Any individual with this degree of imperial favour would have attracted enormous jealousy and criticism in Petersburg society. The fact that Speransky was a parvenu and lacked the time or the skill to forge useful connections made him all the more vulnerable. Rumours floated about concerning Speransky’s plans to emancipate the peasants. Some of his reforms, designed to improve administrative efficiency, damaged the interests of members of the aristocracy. Much of noble opinion saw Speransky as a ‘Jacobin’ and a worshipper of that heir of the Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte. There was little truth in this. Speransky admired some of Napoleon’s administrative and legal reforms but his plans for representative institutions were closer to English models than to Napoleon’s bureaucratic despotism. Moreover, though Speransky would have loved to be allowed to get on with domestic reform untroubled by external complications, he was under no illusions that Napoleon would leave Russia in peace to do this.10
A somewhat more real ‘Bonapartist’ was the minister of the navy, Admiral Pavel Chichagov. The admiral was a far more familiar type than Speransky in the Russian government of Alexander’s day. Though from a run-of-the- mill gentry family, Chichagov was well educated and himself the son of a prominent admiral. The French ambassador believed that Chichagov was one of the strongest supporters of the Franco-Russian alliance, and so too did many Russians. In September 1807, for instance, the admiral wrote to Alexander denouncing British maritime tyranny and hailing Napoleon’s genius. Aged only 40, still relatively young for a minister, the admiral was an intelligent and energetic man, with a lively mind. There were those who said that his conversation was more impressive than his deeds, but both Caulaincourt and Joseph de Maistre considered Chichagov to be one of the most intelligent and interesting figures in Petersburg. Among the admiral’s failings was a tendency to get somewhat carried away by his own wit and to go too far in conversation. Like most Russian noblemen, he was also very quick to take offence if he considered his pride to have been affronted. That could make him a poor subordinate and an overbearing commander. Much worse, Chichagov was generally disdainful of Russian backwardness and inclined to compare his own country unfavourably with others, above all with Napoleonic France. When he did this to a flagrant degree during a long stay in Paris, Russian diplomats there were very unamused. They kept a close eye on him in case he blurted out Russian secrets. Alexander actually shared many of Chichagov’s views, admired him and forgave him his outbursts. But by 1812 there were many knives in Petersburg long since sharpened and waiting to plunge into Chichagov’s back.11
If the Russo-French alliance was to survive, however, the key group which Napoleon needed to cultivate in Petersburg was what Caulaincourt called the ‘Old Russians’ and whom one might realistically call the Russian isolationists. In almost all cases ethnic Russians and often from the older generation, these men saw no reason why Russia should involve itself in European affairs because of (as they would have whispered) Alexander’s infatuation with Queen Louise of Prussia or his fantasies of universal peace and brotherhood. In some cases a desire to avoid diplomatic and military entanglement in Europe went along with a dislike of Frenchified manners and values invading Russian society and ‘subverting’ its traditions. Many of the aristocratic isolationists, however, were highly cultivated men, as much at ease conversing in French as in Russian. Often isolationism also had its own aggressive strategic agenda. It saw expansion to the south against the Ottomans as Russia’s truly national interest and objective, looking back to the victorious wars of Catherine II as a model for future Russian grand strategy. Isolationists also recalled that the great leaders of Russian southward expansion under Catherine – field-marshals Petr Rumiantsev, Grigorii Potemkin and Alexander Suvorov – were all ethnic Russians, unlike so many of the men who commanded Alexander’s armies in the Napoleonic era.
