Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  Yet, in pressing new responsibilities on his friends, Alexander reckoned without the hostility of his own family. When her eldest son had returned from the war, Marie Feodorovna rejoiced as thankfully as any Russian mother. Though she always disliked and distrusted Czartoryski, she insisted on presenting him with a personal gift ‘for not having left her son’s side during the battle or afterwards’.5 But as soon as the Grand Duke Constantine reached Gatchina from his abortive Prussian mission, the Dowager Empress became herself once more, and tart letters of reproach were despatched to the Winter Palace, upbraiding Alexander for his vacillations and cautioning him against the intrigues of the Pole. For Constantine had acquired in Moravia a high regard for his own valour which, when added to his skill in showing off and his jealousy of his elder brother, made him an irresponsible nuisance at Court. He made it clear he believed Czartoryski’s conduct of foreign affairs to be little short of treason and maintained that Arakcheev had supplied the artillery with lightweight guns which disintegrated under the strain of rapid fire. Whatever others might think of Constantine’s soldierly qualities, his mother – and the younger members of the family – were suitably impressed; and by the middle of February Alexander was under almost daily pressure to cut himself free from the last ties linking him with his friends of the Secret Committee.

  The End of Government by the Tsar’s Friends

  Unfortunately this crisis in government, following so closely on the traumatic shock of Austerlitz, sapped what remained of Alexander’s confidence while leaving his determination to rule as an autocrat undiminished. Throughout most of the year 1806, his conduct of affairs was again weak and dilatory: meetings of councils and committees were unduly protracted; there were long discussions on alternative policies and no business was settled. Czartoryski was bitterly disappointed.6 ‘The Emperor is always the same, mingling fear with weakness to the highest degree’, he wrote confidentially in mid-February,

  We are afraid of everything, we can no longer take vigorous steps; it is not even possible to advise him because he will not take advice. The Emperor still prefers to keep us [i.e. Czartoryski, Kochubey and Novosiltsov] in order to avoid the embarrassment of making a change, but he would like to act only according to his own fancy. Misfortune has not strengthened his powers of logical analysis: he has become more arbitrary than ever before. Such accumulation of weakness, uncertainty, fear, injustice and extravagant gestures fills one only with gloom and despair.7

  And Paul Stroganov, who was by nature far more patient and staid than Czartoryski, was almost as critical. He confided to his wife in a note on 18 February7, ‘I love our Emperor as much as is humanly possible but I pity him for possessing such a character. What kind of future will there be for those on whom he calls to govern? In the Emperor’s mind they would be destined as mere blind instruments of his will.’8

  A policy of balance and careful trimming – even occasionally of procrastination – has its merits in times of peace, with ministers sharply divided over measures of domestic reform. But it is an impossible line of conduct for any government at war, least of all in one seeking to save its face after crushing military defeat. By February 1806 the contests with Napoleon had come virtually to a standstill. The only point of contact between the French and Russian forces was in the Adriatic where Admiral Dmitri Senyavin’s naval squadron waged an enterprising campaign against French outposts in southern Dalmatia. Czartoryski, increasingly exasperated at the inertia in St Petersburg, tried to persuade Alexander to support Senyavin by a forward policy in the Balkans, rousing the Greeks and the southern Slavs against Russia’s traditional foe, Turkey, and her present enemy, France. It was all in vain. Alexander thought only of security, of some observation platform beyond the range of Napoleon’s armies where he might watch and wait. Now that Pitt had died, the Tsar had little interest in the English alliance or in what was left of the Third Coalition. Czartoryski, who had worked as much as any man to bring the Coalition together, reminded Alexander of Peter the Great’s warning. ‘We have nothing but honour, and to renounce it is to cease to be a monarch.’9 But such solemn words from the past failed, for once, to evoke a response in Alexander. As a young man Peter, too, suffered defeat and waited nine years for his revenge; and Alexander felt able to insist that he was in no hurry. ‘Let us remain totally passive and not make any move until the time when we are attacked upon our own soil,’ he declared.10

  For Czartoryski it was all too much. In the fourth week of March he sought to resign, only to be told that his sovereign still needed him. In April Czartoryski changed his tactics. He sent the Tsar a letter, several thousand words in length, in which he reviewed foreign and military policy over the previous three years.11 It is a remarkable document, a rare indictment of a sovereign by his minister: Alexander, it maintained, had wasted time between the original breach with France and the start of the campaign; he had allowed personal sentiment to shape his policy towards Prussia; he had hampered conduct of the campaign by joining the army in the field and insisting on giving Napoleon battle. ‘Your presence at Austerlitz was of no value’, wrote Czartoryski with icy candour. ‘The rout was most immediate and complete at the point where you stood. Your Imperial Majesty participated in it and was forced to retire rapidly, an embarrassment you should never have risked.’

