Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  It is easy for you to imagine the sorrow this has caused me. Such an incident is, I think you will agree, unheard of in our army. It is even sadder that it should have taken place in the Guards and, bitterest blow for me personally, in the Semeonovsky Regiment. Since I am accustomed to speaking to you confidentially, I can say that nothing will convince me, whatever people may say, that this action was planned by the soldiers or arose solely from their harsh treatment by Colonel Schwarz … I do not think the origin was military because the training of soldiers would naturally induce them to take up weapons, which none of them did … I think the incitement came from outside the army. The question, of course, arises from where? It is hard to say. I admit that I blame the secret societies which, according to the evidence both you and I possess, are much displeased with our alliance and our work at Troppau. It would appear as if the object of the insurrection was to intimidate us … to force me to abandon my work at Troppau and make me return speedily to St Petersburg. But through the will of God we have avoided this and snuffed out the evil at birth.39

  The mutiny made Alexander resolved to reach agreement with the Austrians and Prussians and to remain in conference as long as was necessary for the security of Europe. He at once instructed Capodistrias to seek a diplomatic compromise with Metternich over the problem of intervention in Italy and to abandon all reference to the ‘dual freedoms’ or any other principle of enlightenment.40

  Metternich was prepared to make token concessions to the Russians provided he was left to settle Italy in his own way. He agreed that Capodistrias should draft the ‘Preliminary Protocol’ of Troppau, a document summarizing the views of the delegates to the Congress which was made public at the end of the third week in November. It asserted a right of intervention to bring back to the Alliance states which had suffered an ‘illegal’ change in government. At the same time it was proposed that an Austrian army of occupation should be sent to southern Italy, accompanied by representatives of the Allied Powers, and that the King of Naples should be invited to a further meeting of the sovereigns in Laibach (Ljubljana) where the future of his kingdom would be discussed.41 Both Metternich and Alexander were well satisfied by the Protocol, although it aroused protests from the British who insisted there was no natural right by which any Power was entitled to interfere in the internal affairs of another state, large or small. The British attitude did not especially worry Alexander, who had by now come to assume London would almost automatically disapprove of any measure he proposed.42

  Technically the Protocol should have ended the Troppau Congress. Nothing could be done until a reply was received from the Bong of Naples. But Alexander had no wish to return home, especially after the Semeonovsky mutiny. Throughout a wet November and December the rulers of Austria, Prussia and Russia, together with their foreign ministers, remained immured in the mud and slush of Silesia. At times they were very, very bored. Only Metternich seems to have been in relatively high spirits. He amused himself by writing a light-hearted description of the difficulties in etiquette caused by the Tsar meeting a lady coming in the opposite direction while both were walking over duckboards spread across the ‘chocolate ice’ mud of the Troppau streets.43 In the evening there was little to do except play whist, talk and drink tea. Never before had Alexander and Metternich exchanged views so freely and in such detail. The Austrian saw more of the Tsar than did either Capodistrias or Nesselrode and he used these meetings to convert Alexander to his own beliefs in a just, orderly and strong system of government. In mid-December he presented Alexander with an eight-thousand-word document which he entitled a ‘Profession of Political Faith’, emphasizing the need of governments to be on guard against the presumption of a middle class jealously and ruthlessly striving for political power.44 It was not a profound or original work of philosophical speculation but it was subtly worded so as to appeal to Alexander’s latent religious fervour. It was, Metternich warned, the duty of the good European sovereign to ‘maintain religious principles in all their purity’ without permitting ‘the faith to be attacked or morality interpreted according to the vision … of foolish sectarians’.45 This was a deft blow at Julie von Krüdener (and, indeed, Prince Golitsyn) just as Metternich’s criticism of presumptuous liberals was an attempt to discredit Capodistrias. Alexander was impressed by the sententious moralizing of this dreary manifesto, and a few weeks later echoed some of its sentiments in a letter to Golitsyn. 46 He was not, however, prepared to change either his attitude to political questions or his policy in any decisive way: he still listened to Capodistrias, even if he took little notice of his advice; he still consulted Nesselrode and Pozzo di Borgo; and, for that matter, he still wrote to Golitsyn asking him to give Baroness von Krüdener (who had come to St Petersburg because her son-in-law had been taken ill there) his fondest wishes (mille choses affectueuses de ma part).47 At times it seems almost as if he were so disappointed at his failure to provide Europe with a new and nobler concept of international morality in politics; that his willpower was paralysed and he was content to drift aimlessly in Metternich’s wake.

