Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Foreign policy and the armed forces
of news collecting. European newsletters were obtained in large numbers and
translated into Russian to be read in the boyar duma on a regular basis. Russian
culture changed rapidly after about 1650, with knowledge of Polish and Latin
spreading among the elite and much geographic knowledge in translation as
well. None of this, however, could substitute for diplomats on the spot, and
in the 1667 treaty with Poland there had been provisions for the exchange of
permanent residents. In Moscow by the 1690s the Polish ambassador was part
of a group that included emissaries from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark
and the Holy Roman Emperor, but Russia sent out permanent ambassadors
only from 1699. The first two were Andrei Matveev (1699) to the Netherlands
(and north-west Europe in general) and Prince Petr Golitsyn to Vienna (1701).
These were men with knowledge of (at least) Latin, and some reading on
European states, and they also brought their wives and servants. Bringing
families was not easy (Princess Golitsyna was very unhappy with high-heeled
shoes and stockings), but it meant that Russian diplomats could begin to mix
in elite society with greater ease. The new diplomats were men of consider-
able learning, as Matveev’s writings and library demonstrate. He wrote his
communications to the Dutch government at first in Latin, but later seems
to have learned French. Prince Boris Kurakin, his successor in the Hague and
later ambassador to other countries, spoke Italian best of all, a language he
learned in Venice. Peter sent him there in 1697 to learn languages and naviga-
tion, and he seems to have passed his navigation tests, but learned his Italian
also from the famous Venetian courtesans. He found in Venice a justification
and ideology of aristocratic government, which he developed in private notes
and writings on Russian history and European states, all the time serving the
absolute tsar.
Most of the Russian ambassadors were indeed great aristocrats (Matveev
the exception here). Kurakin, the Golitsyns, several Dolgorukiis, were all
princes and men who could hold their own in contests of honour and pride, as
well as political acumen, with their European counterparts. Peter also found
foreigners to serve him in this capacity, the unfortunate Patkul but also James
Bruce, Heinrich Ostermann, and lesser lights like Johann Baron von Urbich
and Johann Baron von Schleinitz. At the centre of this network in Russia was
Gavriil Ivanovich Golovkin (1660–1734), who took over foreign policy after
the death of Fedor Golovin in 1706. Golovkin came from a noble but not
aristocratic family, but he had been part of Peter’s household since 1676.He
stayed in Moscow in 1697, where Peter wrote to him regularly. His second
in command was Petr Pavlovich Shafirov (1669–1739), the son of a converted
Jew brought to Moscow in the 1650s. Shafirov was a professional, a translator
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Peter the Great and the Northern War
in the Ambassadorial Office since 1691, serving in that capacity on the Great
Embassy. Later he was Fedor Golovin’s personal secretary. Golovkin found him
indispensable for his knowledge of languages and European politics, though
nobody seems to have liked him. He was ambassador to Istanbul in the crucial
years after the Prut campaign, and Russia’s extrication from that mess owed
much to his skill. In court politics Golovkin retained a strict neutrality, as did
Shafirov at first. After 1714 he was moving closer to the aristocrats, perhaps
out of enmity with Menshikov. Both Golovkin and Shafirov were part of court
politics, but they were both lightweights, and both isolated and neutral for
most of their careers, Golovkin entirely so and Shafirov until nearly the end of
Peter’s life. It was their administrative and other talents that kept them where
they were, not aristocratic origins or court alliances. They were, however,
what Peter needed, knowledgeable executors of his will, good organisers of
diplomacy, not policy-makers.
Peter wasthe policy-maker. In theearlyyears of the reign,Gordonand Lefort
seem to have exerted their influence to encourage Peter to return to war with
the Ottomans, and after their death the rise of Golovin and Menshikov similarly
reflectedthe new foreign policy. Golovin died in 1706, and by the time of Poltava
Peter seems to have made his foreign policy with much consultation with his
favourites, but less with the aristocracy. Menshikov certainly had opinions, and
as Peter’s commander in Germany in 1713 made decisions on his own that Peter
did not like, but they were not major changes of direction, and Peter reversed
them. Later on there is no information to suggest that Prince V. V. Dolgorukii
in his time of favour (1709–18) or Iaguzhinskii, a favourite from about 1710
onwards had any consistent vision of foreign policy or influence over it. The
basic factional breakdown at court after 1709 was about the position of the
aristocracy, pitting the Dolgorukiis and their allies against Menshikov and his.