  Oddly enough, Alexander accepted this lesson in statecraft and soldiery with pained forbearance rather than anger. He was honest enough with himself to see that most of what Czartoryski wrote was true. By now, moreover, he was well accustomed to receiving hectoring notes from his mother at Gatchina or Pavlovsk, none of them so cogently argued as this letter from someone whom he was still glad to acknowledge as ‘a devoted friend’. Throughout the spring he pressed Czartoryski to stay in office, though privately he began to sound out possible successors in April. Inevitably Tsar and minister met almost every day; and it was with Czartoryski’s agreement that Alexander sent a special emissary to Paris in the hope that a general peace might replace the indeterminate state of no-war between the two countries.12 In the second week of May Czartoryski drew up clear and detailed instructions for Oubril, whom the Tsar had selected for the mission: he was not to sacrifice Russia’s interests for transitory gains. But subsequently Alexander informed Oubril orally of his own personal desire for a settlement, and confidentially made it clear that Czartoryski’s ministerial appointment would soon be ended.13

  The final breach came in the closing days of May. The two men found themselves engaged in ‘several heated controversies’, as Czartoryski wrote at the time. Once more he went through the familiar ritual of tendering his resignation; and on this occasion – perhaps a little to his surprise – he found Alexander prepared to accept it.14

  Czartoryski’s departure was not made public until the beginning of July, when it was announced that General Andrei Budberg had been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs (a title never formally accorded to his predecessor). The news was received with mixed feelings both in St Petersburg and Moscow.15 There was little personal sympathy for Czartoryski; the old Russian families still maintained that, however loyal to the dynasty he might be, his Polish patriotism inevitably conflicted with the true needs of the Empire; and they were glad to see him go. But everyone was alarmed at the appointment of Budberg, a Baltic baron whose diplomatic experience was limited to a disastrous spell at the Swedish Court, whence he was hurriedly recalled at the Swedes’ own request. From his estate near Moscow, Theodore Rostopchin – who could never quite understand why he was not himself offered preferment – let it be known that Budberg had just sufficient intelligence to make a capable foreign minister of San Marino; and most of the diplomats in St Petersburg soon came to agree with Rostopchin.16 There was indeed little to be said in poor Budberg’s favour: his Estonian origin made him unacceptable to the true Russian conservatives among the nobility and his ignorance of Europe aroused the intelligentsia to derisive contempt. Twelve years ago he had been an amiable and conscientious instructor t
o the Tsar, teaching him the rudiments of military science; but he had refused all later advancement, partly on the grounds of bad health, but also because he genuinely doubted his own abilities. Even now, only the formidable insistence of Marie Feodorovna browbeat him into accepting the Foreign Ministry. What did Alexander gain by thrusting into high office a man of such limited capacity? Could it be that, after three years of Czartoryski, Alexander wished for a servant rather than a master? So at least believed the Austrian ambassador.17

  Some people, both foreign residents and native Russians, regretted the Pole’s departure for another reason. So long as he was able to influence the Tsar, Russian policy could champion an alternative programme to the new ideology of the French. Now that was no longer possible, and the mood of the government both in home affairs and over war aims became cautiously conservative. Czartoryski’s fall marked the final dispersal of the Secret Committee. Though as a body it never met after 1803, its members remained close to Alexander until his return from Austerlitz. But, with Czartoryski gone, neither Novosiltsov nor Paul Stroganov wished to retain responsible posts in the administration, and both soon resigned.18 Although they remained members of the Senate, they faded from the public eye. Kochubey alone continued in office, at least for another fifteen months, but he never succeeded in capturing Alexander’s interest for any of his reform projects. For the moment little was left of the ideals which fired the Tsar’s enthusiasm in earlier years. The visionary had lost sight of his apocalypse; and in doing so he became hardly distinguishable from the frightened autocrats of Berlin and Vienna, uncertain of themselves in a world which outpaced their imagination.

  Across the Bridge

  Throughout the year 1806 the people of Russia saw little of their sovereign. The Tsar remained close to St Petersburg, venturing out occasionally as far as Pavlovsk or Gatchina, but taking little part in the life of the capital.19 He showed no interest at all in what took place in Moscow (where they feted Bagration) or in Kiev (where they heaped honours on a convalescent Kutuzov). Inevitably Alexander’s remoteness encouraged gossip and rumour. It was said that his character was coming more and more to resemble his father’s: unpredictable moods oranger and suspicion descending with the suddenness of a summer storm; black days when he wished to hide from the public eye; and hours of deep remorse when (so they said) the memory of Austerlitz left him broken with tears. Once more, people caught a fleeting glimpse of a barouche hurrying out in the evenings, across the bridge of boats, past the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, and along the straight avenue towards the Greater Neva and Maria Naryshkin’s villa; and they knew their Tsar was escaping from the cares of government and the strain of life in the Winter Palace.

