Russia (35 page)

The Circassians fought on nevertheless. The howl of the jackal echoed more frequently across the valleys. This was the sinister war cry that heralded the descent of the Circassian warriors to ambush Russian soldiers. Urquhart and his friends J. A. Longworth and James Stanislaus Bell, a connection of the
Vixen’s
owners, who had arrived in the western Caucasus in 1836, persisted in their efforts. Both were to publish accounts of their experiences in Circassia.
³⁶
The Turks, too, sent in their agents and preachers, and presented the insurgents with a handsome banner (twelve stars surmounting three crossed arrows on a blue ground), representing them as ‘sheriffs’ of an Ottoman province
(sanjak).
Bell and Longworth ran guns in, and encouraged the Circassians to translate their claim to national independence into a formal bid for sovereignty.

A moment propitious for the enterprise soon offered itself. In the same year Circassian chiefs warned the Russian command that they would make trouble if the Russians proceeded with their plan to build a new fortified line across their territory. The warning was disregarded, and in the
following year more Russian troops were landed, more Circassian villages were laid waste. The building went ahead.

By this point a forty-year-old bushy-bearded imam called Shamyl had assumed the leadership of the Muridist movement. He was based in Dagestan, but he succeeded in uniting the opposition in the western as well as the eastern Caucasus. Chechens, Circassians and Dagestanis all joined forces. Shamyl’s name soon reached the ears of the Tsar, who was on a tour of the Caucasus. He immediately invited Shamyl to meet him, but after some hesitation the invitation was refused and the imam’s followers were soon offering more resistance to the Russians than ever before.

In 1842 a Russian task force of 10,000 men with 24 guns, closely supervised by the War Minister himself, was forced to retreat with a loss of nearly a fifth of its strength. An entire army corps had to be ordered down to the Caucasus to restore the position. Yet two years later a force of 20,000 men under M. S. Vorontsov, the new commander-in chief, Caucasus, was trapped in the mountains and lost 4,000 men and his war chest before he could be extricated.

These were significant losses for the military establishment of the northern Caucasus, which numbered about 80,000 men. And combat was not the only scourge. In the winter of 1841—2 fever took a toll of one man in six. But the unrecorded losses
of
the enemy were serious too. Several Caucasian communities which Shamyl had hoped would join him responded to his call without enthusiasm or not at all. Even the ardour of some of the Chechens had cooled. Again the demographic factor seems to have governed events. An ecological balance between the population and resources of the northern Caucasus had evidently been regained. Even so, it was only after the Crimean War that the Chechens were subdued. Shamyl was to be captured in 1859, and his movement was broken.
³⁷

Success had been bought at a high financial cost, however. ‘Never was the state so oppressed with debt as it is at this day,’ wrote a French engineer who spent five years in southern Russia. ‘The war in the Caucasus, the grand military parades, and the payment of a countless host of diplomatic agents, avowed and secret, all absorb immense sums.’ In 1841, the Finance Minister, Kankrin, had annoyed the Tsar by telling him the proposed military expenditures were unaffordable. Stamp duties were quadrupled and countless public works were halted in consequence.
³⁸
The crisis was hardly to be wondered at given the size of the military establishment, and the costs were not to diminish. In 1848, when it was put on a war footing, the army could field no fewer than 368 infantry battalions, 460 cavalry squadrons and 996 guns in European Russia alone.

In this same area the Empire’s population had risen from
36
million in 1800 to 60 million by 1850. This implied a huge increase of both taxpayers and young men liable for military service. This strong demographic growth helped to make the huge army more affordable. So did the immensity of the Empire’s natural assets. By 1843 Siberia was producing twice as much gold as all other gold mines in the world, and the state was collecting over 20 tons of it a year for its own purposes. But, though the Empire survived the immediate financial alarms, the seemingly insatiable demands for military and naval expenditures was soon to lead to an effective devaluation of the ruble, which Kankrin had gone to great pains to stabilize.
³⁹
This, however, was not the only cost.

The immensity of Russia’s armaments now thoroughly alarmed other powers — Britain in particular. It could be argued that Russia needed these arms to defend at least half a dozen vulnerable points along its far-flung frontiers as well as the long Polish border. On the other hand they seemed a looming threat to Britain’s vital interests in the Middle East, India and the Pacific. A growing imperial power makes enemies, and the enemies were already combining to halt Russia’s progress.

