Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Foreign policy and the armed forces

fashion that could not be ignored. Bonaparte annexed Piedmont (April 1801),

imposed satellite regimes in the Netherlands (October 1801) and Switzerland

(February 1802), made himself First Consul for life (August 1802), then Emperor

(May/December 1804), president of the new Italian Republic (February 1802)

and subseqently King of Italy (May 1805), manipulated the Imperial Recess to

his advantage (1803 ff.), seized the Duc d’Enghien in Baden, the home of the

Tsaritsa Elizabeth of Russia, executed him (February 1804) and annexed Genoa

(June 1805). The Third Coalition was naturally soon in the making.

By this time, Alexander had come under the inﬂuence of a remarkable

friendship and the very different foreign-policy ideas that it engendered. As

a young man of only nineteen years, Alexander had made the acquaintance

of the Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The two shared a passion for

liberal ideas of statecraft and justice, and Alexander confessed emotionally

to Czartoryski his embarrassment at his grandmother’s partitions of Poland.

There were hints of Alexander’s intention to rectify the injustice, and it was

clearly not a transient idea. In 1812 he was still writing about it to Czartoryski:

‘Quel est le moment le plus propre pour prononcer la r

eration de la

Pologne?’

Scarcely any sentiment could have brought the two men more

nearly together. As the brief honeymoon of concord with the French Republic

dissipated and a new conﬂict loomed, Czartoryski had become in 1803–4 de

facto and then actual minister of foreign affairs. At this point, a new foreign-

policy programme was formed.

While V. P. Kochubei had argued that strategic invulnerability conferred upon

Russia the good fortune of being able to follow an isolationist foreign policy,

Czartoryski argued on the contrary that it imposed on Russia the obligation

to follow an activist policy. Russia, he insisted, would most easily ﬁnd its

own peace by leading the continent to a peaceful condition. Obviously the

biggest threat to the peace of Europe at the time was the expansionist policy of

France, and that fact made it natural for Great Britain and Russia to seek each

other’s alliance against the threat. Once French power were curtailed, they

agreed, it could best be contained by restoring the independence of the Italian

states and forming a confederation of western German states on the French

frontier.

18 W. H. Zawadzki, A Man of Honour: Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and Poland,

1795–1831 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 36. P. K. Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexan-

der I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1801–1825 (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1969), pp. 44, 46, 47. A. Gielgud (ed.), Adam Czartoryski: Memoirs

and correspondence with Alexander I, 2 vols. (Orono: Academic International Press, 1968),

vol. I, pp. 95–8. Alexander to Czartoryski, 1/13 April 1812; Vneshniaia politika Rossii,

vol. VI, p. 351.

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As Kochubei had also observed, the antagonism of Austria and Prussia

wouldnaturallyforcethem tofollow Russia’s lead. Russiamight well undertake

a kind of Pan-Slav drive to liberate the Balkan Slavs from the Turks, sharing

some of the spoils with Austria if necessary, especially if there were a threat of

French imperialism in that area. Moreover, it made sense for Russia to redress

the injustice of the Polish partitions, the more so as sharing those spoils with the

neighbouring German states worked to Russia’s disadvantage. Russia could

easily win her Slavic brethren the Poles to her cause by re-establishing the

kingdom under Russian Grand Duke Constantine.

The policy of Russia must be grand, benevolent and disinterested . . . It must

assure the tranquillity of all of Europe in order to assure its own and in order

not to be distracted from its civilizingconcerns [in developing] its own interior.

Russia wants each power to have the advantages that justice confers on it, . . .

the surest means of assuring the general equilibrium. But it will oppose with

force any excessive ambition.