Legends aside, Peter was not a monarch who refused to consult his ministers
and generals, like Charles XII. On campaign he regularly held councils of war
and seems to have generally gone with the majority, even when he had doubts,
as in the decision not to invade Sweden from Denmark in 1716. Yet his foreign
policy was his own, made with the technical assistance of Golovkin, Shafirov,
the diplomats and the generals, but not with the great men of the court.
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24
Russian foreign policy, 1725–1815
hugh ragsdale
In Russian foreign policy in the era, certain basic generalisations apply: Peter I
had dealt remarkably successfully with the Swedish challenge; he had devised
a novel and rather satisfactory solution for the Polish problem; but he had
failed to resolve satisfactorily the issue of the Ottoman Empire, a challenge
for the future. Moreover, these three sensitive areas were so inextricably inter-
dependent in Russian foreign policy that St Petersburg could not isolate them
from each other and deal with them separately. A crisis in any one of the three
states almost invariably involved complications with the others. The com-
ing of the French Revolution magnified these problems, and the coming of
Napoleon Bonaparte to some extent supplanted them by grander geostrategic
challenges.
Era of palace revolutions
The first period followingPeter’s reign was most conspicuous for the instability
of the throne and the resultant inconsequence that it inflicted on Russian
foreign policy. The diplomatic chancery of the time was not by any means in
incompetent hands; it simply lacked the constancy of government support to
give it proper effect.
The early post-Petrine era exhibited clear elements of the continuity of
Peter’s policy in foreign affairs.
1
The most significant such element was the
continuation of Russian policy in the experienced hands of Vice-Chancellor
For critical readings and comments I am grateful to Paul Bushkovitch, Claudine Cowen,
Anatoly Venediktovich Ignat’ev, Dominic Lieven, Roderick McGrew, Valery Nikolaevich
Ponomarev, David Schimmelpenninck and Vladlen Nikolaevich Vinogradov.
1 Considerations of space prohibit entering into all of the issues of the period, in particular
the complex marriage alliances that Peter I made in northern Germany. For a clear and
authoritative account, see Hans Bagger, ‘The Role of the Baltic in Russian Foreign Policy,
1721–1773’, in Hugh Ragsdale and Valery N. Ponomarev (eds.), Imperial Russian Foreign
Policy (Washington and New York: Wilson Center and Cambridge Univerity Presses,
1993), pp. 36–72.
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Andrei Ostermann. From the days of the Habsburg-Valois – subsequently
Habsburg-Bourbon (1589) – rivalry, France had cultivated the favour of the
East European border states hostile to Habsburg Austria, and the rise of Rus-
sia naturally threatened these border states and therefore French interests
in Eastern Europe. In the circumstances, Ostermann defined Russian policy
naturally by forming an Austrian alliance hostile to France.
It was thus natural enough upon the death of King Augustus II of Poland in
1733 that the Russians and the French fielded different candidates for the Polish
throne. St Petersburg and Vienna supported the son of Augustus II (Saxon
dynasty), while Paris supported former King Stanislaus Leszczynski (1704–9).
In the War of Polish Succession (1733–6), Russia and Austria prevailed, and
Augustus III became King of Poland (1734–63).
It was equally natural that the Turks perceived in this development a shift
of the balance of power against their interests in south-eastern Europe. Border
clashes and raiding parties aggravated tension, but the decisive precipitant of
conflict was undoubtedly Russian success in the disputed Polish succession. In
the Russo-Turkish War (1735–9), Russia and Austria fought a lacklustre cam-
paign, and while Russia re-annexed (Treaty of Belgrade) the territories of Azov
and Taganrog (previously annexed in 1700, relinquished in 1711), it surrendered
the right to fortify these areas and accepted the humiliating principle of trading
on the Black Sea exclusively in Turkish ships.