Europe’s ‘Year of Revolutions’, 1848, hardly touched the Empire. Not even Poland saw an insurrection. An attempt two years earlier had been scotched by the authorities simply by turning the serfs (many of them Ukrainian) against their hated Polish landlords. Nationalist ardour had remained cool ever since. But other powers were promoting it elsewhere. Partly in response to liberal opinion, partly to enlarge their markets, France and America as well as Britain were, albeit unofficially, encouraging national risings in the name of democracy. This tendency strengthened the anti-revolutionary stance not only of Russia, but of Prussia and Austria too. Together they had agreed, by the Convention of Berlin of 1833, to go to each other’s aid if threatened by external or internal enemies. In 1849, in accordance with the convention and at the request of the Emperor of Austria, Russian troops marched west to help suppress insurgent Hungary. Their actions prompted cries of protest from French and British liberals, though no action by their governments. Nevertheless, relations grew increasingly strained.

It was not only Russia’s southward advance at the expense of Turkey and Persia that gave rise to Western concern: its progress in central Asia and the Far East was also worrying. By 1847 a Russian base had been established on the Aral Sea, and army units were soon probing the frontiers of China
beyond. Russia’s trading connection with China had recently become more important than ever. The Opium Wars had cut off Britain’s East India Company’s supply of tea, and Russia was well placed to fill the gap in the market, its supplies coming by caravan through Kyakhta.

In 1851 a new Cossack Host, which included some Buriat and Tungus tribesmen as well as Russian peasants, was to be set up on the far side of Lake Baikal, demonstrating that Russia intended to extend its presence along the Chinese frontier, and two years later an expedition was sent nearly 500 miles up the river Syr-Darya, towards Tashkent. Other imperialist methods were manifested further east. As early as 1836 there were already over 30,000 colonists on Russian territory in North America;
⁴⁰
in 1853 the island of Sakhalin was taken over by the Russia—America Company,
⁴¹
and a Russian squadron visited Japan. Russia’s continuing advance on almost all fronts at last brought confrontation.

When it came, the prime target was the Russian port
of
Sevastopol, chief base for the Black Sea fleet. (By some irony, the fleet’s commander a few years earlier had been Admiral Lazarev, who in his youth had served as a midshipman on Lord Nelson’s flagship
Victory
at Trafalgar.) The British and the French were both well informed about Sevastopol. Travellers like H. D. Seymour provided good accounts of its defences. Nevertheless, it was no mean undertaking to attack it. Russia could now field nearly a million men, at a cost
of
84.2 million silver rubles a year. Though half the size of the Baltic fleet, by 1854 the Black Sea fleet nonetheless boasted 16 first-rate warships fit for service, 7 frigates and 30 steam-boats. Its first-class armament and ordnance included incendiary shells delivered by the deadly Paixhans gun,
⁴²
although the ships were mostly built of pine and fir rather than oak, and were vulnerable to the local woodworm.

Money had been lavished to make Sevastapol a fitting base for the southern fleet, observed another traveller, Laurence Oliphant, but he noticed a weakness: many of the 1,200 guns which guarded the approaches to the harbour had been poorly sited. He stressed another disadvantage for the Russians too: ‘Notwithstanding the large numerical force which occupies the south of Russia, the greatest difficulty must attend the concentration of the army upon any one point, until railroads intersect the empire, and its water communication is improved.’
⁴³
It remained to be seen if his prognostication would be borne out.

The occasion for war arose in 1853, when Russia insisted that Turkey revoke the right it had recently granted to the Catholic Church to protect
the holy places in Jerusalem, and also recognize Russia as protector of the Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks, with French backing, rejected the demand, whereupon Russian troops marched south into the Romanian principalities. In response, British and French fleets sailed for the Black Sea in readiness for combat; the Turks declared war on Russia, and fighting began. The Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed the Turkish fleet at Sinope, but then the Western powers joined in — and on several fronts.

Operations in the Crimean War were not confined to the Crimea and the Black Sea. British and French ships made a brief foray into the Baltic; they destroyed the Arctic settlement of Kola, and attacked Petropavlovsk in faraway Kamchatka, where a landing party was repulsed by Russian guns and a bayonet charge. The Russian army was defeated on the river Alma in the Crimea by a superior force, and also lost the battle of Inkerman. In a diversionary move, British naval units and Circassian insurgents together took the little Black Sea naval station of Novorossiisk. The key port of Sevastopol, doggedly defended by General Totleben, held out, and then the main Russian land force, under General Paskevich, advanced to take the strategic Turkish citadel of Kars. However, in September 1855 Sevastopol and the fleet which sheltered there capitulated after very heavy fighting. Negotiations, which had hardly ceased throughout the period of hostilities, were concluded soon afterwards. But the decisive factor which led the Russian government to come to terms was an ultimatum from Austria.