  Laibach and the Re-opening of the Eastern Question

  Alexander left Troppau in the fourth week of December, spent a few days in Vienna, and arrived in Laibach on 8 January 1821. The weather was much milder than in Silesia, three hundred miles to the north, and the city itself was livelier. Two days after reaching Slovenia he was once more locked in conference with the Austrians and a Prussian representative (for Frederick William himself had shown good sense and gone home rather than watch another diplomatic production stage-managed by Metternich). The Congress formally lasted until 28 February, its sessions dominated throughout by the Austrian Foreign Minister.48 Alexander gave his approval for Austrian troops to be sent southwards into Naples and dutifully praised each of Metternich’s actions. Once and once only the Tsar attempted to take the initiative, suggesting that if Austria was quelling radicalism in Naples then the French should be invited to cross the Pyrenees and free Ferdinand of Spain from liberal restraints. But Metternich did not wish to see France accepted as the agency of good order in Europe. He explained to the Tsar that the French could not be trusted since Paris was the headquarters for a massive international conspiracy, dominated by a secret committee of revolutionaries; and Alexander accepted Metternich’s suggestion that Spanish affairs should be left for a later Congress.49 He was quite happy to wait upon events.

  It seemed, indeed, as if he would even be prepared to wait for them in the city of Laibach itself. For though the Congress was formally dissolved at the end of February, Alexander agreed to remain in Slovenia (or rather, as it was then called, Carniola) until the Italian crisis was over. Within a fortnight the situation had become worse rather than better. Garrisons of the Piedmontese army in Turin and Alessandria mutinied, calling for a war against Austria on behalf of the Neapolitans. The Tsar, still shocked by what had happened to his own Semeonovsky Guards, was deeply affected, wanting to order his army from Poland to march to the assistance of the Austrians at once: ‘Now I understand why the Lord has kept me here until this moment’, he exclaimed. ‘How much gratitude do I owe Him for so arranging things that I was still together with my Allies … If we save Europe it is because He has desired it.’50 While the Austrians prepared to send an army across the north Italian plain, the Tsar sent a courier to St Petersburg with instructions for 90,000 men to be concentrated along the Russo-Austrian frontier ready to march westwards if they were needed. In reality, as so often with Russian military deployment, the emergency in Piedmont was over before the troops reached their destination, but Metternich and his publicists made much of Alexander’s action. All Europe should learn of the complete accord between the Austrian and Russian Courts, the two greatest powers on the continent acting in concert against Revolution.

  Yet, only five days after hearing of the risings in Turin and Alessandria, more serious news still brought alarm to the sovereigns and ministers in Laibach. At the beginning of March one of the T
sar’s aides-de-camp, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, gathered a force of Greek patriots in Odessa, crossed the river Pruth into Moldavia and raised a revolt against the Turkish authorities in the Danubian Principalities. Within a month the Greek Christians of the Peloponnese were in full-scale rebellion against the Sultan’s government and their acts of defiance had received official sanction from the Orthodox Archbishop of Patras. Thus, at the very moment when the Russians were mobilizing in defence of the established order in Italy, their co-religionists in the Balkans re-opened the Eastern Question with a dramatic flourish that no Tsar of Russia could ignore, least of all one whose joint Foreign Minister was himself a Greek.

