The Crimean War

fear that the British might deploy their Indian army to conquer Central Asia and expel the Russians from the Caucasus. In the spring of 1857 the British steamer Kangaroo and several smaller vessels carrying military supplies for Shamil’s forces had been caught on the Circassian coast. Russia no longer had a Black Sea Fleet to block such acts of intervention into its affairs by the British. Alexander demanded ‘categorical explanations’ from the British government, but received none. The ‘unmentionable infamy’, as he called the Kangaroo affair, reinforced the Tsar’s belief that Russia would not be secure against the British threat as long as the Caucasus remained unconquered and the Central Asian steppe beyond her political control.

Throughout the Crimean War the Russians had considered various ideas for an attack through Central Asia towards Kandahar and India, mainly as a means of diverting British troops from the Crimea. Although these plans were all rejected as impracticable, rumours of a Russian invasion were widely circulated and believed in India, where inflammatory pamphlets called on Muslims and Hindus to take advantage of the exhaustion of the British in the Crimea to rise up against their rule. The outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in the early summer of 1857 encouraged the Tsar to reconsider his Central Asia plans. The Royal Navy could threaten Russia’s coastline in the Baltic, in the Pacific Ocean and in the Black Sea, which was now defenceless as a result of the demilitarization imposed on the Russians by the Paris Treaty. The only place where the Russians could even pretend to mount a counter-threat was in India. The British were extremely sensitive to any threat against their Indian empire, mainly because of their fragile tax-base there, which they dared not increase for political reasons. Few Russians strategists believed in the reality of a campaign against India, but exploiting British nervousness was good tactics.

In the autumn of 1857 the Tsar commissioned a strategic memorandum on Central Asia by a brilliant young military attache, Nikolai Ignat?ev, who had been brought to his attention after he had represented Russia on the question of its disputed border with Moldavia at the Paris congress. Considering the possibility of a renewed war against Britain, Ignat?ev argued that the only place where Russia stood a chance of victory was in Asia. Russia’s strength in Central Asia was the ‘best guarantee of peace’, so Russia should exploit the Indian crisis to strengthen its position at the expense of Britain in ‘the countries which separate Russia from the British possessions’. Ignat?ev proposed sending expeditions to explore and map the ‘undiscovered’ steppe of Central Asia for the benefit of Russian trade and military intelligence. By developing commercial and diplomatic ties with the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, Russia could turn them into buffer states against British expansion. Giving his approval to the plan, the Tsar sent an exploratory party to Khiva and Bukhara under the leadership of Ignat?ev which concluded economic treaties with the two khanates in the summer of 1858. Officially, the mission had been sent by the Foreign Ministry, but unofficially it was also working for the War Ministry, collecting topographical, statistical and ‘general military information’ on various routes into Central Asia. From the start of the Russian initiative there was a more forward policy, favoured by the followers of Bariatinsky in the War Ministry, to set up protectorates and military bases in the khanates for the conquest of Turkestan and the Central Asian steppe right up to the borders of Afghanistan.⁴⁴

The Russian advance into Central Asia was led by two veterans of the Crimean War. One was Mikhail Cherniaev, who had fought against the Turks on the Danube in 1853 and had distinguished himself for his bravery at Inkerman and Sevastopol, before being transferred to defend Russian colonists against the raids of the Central Asian tribes on the steppes of southern Orenburg. From 1858 Cherniaev began launching his own raids deep into the territory of Turkestan, destroying Kirghiz and other hostile tribal settlements and supporting rebellions against the khanates of Khiva and Kokand by other Central Asian tribes who were willing to declare their allegiance to Russia. Cherniaev’s military initiatives, quietly supported but not endorsed officially by the War Ministry, led by stealth to the Russian annexation of Turkestan. In 1864, Cherniaev led a force of a thousand men across the steppes of Turkestan to occupy the fortress of Chimkent. Joined by a second Russian column from Semipalatinsk, they then seized Tashkent, 130 kilometres to the south, effectively imposing Russian rule on this vital power-base of the Central Asian cotton trade. Cherniaev was awarded the St George Cross and appointed military governor of Turkestan in 1865. After angry diplomatic protests by the British, who were afraid that the Russian troops might continue their advance from Tashkent to India, the Russian government disowned responsibility for the invasion carried out by Cherniaev. The general was forced into retirement in 1866. But unofficially he was received as a hero in Russia. The nationalist press proclaimed him the ‘Ermak of the nineteenth century’.^bi

