remained loyal to Russia or inert.

Yet, when all these factors have been taken into account, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Napoleon himself was primarily responsible for the disaster. His preparations for the invasion had been inadequate. His maps were inferior, his logistical support poor, his intelligence inferior, his horses inappropriately shod, his assumptions about Russia’s resilience and the Tsar’s firmness of purpose mistaken. In brief, his hubris doomed him.