Despite Catherine’s ambitions, St. Petersburg’s transformation was not yet complete; it was a city still shaking off its rural roots, still in the act of rising from its provincial slumber. Many streets remained paved only with logs, canals remained squalid with sewage, kitchen gardens still dotted the urban landscape, and 20,000 cows were still kept by city-dwellers. But the city hummed with activity, a welcoming bustling vitality. The weather was deceptively welcoming as well. The Americans arrived in the closing days of summer, a season measured by those who knew the city in weeks rather than months. Winter, “rude . . . unsettled and unfriendly,” with temperatures dropping to -40° Celsius, might begin, without warning, as early as November. “You take farewell of Summer at night,” one observer warned, “and hail the grim tyrant in the morning.”33
Dana was ill-prepared for his frigid welcome in Russia, both by Catherine and his fellow diplomats. Count Panin, an advisor to and former favorite of Catherine the Great, was the leader of the pro-Prussian faction in the Russian government and was thought to be sympathetic toward American interests. Charles Oliver de Saint-Georges, Marquis de Vérac, the French minister to the Russian court, was also thought to be a potential ally, though Dana arrived in St. Petersburg already skeptical of French influence in European diplomacy and well aware that Vergennes had done his best to discourage his mission. Neither, it transpired, would prove particularly useful. Louche and languid, Vérac would do almost nothing to aid Dana’s efforts to make contact with the Russian government, while Panin, theoretically an ally, had fallen from favor and could do little to influence events from his rural exile. With few contacts and no friends, Dana would languish in his hotel in months of frustrated, maddening isolation. Vérac and Panin were not, however, entirely to blame for the American mission’s frosty reception.
To the travel-worn Dana, the plague that was Stephen Sayre seemed to have preceded him everywhere he went, poisoning the diplomatic well before he could draw from it. After adventures in Copenhagen and Berlin, Sayre had traveled to St. Petersburg in 1780, claiming to be a representative of the United States, though without any actual authorization. His very presence in the Russian capital angered the British and annoyed the tsarina, but that was nothing compared to the damage done to American credibility when Sayre, as interested as ever in conspiracy and intrigue, attempted to implicate the popular British ambassador, James Harris, in a plot to burn the Russian fleet. Harris dismissed Sayre as a spy, “impudent and indiscreet, with better parts than judgment, enterprising in forming a bold project, but unequal to its execution . . . a rebellious adventurer, but without those qualities requisite to obtain even the confidence of his own party.” Unsurprisingly given its author, the arson ploy came to nothing, with Harris and the British avoiding the opprobrium that was more appropriately heaped on the Americans.34
Dana knew enough of Sayre’s character to avoid entangling himself with the rogue would-be diplomat, and seems to have studiously avoided the New Yorker while in St. Petersburg. But Sayre was not alone undermining the American position in Russia. Although he seems to have been unaware of this, Dana had done much to cast himself in a negative light before he even arrived at his post. In May 1780, while Dana was still in Paris, the Black Prince, an American privateer owned and outfitted by Robert Morris, had captured and plundered a neutral ship in the English Channel in defiance of the freedom of the seas declared by Catherine’s League of Armed Neutrality. It was suggested to Benjamin Franklin, as the United States’ senior ambassador in Europe, that the privateers return the captured goods to the rightful owner. Franklin consulted Dana and John Adams about the matter, and the Massachusetts men, despite their support for the League of Armed Neutrality, publicly advised Franklin to refuse all limits on American privateers. Like many Americans, Dana considered the League of Armed Neutrality to be focused on undermining and preventing British naval tyranny. In his mind, American privateers were not the problem the league was designed to address, and should thus be exempt from the strictures of the league. Catherine, however, saw it as yet another example of American piracy. She had been “entirely furious” about American raids against Russian shipping, “the affronts these Americans have placed upon me” in 1778 and the Black Prince affair seemed to suggest little had changed. The presence of such an outspoken advocate for American privateers, a seeming hypocrite who championed the neutrality of the seas when it was in his country’s interest but undermined its strictures when it was not, was thus hardly likely to receive a warm welcome at her court.35
New to the subtle art of European diplomacy, let alone its more boisterous Russian cousin, the young nation and its novice representative proved to be alarmingly ignorant of the nature of statecraft, a naiveté that blunted Dana’s effectiveness. Little could be accomplished to influence members of the Russian court without the liberal distribution of cash to the proper parties. Merely gaining an audience with key figures in the Russian government required an outlay of gifts, a requirement that the rather stiff and puritanical Dana balked at and that Congress never properly understood much less approved. Congress had also been blinded by Catherine’s enlightened outward presentation. They firmly believed her to be a champion of liberty, progress, and free trade, a keen enemy of a tyrannical Britain and a natural ally of the United States. In assuming Catherine’s enlightened bona fides, and taking for granted a close alignment of interests, Congress repeatedly pushed for treaties and agreements with Russia that were never remotely possible. Catherine had her own interests and her own concerns, and while she welcomed the American rebellion for the opportunities it provided her, she had little interest in its ultimate success. Dana eventually came to recognize this fact, but he was never able to convince his government.
