Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Foreign policy and the armed forces
deliver a combatant country from the pressure of its enemy’s hostilities. The
neutrals, on the other hand, invariably attempted to step into the breach that
the British navy inflicted on trade between French colonies and the mother
country. The American war simply revived an ancient issue.
In these circumstances, the British brought pressure against the Scandina-
vian neutrals and the Dutch. In this instance, the northern neutrals appealed
to Catherine to support their cause. Catherine saw her opportunity and
announced first her principles and subsequently the treaties of the League
of Armed Neutrality (August–September 1780): no paper blockades; freedom
of neutrals to trade along the coasts of belligerents; free ships, free goods;
and a narrow definition of contraband. Eventually supported by Prussia and
Austria as well, the league brought considerable pressure against British mar-
itime practice. Wherein lay Catherine’s advantage? It helped to free Russia
from excessive dependence on British shipping. It enabled the neutrals to carry
Russian trade formerly carried by British shipping. The force of the League
of Armed Neutrality persuaded the British to make serious adjustments for
a time in their cherished maritime practices. It won Catherine considerable
diplomatic favour all over northern Europe, and in the wake of the lustre of her
triumph at Teschen, it enhanced yet more Catherine’s and Russia’s prestige.
It was a victory of considerable significance for Catherine.
These developments enabled Catherine to reorient her foreign policy from
the formerly northern European impetus of Panin’s system onto the increas-
ingly promising direction of the south. The turn towards the south made a
good deal of sense from the viewpoint of the economic development of the
empire. Peter I’s incorporation of the Baltic coast had paid off in handsome
commercial opportunities. In the south, moreover, the land was richer, it was
sparsely settled, the growing season was longer, and the ancient Greek ports in
the area illustrated clearly enough the commercial possibilities of the region.
In the meantime, a struggle for influence at the Russian court climaxed such
as to serve the new orientation of Russian policy. Nikita Panin lost the struggle
to Prince Grigorii Potemkin and his associate in Catherine’s foreign chancery,
A. A. Bezborodko. What the change portended was the abandonment of the
Prussian alliance and Panin’s favoured Northern System, its emphasis on peace
and the status quo, and a turn towards the grander ambitions of Potemkin in
south Russia at the expense of the Turks. The project of driving the Turks out
of the Balkans was the kind of affair that appealed to Catherine’s vanity.
The new outlook was soon embodied in an exchange of notes between
Catherine and JosephII, an exchange that stipulated the notorious grand design
known as the ‘Greek Project’. It envisioned a partitioning of the Ottoman
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dominions of the Balkans between Russia and Austria; the establishment of an
independent kingdom of Dacia in Romania, presumably for Prince Potemkin;
and, in the event of sufficient military success, the complete destruction of
Turkey and the restoration of the ancient Byzantine Empire under Catherine’s
grandson, appropriately named Constantine.
In the wake of the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi, the Crimea had degener-
ated into civil war between the Russian and the Turkish parties. In April 1783,
the last native puppet ruler of the territory abdicated in favour of the Russian
crown, and the annexation of the territory to Russia was proclaimed. It is
possible that Catherine was thus trying to provoke a renewal of the Turkish
war, but the Turks prudently held their fire.
The war was nevertheless not long in coming. Catherine’s new ally, Joseph
II, paid her a visit, and together they took a spectacular and provocative trip
to New Russia in the south in summer 1787. By this time a Russian Black Sea
fleet graced the harbour of Sebastopol. The visit itself was a tangible symbol
of the widely rumoured Greek Project, and it sufficed to provoke a Turkish
declaration of war. Swedish and Polish responses to the opportunity were not
long in coming. Gustav III of Sweden declared war on Russia in July 1788.
Fortunately for Russia, his campaign was handicapped by the revolt of some
of his officers, and he was forced to conclude the Treaty of Verel
¨
a (August
1790) on the basis of the territorial status quo ante bellum.
