The Crimean War

binding in any formal sense. Convinced that all that mattered was the viewpoint of the Queen and her senior ministers, Nicholas failed to appreciate the influence of Parliament, opposition parties, public opinion and the press on the foreign policy of the British government. This misunderstanding was to play a crucial role in the diplomatic blunders made by Nicholas on the eve of the Crimean War.

The Tsar’s visit to London did nothing to dispel the British mistrust of Russia that had been building for decades. Despite the fact that the threat of Russia to British interests was minimal, and trade and diplomatic relations between the two countries were not bad at all in the years leading up to the Crimean War, Russophobia (even more than Francophobia) was arguably the most important element in Britain’s outlook on the world abroad. Throughout Europe, attitudes to Russia were mostly formed by fears and fantasies, and Britain in this sense was no exception to the rule. The rapid territorial expansion of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century and the demonstration of its military might against Napoleon had left a deep impression on the European mind. In the early nineteenth century there was a frenzy of European publications – pamphlets, travelogues and political treatises – on ‘the Russian menace’ to the Continent. They had as much to do with the imagination of an Asiatic ‘other’ threatening the liberties and civilization of Europe as with any real or perceived threat. The stereotype of Russia that emerged from these fanciful writings was that of a savage power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, yet also sufficiently cunning and deceptive to plot with ‘unseen forces’ against the West and infiltrate societies.^e

The documentary basis of this ‘Russian menace’ was the so-called ‘Testament of Peter the Great’, which was widely cited by Russophobic writers, politicians, diplomats and military men as prima facie evidence of Russia’s ambitions to dominate the world. Peter’s aims for Russia in this document were megalomaniac: to expand on the Baltic and Black seas, to ally with the Austrians to expel the Turks from Europe, to ‘conquer the Levant’ and control the trade of the Indies, to sow dissent and confusion in Europe and become the master of the European continent.

The ‘Testament’ was a forgery. It was created sometime in the early eighteenth century by various Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian figures connected to France and the Ottomans, and it went through several drafts before the finished version ended up in the French Foreign Ministry archives during the 1760s. For reasons of foreign policy, the French were disposed to believe in the authenticity of the ‘Testament’: their main allies in Eastern Europe (Sweden, Poland and Turkey) had all been weakened by Russia. The belief that the ‘Testament’ reflected Russia’s aims formed the basis of France’s foreign policy throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹²

Napoleon I was particularly influenced by the ‘Testament’. His senior foreign policy advisers freely cited its ideas and phraseology, claiming, in the words of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the Foreign Minister of the Directory and the Consulate (1795–1804), that ‘the entire system [of the Russian Empire] constantly followed since Peter I … tends to crush Europe anew under a flood of barbarians’. Such ideas were expressed even more explictly by Alexandre d’Hauterive, an influential figure in the Foreign Ministry who had the confidence of Bonaparte:

Russia in time of war seeks to conquer her neighbours; in time of peace she seeks to keep not only her neighbours but all the countries of the world in a confusion of mistrust, agitation and discord … All that this power has usurped in Europe and Asia is well known. She tries to destroy the Ottoman Empire; she tries to destroy the German Empire. Russia will not proceed directly to her goal … but she will in an underhanded manner undermine the bases [of the Ottoman Empire]; she will foment intrigues; she will promote rebellion in the provinces … In so doing, she will not cease to profess the most benevolent sentiments for the Sublime Porte; she will constantly call herself the friend, the protectress of the Ottoman Empire. Russia will similarly attack … the house of Austria … Then there will be no more the court of Vienna [sic]; then we, the Western nations, we will have lost one of the barriers most capable of defending us against the incursions of Russia.¹³

The ‘Testament’ was published by the French in 1812, the year of their invasion of Russia, and from that point on was widely reproduced and cited throughout Europe as conclusive evidence of Russia’s expansionist foreign policy. It was republished on the eve of every war involving Russia on the European continent – in 1854, 1878, 1914 and 1941 – and was cited during the Cold War to explain the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union. On the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 it was cited in the Christian Science Monitor, Time magazine and the British House of Commons as an explanation of the origins of Moscow’s aims.¹⁴

Nowhere was its influence more evident than in Britain, where fantastic fears of the Russian threat – and not just to India – were a journalistic staple. ‘A very general persuasion has long been entertained by the Russians that they are destined to be the rulers of the world, and this idea has been more than once stated in publications in the Russian language,’ declared the Morning Chronicle in 1817. Even serious periodicals succumbed to the view that Russia’s defeat of Napoleon had set it on a course to dominate the world. Looking back on the events of recent years, the Edinburgh Review thought in 1817 that it ‘would have seemed far less extravagant to predict the entry of a Russian army into Delhi, or even Calcutta, than its entry into Paris’.¹⁵ British fears were supported by the amateur opinions and impressions of travel writers on Russia and the East, a literary genre that enjoyed something of a boom in the early nineteenth century. These travel books not only dominated public perceptions of Russia but also provided a good deal of the working knowledge on which Whitehall shaped its policies towards that country.

One of the earliest and most controversial of such travelogues was A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia in the Year 1817 by Sir Robert Wilson, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had served briefly as a commissioner in the Russian army. Wilson made a number of extravagant claims – incapable of demonstration or disproof – which he presented as the fruit of his inside knowledge of the tsarist government: that Russia was determined to drive the Turks from Europe, conquer Persia, advance on India, and dominate the world. Wilson’s speculations were so wild that in some quarters they were ridiculed (The Times suggested that Russia might advance to the Cape of Good Hope, the South Pole and the Moon) but the extremity of his argument guaranteed attention for his pamphlet, and it was widely debated and reviewed. The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review – the most read and respected journals in government circles – agreed that Wilson had overestimated the immediate threat of Russia but nonetheless praised him for raising the issue and thought that the conduct of that country henceforth merited the ‘careful scrutiny of distrust’.¹⁶ In other words, the general premise of Wilson’s extreme views – that Russian expansionism was a danger to the world – was now to be accepted.

From this point on the phantom threat of Russia entered into the political discourse of Britain as a reality. The idea that Russia had a plan for the domination of the Near East and potentially the conquest of the British Empire began to appear with regularity in pamphlets, which in turn were later cited as objective evidence by Russophobic propagandists in the 1830s and 1840s.

The most influential of these pamphlets was On the Designs of Russia, previously discussed, by the future Crimean War commander George de Lacy Evans, which first laid out the danger posed by Russia’s activities in Asia Minor. But this pamphlet was notable for another reason as well: it was here that de Lacy Evans advanced the earliest detailed plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire, a programme that would be taken up again by the cabinet during the Crimean War. He advocated a preventive war against Russia to block its aggressive intentions. He proposed attacking Russia in Poland, Finland, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, where it was most vulnerable. His eight-point plan reads almost like a blueprint of the larger British aims against Russia during the Crimean War:

1. Cut off trade to Russia so that the nobles would lose their profits and turn against the tsarist government.

2. Destroy the naval depots at Kronstadt, Sevastopol, etc.