If Congress had not been too preoccupied with its own struggles to more closely examine recent events in Russia, they might have been cured of their delusions. In 1774, Yemelyan Pugachev, an obscure Don Cossack landowner, had declared himself to be the deceased Peter III, touching off the most serious rebellion of Catherine’s reign. The uprising of Cossacks and peasants was quickly brutally suppressed, but the appeal of Pugachev’s promise of an end to serfdom—in a country in which 90 per cent of the population were serfs—and Catherine’s refusal to entertain the idea, should have exposed the autocratic nature of Catherine’s rule. Furthermore, along with the usual executions and the hanging and quartering of Pugachev, the suppression of the rebellion also saw the beginning of a new stage in the history of Siberian exile. Though criminals and dissidents had been banished to the Arctic steppes of Russia’s hinterland since the eighteenth century, Pugachev’s rebellion, and Catherine’s ferocious reaction to it, began to transform the practice into a formal policy. As for the British in America and Australia, expulsion provided Catherine and her successors with both a handy means of ridding the state of individuals who threatened its stability and of populating and securing the nation’s fringes in an age of imperial expansion. By 1781 Catherine had sent 35,000 men into Siberian exile, marking a growing trend in the use of exile to rid the state of criminals and dissidents while securing the imperial frontiers. Lulled by her advocacy for free seas and mediation, and blinded by her improving interests, Congress remained convinced of Catherine’s enlightened nature, of her commitment to progress, and her status as a potential champion of liberty. It was a miscalculation that would do much to doom Dana’s diplomatic prospects.36
Unfortunately for Dana, his British counterpart at Catherine’s court showed none of the costly inexperience or misguided scruples that plagued the American diplomatic effort. Though still only 31 years old, Sir James Harris had been “in the midst of Russian barbarity” as Britain’s ambassador to St. Petersburg since 1777, and had experience in European diplomacy that stretched back more than a decade. Handsome and socially adept, Harris was a born diplomat, a professional with the deep experience few of America’s amateur ministers could match. His presence in St. Petersburg was ample testament to the growing import
ance of Russia to British interests during the American War. While Dana and Congress balked at the bribery needed to build influence in St. Petersburg, Harris was busy greasing palms to ensure that Russia stayed out of Britain’s family quarrel. The British agent had spent considerable time and money building up an information network in the Russian government and creating a pro-British faction in Catherine’s court. He worked secretly to undermine the position of the pro-Prussian foreign minister Count Panin and tie himself to the ostensibly pro-British Prince Potemkin. In this he largely succeeded. Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine’s great favorite and former lover, was persuaded through large monetary inducements to back Britain, and most, perhaps all, of Potemkin’s secretaries were in Harris’s pocket. Even so, the Russian court remained divided between Potemkin’s pro-British faction and a pro-Prussian faction led by another of Catherine’s favorites, Count Panin, the man on whom Dana pinned much of his hope for success at the Russian court.37