As the name of the period suggests, discontinuity and volatility were as con-
spicuous features of the time as was continuity. Ostermann, having served as
foreign minister during four transient reigns since 1725, was unseated by a web
of intrigues culminating in the palace coup of Elizabeth Petrovna in November
1741. Elizabeth brought a semblance of stability to the throne (1741–62), and
she appointed Alexis P. Bestuzhev-Riumin to the office of vice-chancellor and
the duties of foreign minister. Bestuzhev was to guide Russian foreign policy
during the turbulent and fateful period of the two great European wars of
mid-century.
The first challenge to the European order of the time came from the youth-
ful new king of Prussia, Frederick II, who seized the opportunity of the death
of Emperor Charles VI in May 1740 to invade and conquer the rich Habsburg
province of Silesia, thus precipitating the War of Austrian Succession (1740–
8). Europe at once divided into its two traditional warring camps, Prussia
and France against Austria and Britain, and Bestuzhev continued the spirit of
Ostermann’s policy in the form of the Austrian alliance. Thus he naturally
listed Prussia among Russia’s enemies and Austrian ally Britain among Rus-
sia’s friends. The bulk of Bestuzhev’s activity during this war consisted not of
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genuine foreign policy, however, but rather of combating the plethora of
intrigues mounted bythe foreign powers in St Petersburgfor the favours of Rus-
sian diplomatic and military assistance. In particular, a strong and well-financed
French party appealed with some success to the sentiments of Empress Eliza-
beth, who had as a child entertained romantic illusions, fostered by Peter I, of
marrying Louis XV of France. Bestuzhev succeeded in maintaining an inde-
pendent Russian policy, but the intrigue and counter-intrigue confined that
policy largely to an awkward neutrality such that Russia took little part in the
war and none in the peace settlement. The only power to profit by the war was
Prussia, which maintained its conquest of Silesia (Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle).
Two new factors weighed heavily in the political calculations that followed.
The simpler was the conviction of Empress Elizabeth that the newly expanded
powerof Prussia was dangerous primarilyto Russia and hence mustbe radically
diminished or preferably eliminated. The second was the dissatisfaction of all
of the major combatants of the previous war with their allies. The British
and the French had pursued chiefly their own maritime interests, leaving
their continental allies unsupported. What followed, then, was that celebrated
reshuffling of the alliance system known as the Diplomatic Revolution. Hence
in the wake of the war, the allies changed sides, and the next war found
an Anglo-Prussian alliance against a Franco-Austrian alliance. As Russia was
already the ally of Austria, and France had now become the antagonist of
Prussia, it seemed logical enough for the court of Elizabeth to pursue its own
vendetta against Prussia by extending its alliance system to France, which it
did in January 1756 (Treaty of Versailles). The consummation of this series
of realignments left Prussia as the smallest of the continental great powers –
and supported only by maritime Britain – facing the three large continental
powers, France, Austria and Russia together. It was a mortal threat, to say the
least.
Frederick fought with characteristic genius, exploiting the opportunities
that ramshackle coalitions always provide their enemies, but it was an awe-
some and daunting challenge that he confronted. The Russian army in par-
ticular administered him damaging defeats at Gross-J
¨
agersdorf in 1757 and at
Zorndorf in 1758, and an Austro-Russian army dealt him another serious blow
at Kunersdorf in 1759. The Russians occupied K
¨
onigsberg and East Prussia in
1758 and Berlin in 1760. Frederick despaired of victory and actually sought an
honourable death fighting in the front lines of battle. He was saved, however,
by fortunes beyond his influence.
