The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  The Tsar left England with the firm conviction that the conversations he had held with Peel and Aberdeen were statements of policy, and that he could now look forward to a partnership with Britain the aim of which was to devise a coordinated plan for the partition of the Ottoman Empire whenever that should become necessary to safeguard the interests of the two powers. It was not an unreasonable assumption to make, given that he had a secret memorandum to show for his efforts in London. But in fact it was a fatal error for Nicholas to think that he had a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with the British government on the Eastern Question. The British saw the conversations as no more than an exchange of opinions on matters of concern to both powers and not as something 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 Ru
ssophobic 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.

  3. Launch a series of ‘predatory and properly supported incursions along her maritime frontiers, especially in the Black Sea, within the shores of which, and even in the rear of her line of military posts, she has a host of unsubdued, armed, indomitable mountaineer enemies …’.

  4. Help the Persians to reclaim the Caucasus.

  5. Send a large corps of troops and a fleet to the Gulf of Finland ‘to menace the flanks and reserve of the Russian armies of Poland and Finland’.

  6. Finance revolutionaries to ‘create insurrections and a serf war’.

  7. Bombard St Petersburg, ‘if that be practicable’.

  8. Send arms to Poland and Finland ‘for their liberation from Russia’.17

  David Urquhart, the famous Turcophile, also advocated a preventive war against Russia. No writer did more to prepare the British public for the Crimean War. A Scotsman educated at Oxford in Classics, Urquhart first encountered the Eastern Question in 1827, when, at the age of 22, he enrolled in a group of volunteers to fight for the Greek cause. He travelled widely in European Turkey, became enamoured of the virtues of the Turks, learned Turkish and modern Greek, adopted Turkish dress, and quickly gained a reputation as something of an expert on Turkey through his reports on that country which were published in the Morning Courier during 1831. Making use of a family friendship with Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King William IV, Urquhart got himself attached to Stratford Canning’s mission to Constantinople to negotiate a final settlement of the Greek boundary in November 1831. During his time there he became convinced of the threat posed by Russian intervention in Turkey. Encouraged by his patrons at the court, he wrote Turkey and Its Resources (1833), in which he denied that the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse and highlighted the commercial opportunities awaiting Britain if it gave aid to Turkey and protected it from Russian aggression. The success of the book earned Urquhart the favour of Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary in Lord Grey’s government (1830–34), and a new appointment to the Turkish capital as part of a secret mission to examine the possibilities for British trade in the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, southern Russia and Afghanistan.

  In Constantinople, Urquhart became a close political ally of the British ambassador, Lord John Ponsonby, an ardent Russophobe who was unshakeable in his conviction that Russia’s aim was the subjugation of Turkey. Ponsonby urged the British government to send warships into the Black Sea and to aid the Muslim tribes of the Caucasus in their fight against Russia (in 1834 he even won from Palmerston a ‘discretionary order’ granting him authority to summon British warships into the Black Sea if he deemed it necessary but this was soon cancelled by the Duke of Wellington, who thought better of giving so much power to make war to such a notorious Russophobe). Under the influence of Ponsonby, Urquhart became increasingly political in his activities. He did not stop at writing but actually did things to make war against the Russians more likely. In 1834 he visited the Circassian tribes, pledging British support for their war against the Russian occupation, an act of provocation against Russia that obliged Palmerston to recall him to London.

  There, Urquhart stepped up his campaign for British military intervention against Russia in Turkey. A pamphlet he had written with Ponsonby, England, France, Russia and Turkey, was published in December 1834. It went through five editions within a year and received very positive reviews. Encouraged by this success, in November 1835 Urquhart launched a periodical, The Portfolio, in which he aired his Russophobic views, of which the following is typical: ‘The ignorance of the Russian people separates them from all community with the feelings of other nations, and prepares them to regard every denunciation of the injustice of their rulers as an attack upon themselves, and the Government has already announced by its Acts a determination to submit to no moral influences which may reach it from without.’18

  In another act of provocation Urquhart published in The Portfolio what purported to be copies of Russian diplomatic documents captured from the palace of Grand Duke Constantine, the governor of Poland, during the Warsaw insurrection in November 1830 and passed on by Polish émigrés to Palmerston. Most, if not all, of these documents were fabricated by Urquhart, including a ‘suppressed passage of a speech’ in which Tsar Nicholas was said to have declared that Russia would not stop its repressive measures until it had achieved the complete subjugation of Poland, and a ‘Declaration of Independence’ supposedly proclaimed by the Circassian tribes. But such was the climate of Russophobia that they were widely accepted as authentic documents by the British press.19