Meanwhile, the conquest of the Central Asian steppe was carried on by General Kaufman, a second veteran of the Crimean War, who had led the sappers at the siege of Kars before becoming Miliutin’s chief of engineers at the War Ministry. Kaufman replaced Cherniaev as the military governor of Turkestan. In 1868 he completed the conquest of Samarkand and Bukhara. Five years later Khiva also fell to the Russians, followed by Kokand in 1876. Left in the hands of their respective khans as far as their internal government was concerned, but subject to the control of the Russians in their foreign relations, Bukhara and Khiva became essentially protectorates along the lines of the Princely States of British India.

Cherniaev and Ignat?ev became leading figures in the pan-Slav movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Along with Russia’s turn towards the East, pan-Slavism was the other main reaction by the Russians to their defeat in the Crimean War, as their feelings of resentment against Europe led to an explosion of nationalist sentiment. With censorship relaxed by the liberal reforms of the new Tsar, a new slew of pan-Slav journals forcefully criticized Russia’s foreign policy before the Crimean War. In particular, they attacked the legitimist policies of Nicholas I for having sacrificed the Balkan Christians to Muslim rule in the interests of the Concert of Europe. ‘For the sake of the balance of Europe,’ Pogodin wrote in the first number of the pan-Slav journal Parus in January 1859, ‘ten million Slavs are forced to groan, suffer, and agonize under the yoke of the most savage despotism, the most unbridled fanaticism, and the most desperate ignorance.’⁴⁵ With Gorchakov’s abandonment of these legitimist principles, the pan-Slavs renewed their calls on the government to support the liberation of the Balkan Slavs from Turkish rule. Some went so far as to claim that Russia should protect itself against a hostile West by uniting all the Slavs of Europe under Russian leadership – an idea first put forward by Pogodin during the Crimean War and repeated with even more insistence in his writings afterwards.

As pan-Slav ideas gained influence in Russian intellectual and government circles, there was a proliferation of philanthropic organizations to promote the pan-Slav cause by sending money to the Balkan Slavs for schools and churches, or by bringing students to Russia. The Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee was established in 1858, with separate branches opening in St Petersburg and Kiev in the 1860s. Funded by private benefactors and the Ministry of Education, it brought together officials and miltary men (many of them veterans of the Crimean War who had fought in the Balkans) with academics and writers (including Dostoevsky and Tiutchev, who both belonged to the St Petersburg Committee).

During the first post-war years the pan-Slavs were cautious not to discuss openly their more radical ideas of Slavic political unification, nor to criticize too severely the foreign policy of the government (the views expressed by Pogodin led to Parus being banned). But by the early 1860s, when Ignat?ev emerged as a pan-Slav supporter and became a leading figure in the government, they became more vocal in their views. Ignat ?ev’s growing influence in foreign affairs was based largely on his highly successful negotiation of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, in November 1860, which gave Russia possession of the Amur and Ussuri regions as well as Vladivostok in the Far East. In 1861 Ignat?ev became Director of the Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry, the office responsible for Russia’s policy in the Balkans. Three years later he was appointed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople – a post he held until the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. Throughout these years Ignat?ev pushed for a military solution to the Eastern Question in the Balkans: Russian-sponsored Slav uprisings against Turkish rule and the intervention of the tsarist army, leading to the liberation of the Slavs and the creation of a Slavic Union under Russian leadership.

Pan-Slav ambitions for the Balkans focused first on Serbia, where the restoration of the Europeanized but autocratic Prince Mihailo to the throne in 1860 was seen as a victory for Russian influence and yet another defeat