The heir to the Russian throne was Elizabeth’s nephew, Grand Duke Peter,
Duke of Holstein, an enthusiastic admirer of Frederick. The commanders of
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the Russian armies all dreaded the consequences of dealing to Frederick’s
armies a death-blow only to discover on the morrow the demise of Elizabeth,
who was well known to be aged and ailing, and the accession to the Russian
throne of Frederick’s protector, Peter III. Hence they refused to press their
campaign with the customary vigour and opportunism. Bestuzhev himself
was not above the suspicion of being caught in this net of intrigue, as he was
on close terms with some of the Russian field commanders and was necessarily
sensitive to opinion at the ‘young court’. He was consequently relieved of his
duties in 1758. In these circumstances, the war dragged on until Elizabeth’s
death obliged her enemies in January 1762, and what had been anticipated
materialised: Peter III left the coalition and offered Frederick both peace and
an alliance. Peter was himself, however, one of those royal transients of the
era of palace revolutions. He ruled a mere half year before being overturned
and murdered. In the Peace of Hubertusburg, Frederick retained Silesia, and
Russia acquired nothing.
Russian foreign policy of the era of palace revolutions, then, had cost the
country a good deal and gained it little but unrealised potential influence.
Catherine II
In the eighteenth century, the real sport of kings – of despots enlightened or
not – was the aggrandisement of power. Enlightened despotism as a paradigm
of modernisation conceived and driven by the state was as unpopular in
eighteenth-century Russia as it was imperative. According to a celebrated
European witticism of the age, the government of Russia in the era was
a despotism tempered by assassination. No idle joke, assassination and the
threat of it were a persistent means of intimidating progressive governments
all over Europe in the eighteenth century – the age of the nobles’ revolt.
2
Catherine II discovered early the force of conservative reaction – it spoiled
her Legislative Assembly and her plans to improve the lot of the serfs. Her
successor Paul paid for it with his life, and his successor Alexander was made
to fear for his own. In the words of Catherine’s most ambitious historian,
V. A. Bil’basov: ‘It is a big mistake to think that there is no public opinion in
Russia. Because there are no proper forms of the expression of public opinion,
2 The nobles’ revolt took an impressive toll of progressive statesmen of the age. Catherine
was merely intimidated. Joseph II was ruined. Frederick II took refuge in cynicism and
realpolitik. Friedrich Struens
´
ee was brutally executed. Gustav III was assassinated. Gustav
Adolf IV was persuaded with a knife at his throat to abdicate. The Marquis de Pombal was
tried for treason and banished. Carlos III of Spain sacrificed the Marqu
´
es de Esquilache
to the demands of the angry crowds; and Louis XVI surrendered Chancellor Maupeou.
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it is manifested in improper ways, by fits and starts, solely at crucial historical
junctures, with a force that is all the greater and in forms that are all the more
peculiar.’
3
The nobles’ revolt weighed especially heavily on politics at home,
but, as we shall see, foreign policy was not utterly immune to its influence
either.
Catherine soon emerged as one of the master diplomats of the time and
perhaps, in terms of material achievements, the grand champion of the com-
petition for aggrandisement in her era. Proceeding evidently neither by a
blueprint nor without some distinct conception of Russian interests, she was a
consummate opportunist, not always without mistakes certainly. All politics,
she famously observed, were reduced to three words, ‘circumstance, conjec-
ture, and conjuncture’,
4
and her diplomacy would be a monument to the
principle, if principle is what it was.
If Peter I’s achievements in Sweden and Poland had been considerable,
there had been some backsliding, some lost ground, in both areas during the
era of palace revolutions, and Catherine was to address herself to articulation
and repair. In both Poland and Sweden, she would meddle in constitutional
questions, as different as they were in the two environments, bribing and sup-
porting political parties in Sweden with money, in Poland supporting or sup-
pressing them with arms. The Turkish challenge she left for the presentation of
opportunity.
In the meantime, Catherine evidently appreciated what her neighbouring
great powers demonstrably did also, that the geographical position of Russia
in Europe enabled it to combine effectively with or against both the weak
border states and the more imposing great powers beyond them, while it was
difficult for the other powers to bring their strength to bear effectively against
Russia. She exploited these advantages artfully.