  The Tsar’s behaviour provoked censorious comment in unexpected places. A mischievous ‘letter from St Petersburg’ was printed in Le Publiciste, a Parisian newspaper, on 12 February: the political life of the Russian capital was, it said, dominated by the Dowager Empress, while ‘the reigning Empress has only the modest ambition of finding means to recapture her husband’s heart’, and it went on to paint a sensational picture of the scandal caused by ‘the constant favours and gifts’ bestowed by the Tsar on ‘Madame de Naryshkin … a beautiful Polish woman’.20 Le Publiciste already had a tradition of gutter journalism, going back at least eight years to the Congress of Rastatt when it had reflected piously on the deplorable reputation of the Metternich family (father and son) who were among Austria’s representatives;21 but it was a publication which enjoyed wide readership in France and the Bonapartist dependencies, and eventually a copy reached Alexander’s mother-in-law in Karlsruhe. The Margravine cannot, in all honesty, have been surprised at the relevations. Only two months previously Napoleon himself had said to her, ‘Your son-in-law is surrounded by Poles – his minister and his mistress come from that nation, and the last-named is a worthless woman.’ But the Margravine could not ignore the gossip. Strictures on moral rectitude from the Emperor of the French might be dismissed with an ironic sigh of disbelief; prurient pillorying in the public press was another matter. On 3 April ‘with pain’, the Margravine sent the more damning extracts from the French newspaper to her daughter in St Petersburg.22

  As Elizabeth well knew, the report was not far removed from the truth. Never before had the Dowager Empress and her whims carried such weight in the affairs of the capital; while Alexander’s flirtations (which were by no means limited to Countess Naryshkin) had become notorious. But Elizabeth was too proud and too tolerant to turn her marriage into a dog-fight. She resented the masterful manners of Marie Feodorovna and the flaunting insolence of the Polish courtesan, just as she had done two years before; but now she knew – as no journalist suspected – that she was better fitted to meet a challenge to her domestic happiness. For by the day she received her mother’s letter she had discovered that, for the first time in seven years, she was pregnant. At last she hoped to present Russia with an heir to the Imperial title. If St Petersburg saw little of Elizabeth that summer, it was not that she frowned on her husband’s behaviour but that she needed long hours of rest in the quiet of Kammionyi Island. There, at the small gem of a palace which Bezhenov had built for Paul, she could look out on the pallid stillness of the Finnish waters and find the tranquillity the city denied her. Alexander, for all his waywardness, was most solicitous for Elizabeth’s well-being.23 Kammionyi Island was only three miles from the Winter Palace itself; and sometimes that summer and autumn, as the Imperial carriage swept across the River Neva, it was carrying the Tsar, not to the voluptuous Maria, but to his wife in Bezhenov’s villa above the reedy shallows of the Gulf.

  On 15 November, 1806, Elizabeth duly gave birth to her child. Three days later she sent a brief note to Karlsruhe, ‘I am doing fine, my darling Mamma, and so is my little Elise who asks you to forgive her for not being a boy.’24 Salvoes of rejoicing were fired in St Petersburg and Moscow; and Alexander was relieved at Elizabeth’s safe delivery. Characteristically he insisted on doubling the number of physicians in attendance upon her, and then ordered her to remain in bed for one day longer than the nine which the most cautious of her doctors recommended.25 Alexander still had no son to succeed him; but, if pangs of regret troubled him, he hid his anguish with comforting reassurance and was delighted to be, once more, the father of a baby daughter.

  Preparing for War on Two Fronts, 1806

  By November 1806, when the child was born, Alexander had again become deeply involved in the European conflict. To outside observers Budberg’s foreign policy seemed hardly distinguishable from his predecessor’s, except that it lacked long-term planning. Within four months of Czartoryski’s resignation the Russians were engaged in the two-front war which he had long anticipated: a campaign against Turkey on the lower Danube; and a renewed campaign against the French on the plains of Poland. Neither enterprise showed, however, the offensive spirit which Czartoryski had sought eagerly to encourage in Alexander and his more conservative advisors; and in both instances the decisive move towards war was taken by foreign sovereigns rather than by the Tsar.

  In June Napoleon sent a note to his foreign minister, Talleyrand, in which he declared, ‘The ultimate object of my policy is to make a triple alliance of myself, the Porte [i.e. Turkey] and Persia, aimed against Russia directly or by implication.’26 Ever since the defeat at Austerlitz, the Turks had shown suspicion and hostility towards their Russian neighbour and the Sultan welcomed French overtures in Constantinople, hoping that Turkey might recover her old mastery of the Black Sea if joint operations with the French and the Persians made the Tsar sue for peace. The Russians, however, were disinclined to stand idly by and watch a hostile combination form against them. There was a formidable war party in St Petersburg which had long desired to resume the Russian march southwards, and as soon as the Turkish attitude stiffened, the Russians began to concentrate an army of 35,000 men between the lower Bug and the Dniester. When, at the end of August, the Sultan replaced the Governors of the two Danubian Principalitie
s (Moldavia and Wallachia) by agents of the French, there was an explosion of wrath in St Petersburg, intensified by the Sultan’s refusal to allow Russian warships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to join Senyavin’s squadron in the Adriatic; and early in November Alexander authorized his troops to cross the River Dniester and invade the Roumanian regions of the Sultan’s Empire.27 Thus, almost as a sideshow, a war began with Turkey which was to drag on intermittently for five and a half years. It tied down trained troops whom the Tsar could ill spare from the north.