For the first time in a century Russia had failed at arms, and it paid the price in the ensuing settlement. Its frontier was moved away from the Danube, and it was barred from the Black Sea, as were Turkish warships. Russia’s advance in the west had been halted, its primacy as a European land power ended, and it sustained a grievous blow to its prestige. It paused to take stock.

In fact the war had been fought inefficiently by both sides. However, it was recognized in St Petersburg that the roots of the Empire’s problem lay in an inadequate transportation system, underdeveloped industry, and an antiquated social system based on serfdom. Yet the realization that these problems must be addressed was not quite new. In 1842 Tsar Nicholas had ‘decreed the construction of a railroad from St Petersburg to Moscow, to be built according to the example of other powers at the treasury’s expense, for the general good’.
⁴⁴
The state would keep control of it, but it was
expected to be of great importance to industry and, generally, to stimulate activity. Only the financial deficit had delayed implementation.

Nicholas had also made it clear in a speech to the State Council the same year that he was contemplating radical change to the social system. He did not want to alarm the nobility, who were descended from the service class that had built the state, and who depended on their serfs, so he did not talk of emancipation. Nevertheless, he explained in a cautious, convoluted way that ‘it is essential at least to prepare the way for a gradual transition to a different order … A way must be opened up to a transitional order combining emancipation with the inviolable preservation of hereditary land ownership.’
⁴⁵

In 1846 he had gone further. Serfs should not be emancipated, as they had been in the Baltic provinces at the beginning of the century, without land on which they could support themselves. The following year he told a delegation of nobles that serfs should not be considered as chattels. Fundamental changes were on the way. It remained to be seen whether they would come in time to save the Empire — or whether the disruption that reform would involve would undermine it.

A
FAMOUS NINETEENTH-CENTURY
novel, less well-known in the West than in Russia, pictures a lethargic hero who is reluctant to confront the world, or, indeed, to leave his bed. Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov is a good-natured, well-to-do young gentleman full of excellent intentions. Only he cannot stir himself to take any necessary action — whether to save his fortune or to keep the girl who loves him. His friend, a German who embodies the dynamism that Oblomov lacks, tells him what he needs to do, encourages him, cajoles him; but in vain — Oblomov cannot find the will to transform intention into action. He dissipates his fortune, sinks slowly into penury, marries a peasant woman, and ends his days on a country smallholding surrounded by clucking chickens.

Oblomov
¹
is, of course, a metaphor for Russia at a point of crisis, facing — or rather avoiding — the challenges
of
the modern world. Powerful forces of inertia encouraged Russia to go Oblomov’s way. They were contested by the advocates of progress in government, and, on the whole, the new tsar, Alexander II (r. 1855—82), inclined towards progress. He was well educated, literate in French and German, dutiful and decent, and he disliked serfdom. Well informed about civil as well as military affairs, he had already served on bodies concerned with the problem of serfdom and with railway-building. He became tsar at the age of thirty-seven, at the moment of decision.

Defeat in the Crimean War gave the country the jolt it needed to shake off complacency and move the government to action. It was a reverse for Russian imperialism, of course, and delivered a heavy blow to Russia’s prestige, but otherwise it was hardly a disaster. Few assets of much value were lost; the financial cost of war, though serious, was not serious enough to cause political disruption; and the deep structural faults in the economy and society, which underlay the glittering outward show of power, had at least been revealed and were to be quickly and conscientiously addressed.

The defeat did not even halt the Empire’s expansion for long. The peace settlement blocked an advance to the south, but the Empire was making
significant gains in Asia, edging its frontiers out towards India and Japan. It also contrived to enlarge its sphere of influence in the Balkans, and created a new one in Korea.

By the 1850s, senior figures in government had understood that serfdom was no longer compatible with Russia’s status as a great power, and that if the Empire did not industrialize it would soon be overtaken by other powers. Serfdom trapped a major part of the population in the relatively unprofitable agricultural sector, threatening to starve emergent industries of labour. It supported a noble class which had ceased to be liable for service to the state a century earlier and had therefore lost its
raison d’être.
And, since it was deeply unpopular with the peasants, it nurtured a permanent threat of rural rebellion. Yet to free the serfs without land, as had been done in the Baltic provinces early in the century, would lead to massive impoverishment and further inflame peasant tempers, while to give them land without compensating the nobles would alienate a large part of the literate class, on which the state relied.

