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

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Foreign policy and the armed forces

industry was in its infancy, and German imports supplied most of Russia’s

machine tools prior to the outbreak of the war. Russia did eventually manage

to achieve an extraordinary expansion in the military output of her factories,

so great in fact that by November of 1917 the provisional government had

amassed a reserve of 18 million artillery shells.

Most of these, however, were

rounds for the army’s 3

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ﬁeld piece, whose utility in trench warfare was severely

limited. Russia was never able to manufacture heavy mortars, howitzers and

high explosive shell in adequate enough quantities. Despite the growth in war

production, the Russian army remained poorly supplied by comparison with

its enemies. Germany ﬁred 272 million artillery rounds of all calibre during

the war, Austria, 70 million and Russia, only 50 million.

For much of the war,

the Russian army suffered from a deﬁciency in materiel.

The war also occasioned a military manpower crisis, for the army’s losses

were unprecedented. Germany virtually destroyed ﬁve entire Russian army

corps during the battles of August and September 1914. In the same period the

forces of the Russian south-west front experienced a casualty rate of 40 per

cent. By early 1915, in addition to the dead, there were 1 million Russian troops

in enemy captivity or missing in action, and another 4 million who were hors

de combat owing to sickness or wounds. In the end at least 1.3 million of Russia’s

soldiers would die in the war; some estimates put the ﬁgure at twice that.

Military attrition ground down the ofﬁcer corps, too. Over 90,000 ofﬁcers

had become casualties by the end of 1916, including a very high proportion of

those who had earned their commissions before the war. The War Ministry

improvised special short-term training courses to ﬁll ofﬁcer vacancies, whose

graduates streamed to the army in such quantities that the character of military

leadership was altered permanently. By 1917 the typical Russian junior ofﬁcer

was a commoner who had completed no more than four years of formal

education.

All of this had implications for Russia’s military performance. So too did

transportation bottlenecks, the excessive independence of front commanders,

political turmoil back in Petrograd and sheer command error. The list of

Russian defeats in the First World War is a long one and includes Tannenberg

49 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975),

p. 211.

50 Shatsillo, Ot portsmutskogo mira,p.340.

51 William C. Fuller, Jr, ‘The Eastern Front’, in Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker and Mary R.

Habeck, (eds.), The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2000), p. 32.

52 Alan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’

Revolt (March–April, 1917) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 96–7.

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The imperial army

(1914), the winter battle of Masuria (1915), Gorlice-Tarnow (1915) and Naroch

(1916) among other disasters. Yet the operational picture was not unrelievedly

bleak, for from 1914 to 1916 the army chalked up some remarkable successes,

particularly against the Ottomans and Austrians. The most signiﬁcant of these

was the summer 1916 offensive conducted by General A. A. Brusilov, which

inﬂicted a million casualties on the Austriansand Germans,and overran 576,000

square kilometres of territory before its impetus was spent.

Despite everything, Russia’s loss of the First World War was not preor-

dained. It was, after all, the Revolution, not hostile military action that took

Russia out of the war. But although Russia’s backwardness did not guarantee

her defeat in the great war, it nonetheless severely reduced her chances of

achieving victory. At the dawn of the imperial era Russia was able to devise a

military system that capitalised on backwardness to give rise to military power.

By the time of the Crimean War, backwardness was no longer a military bless-

ing, but a curse. The imperial government then endeavoured to reshape the

military system and bring it into conformity with the demands of modern war.

Success was only partial, for enough vestiges of the old system remained to

stymie progress. The Russian army in the late imperial period was therefore

something like a butterﬂy, struggling in vain to free itself completely from its

chrysalis. Tsarist military reformers had envisioned an army suitable for an

industrial age of mass politics, but it would be up to the Soviets to translate

that vision into reality.

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Russian foreign policy: 1815–1917

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During the ﬁnal century of Romanov rule, Russian foreign policy was moti-

vated above all by the need to preserve the empire’s hard-won status as a

European Great Power.

The campaigns and diplomacy of Peter I, Cather-

ine II and the other emperors and empresses of the eighteenth century had

raised their realm’s prestige to the ﬁrst rank among the states that mattered

in the West. The stunning victories in the French revolutionary wars at the

turn of the nineteenth century marked the apogee of tsarist global might. By

defeating Napoleon’s designs for continental dominion in 1812, Tsar Alexan-

der I won an admiration and respect for Russia unparalleled in any other

age. The difﬁcult challenge for his heirs would be to keep Alexander’s legacy

intact.