For Harris, who had formally objected to Dana’s presence in St. Petersburg, preventing Dana from securing an alliance with Russia was not enough. Harris and the British ministry feared that Catherine’s very public desire to serve as mediator between the warring parties might lead to the recognition of American independence, an idea still anathema in Britain. For one so well studied in the art of bribery, the path forward was clear. Harris determined to distract Catherine’s attention from neutrality and mediation by means of an audaciously spectacular bribe. Catherine was to be offered a British sugar island in the West Indies or the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean in return for her promise not to push for a negotiated peace. Catherine, however, had her sights set on a greater prize, one that necessitated the continuation of the Franco-British War and the smokescreen of armed neutrality.38
In the meantime, Dana remained steadfast in his determination to do what he could to secure a Russian alliance or at least the much hoped-for recognition of his nation’s status as an independent state. In December 1781, Dana’s stoic resolve was buoyed when the news of the American victory at Yorktown at last reached him on the banks of the Neva. “We receive the great news of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his army,” enthused a jubilant Dana upon hearing of his country’s unexpected triumph in Virginia. “Thus the very first rational plan which has been formed, has been happily crowned with the most ample success.” Outwardly at least, Yorktown appeared to inaugurate a new phase in Dana’s diplomatic mission. Studiously spurned by both Catherine’s court and European diplomats before the pivotal battle, in the immediate aftermath Dana began to feel a thaw in his relations in St. Petersburg. The Prussian minister, who like most European agents had previously ignored Dana’s very existence, made contact and even delivered a letter from Frederick the Great himself. The normally self-assured Harris was shaken, sure that he now saw clear signs that Catherine was turning her back on Britain. Back in America, many were convinced that Harris was right, certain that the time was ripe for Catherine to throw the strength of the League of Armed Neutrality into the fight against the British tyrant of the waves, to cow their common enemy and ensure the freedom of trade. And yet the changes that everyone was sure they saw in the disposition of Catherine and her court were merely cosmetic, a surface sheen of cooperation obscuring the machinations of the empress. Dana remained officially shunned, American independence remained unrecognized, and the neutral league exasperatingly neutral.39
The League of Armed Neutrality and the persistent offers to negotiate peace between the belligerents were designed to hamstring the British and the French while offering Russia maximum flexibility to pursue its predatory interests on the Black Sea. After all, for an empire the size of Russia, concentrating its military on its south-eastern border would leave its northern and western frontiers vulnerable, and there were age-old enemies besides the Turks to worry about. The League of Armed Neutrality did much to secure Russia’s European borders. Sweden and Denmark, who had been waging war with Russia for as long as the Ottomans, joined the league in 1780 with the great central European powers Prussia and Austria joining in 1781. All this promised to lessen the threat of a war on multiple fronts, freeing Catherine to act in the Crimea.