The campaign against the Turks was hampered by a revolt in the Austrian
Netherlands,the death of JosephII and the diversion of Austrianattention to the
challenge of the French Revolution. Catherine thus had to content herself with
much less than her dreams of the Greek Project. The Treaty of Jassy ( January
1792) enabled Russia to annex Ochakov and the territory between the Dniester
and the Bug and recognised the annexation of the Crimea. Catherine did not,
however, surrender the Greek Project, which was written explicitly into the
Austro-Russian treaty of January 1795.
Neither had the Poles neglected the opportunity provided by Russian war
with both the Turks and the Swedes. Unfortunately for them, they were
engaged by the intrigues of King Frederick William II of Prussia in a series
of illusions both foreign and domestic. Counting on the support of a new
alliance with Prussia, the Poles devoted themselves belatedly to constitutional
reform, scrapping elective monarchy, the liberum veto and the practice of
confederations alike (the constitution of 3 May 1791). Succession to the throne
was settled on a hereditary basis in the House of Saxony. These noble efforts
soon fell victim to characteristically Polish ill fortune, however, as the Russians
made peace with Sweden and Turkey, and the coming of the French Revolution
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turned the attention of Prussia and Austria westwards. Catherine had in these
circumstances no trouble sponsoring a party of her own in Poland and sent an
army to support it. In the face of this challenge, Frederick William shamelessly
deserted his newPolishallyand consummated an alliance with Russia for a new
partition of Poland ( January 1793). The second partition provoked a patriotic
revolt led by the hero of the American Revolution, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, but
the combined actions of the armies of Russia, Prussia and Austria condemned
it to fail, and the third partition consummated the oblivion of Poland (several
treaties of 1795–7).
By reference to the standards prevailing in the age, the foreign policy of
Catherine was a great success. She conquered 200,000 square miles of new
territory and expanded the Russian population from 19,000,000 to 36,000,000.
Yet there is here another element of this story, one taken too little into
account. If the opposition of the Russian nobility to the reforming aspirations
of the monarchy is well known, its opposition to Russian foreign policy is less
familiar.
The Greek Project, for example, provoked dissent even in the inner circle
of Catherine’s government. As the French ambassador reported in 1786, ‘the
Russian ministers’ loathed the plans of Potemkin.
Their secret wishes are for peace; war and conquests do not offer them any
personal advantage;each of them sees in [war and conquests] . . . complications
for their departments [of government] and fatal possibilities for the empire.
[Alexander]Vorontsov fears the stagnation of commerce;Bezborodko,numer-
ous obstacles in the course of diplomacy; all of them [fear] the growth of the
power of Prince Potemkin, [but] everyone dissimulates his opinions for fear
of losing the favor of the empress.
5
The Austrian ambassador, Louis de Cobenzl, reported the same attitudes in
1795: ‘The entire Russian ministry, without exception, disapproves this project
of the empress.’
6
The second partition of Poland exhibits the same conflict. The
opposition gathered around Alexander Vorontsov, but it was the expansionist
party around Potemkin and the Zubovs that triumphed.
In fact, the phenomenon was far older and broader than we have appre-
ciated. We may recall the division of Russian society over Ivan IV’s Livonian
War or the Dolgorukiis and Golitsyns who transferred the capital briefly back
to Moscow in 1727. An English diplomat characterised the nobility’s attitude
typically in the 1740s:
5 Louis-Philippe de S
´
egur, M
´
emoires, 3 vols. (Paris: Eymery, 1827), vol. II, pp. 293–4.
6 Cobenzl to Thugut, 5 January 1795; Alfred von Arneth (ed.), ‘Thugut und sein politisches
System’, Archiv f
¨
ur
¨
osterreichische Geschichte, 42 (1870): 442.
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There is not one among [them] who does not wish St Petersburg at the bottom
of the sea and all the conquered provinces gone to the devil; then they could
all move back to Moscow, where, in the vicinity of their estates, they could all
live better and cheaper. Moreover, they are convinced that it would in general
be much better for Russia to have no more to do with the affairs of Europe
than it formerly did but to limit itself to the defense of its own [traditional]
old territories.
7
The nobility wished in particular to limit the burden of armaments as much
as possible.
