February 1853, with an ultimatum to the Turks: the Holy Land controversy was to be settled in favor of the Orthodox, and the Porte was to recognize explicitly the rights of the vast Orthodox population of its empire. When Turkey accepted the first series of demands, but would not endorse Russian interference on behalf of the Orthodox subjects of the Porte, considering it to be an infringement of Turkish sovereignty, Menshikov terminated the discussion and left Constantinople. Russian occupation of the Danubian principalities as 'material guarantees' added fuel to the fire. There is little doubt that the rash actions of Nicholas I precipitated war, although it is probable that he wanted to avoid a conflict. After the first phases of the controversy described above, the Russian government acted in a conciliatory manner, accepting the so-called Vienna Note as a compromise settlement, evacuating the principalities, and repeatedly seeking peace even after the outbreak of hostilities. The war guilt at this later stage should be divided principally among Turkey, France, Great Britain, and even Austria, who pressed increasingly exacting demands on Russia. In any case, after fighting between Russia and Turkey started in October 1853, and the Russians destroyed a Turkish fleet and transports off Sinope on November 30, Great Britain and France joined the Porte in March 1854, and Sardinia intervened the next year. Austria stopped just short of hostilities against Russia, exercising strong diplomatic pressure on the side of the allies. Nicholas I found his country fighting alone against a European coalition.
The Russian emperor's Near Eastern policy, which culminated in the Crimean War, has received various interpretations. Many historians have emphasized Russian aggressiveness toward Turkey, explaining it by the economic requirements of Russia, such as the need to protect grain trade through the Black Sea or to obtain markets in the Near East, by the strategic imperative to control the Straits, or simply by a grand design of political expansion more or less in the footsteps of Catherine the Great. Yet, as we had occasion to observe, the tsar's attitude toward the Ottomans long retained the earmarks of his basic belief in legitimism. Even his ultimate decision to partition the Turkish Empire can be construed as a
result of the conviction that the Porte could not survive in the modern world, and that therefore the leading European states had to arrange for a proper redistribution of possessions and power in the Balkans and the Near East in order to avoid anarchy, revolution, and war. In other words, Nicholas's approach to Great Britain can be considered sincere, and the ensuing misunderstanding thus all the more tragic. However, one other factor must also be weighed in an appreciation of Nicholas I's Near Eastern policy: Orthodoxy. Obviously, the Crimean War was provoked partially by religious conflicts. And the tsar himself retained throughout his reign a certain ambivalence toward the sultan. He repeatedly granted the legitimacy of the sultan's rule in the Ottoman Empire, but remained, nevertheless, uneasy about the sprawling Moslem state which believed in the Koran and oppressed its numerous Orthodox subjects. Once the conflict began, Nicholas I readily proclaimed himself the champion of the Cross against the infidels.
Although the Crimean War involved several major states, its front was narrowly restricted. After Austrian troops occupied Moldavia and Wallachia separating the Russians from the Turks in the Balkans, the combatants possessed only one common border, the Russo-Turkish frontier in the Caucasus, and that distant area with its extremely difficult terrain was unsuited for major operations. The allies controlled the sea and staged a number of naval demonstrations and minor attacks on the Russian coasts from the Black, the Baltic, and the White seas to the Bering Sea. Then, in search of a decisive front, they landed in the Crimea in September 1854. The war became centered on the allied effort to capture the Crimean naval base of Sevastopol. Except for the Crimea, the fighting went on only in the Caucasus, where the Russians proved rather successful and even seized the important Turkish fortress of Kars. Sevastopol held out for eleven and a half months against the repeated bombardments and assaults of French, British, Turkish, and Sardinian forces with their superior weapons. While the Russian supply service broke down and the high command showed little initiative, the soldiers and the sailors of the Black Sea fleet, led by such dedicated officers as the admirals Paul Nakhimov and Vladimir Kornilov - both, incidentally, killed in combat - fought desperately for their city. Colonel Count Edward Todtleben, the chief Russian military engineer at Sevastopol, proved to be a great improviser of defenses, who did more than any other man to delay the allied advance. The hell and the heroism of the Crimean War were best related by Leo Tolstoy, himself an artillery officer in the besieged city, in his
and other epidemics caused even more deaths than did the actual fighting. It was in the Crimean War that Florence Nightingale established a new type of war hospital and worked toward the modernization of nursing, as did French and Russian women.
The Russian forces finally abandoned Sevastopol on September 11, 1855, sinking their remaining ships - others had been sunk earlier to block the harbor - and blowing up fortifications. Nicholas I had died in March, and both his successor, Alexander II, and the allies effectively supported by Austrian diplomacy, were ready early in 1856 to make peace. An impressive international congress met in Paris for a month, from late February until late March. Its work resulted in the Treaty of Paris, signed on the thirtieth of March. By the provisions of the Treaty, Russia ceded to Turkey the mouth of the Danube and a part of Bessarabia and accepted the neutralization of the Black Sea - that is, agreed not to maintain a navy or coastal fortifications there. Further, Russia gave up its claims to a protectorate over the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire. The Danubian principalities were placed under the joint guarantee of the signatory powers, and an international commission was established to assure safe navigation of the Danube. The Treaty of Paris marked a striking decline of the Russian position in southeastern Europe and the Near East, and indeed in the world at large.
With the major exception of the Marxist scholars, most historians of the reign of Nicholas I - whether they concentrated, like Schilder, on court and government, like Schiemann on foreign policy, like Polievktov on internal developments, or like Lemke on political police and censorship - have noted the importance of the emperor and his firm beliefs for the course of Russian history. Nicholas I, to be sure, gave no new direction to the development of his country. Rather he clung with a desperate determination to the old system and the old ways. The creator of the doctrine of Official Nationality, Count Uvarov, once remarked that he would die with a sense of duty fulfilled if he could succeed in 'pushing Russia back some fifty years from what is being prepared for her by the theories.' In a sense, Nicholas I and his associates accomplished just that: they froze Russia as best they could for thirty - although not fifty - years, while the rest of Europe was changing. The catastrophe of the Crimean War underlined the pressing need for fundamental reforms in Russia as well as the fact that the hour was late.
However, before we turn to Alexander II and the 'great reforms' we shall consider the development of Russian economy, society, and culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. In those fields, as we shall see, by contrast with Nicholas's politics, movement prevailed over stagnation.
XXVII
THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF RUSSIA IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The development of an exchange or money economy, much more rapid and widespread than formerly, must certainly be recognized as the main feature of the economic history of Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century or - more precisely - until the abolition of serfdom. A money economy began perceptibly to develop in Russia as early as the middle of' the sixteenth century, but at first this process went on very slowly and encompassed relatively small groups of the population. Only in the nineteenth century did the money economy begin to evolve into its second stage of development, when a majority of the people becomes engulfed in the trade cycle, works for the market, and to satisfy its own needs buys products of someone else's labor, also brought to the market as merchandise.