The first serious issue to arise was Polish. The Polish constitution was noto-
rious for the vulnerability of its vagaries: elective monarchy, liberum veto
and the armed confederacies that nourished seemingly perpetual civil war.
In this instance, August II was growing old and ill, suggesting a succession
crisis. Austria would support a Saxon candidate, because he would be hostile
to Prussia. Catherine had her own favourite, a genuine Piast, her own for-
mer lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski, acceptable also to Frederick II. Catherine
then chose to arrange an alliance with Prussia addressed chiefly to the Polish
3 V. A. Bil’basov, Istoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi, 3 vols. (1, 2, 12) (Berlin: Gottgeiner, 1896–1900),
vol. I, pp. 473–4.
4 A. V. Khrapovitskii, Dnevnik (St Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1874), p. 4.My
thanks to John Alexander for this reference.
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issue. When Augustus died in October 1763, Catherine and Frederick signed
a treaty to support Poniatowski and to maintain unchanged the anarchical
Polish constitutional arrangements (April 1764).
There were gains and losses here. If the gains were obvious, this was the
first time that Russia had shared power with a German state in Poland, an
area formerly a nearly exclusive Russian sphere of influence. Catherine’s chief
adviser in foreign policy, Nikita Panin, regarded the arrangement as the foun-
dation of his ‘Northern System’, a series of alliances in which he intended
to include Britain, Sweden and Denmark, a system dedicated to keeping the
peace of the North and preventing the intrusion of disturbing influences from
the most conspicuous south European system of Austria, France and Spain.
The Northern System gave Russia little leverage against the Turks, but so
long as Austria was allied with France and France continued to support the
Turks, Russian alliance with Austria made little sense. On the other hand, an
alliance with Denmark in March 1765 and the manipulation of the triumph of
the pro-Russian Cap Party in the Swedish Riksdag at the same time enhanced
the Northern System.
Catherine then turned her attention in good Enlightenment fashion to the
rights of the religious dissidents in Poland, and in this question she overplayed
her hand. She and Panin were willing to countenance limited constitutional
reforms in Poland – though Frederick was not – but only in exchange for rights
of toleration for religious minorities, while the Poles were largely adamant on
the issue of Catholic supremacy, and so the prospects of reform on both issues
soon foundered. Orthodox and Catholic confederacies formed, the former
supported by Russian military intervention, and the conflict dragged on for
years, opening up just such nefarious prospects as the conflict with the Turks
that soon ensued.
It was perhaps predictable that a protracted Russian military engagement
in Poland would draw into the maelstrom of East European politics a conflict
with the other two border states, Turkey and Sweden, as well. The Turks
reacted first. Alarmed at the portended shift of the balance of power in their
part of the world and encouraged by the powers that shared their fears, the
French and the Austrians, they responded to a cross-border raid of Cossack
irregulars in summer 1768 and declared war.
The Russian military campaign may be characterised as distinguished and
difficult at once. A variety of able commanders, Petr Rumiantsev, Aleksandr
Suvorov, Grigorii Potemkin, dealt the Turks serious blows. Meantime, how-
ever, the situation grew immensely complicated as a variety of new factors
intruded.
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The first was Catherine’s astonishingly stubborn and ambitious pretentions.
She wasdetermined to pursue the campaign to a glorious conclusion, to dimin-
ish the Turks if not ruin them and drive them out of Europe. These aspirations
could only raise apprehensions elsewhere. The French were naturally com-
mitted to the Turks. The Austrians were threatened by Russian successes. The
alliance of small and indigent Prussia with St Petersburg required Frederick to
pay throughout the war subsidies that he could ill afford. The Swedes naturally
found in Russian involvement in two fronts already an opportunity that they
could scarcely overlook. In August 1772, the young Gustav III executed a coup
d’
´
etat to scrap the constitution of 1720, which had placed power in the hands
of the four estates of the Riksdag (the Age of Freedom), enabling Russia (and
other powers) to manipulate Swedish party politics advantageously. Gustav
thus restored constitutional absolutism while Catherine was too engaged else-
where to do anything about it. In fact, this development portended a new war
on yet another front, and Catherine apprehensively deployed troops to deal
with it, though it did not actually happen. At the same time, the plague broke
out in Moscow (1771), and the stresses and strains of the war in the form of tax
and recruitment burdens on the population provoked the infamous Pugachev
rebellion (September 1773). This accumulation of liabilities would have under-
mined the resolve of a pantheon of heroes, but it did not move Catherine, and
the longer she persisted, the more the powers of Europe moved to persuade
her.