And yet the remarkable nineteenth-century commercial progress of the
newly founded port city of Odessa does speak pointedly to the breadth of
Catherine’s vision.
8
In any event, Catherine was obviously able to master
dissent in foreign policy as she was not able to do in reform at home. And
yet, the social dynamic of protest in foreign policy continued. It was clearly
present in the reign of Tsar Paul, though it may not have been the chief
motivation behind the tragedy of his demise. It was more important, yet still
rarely decisive, in the reign of Alexander.
The metamorphosis of the 1790s
The notoriously expansionist nature of Catherine’s foreign policy underwent
decisive changes in the decade of the 1790s. The new policy was explained in
part by alterations in the geopolitical environment.
First, Russian power by the end of Catherine’s reign had acquired a secure
hold on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. It thus abutted there on something as
nearly like natural frontiers as it is possible to imagine in the circumstances of
the time and place. The two seacoasts were of great economic advantage, and
as Russia was not a major sea power, it is not easy to imagine its expansion
beyond these seas.
7 Robert E. Jones, ‘The Nobility and Russian Foreign Policy, 1560–1811’, CMRS 34 (1993):
159–70, and Robert E. Jones, ‘Opposition to War and Expansion in Late Eighteenth
Century Russia’, JfGO 32 (1984): 34–51. Quotation in Walther Mediger, Moskaus Weg nach
Europa: der Aufstieg Russlands zum europ
¨
aischen Machtstaat im Zeitalter Friedrichs des Grossen
(Braunschweig: Goerg Westermann Verlag, 1952), pp. 108, 295.
8 Odessa, founded in 1794, was in 1900 the third largest city in Russia(excludingWarsaw), the
conduit of 45 per cent of the foreign trade of the Russian Empire, including 40 per cent of
the grain trade. Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986); I. M. Kulisher, Ocherk istorii russkoi torgovli (St Petersburg: Atenei,
1993); S. A. Pokrovskii, Vneshniaia torgovlia i vneshniaia torgovaia politika Rossii (Moscow:
Mezhdunarodnaia kniga, 1947).
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Second, Russia had acquired the bulk of Poland, and the disappearance of
an independent Poland both removed a source of instability in East Euro-
pean politics and brought Russia to the frontier of two more stable and more
formidable states, Austria and Prussia.
The third factor was the most obvious, the grandest international phe-
nomenon of the age, the ravages of the traditional international order by the
French Revolution; or French imperialism in the ideological guise of the war
of peoples against kings (the notorious Propaganda Decrees of November and
December 1792).
And yet a fourth factor of quite another kind was probably both the most
volatile and the most influential. It was simply the personality and values of
the new sovereigns, Paul and Alexander.
If Catherine was a masterful opportunist, if her most stable principles were
‘circumstance, conjecture, and conjuncture’, Paul was her polar opposite.
Notoriously motivated by antagonism to his mother and her policies and
characterised by some remarkably spastic impulses, Paul was also motivated
by the respectable ideas of the age, the ideas of the Panin party, in particular
the idea that Russia needed peace, good order and development of its domestic
resources. The most basic elements of Paul’s unusual personality were moral-
ism and dedication to political and social stability. Even the axiom of legitimacy
yielded in his outlook to considerations of political order. In most questions
of principle, however, Paul was a literal-minded iconodule.
9
The contrast with Catherine could not be clearer. Paul said that he regretted
the partitions of Poland, and he released Tadeusz Kosciuszko from the Peter
and Paul Fortress. He negotiated in 1797 with the French Republic in hopes
of persuading it to moderate its foreign policy of conquest – but failed. He
extended his protection to the Knights of Malta, whose principles of religion
and morality he admired. Similarly, he offered the protection of Russia to the
vulnerable German and Italian powers subject to the ravages of the French
Revolution. From 1797–9, he three times summoned the powers of Europe
to a general peace conference, but there was no response. When Bonaparte
invaded Egypt, Paul signed an alliance with the Turks. Eventually convinced
that the French Revolution threatened the entire order of Europe, he joined the
Second Coalition. Subsequently convinced that the ambitions of his Coalition
allies, the Austrians and the British, were as subversive of good order as those
of the French, he demonstratively denounced them and left the coalition:
9 The following account is quite contrary to more traditional ones, and I have no space
here to elaborate it and document it. See Hugh Ragsdale, ‘Russia, Prussia, and Europe
in the Policy of Paul I’, JfGO 31 (1983): 81–118.
