Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Nicholas read it in manuscript and had it printed in Paris as “Mémoire présenté à l’empereur Nicolas depuis la révolution de février, par un russe, employé supérieur aux affaires étrangères,” in an extremely limited edition of twelve copies. Tyutchev’s brochure was sent by special channels to the political leaders of France, including Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the republic. The French correctly regarded this as a “quasi-official document,” and it was widely quoted in the European press.

The international situation was unfavorable for Russia then. France, with Napoleon’s defeat in the War of 1812 a distant memory, wanted to limit Russia’s role as arbiter in European affairs; so did England. Both countries were worried by Russia’s pressure on Turkey, which Nicholas I called “the sick man of Europe.” England feared that if Russia affirmed itself in the Balkans, home to millions of Orthodox Slavs, it would be a major threat. Anti-Russian rhetoric ran high in the European press.

On the Russian side, the Slavophiles tried to fire up Nicholas’s hidden pan-Slavic ambitions, which Tyutchev supported. In 1849 he wrote “The Dawn”:

Arise, Rus! The hour is nigh!

Arise for the sake of Christ’s service!

Isn’t it time to make the sign of the cross

And toll the bell of Tsargrad?

Tyutchev and his fellow thinkers did not limit their goals to the taking of Tsargrad (as Russians called Constantinople). This is how he defined the borders of the “Russian Kingdom” in another poem of that year, “Russian Geography”: “From the Nile to the Neva, from Elba to China, from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube.”

Such voracious geographical appetites struck even Nicholas as excessive, so this poem remained in manuscript. Later, when the emperor read Tyutchev’s poem “Prophecy” in Contemporary, in which the poet predicted that Nicholas would triumphantly enter St. Sophia in Constantinople as “All-Slavic Tsar,” the monarch crossed out the lines and wrote, “Such phrases must not be allowed.”¹⁴ Nicholas’s decision was handed down to the minister of foreign affairs.

But despite Tyutchev’s political extremes, Nicholas valued him highly as an agent of influence. In 1853, on the eve of armed conflict with Turkey, Tyutchev was sent to Paris on a special assignment to work on French journalists, who were almost all in favor of Turkey in the conflict with Russia. The French ambassador in St. Petersburg warned his government about this, advising that Tyutchev “must be kept under observation,” which the French police did.

The British ambassador also informed his department about Tyutchev’s assignment in Europe, adding, “One gets the impression that at the present moment the Russian government is making great efforts to influence the public press in foreign nations and, as is known, has spent significant sums on this.”¹⁵

Equipped with royal subsidies, Tyutchev did what he could in Paris. It was too little, too late: no propaganda moves on the part of the Russian government could prevent England and France from siding with Turkey in the coming war.

In September 1854, the sixty-thousand-strong Anglo-French expeditionary corps landed in the Crimea and with the Turks besieged Sevastopol, an important naval base on the Black Sea. From the start, the war did not go the way Nicholas wanted. He had overestimated Russian military might. Nicholas was certain that in his thirty years on the throne, he had turned Russia into an undefeatable colossus. Suddenly, he discovered that the colossus had feet of clay.

Nicholas had almost a million armed men. But the Russian soldiers used obsolete rifles and artillery, the provisioning was terrible (there wasn’t a single railroad connecting continental Russia with Sevastopol), and the Russian sailing fleet could not compete with European steamships.

The war turned into a competition of technology and, more broadly, of economies; serf-holding, backward Russia could not beat the advanced West. The bravery of the Russian soldiers was of little help.

The bad news from Sevastopol plunged the proud and severe Nicholas into a deep depression. That magnificent giant, fifty-eight years old, with a rich commanding voice that sometimes made even experienced officers faint, now wept like a child when he received dispatches about defeats in the Crimea, and at night he prayed fervently, bowing low before the icons in the Winter Palace chapel.¹⁶ The once ironclad health of the emperor collapsed along with his faith in Russia’s military power.

Nicholas I burned up in a few days, dying February 18, 1855; the official cause of death was pneumonia. It came so unexpectedly that there was talk in St. Petersburg that he had committed suicide by poison.