This paper forms the background of the mission of N. N. Novosil’tsev to

London in November 1804. Czartoryski drafted Novosil’tsev’s instructions. If

Russia should overstep the bounds of her own national interests – an impor-

tant point – and mix in the affairs of Europe, he wrote, it should be for the

purpose of establishing a benign and peaceful order of affairs on the conti-

nent of Europe, a permanent peace. The ascendancy of Bonaparte in Europe

threatened, he said, to supplant all notions of justice, of right, and of moral-

ity in international affairs by the triumph of crime and iniquity and thus to

suspend the security of the continent in general. Proceeding from these prin-

ciples, he set out Alexander’s particular aims: to return France to its ancient

borders; to give it a new government; to liberate Sardinia, Switzerland and

the Netherlands; to force the French evacuation of Naples and of Germany; to

preserve the Turks – always a volatile and slippery issue – and to form larger

states or a federation of states on the French frontiers as a barrier to French

expansion.

In order to make success in the war as sure as possible, Alexander con-

templated an imitation of Paul’s policy of forcing a reluctant Prussia to

take part in the coalition (Alexander’s so-called Mordplan). In the peace

to follow, Alexander imagined calling for something like national frontiers

drawn along clearly recognisable lines of nationality and/or natural fron-

tiers (a concept which would have disintegrated his own kingdom). Finally,

19 P. K. Grimsted (ed.), ‘Czartoryski’s System for Russian Foreign Policy: A Memorandum’,

California Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 19–91.

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Alexander proposed a kind of concert system to sustain the peace after the war

was won. He professed to be motivated by nothing more than the ‘general

wellbeing’.

Meantime, never mind the fact that Alexander had conspired on war aims

and peace terms with the British in advance; he nevertheless represented his

plans of 1805 as an armed mediation! That is, he would present to the French

and British governments alike the Anglo-Russian terms as those of a coalition

of Russia and Austria – and Prussia if possible – in an effort to mediate the

conﬂict between Britain and France.

Here is a most reasonable facsimile of the politics of crazy Paul, who was

seeking to use his Russo-Prussian Northern League of the winter of 1800–1 for

the same kind of armed mediation between the French on the one hand and

the Anglo-Austrian alliance on the other. The idea of the Concert of Europe

as it grew out of Vienna is more fully developed than anything that Paul had

in mind, but he was notably congress-prone. Short of the concert, and with

the exception of the extravagances of the last two to three weeks of his life, it

is essentially Paul’s kind of plan, subject merely to the changes that the course

of events had worked in political geography and alliances: that is, Bavaria and

urttemberg had been indemniﬁed sufﬁciently handsomely by Bonaparte to

cease to look to Russia for protection, and while Paul had not stipulated in Paris

in favour of Switzerland and the Netherlands, he had sent armies to liberate

them. About the same time, Alexander renewed Paul’s treaty of alliance with

the Turks (11/23 September 1805).

Meantime, as implausible as it seems, Alexander did not hesitate, during his

negotiations with the British, to urge their evacuation of the island of Malta,

and he continued to defend the cause of neutral trade, both of which issues

almost cost him the alliance of London. Taking the similarities of the policies of

the two sovereigns into account, either Alexander and his allies were under the

spell of Paul – a ludicrous suggestion – or there was method in Paul’s madness.

Or there was something in the context of Russian foreign policy driving very

different personalities to similar geopolitical conceptions. That context was

very likely the product of the educational values of the Enlightenment and the

challenge that the French Revolution posed to conceptions of political order

in Europe.

In any event, the awkward alliance – a compromise version of it – was made,

and the Austrians adhered to it. War aims stipulated the French evacuation

of north Germany (including Hanover), the Netherlands, Switzerland and

Piedmont-Sardinia, as well as the augmentation of these territories such as to

constitute in future a barrier to French expansion.

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Of course, all of these grand plans went terribly awry. The Austro-Russian

armies were crushed at the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, whereupon

Austria, deserted brieﬂy by a panicked Alexander, made peace (Pressburg).

Prussia, having persisted in the most undigniﬁed neutrality since 1795, rallied

to the cause too late, and with equal lack of dignity, only to be routed utterly

at Jena and Auerst

adt in October 1806. Whereupon Russia, after extensive

tergiversations, returned to the fray in the most inauspicious circumstances

imaginable, carrying on the ﬁght virtually alone until the lost battle of Fried-

land in June 1807, whereupon it, too, made peace.