Despite a reputation for aggression and adventurism, nineteenth-century

tsarist diplomacy was essentially conservative. In the West, Russian territo-

rial appetites were sated. Having recently absorbed most of Poland, one tra-

ditional foe, and won Finland from its erstwhile Swedish rival, the empire

kept its European borders unchanged until the dynasty’s demise in 1917.The

imperative here was to protect these frontiers, especially the Polish salient.

Surrounded on three sides by the Central European powers of Austria and

Prussia, Poland never reconciled itself to Russian rule, and the restive nation

seemed particularly vulnerable to foreign military aggression and revolution-

ary agitation. Maintaining the continental status quo therefore appeared to

be the best guarantee for securing Russia’s western border. For much of the

nineteenth century, the Romanovs would strive to maintain stability in close

1 The ﬁve Great Powers of the nineteenth century were Austria, France, Great Britain,

Prussia (after 1871, Germany) and Russia. As one standard textbook explains, ‘a Power

has such rank when acknowledged by others to have it. The fact of a Power belonging in

that category makes it what has been called a Power with general interests, meaning by

this one which has automatically a voice in all affairs’ (R. Albrecht-Carri

e, A Diplomatic

History of Europe since the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958),

pp. 21–2).

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partnership with Europe’s other leading conservative autocracies, the Prussian

Hohenzollerns and the Austrian Habsburgs.

The strategic landscape on Russia’s south-western frontier was more unset-

tled. The neighbour there was Ottoman Turkey, an empire very much in

decline by the reign of Alexander I. There were still some lands to be won in

this region if the occasion presented itself, especially earlier in the century. At

the same time, many Russians sympathised with Orthodox Christians under

Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Yet in the main, St Petersburg preferred order to

opportunity in Turkey as well. A very basic strategic calculus dictated caution:

Ottoman instability might well invite involvement by European rivals, thereby

possibly jeopardising the Turkish Straits and the Black Sea, whose waters

washed south-western Russia. Tsars did go to war against Turkey four times

during the nineteenth century, albeit with increasing reluctance. While the

senescent Ottomans could never match the comparatively stronger military

of the Romanovs, two such confrontations led to severe humiliations for Russia

when other powers intervened to support Turkey.

The only real arena for Russian expansion after 1815 was in Asia. To the

east of Turkey, the empire bordered on states of varying cohesion. Like the

Ottomans, the ruling dynasties of Persia and China were also well past their

prime. Despite growing internal stresses, both of these governments managed

to avert territorial disintegration. Nevertheless, St Petersburg beneﬁted from

occasional weakness in Tehran and Peking to improve its position in Asia to

the latter’s detriment. Between Persia and China, Russia’s frontier was even

less stable. The steppes that lay in this region were peopled by antiquated

khanates and fragile nomadic confederations, whose medieval cavalry proved

no match for European riﬂe and artillery. As in Africa and the American West

during this era of colonial expansion, these Central Asian lands were ripe for

absorption by a more developed power.

To respond to these divergent imperatives along its vast borders, nineteenth-

century St Petersburg basically divided the world beyond into three parts and

acted with each according to a distinct strategy. To its west, Russia aspired to

maintain its dignity as a leading power and therefore championed the status

quo. With regard to Turkey, motivated by anxiety over the Straits, tsarist

ofﬁcials jockeyed for position among European rivals. And in Central and East

Asia, they pursued a policy of cautious opportunism, occasionally expanding

the realm where and when possible. St Petersburg understood that these three

regions did not exist in isolation. Developments in Central Asia, for example

a conquest near the Afghan border, might well have implications in the West,

by straining ties with a European power like Great Britain. Nevertheless,

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until the turn of the twentieth century tsarist foreign policy maintained this

diplomatic trinity with remarkable consistency. Despite two major setbacks,

both involving Turkey, the Russian Empire was able to achieve its primary

international imperatives along all three lines. However, when Nicholas II

acceded to the throne in 1894, unsteadier hands began to guide Russian foreign

affairs, with fatal consequences for both dynasty and empire.

From Holy Alliance to Crimean isolation

The Vienna Conference of 1814–15 set the European diplomatic order of the

nineteenth century. Summoned in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, statesmen of

the leading powers and a host of lesser monarchies assembled in the Austrian

capital to rebuild the peace. After a quarter of a century of revolution and war,

the victorious allies – Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia – sought enduring

stability rather than revenge. They hoped to achieve this by restoring the map

to a semblance of what it had been before the storming of the Bastille in 1789,

as well as setting up a mechanism for jointly resolving major disputes. On the

whole, the outcome was successful. The four allies, soon rejoined by France,

maintained a relative balance of power for the following century, and Europe

avoided another major continental conﬂagration until 1914.