Reforming the system was not only politically dangerous; it required solutions to a tangle of problems, immense in scale and hair-raising in their administrative complexity. Millions of acres of land had to be surveyed, the quality of their soil assessed, woods and common lands assigned to village communes, and fields apportioned fairly between all the peasant households. The powers of the village commune, which operated collectively and was to be given responsibilities for the peasants that were formerly the lord’s, also had to be defined. Organs of local government had to be set up, their membership — representative of both lords and peasants — laid down, and their responsibilities and mode of operation, which was to be largely democratic, specified. Local magistrates’ courts with elected justices had to be set up too, their powers defined in relation to the existing regional judicial system, with separate provision made for native peoples, priests, the military and commercial cases. There were also the financial aspects. Money had to be found to compensate the erstwhile serf-owners, arrangements made eventually to recoup the cost from the peasant beneficiaries in the form of redemption payments, banks founded to lend money at reasonable rates to peasants… At every stage the process was plagued by political differences and bureaucratic infighting, yet, albeit imperfectly, the task was accomplished, the challenge answered.
²

While this revolution was taking place in the countryside, modernization in the form of the railway was beginning to break down rural isolation, to
enliven commerce and, with its increasing demand for coal and steel, to stimulate industry. The creation of a rail network had been mooted for some time, but the St Petersburg—Moscow line was the only important link that had been completed before the Crimean War demonstrated the military cost of an obsolescent communications system. The opponents of the railway at last gave way, and in 1857 the Tsar felt able to order action as soon as hostilities should cease. The construction of a rail network in European Russia was opened up to tender from private enterprise, and the Tsar himself attended the ministerial meeting that decided to let the contract. It was granted to a consortium of Russian and foreign capitalists. The consortium undertook ‘to build at its own expense within ten years … [a] rail network extending some 2,500 miles, the government guaranteeing interest of five per cent on the construction costs’. The system would be run by the consortium for eighty-five years, after which it would become the property of the state.

The scheme succeeded in extending the railways from a total of 600 miles to 11,000 in less than twenty years, and to nearly 15,000 by 1882. By that time St Petersburg and Moscow had been connected with Warsaw and the Prussian frontier to the west, and with Nizhnii-Novgorod, New Russia and the Crimea to the south. The network had been expected to boost Russian grain exports, and it did so. Indeed, by 1914 southern Russia and Ukraine had become the grain basket of Europe. The new railways also facilitated a huge expansion of the textile industry, and encouraged the growth of banks, a big expansion in joint-stock-company flotations, and the introduction of new technology and organizational methods. But in 1871 Imperial Germany had come into existence, and it proceeded to forge further and further ahead of Russia in both industrial production and capacity. Another shot in the arm was needed if Russia were to stay in the race.

Since the Empire lacked sufficient capital, efforts were made to raise investment for further railway-building from local authorities, and to encourage foreign investment. But all these sources combined proved inadequate. The stimulus eventually had to come from the state.
³
Most continental powers had the same experience. On the other hand, demographic data promised strong future economic growth and even larger armed services. The Empire’s population was teeming. Between 1850 and 1875 it grew by 25 per cent in Europe and by almost 45 per cent in Asia.
⁴
Commensurate territorial growth, through exploration, colonization and conquest, might have been expected. Indeed, it was already on the way.

In 1864 the Russian government informed other powers quite openly of its intention to expand. The minister for foreign affairs, A. M. Gorchakov, also provided a disarming explanation. Expansion w as ‘the fate of all states
placed in a similar situation. The United States of America, France in Africa, Holland in its colonies, England in the East Indies were all driven to choose the path of onward movement, not so much out of ambition as of dire necessity. The greatest difficulty lies in being able to stop.’ The problem stemmed from the fact that, once it had

come into contact with half-savage nomadic tribes which lack firm social organization … the interests of border security and commerce demand that the more civilized state exercise a certain authority over its neighbours, whose … unruly ways make them very troublesome. It begins by curbing raids and pillaging, which … often requires the subjection of neighbouring tribes to some degree of control. But … once this has been done and they become more peacable, they in turn are exposed to attacks from tribes farther away … So the state has the choice of giving up this … effort and dooming its frontiers to constant unrest, making prosperity, safety and cultural progress impossible, or else of advancing ever farther into … the wild country.
⁵

This was not quite the ‘civilizing mission’justification for empire, but it made a valid point, exemplified repeatedly in Russia’s past.