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I united with the powers that appealed to me for aid against the common
enemy. Guided by honour, I have come to the assistance of humanity . . . But,
having taken the decision to destroy the present government of France, I have
never wished to tolerate another power’s taking its place and becoming in
its turn the terror of the neighbouring Princes . . . the revolution of France,
having overturned all the equilibrium of Europe, it is essential to re-establish
it, but in a common accord.
10
He added that he sought the pacification of Europe, the general wellbeing, that
honour was his only guide. If these documents display a kind of school-marm
mentality, was the Alexander of the s
´
eances with Julie Kr
¨
udener and the Holy
Alliance altogether different?
Disappointed in his British allies of the Second Coalition and offended by
British naval and commercial policy, he renewed the Armed Neutrality. More
ambitiously, he attempted to make it the nucleus of a project that he called
the Northern League, designed to include Russia, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden,
Saxony and Hanover. The purpose of this constellation of powers was to
achieve the pacification of Europe by the instrument of armed mediation. In
particular, it was intended to restrain the ambitions of both Austria and France
and to preserve the integrity of the German constitution. The Prussians, alas,
lacked the heart for so bold a move, and so it failed. The Northern League,
then, was reduced to the League of Armed Neutrality, and when the Prussians
hesitated to perform Paul’s conception of their duty by occupying Hanover,
he sent an ultimatum demanding it within twenty-four hours. They complied
on 30 March 1801.
By this time, the new First Consul of the French Republic undertook to
charm and seduce the reputedly volatile Paul. He dispatched overtures and
gifts to St Petersburg, and Paul is supposed to have swooned and fallen prey
to Bonaparte’s conniving schemes. In fact, Paul was interested in co-operating
with any government in France that conducted itself with responsible restraint.
Hence he dispatched his terms to Paris: if Bonaparte would respect the legiti-
mate old order in Italy and Germany, then Paul suggested that he should take
the crown of France on a hereditary basis ‘as the only means of establishing
a stable government in France and of transforming the revolutionary prin-
ciples that have armed all of Europe against her’.
11
This last suggestion was
evidently premature, and Bonaparte had no intention of forswearing French
10 D. A. Miliutin, Istoriia voiny 1799 goda mezhdu Rossieii Frantsiei v tsarstvovanie imperatora
Pavla I, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk, 1857), vol. II, pp.
553–8, vol. III, pp. 444–5.
11 Russkii arkhiv, 1874,no.2, columns 961–6.
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conquests. Paul’s antagonism towards London was plain to see, however, and
Bonaparte was able to manage the appearance of it sufficiently to create the
false impression of a Franco-Russian alliance. As a British fleet entered the
Baltic to deal with the Armed Neutrality, a conspiracy of assassins did their
work in St Petersburg, and Paris soon faced a quite different government in
Russia.
Only one contemporary seems to have understood the foreign policy of
Russia in this reign, the Bavarian minister at the court of St Petersburg, the
Chevalier Franc¸ois-Gabriel de Bray:
Russia has no system, the whims of its sovereign are its whole policy...
His intentions, however, are always the same. Perhaps no prince has been
more constantly occupied with the same idea, more imbued with the same
sentiment;anditis...notalittle extraordinary to see this instability of actions
joined so intimately to this constancy of principle.
A scrupulousprobity,the sincere desire to see each one come intopossession
of his own legitimate rights, an innate penchant for despotism, a certain
chivalrous turn of spirit, which makes him capable of the most generous
resolutions, or the most rash, have constantly guided Paul in his relations
with the other powers. He placed himself at the head of the Coalition by
sentiment and not by interest . . .
This Monarch wanted to make himself the restorer of Europe, the one
to redress all wrongs. He believed that in declaring that he had no designs
of ambition, no interests [to pursue], he would prompt the others to do as
much...
