Longworth, Philip. (1984). Alexis, Tsar of All the Russias. New York: Franklin Watts. O’Brien, Carl Bickford. (1963). Muscovy and the Ukraine, 1654-1667. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rady, Martyn. (1990). Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine, 1462-1725. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
W. M. REGER IV
The Three Emperors’ League, or Dreikaiserbund, was part of the diplomatic web created by Otto Bismarck (1815-1898) to keep France isolated. An initial agreement between Alexander II of Russia, William I of Prussia, and Francis-Joseph of Austria-Hungary was reached in September 1873. This phase of the Three Emperors’ League is sometimes referred to as the Three Emperors’ Treaty. The agreement was renewed in June 1881, with the same signatories for Prussia and Austria-Hungary, but with the new tsar, Alexander III, representing Russia.
The dual goals of the league were to prevent intervention by Austria-Hungary or Russia in the event of an outbreak of hostilities between France
1544
and Germany and to prevent friction between Austria-Hungary and Russia over territorial claims in the Balkans. Both of these goals are apparent in the terms of the agreement. Article 1 addresses the potential of a Franco-German conflict by stating, “In case one of the High Contracting Parties should find itself at war with a fourth Great Power, the two others shall maintain towards it a benevolent neutrality and shall devote their efforts to the localization of the conflict.” The issue of potential conflict over the Balkan territories of the Ottoman Empire is dealt with in Article 2. It states, “The three Courts, desirous of avoiding all discord between them, engage to take account of their respective interests in the Balkan Peninsula. They further promise one another that any new modifications in the territorial status quo of Turkey in Europe can be accomplished only in virtue of a common agreement between them.”
Ultimately, this alliance foundered over the issue of Balkan territorial claims. The Austro-Hun-garian Empire contained a sizeable number of Slavs who were sympathetic to the plight and aspirations of their Balkan brothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Simultaneously, the Russian tsar was under pressure from the Pan-Slavs to intervene in the Balkans because the Pan-Slavic movement regarded Russia as the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
A series of uprisings against the Ottoman Empire and reprisals by the Turkish forces occurred in the Balkans in the mid-1870s. These events led to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. Although the Russians decisively defeated the Turkish forces, opposition from Austria-Hungary and Great Britain led to the final settlement being decided at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Under the auspices of the honest broker Bismarck, much of the fruit of the Russian military victory was plucked from their hands. The Russians felt that they had won the war but lost the diplomatic negotiations. Both the Balkan nationalists and the Russian Pan-Slavists felt a lingering resentment toward Austria- Hungary and Germany for depriving them of the fruits of the Russian military victory.
The Three Emperors’ League was not renewed when it expired in 1884. Instead, Russia moved closer diplomatically to France. This shift culminated in the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894. The dissolution of the Three Emperors’ League took Europe a step closer to the outbreak of World War I.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
See also: AUSTRIA, RELATIONS WITH; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH; PANSLAVISM; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS; WORLD WAR I
The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. (2003). “The Three Emperors’ League.” «http://www.yale.edu/ lawweb/avalon/empleagu.htm». Eyck, Erich. (1968). Bismarck and the German Empire. New York: Norton. Glenny, Misha. (2001). The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999. New York: Penguin.
The three-field system predominated in Russian peasant agriculture until the Stalin era. Plowland was divided into three sections: each year one section was sown in the winter, a second was sown to another grain in the spring, and a third was left fallow to restore its fertility. The following year the section that had been sown in the winter was sown in the spring, the section sown in the spring was left fallow, and the previous year’s fallow was sown in the winter. Land not sown to grain was kept outside the three-field system.
Similar forms of rotation prevailed across Europe well into the eighteenth century. These forms were displaced by systems that promised higher productivity and money profits. In Russia, however, the Agricultural Revolution did not make significant inroads on the three-field system, though it prompted learned landowners to reproach peasants for superstitiously clinging to an outmoded system.
In fact, the three-field system remained an appropriate adaptation to Russian conditions for a long time. It assumed a relative abundance of land and took into account the harshness of the climate and (often) the poor fertility of the soil. In contrast to profit-seeking farmers, Russian peasants sought, above all, to avert the threat of starvation. The forms of rotation practiced in the West entailed the intensive application of fertilizers, in the form of manure and of crops such as clover. The animals that provided the manure and ate the clover produced dairy and meat products for the market. RusENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY sia’s vast spaces and poor system of transportation meant that most peasants did not have the access to markets required for relatively perishable products (as opposed to grain, which peasants did market). As railroads improved access to markets, many peasants did adapt. As late as 1920, however, for most peasants, abandoning the three-field system meant pursuing illusory gains and running unacceptable risks. It was not yearning for profits but the pressure of population on land that brought the three-field system into crisis. What peasants perceived as a problem of land shortage fueled the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. See also: AGRICULTURE; PEASANT ECONOMY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Moon, David. (1999). The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made. London: Addison Wesley Longman. Robinson, Geroid Tanquary. (1932). Rural Russia under the Old R?gime. London: Macmillan.
Tiflis (Tbilisi in Georgian) is the capital of the Republic of Georgia. Its legendary origins begin with the early medieval king of eastern Georgia (Kartli), Vakhtang Gorgasali (c. 447-522), who is said to have shot a deer that fell into a pool of hot spring water on the spot where he then decreed his capital to be built. The city’s name derives from the Georgian word for “warm” (tbili). From its origins, Tiflis was in the Iranian sphere of cultural influence, as was much of eastern Georgia, and even today the oldest parts of the city, around Maidan (square) and stretching up the Holy Mountain (Mtatsminda) have a Middle Eastern appearance with their narrow winding streets and elaborately carved balconies. From the arrival of the Arab conquerors in the seventh century, the city was often in the hands of Muslim rulers. Indeed, in 853 the caliph of Baghdad sent an army to put down the rebellious Muslim emir of Tiflis and had the city burned to the ground, thus ending any pretension of the town becoming the center of a rival Islamic state.
After nearly four hundred years in Muslim hands, Tiflis was taken by the Georgian king David
1545
The ancient buildings of Tiflis (Tbilisi) are shown in this lithograph from 1849. © HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/CORBIS the Builder (1089-1125) and reached its medieval zenith in the reigns of Queen Tamar (1184- 1212) and her son Giorgi the Resplendent. In the centuries that followed the Mongol invasions (thirteenth- fourteenth centuries), Georgia suffered a long, slow decline, and Tiflis and eastern Georgia came under the hegemony of Iran. In the mid-eighteenth century the last great king of eastern Georgia, Erekle II (1744-1798), recaptured the city, which became the center of a multinational empire that reached north to the Great Caucasus and south into Armenia.