By this time, Alexander was thoroughly disgusted with his former allies. As

the Baron de Jomini remarked after the costly but indecisive battle of Eylau –

February 1807, on the wintry plains of Poland, nearly a thousand miles from

Paris – ‘Ah, if only I were the Archduke Charles!’ In Alexander’s opinion, the

British were worse than the Austrians. The great wartime prime minister,

William Pitt, had died in January 1806, and the Ministry of All the Talents that

followed him – Lord Grenville and Charles James Fox – was a vain misnomer.

Until the coming of Viscount Castlereagh to the Foreign Ofﬁce in March 1812,

British foreign policy was simply adrift in demoralising, defeatist incompe-

tence, and Alexander’s grievances against London were multiple: Russia was

bearing a disproportionate burden of the war; the British were niggardly with

loans and subsidies; they might have but did not open in Western Europe

something like a second front; their navy’s enforcement of the British code of

maritime commerce was an offence both to Russia and the neutrals. Finally,

the Russians had stumbled imprudently into a war with Turkey for fear of

Napoleon’s designs on the Balkans, and London, always suspicious of the

Russians’ own designs in the East Mediterranean, stubbornly refused to assist

them.

The war had ceased to be popular in Russia, and Alexander’s frustration

disposed him to a change of front. Here was the celebrated peace of Tilsit

and the Franco-Russian alliance attached to it. It recognised the whole of the

Napoleonic order of Europe, the Bonaparte dynasty in Naples, the Nether-

lands and Westphalia; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; the Confederation of

the Rhine; French possession of Cattaro and the Ionian Islands. Russia would

mediate peace between France and Britain; France would mediate between

Russia and Turkey; and, failing peace, each power would join the other at

war. The ancient idea of the partition of the Ottoman Europe was stipu-

lated. Russia would join the Continental System to bar British trade from the

continent, and Portugal, Denmark and Sweden would be forced to join it

as well.

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Of course, this new system, so contrary to Czartoryski’s, naturally had

to be embodied in a new Russian foreign minister, Count N. P. Rumiantsev.

Rumiantsev identiﬁed with it naturally, as he was the son of Field Marshal

Petr A. Rumiantsev, who had led Catherine’s successful campaigns against

the Turks. Rumiantsev stood for a division of Europe into eastern/Russian

and western/French spheres. Hence he represented one of two traditional

variants of Russian foreign policy, the isolationist impulse that we formerly

saw in V. P. Kochubei. If the peace was popular in Petersburg, however, the

alliance was not. Alexander hoped in vain that the promised partition of the

Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Swedish Finland would compensate for

the substantial obligations and burdens of the alliance.

And now Alexander turned fondly again to his pet projects of liberal reform

at home. This time, his whole ‘secret committee’ was concentrated in a single

person, arguably the most able civil servant in the history of Russia, a priest’s

son who had married an English woman, Mikhail Speranskii. Alexander asked

for the project of a constitution, and Speranskii drafted a prudently progressive

document. The French alliance and the Speranskii constitution alike provoked

the problem of public opinion again. Napoleon’s emissaries carefully moni-

tored the massive Russian discontent with the French alliance. General Savary

reported that France had only two friends in Russia, the emperor and his

foreign minister. One of Alexander’s courtiers allegedly warned him bluntly,

‘Take care, Sire, you will ﬁnish as your father did!’

Speranskii’s constitu-

tion was naturally never implemented, but the mere drafting of it provoked

consternation, and when the war of 1812 approached, Alexander, in deference

to the good Russian sentiments that the nation at war would require, dis-

missed the unpopular Francophile Speranskii and the constitution with him.

When another of his intimates questioned the dismissal of so devoted a public

servant as Speranskii, Alexander responded, ‘You are right,...onlycurrent

circumstances could force me to make this sacriﬁce to public opinion.’