One of the most contentious issues at Vienna was the fate of Poland. Parti-

tioned by Catherine II in the late eighteenth century between her empire, Aus-

tria and Prussia, the nation had regained a semblance of independence under

Napoleon. Alexander now proposed to join most of Poland to his own realm

as a semi-autonomous kingdom. Reﬂecting his earlier liberal inclinations, the

tsar offered to grant his new possession a constitution and other privileges.

Despite strong opposition from Austria and Britain,

Alexander won the con-

ference’s consent. He also convinced the other delegates to join his ‘Holy

Alliance’, a vague, idealistic appeal to all Christian princes to live together in

harmony. Bereft of any concrete apparatus to enforce it and scorned by cyni-

cal diplomats, this utopian initiative had little lasting effect, serving more as a

reﬂection of the emperor’s withdrawal into otherworldly concerns. During the

coming years, the diplomatic initiative on the continent was effectively ceded

to Austria’s conservative foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich.

The disagreement between Russia and Britain in Vienna over Poland

augured deeper differences. Both geopolitics and ideology drove this rivalry,

2 In contrast to Prussia, which also took advantage from the Congress of Vienna to make

major territorial gains.

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whichwould remain one of the most enduring constants of nineteenth-century

tsarist diplomacy. Loyal to its tradition of maintaining a balance of power on

the continent, the British Foreign Ofﬁce inevitably sought to counterpoise the

strongest European state. To London, the Russian Empire seemed particularly

menacing, since its enormous Eurasian landmass seemed to have the poten-

tial to affect British interests both at home and in its colonies overseas. This

strategic competition was exacerbated by a strong distaste among many in the

British public for the repressive ways of the Romanov autocracy. Meanwhile,

the anti-Napoleonic alliance inevitably weakened in the absence of a common

foe. Already within seven years of the negotiations at Vienna, the conference

system foundered over Britain’s reluctance to intervene against revolutions

in Europe. This difference of opinion only drove St Petersburg closer to the

Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, whose conservative politics were more

reassuring.

The increasingly reactionary turn of Alexander I’s ﬁnal decade determined

Russia’s approach to a Greek revolt against Turkish rule in the early 1820s, the

ﬁrst important manifestation of the Eastern Question that would vex Europe’s

chancelleries with nagging regularity until the Great War. The Eastern Ques-

tion asked what would happen to the Ottoman sultan’s European possessions

as his dynasty’s grip weakened. Aside from Berlin (until the turn of the twen-

tieth century, at any rate) all of the leading powers considered themselves

to be vitally concerned with the fate of the Porte. Vienna, which also ruled

over Orthodox minorities in the region, feared that successful emancipation

from Turkish dominion of Balkan Christians might contaminate its own Slav

subjects with the virus of nationalism. As naval powers, Britain and, to a lesser

extent, France worried about the Turkish Straits, the maritime passage from

Constantinople to the Dardanelles that linked the Black Sea to the Mediter-

ranean. St Petersburg was similarly concerned about the security of the Straits,

‘the key to the Russian house’, lest Russia’s Black Sea shores become vulnerable

to hostile warships. But there were also important elements of Russian opin-

ion that sympathised with the plight of Orthodox co-religionists in European

Turkey.

These contradictory elements of tsarist Balkan diplomacy confronted each

other during the Greek rising that erupted in spring 1821. Alexanderwasinitially

shocked by Turkey’s draconian repression of the insurgency, but, with some

prodding from Prince Metternich, he gradually became more concerned about

maintaining the status quo. Even if it involved a Muslim sultan, the principle

of monarchical legitimacy overrode the rights of national minorities. To yield

to subversion anywhere, the tsar feared, might open the ﬂoodgates to regicide

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and anarchy throughout the continent, not to mention shattering the post-war

alliance system. A mutiny in his own Semenovskii Guards regiment in 1820

had only deepened Alexander’s pessimism about a ubiquitous revolutionary

‘empire of evil...morepowerfulthan the might of Napoleon’.

Appeals from

the insurgents for support against Turkey fell on deaf ears, and in 1822 the

emperor sidelined a leading ofﬁcial in his own Foreign Ministry sympathetic

to the revolt, the Ionian Count Ionnes Kapodistrias.