12
Roderick McGrew comes to similar conclusions. ‘Paul was a moralist rather
than a politician; it was this which gave a utopian cast to those projects which
were nearest to his heart, and a totalitarian tone to the ensemble of his poli-
cies.’
13
A good example is his fascination with the Knights of Malta.
The knights of Malta, reformed and revived ...wereintegraltohisplans
for confronting and defeating revolutionary Jacobinism. He...hadinvited
Europe’s displaced nobility to come to Russia where he was building a bastion
against the destructive forces of the modern world . . . It was for this great
enterprise that he was taking over the knights, mobilizing the
´
emigr
´
es,and
inviting the pope’s participation . . . From Paul’s perspective, the knights
would [also] ...serveasamodelforraising the moral consciousness of the
Russian nobility...another means to further Paul’s moral revolution.
14
12 F.-G. de Bray, ‘La Russie sous Paul I’, Revue d’histoire diplomatique 23 (1909): 594–6.
13 R. E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 1754–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 16.
14 McGrew, Paul,pp.276–7.
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McGrew finds – as did the Chevalier de Bray – the fundamental elements
of Paul’s foreign policy to be stable and consistent. Paul found Russia’s vital
interests in a stable and lasting peace in Europe. He preferred hereditary
monarchy, but the form of government was less important than its behaviour.
It was the expansionist policy of the Directory rather than its republican nature
that provoked Paul’s hostility. Aggressive states were objectionable whether
republican or monarchical.
His principles, in foreign as well as domestic policy, marked out the Russian
future . . . he attempted to open new directions in Russian foreign policy. In
all of his efforts, he showed himself to be disinterested. He had no territorial
claims to make; he offered himself as a mediator and . ..aguardian[ofthe
smaller powers]. The Europe Paul wanted to see was one in which each
state would be safe, in which there was justice for the smaller principalities
as well as protection . . . The ideas he pursued became the writ of post-
Napoleonic Europe; what he failed to create at the end of the eighteenth
century, Metternich finally realized between 1815 and 1848.
15
Alexander I
As Alexander assumed power, the most urgent issue was the approach of the
English fleet, which, having left the wreck of Copenhagen (2 April 1801)inits
wake, was sailing for St Petersburg. Alexander assured his allies of the Armed
Neutrality that he would not forsake them and their common principles, but
he warned that these principles were subject to some accommodation with
London. In the maritime convention embodying that accommodation, the
English surrendered paper blockades, and the Russianssurrendered everything
else, including the issue of ‘free ships, free goods’ as well as English rights of
search of vessels under convoy. Denmark and Sweden adhered with obvious
reluctance to the Anglo-Russian settlement. In the meantime, the British fleet
left the Baltic, and Alexander lifted the Russian embargo on British trade.
There was irony in the Russian position in this conflict. According to the
observation of a rather canny American diplomat on temporary assignment
in Berlin, John Quincy Adams, ‘the question whether free ships shall make free
goods is to the empire of Russia, in point of interests, of the same importance that
the question whether the seventh commandment is conformable to the law
of Nature would be to the guardian of a Turkish Haram’.
16
Two sovereigns as
15 McGrew, Paul,pp.17, 320.
16 Adams to Secretary of State, 31 January 1801; US National Archives, Record Group 59.
Emphasis added (HR).
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different as Catherine and Paul had, however, subscribed to the same principle,
and as Alexander wrote to his ambassador in Stockholm before the convention
was signed, ‘The pretensions of the English are absurd . . . their conduct is
revolting, the exclusive dominion of the seas to which they presume is an
outrage to the sovereigns of the commercial states and an offense to the
rights of all peoples.’
17
Alexander was disgusted by the new British attack on
Copenhagen, and he would repeat this whole set of attitudes both before and
after Tilsit.