In fact, the arrangements of Tilsit almost predictably contained irreconcil-

able elements of conﬂict. The most conspicuous factor here was the unlim-

ited ambition of Napoleon. As Napoleon later remarked after his meeting

with Alexander at Erfurt, Alexander expected to be treated as an equal, and

it was not Napoleon’s habit to deal with others as equals. Particular issues

abounded. There was the persistent suspicion of the Grand Duchy of War-

saw. Moreover, Napoleon stubbornly refused to evacuate his troops from the

20 F. L e y, Alexander I et la Sainte-Alliance (Paris: Fischbacher, 1975), p. 32.

21 N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi: ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, 4 vols. (St Petersburg:

Suvorin, 1897–1898), vol. III, pp. 41–2. Emphasis added (HR).

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Prussian territory of Alexander’s friend, King Frederick William of Prussia.

Here were two offensive encroachments on Russian sensitivities in Eastern

Europe. In addition, the Continental System was a burden: Britain was a nat-

ural commercial ally of Russia; France was not. Finally, Napoleon clearly had

no intention of sharing what might have been the most ostentatious Russian

beneﬁt of the alliance, the Ottoman possessions of the Balkans. In December

1810, Alexander, thoroughly disillusioned now of the raptures of Tilsit, repu-

diated the Continental System, and the coming of war was only a matter of

time.

The defeat of Napoleon in Russia faced Alexander with a dramatic foreign-

policy choice. His commander of the armies, Field Marshal M. I. Kutuzov,

stood shoulder to shoulder with Foreign Minister Rumiantsev: Russia was

rid of Napoleon, and there was no need to send the armies into Europe.

Alexander, however, perhaps predictably, followed the system formerly laid

out by Czartoryski.

The Russo-Prussian Treaty of Kalisch (27 February 1813) stipulated an

alliance to deliver the nations of the continent from the French yoke and the

restoration of Prussia to its possessions of 1806. The Russo-Austro-Prussian

Treaty of Toeplitz (9 September 1813) stipulated the restoration of the Aus-

trian Empire, dissolution of Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, and an

arrangement of the future fate of the Duchy of Warsaw agreeable to the

three courts of Russia, Prussia and Austria. This last point, of course, was

soon to become a subject of contention. The British joined the coalition in

the treaty of Reichenbach (27 June 1813), which stipulated the restoration of

Hanover to the British monarchy and, of course, subsidies for the continental

powers.

By this time, the outline of the treaties of Vienna was emerging. The treaty

of Chaumont (1 March 1814) committed the allies to a German confederation

robust enough to sustain its independence; the restoration of an indepen-

dent Switzerland; independent Italian states between Austria and France; the

restoration of Ferdinand VI of Spain; an augmentation of the Netherlands

under the sovereignty of the Prince of Orange; the accession of Portugal,

Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands to the treaty; and a concert among the

powers to maintain these peace terms for twenty years.

The ﬁrst Treaty of Paris (30 May 1814) recognised Louis XVIII as king of

France, reduced France to its frontiers of 1792, restored Malta to Great Britain

and stipulated French recognition of the terms of Chaumont. The second

Treaty of Paris (20 November 1815) – after Napoleon’s return and the battle

of Waterloo (18 June) – reduced France to the borders of 1790, assessed an

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indemnity of 700,000,000 francs and provided an allied army of occupation of

150,000 men supported by France for a period of three to ﬁve years.

The treaties of Vienna (9 June 1815) largely ratiﬁed the provisions of the

preceding treaties with one large exception. By this date, however, Alexan-

der had succumbed, contrary to the stipulations of Kalisch and Toeplitz, to

Czartoryski’s blandishments on the future of Poland. His wish to restore the

Kingdom of Poland under his own auspices and to compensate Prussia for

its consequent Polish sacriﬁces in the Kingdom of Saxony nearly provoked a

war with Austria, Britain and France. Alexander compromised, chieﬂy at the

expense of Prussia in Saxony, and peace was made.