Nicholas I, who inherited the throne in 1825, tended to be equally loyal to

the diplomatic status quo, despite some Near Eastern temptations early in his

reign. At the same time, he kept on his older brother’s foreign minister, Count

Karl Nesselrode. More forceful and direct than Alexander and thoroughly

immune to any idealistic temptations, Nicholas unambiguously opposed any

challenges to the authority of his fellow sovereigns. Such tests were not long in

coming. His own reign had begun inauspiciously with the Decembrist revolt,

an attempted coup by Guards’ ofﬁcers with constitutionalist aspirations. Five

years later, in 1830, a wave of revolutions beginning in France convulsed the

continent. When Belgians rose against Dutch rule that year, Nicholas prepared

to send troops to support King William I of Orange, who also happened to be

his brother-in-law’s father. However, such plans were cut short when a sepa-

ratist revolt erupted in Poland, whose suppression required more immediate

attention.

Deeply shaken by these and other disturbances, the tsar resolved to co-

operate more closely with the other conservative powers to preserve the

political order in Europe. In 1833 he met with the Austrian emperor, Francis II

and Prussia’s Crown Prince at the Bohemian town of M

unchengr

atz, where

among other matters he signed a treaty on 6 (18) September offering to inter-

vene in support of any sovereign threatened by internal disturbances. It was

on the basis of this agreement that Nicholas intervened in Hungary to help

the Habsburgs restore their rule in the waning days of a revolt that had begun

during the European revolutions of 1848.

At mid-century, Russia still seemed to be the continent’s dominant state.

Unlike 1830, the disturbances of 1848 had not even touched Nicholas’s empire,

and his autocratic allies had successfully weathered the recent political storms.

The only on-going military challenge was Imam Shamil’s lengthy rebellion

in the Caucasus Mountains. While it would take nearly another decade to

pacify the region, the Islamic insurgency was largely dismissed as a colonial

3 P. K. Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University

of California Press, 1969), p. 277.

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small war by the other powers and hardly diminished Russia’s martial reputa-

tion. Yet his seeming invincibility began to cloud Nicholas’s judgement. At the

same time, the zeal of the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ to root out all enemies of

monarchism, wherever they might lurk, earned him the almost universal dis-

like of his contemporaries abroad. Even the Austrian foreign minister, Prince

Felix Schwarzenberg, darkly muttered after Russia’s Hungarian intervention

that ‘Europe would be astonished by the extent of Austria’s ingratitude’.

When complications arose once again in Turkey in the early 1850s, Nicholas

discovered to his cost that Machiavelli’s celebrated maxim about the advan-

tages of being feared was not always valid.

The Greek crisis had remained unresolved at the time of Alexander’s death

in 1825. Although Nicholas shared his brother’s distaste for the rising, he nego-

tiated with London and Paris to seek a solution. After a series of clashes,

including an Anglo-French naval intervention and a brief, albeit difﬁcult war

with Turkey, by 1829 the Eastern Mediterranean was again at peace. Accord-

ing to the Treaty of Adrianople that Nicholas concluded with the sultan on

September 2 (14) of that year, the Ottomans formally ceded Georgia, conﬁrmed

Greek as well as Serbian autonomy and granted substantial concessions in the

Danubian principalities (the core of the future Romania), which became a

virtual tsarist satellite. Meanwhile, St Petersburg also won important strategic

gains, including control of the Danube River’s mouth.

Impressive as they were, Nicholas’s gains belied considerable restraint,

given the magnitude of the Turkish rout. Although his forces were within

striking distance of Constantinople, the tsar refrained from dealing the coup

de gr

ace. Order and legitimacy continued to be paramount in his consid-

erations. A commission Nicholas convened that year to consider the East-

ern Question unequivocally declared, ‘that the advantages of the preserva-

tion of the Ottoman Empire in Europe outweigh the disadvantages and

that, as a result, its destruction would be contrary to the interests of

Russia’.

Preserving the Ottoman Empire in Europe did not necessarily imply fore-

going any advantages that St Petersburg might be able to extract from the

Porte. Thus four years after Adrianople, Nicholas negotiated an even more

favourable pact with the Ottomans, the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi on 26 June

(8 July) 1833, in return for assistance in putting down a rebellion by the latter’s

Egyptian vassal. But the tsarist ascent in Turkey led to considerable alarm in

4 In Albrecht-Carri

e, Diplomatic History,p.73.

5 In William C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992),

p. 222.

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Foreign policy and the armed forces

Britain, which saw a great outburst of Russophobia in the press. Yet another

Turkish crisis in 1839 once again invited foreign intervention, now by Russia

acting together with Britain and Austria. The outcome of this action was the

Straits Convention of 1 (13) June 1841, which forced Russia to backtrack from its

demands at Unkiar-Skelessi eight years earlier. For the next decade the Eastern

Mediterranean remained relatively calm.