  In 1836 Urquhart returned to Constantinople as secretary of the embassy. His growing fame and influence in British diplomatic and political circles had forced Palmerston to bring him back into office, although his role in the Turkish capital was rather limited. Once again, Urquhart took up the Circassian cause and attempted to stir up a conflict between Russia and Britain. In his most brazen act yet, Urquhart conspired to send a British schooner, the Vixen, to Circassia in deliberate contravention of the Russian embargo against foreign shipping on the eastern Black Sea coast imposed as part of the Treaty of Adrianople. The Vixen belonged to a shipping company, George and James Bell of Glasgow and London, that had already clashed with the Russians over their obstructive quarantine regulations on the Danube. Officially, the Vixen was transporting salt, but in fact it was loaded with a large supply of weapons for the Circassians. Ponsonby in Constantinople had been informed of the ship’s intended journey and did nothing to discourage it; nor did he reply to the Bells’ enquiries about whether the Foreign Office recognized the embargo and whether Britain would defend their shipping rights, as Urquhart had assured them that it would. The Russians were aware of Urquhart’s plans: in the summer of 1836 the Tsar had already complained to the British ambassador in St Petersburg after one of Urquhart’s followers had travelled to Circassia and promised British support for their war against Russia. The Vixen sailed in October. As Urquhart had anticipated, a Russian warship seized the Vixen on the Caucasian coast, at Soujouk Kalé, prompting loud denunciations of the Russian action and calls for war in The Times and other newspapers. Ponsonby urged Palmerston to send a fleet into the Black Sea. Although he was reluctant to recognize Russia’s embargo or its claims to Circassia, Palmerston was nevertheless not ready to be pushed into a war by Urquhart, Ponsonby and the British press. He acknowledged that the Vixen had contravened Russian regulations, which Britain recognized, but only in so far as these related to Soujouk Kalé, not to the whole Caucasian coastline.

  Recalled once again from Constantinople, Urquhart was dismissed from the foreign service and charged with a breach of official secrecy by Palmerston in 1837. Urquhart always claimed that Palmerston had known about the Vixen plan. For years he harboured a deep grudge against the Foreign Secretary for supposedly betraying him. As Britain moved towards entente with Russia, Urquhart became increasingly frustrated and extreme in his Russophobia, calling for an even stronger anti-Russian line – not discounting war – to defend Britain’s trade and its interests in India. He eve
n accused Palmerston of being in the pay of the Russian government, a charge taken up by his supporters in the press, including in The Times, a major influence on middle-class opinion, which joined the Urquhart camp in opposition to the ‘pro-Russian’ foreign policy of Palmerston. In 1839 a long series of letters to The Times by ‘Anglicus’ – a pseudonym of Henry Parish, one of Urquhart’s acolytes – almost took on the status of editorials, warning of the dangers of any compromise with an empire bent on the domination of Europe and Asia.

  Urquhart continued his attacks on Russia in the House of Commons, to which he was elected in 1847 as an independent candidate (taking as his colours the green and yellow of Circassia). By this time Palmerston was the Foreign Secretary in Lord John Russell’s Whig administration, which took office in 1846, following the split of the Conservatives over the repeal of import tariffs on cereal products (the Corn Laws). Urquhart renewed his charges against him. In 1848 he even led a campaign to impeach Palmerston for his failure to pursue a more aggressive policy against Russia. In a five-hour speech in the House of Commons, Urquhart’s main ally, the MP Thomas Anstey, accused him of a shameful foreign policy that had endangered Britain’s national security by failing to defend the liberty of Europe against Russian aggression – in particular, the constitutional liberties of Poland, whose maintenance had been made a condition for the transfer of the Polish kingdom to the Tsar’s protection by the other powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Russia’s brutal crushing of the Warsaw uprising in 1831 had obliged Britain to intervene in Poland in support of the rebels, even at the risk of a European war against Russia, Anstey maintained. In self-defence, Palmerston explained why it had been unrealistic to take up arms in favour of the Poles, while laying out the general principles of liberal interventionism which he would call on again when Britain entered the Crimean War: