The Crimean War

included. The aim of his intervention in the Balkans was merely to stamp out the possibility of national revolutions arising there which might spread to the Slav nations under his own rule (the Poles in particular). At home, he openly condemned the pan-Slavs as dangerous liberals and revolutionaries. ‘Under the guise of sympathy for the oppression of the Slavs in other states,’ he wrote, ‘they conceal the rebellious idea of union with these tribes, despite their legitimate citizenship in neighbouring and allied states; and they expect this to be brought about not through God’s will but from violent attempts that will make for the ruin of Russia herself.’³² The ‘Russian Party’ were deemed a major threat by Nicholas and kept under a close watch by the Third Section, the political police, during the 1830s and 1840s. In 1847 the Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius, the centre of the pan-Slav movement in Kiev, was closed down by the police.³³

Yet the Tsar was pragmatic in his adherence to legitimist principles. He applied them to Christian states but not necessarily to Muslim ones, if this involved siding against Orthodox Christians, as demonstrated by his support for the Greek uprising against the Ottoman Empire. As the years passed, Nicholas placed more importance on the defence of the Orthodox religion and Russia’s interests – which in his view were practically synonymous – than on the Concert of Europe or the international principles of the Holy Alliance. Thus, while he shared the reactionary ideology of the Habsburgs and supported their empire, this did not prevent him from encouraging the nationalist sympathies of the Serbs, Romanians and Ukrainians within the Austrian Empire, because they were Orthodox. His attitude towards the Catholic Slavs under Habsburg rule (Czechs, Slovenes, Slovaks, Croats and Poles) was less encouraging.

As for the Slavs within the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas’s initial reluctance to support their liberation gradually weakened, as he became convinced that the collapse of European Turkey was unavoidable and imminent and that the promotion of Russia’s interests involved building up alliances with the Slav nations in readiness for its eventual partition. The shift in the Tsar’s thinking was a change of strategy rather than a fundamental alteration of his ideology: if Russia did not intervene in the Balkans, the Western powers would do so, as they had in Greece, to turn the Christian nations against Russia and into Western-oriented states. But there is also evidence that in the course of the 1840s Nicholas began to feel a certain sympathy for the religious and nationalist sentiments of the Slavophiles and the pan-Slavs, whose mystical ideas of Holy Russia as an empire of the Orthodox increasingly appealed to his own understanding of his international mission as a Tsar:

Moscow, and the city of Peter, and the city of Constantine –

These are the sacred capitals of Russian tsardom …

But where is its end? and where are its borders

To the North, to the East, to the South and toward sunset?

They will be revealed by the fates of future times …

Seven internal seas and seven great rivers!

From the Nile to the Neva, from Elbe to China –

From the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube …

This is Russian tsardom … and it will not disappear with the ages.

The Holy Spirit foresaw and Daniel foretold this.

(Fedor Tiutchev, ‘Russian Geography’, 1849)³⁴

The leading pan-Slav ideologist was Mikhail Pogodin, a professor of Moscow University and founding editor of the influential journal Moskvitianin (Muscovite). Pogodin had an entry to the court and high official circles through the Minister of Education, Sergei Uvarov, who protected him from the police and brought many of his ministerial colleagues round to Pogodin’s idea that Russia should support the liberation of the Slavs on religious grounds. At the court Pogodin had an active supporter in Countess Antonina Bludova, the daughter of a highly placed imperial statesman. He also had a sympathetic ear in the Grand Duke Alexander, the heir to the throne. In 1838 Pogodin laid out his ideas in a memorandum to the Tsar. Arguing that history advanced by means of a succession of chosen people, he maintained that the future belonged to the Slavs, if Russia took upon itself its providential mission to create a Slavic empire and lead it to its destiny. In 1842 he wrote to him again:

Here is our purpose – Russian, Slavic, European, Christian! As Russians, we must capture Constantinople for our own security. As Slavs we must liberate millions of our older kinsmen, brothers in faith, educators and benefactors. As Europeans we must drive out the Turks. As Orthodox Christians, we must protect the Eastern Church and return to St Sophia its ecumenical cross.³⁵

Nicholas remained opposed to these ideas officially. His Foreign Minister, Karl Nesselrode, was adamant that giving any signs of encouragement to the Balkan Slavs would alienate the Austrians, Russia’s oldest ally, and ruin the entente with the Western powers, leaving Russia isolated in the world. But judging from the notes that the Tsar made in the margins of Pogodin’s writings, it appears that privately, at least, he sympathized with his ideas.

Western fears of Russia were intensified by its violent reaction to the revolutions of 1848. In France, where the revolutionary wave began in February with the downfall of the July Monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic, the Left was united by the fear of Russian forces coming to the aid of the counter-revolutionary Right and restoring ‘order’ in Paris. Everybody waited for the Russian invasion. ‘I am learning Russian,’ wrote the playwright Prosper Merimee to a friend in Italy. ‘Perhaps it will help me to converse with the Cossacks in the Tuileries.’ As democratic revolutions spread through the German and Habsburg lands that spring, it seemed to many (as Napoleon had once said) that either Europe would become republican, or it would be overrun by the Cossacks. The Continental revolutions appeared destined for a life-or-death struggle against Russia and Tsar Nicholas, the ‘gendarme of Europe’. In Germany, the newly elected deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly, the first German parliament, appealed for a union with France and for the creation of a European army to defend the Continent against a Russian invasion.³⁶

For the Germans and the French, Poland was the first line of defence against Russia. Throughout the spring of 1848, there were declarations of support and calls for a war for the restoration of an independent Poland in the National Assembly in Paris. On 15 May the Assembly was invaded by a crowd of demonstrators angry at the rumours (which were true) that Alphonse de Lamartine, the Foreign Minister, had reached an understanding with the Russians over Poland. To cries of ‘Vive la Pologne!’ from the crowd, radical deputies took turns to declare their passionate support for a war of liberation to restore Poland to her pre-partition frontiers and expel the Russians from all Polish soil.³⁷

Then, in July, the Russians moved against the Romanian revolution in Moldavia and Wallachia, which further inflamed the West. The revolution in the principalities had been anti-Russian from the start. Romanian liberals and nationalists were opposed to the Russiandominated administration that had been left in place by the departing tsarist troops following their occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1829–34. The liberal opposition was first centred in the boyar assemblies whose political rights had been severely limited by the Reglement organique imposed by the Russians before handing back the principalities to the sovereignty of the Ottomans. The rulers of the principalities, for instance, were no longer elected by the assemblies, but appointed by the Tsar. During the 1840s, when moderate leaders like Ion Campineanu were in exile, the national movement passed into the hands of a younger generation of activists – many of them boyar sons educated in Paris – who organized themselves in secret revolutionary societies along the lines of the Carbonari and the Jacobins.

It was the largest of these secret societies, the Fratja or ‘Brotherhood’, that burst onto the scene in the spring of 1848. In Bucharest and Iai there were public meetings calling for the restoration of old rights annulled by the Reglement organique. Revolutionary committees were formed. In Bucharest, huge demonstrations organized by the Fratja forced Prince Gheorghe Bibescu to abdicate in favour of a provisional government. A republic was declared and a liberal constitution promulgated to replace the Reglement organique. The Russian consul fled to Austrian Transylvania. The Romanian tricolour was paraded through the streets of Bucharest by cheering crowds, whose leaders called for the union of the principalities as an independent national state.

Alarmed by these developments, and fearing that the spirit of rebellion might spread to their own territories, in July the Russians occupied Moldavia with 14,000 troops to prevent the establishment of a revolutionary government like the one in Bucharest. They also brought up 30,000 soldiers from Bessarabia to the Wallachian border in