Theresolutionof whatappearedto be anadamantine stalemate ofCatherine
against Europe was one that had long been bruited about the chanceries of
the continent, and it was recommended in this instance by the imaginative
covetousness of Frederick: the partition of Poland. The Poles were helpless to
resist, their territory would substitute for at least some of the sacrifices that
Catherine might demand of the Turks, and the acquisitions that Austria and
Prussia would share would reconcile them to Catherine’s gains in the south.
And so in August 1772 the deal was struck. Meantime, the Russo-Turkish War
continued until the Turks, finally exhausted, conceded the essence of defeat
and signed with St Petersburg the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi (July 1774),
one of the most signal Russian military and diplomatic achievements of the
era. It stipulated – ominously – the independence of the Crimea; the right
of free commercial navigation on the Black Sea and through the straits; a
large Turkish indemnity; the right to fortify Azov and Taganrog; annexation
of the Black Sea coast between the Dnieper and the Bug; and ill-defined,
controversial rights to some kind of protection of Christians in the Ottoman
Empire.
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The turning of the 1770s to the 1780s marks a watershed in the nature and
aspirations of Catherine’s foreign policy. The new orientation is explained by
several factors; in fact, by several developments of simple good fortune that
came Catherine’s way quite without any effort on her part.
The first of these was the by-product of the constant rivalry between Austria
and Prussia. Joseph II, relentlessly restless, had long harboured the scheme of
the so-called Bavarian Exchange. He wished to acquire large parts of Bavaria
for Austria, compensating the Bavarian dynasty by the cession of the Austrian
Netherlands. Opportunity arose in December 1777, when the Bavarian branch
of the Wittelsbach family died without heirs, leaving a complicated and dis-
puted succession. Joseph struck an agreement with the legitimate heir in a
cadet branch of the family, the Elector Palatine, and thereupon decided to
execute his claims to Bavarian dominions. Naturally, Frederick II objected to
uncompensated Austrian aggrandisement, and he called upon his ally Cather-
ine for support and for mediation of the conflict. In the meantime, Joseph
similarly called upon his ally in Paris. Catherine was most reluctant to be
involved in a war in Germany, as tension with the Turks threatened to renew
the conflict in the south of Russia. At the same time, the French, on the verge of
entering the American War of Independence, were similarly determined not
to be encumbered by a war in Germany. As the crisis played out, the French
and the Russians agreed to mediate jointly between the two German powers.
The result was the signature of the Treaty of Teschen (May 1779), whereby
Joseph acquired modest portions of Bavaria while promising to support com-
parable Prussian acquisitions elsewhere in Germany. For St Petersburg, the
most significant feature of the problem was the acquisition by Russia of the
status as guarantor of the German constitution, a serious gain in prestige as
well as an instrument for legitimate participation in German politics.
The second such opportunity to come Catherine’s way was the American
War of Independence. In February 1778, France entered the war in alliance
with the rebellious colonies. Virtually simultaneously, then, the two great
land powers of Central Europe and the two great maritime powers of Western
Europe had entered traditional conflicts with each other such as to divert all
their attention awayfrom that increasinglyRussiansphereof influence, Eastern
Europe. Catherine did not hesitate to see her opportunity or to exploit it.
A British war always entailed the issue of neutral trade, in particular the
neutrals’ doctrine of ‘free ships, free goods’. The British maintained that if
trade in neutral ships between a mother country and its colonies was illegal in
peacetime – the rules of mercantilism – then it was illegal in wartime. To put
the matter another way, London insisted that neutral shipping had no right to
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