Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

The Slavophiles affirmed that, on the contrary, Russia did have its own distinct and valuable contribution to make. It had preserved the integrity of Orthodox Christianity, which in most of Europe had been destroyed either by power-loving Popes or by rationalist, individualist Protestants. The spirit of community (sobornost), which the church had upheld, was also exemplified in the peasant community and the workmen’s cooperative (artel), where resources were shared and periodically redistributed to reflect the changing needs of individual households. In the West, human beings were spiritually impoverished, tainted by a mercenary laissez-faire economy, by individualism, rationalism, and atheism. Russia’s sobornost would heal the West’s ailments. In this way, the Slavophiles made a virtue of Russia’s local communities of joint responsibility. But they also warned that Russia’s monarchy was itself, since Peter the Great, becoming dangerously Westernized.

Westerners took Europe as their norm. They believed that Russia was a backward Western country, but that its youthful energy would give it advantages as it took its place among the European powers. Their intellectual justification for asserting this was Hegelian: that each nation had its place in the evolution of universal history, a period when its characteristics were dominant. In this scheme, the French period was coming to an end, the German period was beginning, but it would be succeeded by a period when Russia would take over. This evolutionary timetable assumed that Russia was becoming a nation, and that state and nation were mutually reinforcing – a dubious assumption for a multi-ethnic land empire.

The Crimean War

After the defeat of Napoleon, Russia became incontestably the leading land power in Europe. As other European countries set up constitutional political systems, though, Russia’s autocracy began to seem anachronistic and even immoral. When it suppressed the Polish rising of 1830–1 and assisted the Habsburgs in suppressing the Hungarian rising of 1849, Russia became widely known as the ‘gendarme of Europe’. Russian émigrés were reinforced by Polish ones in spreading ominous accounts of the despotic brutality of its rulers.

The origins of the Crimean War in the 1850s exemplified many of the problems which could arise from mutual misunderstandings between Russia and the European powers. Even after Russia conquered the northern shore of the Black Sea, its merchant navy – let alone its Black Sea Fleet – could still not be sure of free access to the Mediterranean, since every ship had to pass through the very narrow Bosphorus straits, which were controlled on both shores by the Ottoman Empire. The fate of that empire thus mattered vitally to Russia. By the mid-19th century, Turkey was widely regarded as the ‘sick man of Europe’, which had failed to reform fundamentally and hence was likely to collapse in the near future. Russia would welcome such collapse – but only if it could replace Turkey as ruler of Constantinople and fulfil the symbolic mission of restoring the cross to the great church (currently mosque) of Hagia Sophia. If, however, Turkey was supplanted by another European power, that power would offer an even greater threat to Russia than the Sultan’s moribund realm. As Foreign Minister Nesselrode wrote in 1830:

If we have allowed the Turkish government to continue to exist in Europe, it is because that government, under the preponderant influence of our superiority, suits us better than any of those which could be set up on its ruins.

A weak Ottoman Empire as Russian protectorate was far from being the worst option.

Russia, then, vacillated between trying to destroy the Ottoman Empire and trying to preserve and dominate it. In general, Russia endeavoured to avoid war, especially against other European powers, because war disrupted its finances and frequently also generated internal unrest. In the meantime, it pushed for maximum peaceful influence inside Ottoman territory by reasserting its right to intervene on behalf of Christian subjects – some 40% of the Ottoman population – quoting an obscurely worded 18th-century treaty. Other European powers, especially France, pressed to have similar rights acknowledged.