There were parallels between these Russian isolationists and eighteenth-century British debates about grand strategy. Many English politicians demanded a truly ‘national’ policy of colonial and maritime expansion, and denounced involvement on the continent of Europe as mere pandering to the Hanoverian dynasty. Opinions which could be shouted from the rooftops in Britain could only be whispered in Russia. Nor were the Romanovs as obviously foreign as the Hanoverians. But when the male line of the dynasty died out in 1730, the succession had passed down through a daughter of Peter the Great who had married into the princely house of Holstein. The deference of Peter III and his son Paul I to the ‘Great Frederick’ and his Prussian army suggested to some Old Russians that a distinctly German and poisonous element had entered the Romanovs’ bloodstream. In August 1809, thoroughly disillusioned by Alexander’s foreign policy, Field-Marshal Prince Prozorovsky wrote to Prince Serge Golitsyn, fellow ‘Old Russian’ aristocrat and veteran of Catherine’s wars, that if Napoleon continued to trick and weaken Russia then no doubt the Prozorovskys and Golitsyns would hang on to their estates one way or another but the ‘House of Holstein’ would cease to sit on the Russian throne.12
The parallels between Russian and British debates on strategy reflected a basic common geopolitical reality. Britain and Russia were great powers on the European periphery. For both countries it was more profitable to use their power outside Europe, where pickings were easier and other European rivals found it almost impossible to intervene. Acquisitions in the European heartland were far more expensive to acquire and defend. By 1800, however, if both Britain and Russia could benefit from their peripheral position the key advantages rested with Britain. In terms of the security of the two empires’ core territory, the seas were a better barrier than the plains of Poland and Belorussia. To an extent, what Poland was to Russia, Ireland was to the English, in other words a vulnerable frontier territory inhabited by religious and historical enemies. Having expropriated almost the entire native elite, however, the English were confident that the Irish back door into Britain was secure unless the country was invaded by a large French army. The power of the Royal Navy made it almost certain that it would not be. No Russian statesman could feel a similar security about Poland.13
The British were also much better placed as regards new acquisitions on the periphery. As Russian southward expansion brought them within range of Constantinople and even sent their fleet into the eastern Mediterranean they were entering a region which other great powers considered as crucial and where they could intervene effectively to block the Russians. Moreover, though southward expansion brought Russia gains in ‘Ukraine’ and on the Black Sea shore which were of great significance, they could not compare with the enormous advance of British power between 1793 and 1815. With the French, Spanish and Dutch navies all more or less eliminated, the British were able to take over much of South America’s trade, eliminate their key rivals in India, begin to use Indian exports to break into the Chinese market and consolidate their hold on naval bases which stretched across the globe and greatly enhanced their control of international trade. The basic geopolitical realities underlying the Napoleonic era pointed towards future British global predominance, especially since geopolitics was reinforced by the first signs of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. This had to cause unease in some Russian minds. On the other hand, the overriding current geopolitical priority was that both Russian and British security would be in great danger if any other power dominated continental Europe.14
The most prominent representative of the ‘Old Russians’ between 1807 and 1812 was Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, the foreign minister in this period. Before Peter the Great’s time the Rumiantsev family had been middling gentry, far beneath the status of the princes Volkonsky, Lobanov or Golitsyn, but Nikolai’s grandfather, Aleksandr Rumiantsev, had been a close associate of Peter from childhood and throughout his reign. He died a full general, a count and a wealthy man. Peter ensured that Aleksandr Rumiantsev married into the core of the old Muscovite aristocracy. As a result, his grandson Nikolai’s connections were formidable: he was for example the first cousin of Aleksandr Kurakin.
The relationship which really mattered, however, was with Nikolai’s father, the great hero of Catherine’s reign, Field-Marshal Count Petr Rumiantsev. As the Foreign Minister once said to Caulaincourt, ‘only the hope of achieving a great benefit for his country could inspire the son of Field-Marshal Rumiantsev’ to remain in public service. Acutely conscious of his heritage, Nikolai Rumiantsev was a ferociously proud Russian patriot, determined that his country should be second to none. One aspect of his patriotism was his enormous interest in old Russian manuscripts and other artefacts. Not only did he fund the collection, publication and display of these treasures, he also participated enthusiastically in expeditions across Russia to find them. Many of the greatest old Russian and Slavic collections in contemporary Russian libraries and museums owe their origins to this remarkable man, who ultimately bequeathed his treasures to the public.15
In Rumiantsev’s youth not only had Russia been on the march southwards under his father’s command, it had also been Europe’s leading producer of iron. As Rumiantsev was well aware, however, by 1807 its relative economic position was slipping. During Rumiantsev’s service as Foreign Minister, Russia established diplomatic relations with the United States. The first American envoy to Russia was John Quincy Adams, the son of an American President and himself to hold this office in the 1820s. Rumiantsev once confided to Adams that ‘it was no subject for exaltation to a great empire that the choicest of its productions for exportation were hemp and tallow, and bees- wax and iron’. His interest in economic affairs was partly that of an immensely wealthy landowner, very aware of