The origins of the Crimean War, Russia’s most catastrophic entanglement

in the Eastern Question, remain a source of lively controversy. What is clear

is that the conﬂict began, almost innocuously, over a French attempt in 1850

to extend the Catholic Church’s rights to maintain the Holy Places, sacred

sites of Christendom in Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Motivated by President

Louis Napoleon’s effort to court domestic political support, the ploy elicited

a strong response from Nicholas, who insisted on the prerogatives of the

Orthodox Church. Although none of the powers sought war, the tsar’s clumsy

diplomacy, the intransigence of the sultan and the machinations of Stratford

Canning, Britain’s Russophobe minister to Constantinople, all helped trans-

form a ‘quarrel of monks’ into the ﬁrst major clash among the powers since

Waterloo.

The Crimean War itself was more a diplomatic than a military defeat for

Russia. The ﬁghting, which eventually focused on the Black Sea naval bastion

of Sebastopol, was marked by colossal inefﬁciency, blunders and incompetence

among all combatants. Although Sebastopol eventually fell to the combined

forces of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia, the siege had taken nearly a

year, and logistics made further action against Russia exceedingly difﬁcult. It

was only when Austria sided with the allies towards the end of 1855 that St

Petersburg was forced to sue for peace.

The moderate terms of the Peace of Paris, which the combatants con-

cluded on 18 (30) March 1856, reﬂected the relatively inconclusive nature of the

Crimean campaign. St Petersburg was forced to return the Danubian region

of Bessarabia, annexed in 1812, to the Porte and generally saw its inﬂuence

in the Balkans decline. More galling were the so-called Black Sea clauses that

demilitarised these waters, severely restricting tsarist freedom of action on

its south-western frontier. Yet if the allies refrained from exacting a heavy

penalty on their foe, Russia’s setback in the Crimea was a devastating blow

to Romanov prestige. Nicholas’s army, feared by many as the mailed ﬁst of

Europe’s most formidable autocracy, had proven to be a paper tiger. Not for

nearly another century, and then under a very different regime, would Russia

regain its pre-eminent standing on the continent.

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Recueillement

Defeat in the Crimea broke both Nicholas’s order and its creator. Profoundly

depressed by the humiliations inﬂicted on his beloved military, the emperor

easily succumbed to a cold in February 1855 and was succeeded by his son,

Alexander II. The new tsar clearly understood the link between backwardness

at home and weakness abroad, and largely withdrew from European affairs to

concentrate on reforming his empire. As his foreign minister, Prince Aleksandr

Gorchakov, famously put it, ‘La Russie ne boude pas, elle se recueille’ (Russia is

not sulking, it is recovering its strength).

Rather than battling the chimera of

revolution, Alexander II’s diplomacy endeavoured to repair the damage done

by the recent war. In Europe, this amounted to ending St Petersburg’s isolation

and abrogating the distasteful Black Sea clauses.

Recueillement,or the avoidance of foreign complications to focus on domestic

renewal, did not apply to all of the empire’s frontiers. To the east Alexander II

oversaw dramatic advances on the Paciﬁc and in Central Asia. Already in the

waning years of Nicholas I’s reign, the ambitious governor-general of Eastern

Siberia, Count Nikolai Murav’ev, had begun to take advantage of the Qing

dynasty’s growing inﬁrmity to penetrate its northern Manchurian marches.

As would often prove the case in Central Asia during the coming decades, the

count was acting on his own, but his master turned a blind eye to his colonial

ambitions.

When in 1858 Peking suffered defeat during the Second Opium War with

Britain and France, Count Nikolai Ignat’ev, a skilled diplomat who fully shared

Murav’ev’s enthusiastic imperialism, beneﬁted from the Middle Kingdom’s

malaise to negotiate vast annexations of the latter’s territory. The Treaties of

Aigun and Peking, signed on 28 May (9 June) 1858 and 2 (14) November 1860,

respectively, ceded the right bank of the Amur River and the area east of the

Ussuri River, thereby expanding Russian rule southwards to the north-eastern

tip of Korea. Count Murav’ev modestly named a port he founded in his new

acquisition Vladivostok (ruler of the East).

Russian gains in Central Asia were no less spectacular. In the early nine-

teenth century, a string of fortiﬁcations, stretching from the northern tip of

the Caspian Sea to the fortress of Semipalatinsk on the border with the north-

western Chinese territories of Xinjiang, marked the southward extent of Rus-

sia’s march into Central Asia. The arid plains beyond were ruled by the archaic

khanates of Kokand, Khiva and Bokhara. Collectively known to Russians as

6 Constantin de Grunwald, Trois si

ecles de diplomatie russe (Paris: Callman-L

evi, 1945), p. 198.

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