Once the crisis of conflict with Britain had passed, Alexander circulated
to Russian embassies abroad his first general exposition of foreign policy. In
traditionally familiar fashion, he announced the withdrawal of Russia from
European affairs as formerly argued by N. I. Panin and represented in Alexan-
der’s own reign by V. P. Kochubei. Aggrandisement, Alexander said, was inap-
propriate for so vast a state as Russia. He wanted no part of the ‘intestine
dissensions’ of Europe and was indifferent to the question of the forms of for-
eign governments, as Paul obviously had been. His aim, rather, was to give his
people the blessing of peace. In other words, he was at this point isolationist,
non-interventionist. Yet even here there was a hint of ambivalence. If he took
up arms, Alexander said, it would only be to protect his people or the victims
of aggrandisement threatening the security of Europe.
As Alexander turned to the next major item of unfinished business inher-
ited from his father, the negotiation with the First Consul, he found that he
was, on the one hand, obliged by the treaties and other commitments of the
previous reign; and, on the other hand, he was embarrassed by many of them.
Though he admitted that his obligations in Italian questions were awkward,
Alexander continued to solicit generous treatment for the kingdoms of Naples
and Sardinia. In fact, Bonaparte, as soon as he learned of the death of Paul,
hastened in both principalities to make pre-emptive arrangements – closing
of ports, stationing of French troops in Naples, preparations for annexations
in Sardinia – before Alexander could intervene, and Alexander was left with
little choice in questions about which at the time he did not seem deeply to
care. When the treaty of peace and the accompanying political convention
were signed, they reflected French wishes. As in the treaty of Teschen, the two
powers would mediate German indemnities. Russia was to mediate French
peace with the Turks. Bonaparte engaged himself to maintain the integrity of
Naples as stipulated in the treaty that French troops had just imposed on it
17 Alexander to Budberg, 9/21 April 1801; Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka,
ed. A. L. Narochnitskii et al., 8 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1960–1972), vol. I, p. 19.
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(28 March 1801), and French troops were to remain there until the fate of Egypt
was settled. The reference to Sardinia was a gossamer gloss leaving the French
army fully in charge there.
In the reorganisation of Germany, Alexander’s wishes were simple: to alter
the German constitution as little as possible and to strengthenGermany such as
to avoid revolutionary anarchy and make it more capable of resisting French
aggression. What happened here was that Bonaparte was able to use the
principle of secularisation of ecclesiastical estates – how many divisions had
the pope? – and the proximity and the power of France to reward and seduce the
south German states, thus converting them from Russian clients into French
satellites.
In the lull of 1801–5 between the two storms of the Second and Third
Coalitions, Alexander found a respite for deliberate reflection on the issues
of foreign affairs, and here we find a rare and genuinely interesting effort to
enunciate something like an official doctrine of Russian foreign policy. The first
compelling conception to emerge was the presentation of V. P. Kochubei to the
Unofficial Committee in summer 1801. It envisaged a remarkable harmony of
domestic and foreign policy, and its basic principles were clear and persuasive.
Russia had two natural enemies, Kochubei maintained, Sweden and Turkey,
and two natural rivals, Austria and Prussia. Both Sweden and Turkey were
weak, unable to challenge Russia dangerously, and the best policy was simply
to maintain them in their present condition, weak enough to be harmless, not
so weak as to require the protection of Russia from the designs of another
great power. The notorious antagonism of Prussia and Austria required both
to solicit the favour of Russia, a state of affairs that easily enabled Russia
to preserve a constructive sphere of influence in the German Empire. Russia,
Kochubei observed, was sufficiently great both in population and in geograph-
ical extent to enjoy extraordinary national security. It had little to fear from
other powers so long as it did not interfere in their affairs; yet it had too often
entered the quarrels of Europe that affected Russia only indirectly, entailing
costly and useless wars. In so far as possible, Russia needed to remain aloof
from European alliances and alignments, to establish a long period of peace
and prudent administration.
There was, however, even in the midst of these pacific sentiments, one
jarring note. It was agreed in a fashion reminiscent of Alexander’s foreign-
policy manifesto of 17 July 1801 that surrendering the continent tothe inordinate
ambition of Bonaparte was not an acceptable option.
Unfortunately, the First Consul of the French Republic declined Alexander’s
pleas for moderation and peace and challenged the order of Europe in a
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