But by the 1860s educated Russians had caught the spirit of the time. Ideas of empire were reflected in plays and poetry and in animated conversations at soirees. Some Russians were concerned about the costs of territorial expansion, but for most such expansion was a source of pride, and they justified it in a variety of ways. For the poet Tiutchev the connections with Imperial Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church were all-important. For him, Imperial Russia was

The legitimate, direct descendant of the authority of the Caesars …

[It] knows no historical equal.

It represents two entities: the fate of an entire race, and the better, and

Most sacred, half of the Christian Church.
⁶

The historian of Asia Vasilii Grigorev, however, did invoke the idea of Russia’s civilizing mission, especially in Asia:

We are called on to protect these peoples from the destructive influence of Nature itself, hunger, cold and sickness … to put these people’s lives in order, having taught these rude children of the forests and deserts to acknowledge the beneficent power of [civilizing] laws. We are called on to enlighten these peoples with religion and science.

And Russia had a specific mission because it was

closer to Asia … [and had] preserved in itself more of the Asiatic element… If the science and civic life of Europe must speak to Asia through the mouth
of one of its own people, then it will of course be us … Is it not obvious that Providence preserved the peoples of Asia as if intentionally from all foreign influences so that we would find them in an entirely undisturbed condition and therefore … more inclined to accept the gifts we bring?
⁷

A third proponent of empire was at once more practical and more traditional. N. Ilminskii was an oriental-languages expert who taught at the Orthodox seminary at Kazan and then at Kazan University. An ideological crusader, he saw himself in the vanguard of Russia’s cultural advance against Islam, and the objects of his particular attentions were the Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs and Turkmens of the old frontier lands along the Volga. In 1863 he founded a school for baptized Tatars, intended to serve as a model for others. Tatar was the language of instruction; the school was equipped with appropriate dictionaries and grammars as well as school books, and the curriculum was infused with Christian content. A few years later he also established a teacher-training college for non-Russians. By 1904 it was attended by Korean as well as Tatar, Chuvash, Votiak and Cheremis teachers and priests, and even a Yakut. One of his students, N. Ostroumov, introduced Ilminskii’s system into the Far Eastern and Central Asian provinces. It proved highly successful in insulating animists and new Christians against Islam, but had only limited impact in areas where the rival religion was already entrenched.

The government assumed that the indigenous peoples of the middle Volga and Urals were already integrated into the Empire. They were subject to military service on the same terms as Russians, and their nobility were co-opted into the imperial nobility. Reforms introduced around the turn of the century restricted the autonomy of some other native peoples, but imperial administrators treated the Buriats, for example, in the same way as Russian peasants, even though most still clung to Buddhism.
⁸
Russian imperialists made very limited progress in converting the peoples in their Central Asian possessions.

British officials in India became increasingly concerned as they observed Russia’s advance into the continental heartland. In 1864 (on the initiative of a local commander) Russian forces entered Chimkent and occupied Turkestan, a useful producer of cotton. The next year they took Tashkent, and in 1868 Samarkand on the ancient silk road to China. Five years later the khanate of Khiva followed, and in 1876 Kokand. Most of these new acquisitions became Russian protectorates, like Bukhara, the Russians assuming responsibility for their foreign relations but otherwise leaving government in the hands of their respective khans. However, a rising staged
against the Khan of unstable Kokand called for a full-scale intervention. An Uzbek tribe had recently appropriated the most fertile area, the Fergana valley, the Persian Tajiks were at daggers drawn with the inward-migrating Turkic Sarts; and the Sarts and Kipchaks tried to exterminate each other. These troubles had preceded Russian occupation. Most of the population came to accept Russian rule, but the Sufi Muslims of Fergana continued to give problems. In 1898 they mounted an armed attack on Russian barracks. Kokand had to be administered directly.
⁹

In general, Russian colonial administration was closer to the French than to the British model, in that the territories were regarded as part of Russia. They were governed by a military hierarchy down to district level, although local courts, taxation, irrigation and other functions were usually delegated to elected officials. In this fashion Russian norms were adapted to local realities. The Muslim population lacked the rights prevalent in Russia proper, but were not subject to military service or Russian taxation. The problem in Central Asia, however, was not the regime as such but the administrators on the ground. Some Russian colonial governors, such as Muravev-Amurskii in the Far East, combined humanity with efficiency and were first-rate by any standard, but the dross of the service tended to be posted to Central Asia. Many officials in Turkestan in particular had been sent there as a punishment. They were overworked, and rarely bothered to learn the local language; and their low pay encouraged many to take bribes.
¹⁰