Conclusion

One of the grand ironies of the history of Russian foreign policy related here is

that foreign-born Catherine exerted herself in foreign affairs for strictly Russian

interests,whilenative-born Paul and Alexander extended Russian protection to

the interests of the continent as a whole. This fact is a product of the revolution

in foreign-policy outlook that took place in Russia in the 1790s.

In the murky record of Russian foreign-policy programmes and ideas, it is

sometimes customary to identify two relatively distinct camps or lobbies. One

is known variously as Russian, national, or Eastern; the other, as German,

European, or Western.

These terms are so poorly documented, especially

beforethe latter part of the nineteenth century, as to make generalisation about

them a bit hazardous. Somehow, however, the ﬁrst party is semi-isolationist.

It is sometimes associated with the term svoboda ruk – carte-blanche more

22 One of the most striking documents on the virtues of Russian foreign policy as well as the

continuity of it between 1796 and 1856 was the long instruction for Tsarevich Alexander

Nikolaevich composed in 1838 by Nesselrode’s assistant, Baron E. P. von Brunnow, an

assistant to Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode, ‘Aperc¸u des principales transactions du

Cabinet de Russie sous les r

egnes de Catherine II, Paul I et Alexander I.’ Sbornik russkago

istoricheskago obshchestva, 148 vols. (St Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1867–1916),

vol. XXXI, pp. 197–416. It is a frank condemnation of the acquisitiveness of Catherine and

an endorsement of the moral qualities of the policies of Paul and Alexander. At the other

end of the political spectrum of the age was the outlook of Viscount Castlereagh and the

British policy that he represented: ‘When the Territorial Balance of Europe is disturbed

[Great Britain] can interfere with effect, but She is the last Government in Europe,

which can be expected, or can venture to commit Herself on any question of an abstract

Character. . . . We shall be found in our place when actual danger menaces the System

of Europe, but this Country cannot, and will not, act upon abstract and speculative

Principles of Precaution’ (P.Langford, Modern British ForeignPolicy:The Eighteenth Century,

1688–1815 (New York: St Martin’s, 1976), p. 238).

23 For a brief exposition, see Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy’,

in Ragsdale and Ponomarev, Imperial Russian Foreign Policy,pp.351–2.

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Russian foreign policy, 1725–1815

or less.

Catherine’s policy, whether in the heyday of Panin or in that of

the Greek Project, while ﬁrst in alliance with Prussia and later with Austria,

appears to have used these alliances to divide central Europe, and sometimes

all of Europe, against itself in order to leave Russia a free hand in imperial

enterprise. Her heavily European involvement in the Armed Neutrality of

1780 served this purpose. The policy of Paul and Alexander, on the other hand,

one of congress and concert, was distinctly Europhile. They wished to make

of Russia the arbiter of the peace of Europe. Some day we may understand

these categories, and the way in which they expressed Russian interests, better

than we do today. For the moment, they must remain merely intriguing.

If the European extensions of the foreign policy of Paul and Alexander had

more benign consequences for the continent than West Europeans realised,

their consequences for Russia were less fortunate. As Russian foreign policy

adopted a distinctly Europhile outlook, domestic policy just as distinctly repu-

diated it. Thus the burden of foreign policy increased, while the strength of

the empire that supported it succumbed to obsolescence such as to be in the

long run unequal to the challenge of supporting the ambitiously conservative

task of preserving social and political peace on a continent in the throes of the

multiple revolutions of the nineteenth century. The long-term consequences

were seen in the First World War. The policy that was good for Europe in 1815

also raised Russia to the pinnacle of its imperial power, but it was in the long

run fatal for the empire.

24 The most prominent use of the term svoboda ruk is in V. G. Sirotkin, Duel’ dvukh diplomatii

(Moscow: Nauka, 1966), but the authors of the ﬁrst of ﬁve projected volumes to appear

in a new and unprecedentedly authoritative history of Russian foreign policy also rely

heavily on it (in my opinion excessively and without deﬁning it properly): O. V. Orlik

(ed.), Istoriia vneshnei politiki Rossii: pervaia polovina XIX veka (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye

otnosheniia, 1995), pp. 27–135 passim.