At the same time, in June 1781, Catherine had negotiated a secret alliance with the ever-ambitious and land-hungry Joseph II of Austria. Like Russia, Austria had been engaged in a centuries-long conflict with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had been an object of fear since the days when Suleiman the Magnificent swept through the Balkans, bringing the seemingly irresistible surge of an expansionist empire crashing against the very gates of Vienna itself. The Habsburgs were on the back foot for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but by the early decades of the eighteenth, Austria had begun to take the offensive. Huge territorial gains were made in wars with the Ottomans in the years between 1714 and 1739, but humiliating setbacks quickly followed. Belgrade was lost in 1739, and the Seven Years’ War, a war that saw Russia make considerable conquests, proved to be largely a disappointment for the overstretched Austrians. By 1781, Joseph II had learned the lessons of the previous wars. Austria embarked on wide-ranging military reforms and a period of massive military growth. “Vienna has now been transformed into an arsenal,” a British resident in the Austrian capital reported. “Every day new regiments arrive . . . Nothing can convey a more striking idea of the greatness of the House of Austria.” It was the allure of these new forces that had led a bellicose Joseph into the entirely unsatisfying debacle of the Potato War with Prussia, an abortive war that saw both sides mobilize huge armies but no actual combat.40
Despite the inconclusiveness of the Potato War, Joseph II had been pleased by the performance of his newly modernized army—in his eyes it had forced the notoriously bellicose Frederick the Great to stand down—but the negotiating table brought only frustration. He was forced to relinquish his claim to Bavaria—the original source of the conflict—while Frederick was granted his demand of hereditary rights to the Franconian duchies. In a further coup for Prussia, many smaller German states had viewed the emperor as the aggressor, and as the greater danger to the autonomy of the principalities. As a result, Frederick, who had spent most of his life gobbling up territory and increasing his influence over lesser German states, was now able to convincingly portray Prussia as the defender of imperial integrity and the guarantor of German independence in the face of an aggressive, expansionist Austria. When Joseph renewed his attempts to add Bavaria to his domains in 1785, Prussia would draw the principalities even closer with the creation of the Fürstenbund, a league of German states dedicated to the protection of the constitutional and territorial integrity of the Holy Roman Empire. Central Europe had long been caught between Prussian and Austrian poles, but the Bavarian war did much to intensify this German dualism, and to swing the balance of power decidedly in a Prussian direction. For Joseph II, the war had done little to quench his thirst for territorial expansion, but it provided a valuable lesson about the need to secure his eastern borders before the seemingly inevitable resumption of hostilities with Prussia. While keeping a wary eye on Frederick II, the Austrian gaze began to turn to the east.
With his territorial ambitions blocked in Germany, and with as much as half of total state expenditure going to fund the military, Joseph began to look elsewhere for a fight. The memory of the loss of Belgrade weighed deeply on the Austria psyche in 1781, and so with revenge in mind, and with Russia’s spectacular success in the Seven Years’ War as a guide, Joseph settled on the eastern frontier as the key to his ambitions. In furtherance of these ends, Joseph and Catherine entered into secret negotiations known as the “Greek Project.” The rulers recognized a common interest in the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and used the negotiations to hash out the division of spoils in the next Ottoman war, a war all were convinced was on the horizon. A secret alliance was thus formed, which stipulated that Catherine would receive Moldavia, Wallachia, and Bessarabia, while Joseph would gain the rest of the Ba
lkans with Belgrade the jewel in the crown.41
With Austria on board and her other frontiers suitably secured, Catherine could now afford to mass her troops against Crimea and the Ottomans when the opportunity for war presented itself. The rebellion against the khan in 1781 provided the perfect pretext. In a June 1782 letter to Potemkin, Catherine brought the deteriorating situation in Crimea to the prince’s attention. “In Crimea,” she wrote, “the Tatars have once again begun to make not insignificant disturbances, which forced the Khan and Veselitsky [the Russian consul in Crimea] to leave Kaffa by water for Kerch . . . It is now necessary to give the Khan the promised defense, to protect our borders and his, our friend’s.” Signaling that the ongoing Franco-British War would provide cover for Russian actions even after the surrender at Yorktown, the empress concluded the letter with the news of the crushing British naval victory over the French at the Battle of the Saintes near Martinique. The British had not yet been cowed, meaning the war might well continue for the foreseeable future. Potemkin unsurprisingly saw an Ottoman conspiracy behind the uprising in Crimea (a senior Ottoman commander had recently been sent to nearby Taman), and a chance to bring the territory under Russian control for good. “The opportunity to send troops into the Crimea is now at hand, and there is no reason to delay. Your loyal ally and absolute Sovereign of his land requests your aid in suppressing the rebels.” Despite the rather flimsy pretext of coming to the aid of an ally, even at this early stage Potemkin hinted that perhaps it would be best to create a permanent Russian presence in Crimea. According to Potemkin, the rebels “intend to kill him [the khan], which they’ve not yet succeeded in doing, but their intention will remain forever, so even if the Tatars were to submit, how could the Khan live among them without protection?” The stage was being set for a Russian conquest.42
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