25 This is the argument of Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–

1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

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william c. fuller, jr

It is difﬁcult to exaggerate the centrality of the army to the history of the

Russian Empire. After all, it was due to the army that the empire came into

existence in the ﬁrst place. It was the army that conquered the territories of

the empire, defended them, policed them and maintained internal security all

at the same time. It was the army that transformed Russia into a great power,

for it was the army that built the Russian state.

Yet if the army built the state, the state also built the army, and there

was a symbiotic relationship between these two processes. By any reckoning

the creation of a strong army was an extraordinary achievement, for in the

middle of the seventeenth century Russia did not enjoy many advantages

when it came to the generation of military power. To be sure, comprising

over 15 million square kilometres in the 1680s, Muscovy was extensive in

land area, but the population of the country, probably less than 7 million

persons, was relatively small, and widely dispersed. Distances were vast, roads

were execrable, the climate was insalubrious and much of the soil was of

poor agricultural quality. Total state income amounted to a paltry 1.2 million

roubles per annum and the country as a whole was undergoverned.

Industry

was underdeveloped, and Muscovy had to import both iron and ﬁrearms.

Still worse, Russia lacked any natural, defensible frontiers and was hemmed in

from the south, west and north by formidable enemies – the Ottoman Empire,

the Khanate of the Crimea, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the

Kingdom of Sweden.

In view of its numerous weaknesses and vulnerabilities, it is not surpris-

ing that Muscovy generally fared poorly in military confrontations with its

neighbours during the seventeenth century, enduring defeat after defeat at the

1 A. A. Novosel’skii and N. V. Ustiugov (eds.), Ocherki istorii SSSR. Period feodalizma. XVIII

v. (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1955), p. 438.

2 Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1971), p. 355.

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hands of the Swedes, Poles and Tatars. Of course, Russia did manage some

successful expansion in this period, such as the acquisition of left-bank Ukraine

by the terms of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667). However, this gain owed more

to the Cossack rebellions and Swedish invasion that had crippled Poland than

it did to any conspicuous Russian military prowess. While Russia did engage

in military modernisation during the century, for example by augmenting the

traditional cavalry levy with Western-style infantry units, the problem was that

the state was capable of mobilising for discrete campaigns only and lacked the

resources and stamina necessary for protracted war.

Slightly more than 140 years later, towards the end of the reign of Alexander

I, the picture was completely different, for a succession of impressive military

victories had resulted in the dramatic expansion in the political inﬂuence,

population and size of the Russian state. In 1825 Russia’s standing army of

750,000 men was the largest in the Western world. By that point Russia’s land

area had grown to 18.5 million square miles, and her population to 40 million.

A full third of that population growth was directly attributable to conquest

and annexation.

Understanding Russian military success, 1700–1825

The key element in Russia’s transition from military debility to military capa-

bility was learning how better to mobilise both material resources and, even

more importantly, human beings in the service of the army. This involved a

frightening intensiﬁcation of the coercive exploitation of all classes of people in

Russia society from top to bottom. It was Peter the Great who was responsible

for inaugurating the change. In 1700 in combination with Saxon and Danish

allies, Peter launched what he thought would be a short and easy war against

Sweden. In September of that same year, however, King Charles XII of Sweden

annihilated Peter’s army at Narva, capturing almost its entire artillery park.

Over twenty years of war between Russia and Sweden ensued.

Needing to reconstitute his forces under the pressure of military emer-

gency and protracted war, Peter invented a set of institutions to recruit,

ofﬁcer, equip, ﬁnance and administer his army that laid the foundation

for the upsurge of Russia’s military power during the eighteenth century.

Although these new arrangements did not operate precisely as intended

in Peter’s lifetime, in the decades after his death they put down deep

roots. There evolved a hybrid military system with both ‘Western’ and

peculiarly ‘Russian’ characteristics. Partly by design and partly by improvi-

sation, Russia devised a unique military system that represented a brilliant (if

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