  Ypsilanti was not an obscure agitator, he was a Russian General, a friend of the Stourdzas and a prominent figure in Viennese Society during the Congress. He had met Capodistrias on several occasions and had made no secret of his ambition to kindle a patriotic insurrection of the Greek peoples. It is probable that he believed he could force Alexander’s hand by his raid across the Pruth. At the very outset of his enterprise he sent an appeal to Alexander, ‘Save us, Your Majesty, save our religion from those who would persecute it, return to us our temples and our altars whence the divine light once spread its beams to the great nation you govern.’51 It was difficult for Alexander to reject such a plea, based as it was on the deepest of religious sentiments. But the Tsar was in an impossible position. Ypsilanti’s action was ill-timed. So long as Alexander was at Laibach with Metternich and the Emperor Francis, he had to condemn revolution wherever it might break out. There was, as Metternich speedily saw, a case for arguing that if Austria sent troops to restore order in Italy then Russia should intervene in Turkey. But Metternich drafted an early note denying that there was any parallel in the situation and arguing that the Balkan insurrections had been planned so as to weaken Austro-Russian collaboration and destroy the Concert of Europe.52 The Tsar accordingly instructed Capodistrias to let Ypsilanti know that he could never approve of his actions, that national liberty for the Greek peoples could not be won by armed rebellion and that it was his duty, as an officer in the Russian service, to repent and lay down his arms.53 At the same time Alexander gave Metternich a pledge that Russia would not resort to independent action in the Balkans. Ypsilanti’s raid was doomed to disavowal from the start. Without official patronage it had no chance of success,† and once Alexander had become alarmed by the threat of mutiny and the bogey of secret societies, he was unlikely to respond to the call for an Orthodox Crusade against the Turks. The chief immediate effect of the Greek insurrection on the Tsar was to prompt his return to St Petersburg. With the emotions of his subjects stirred by what was happening in the Balkans, he could remain abroad no longer. At the end of the first week in June he reached Tsarskoe Selo.

  Alexander’s Dilemma over the Greek Insurrection

  He arrived back in his capital worried and depressed. As he travelled eastwards so the news which reached him grew worse and worse. For what had begun as a piratical raid by irregular forces on the northern frontier of the Ottoman Empire fast became a major insurrection setting all south-eastern Europe aflame. Sultan Mahmud II called on the faithful to resist the Greek Christians and, at the end of April, ordered the public execution of the Patriarch Gregorius outside his palace in Constantinople. There were ferocious massacres of Greeks by Turks in Asia Minor and no less terrible deeds committed by the Greek patriots in the Peloponnese and on the islands. The Russian ambassador in Constantinople was insulted and the Turkish authorities interfered with vessels exporting grain from Odessa through the Straits to the Mediterranean; a number of Russian sailors were killed. All these provocative acts, and especially the hanging of the Patriarch on Easter Day, aroused indignation in Moscow and St Petersburg. There had long been friction between Russian and Turkish authorities in the Caucasus, with frequent disputes over the ill-defined frontier; and almost every political, religious or commercial interest in the capital could make out a case for war against Turkey.54 As soon as he returned from Laibach Alexander protested to the Turkish authorities at the callous treatment of Christians and at interference with the Odessa grain trade. He also wrote to the Emperor Francis and to Castlereagh seeking their support in condemning ‘the deplorable affairs in Turkey’; but he would not be stampeded into a declaration of war. ‘Heaven is my witness’, he declared. ‘My only wish, my sole ambition, is to conserve that peace which cost the world so much to attain.’55

  Yet throughout the summer of 1821 the temptation to declare war and resume Russia’s thrust to the south was considerable. Capodistrias spared no effort to secure Alexander’s active support for his compatriots; he let him learn of every movement of Turkish troops along the frontier; he saw to it that no insult to the Russian flag went unrecorded; he informed him of every tale of atrocity against Christian communities, trusting that his conscience would induce him to intervene. Foreign diplomats were puzzled at the Tsar’s apparent passivity, especially as he was heard to admit that there was ‘a very strong public feeling in favour of war’ in the capital.56 The French chargé d’affaires saw to it that Paris had a full account of Baroness von Krüdener’s activities: once again she was favoured by people of influence, to whom she predicted the imminent fall of the Turkish Empire. ‘Alexander’, she declared, ‘will be in Constantinople during the year 1823 but it will be later, in Jerusalem itself, by the tomb of the Saviour that the Glory of God will be made manifest to him.’ He had, it appears, a second mission to fulfil: having liberated Paris from the ungodly, he must now liberate the Holy Places from Islam and proclaim the unity of Christendom in the city where there could be ‘only one sheepfold and one pastor’.57

  This vision went much farther than any design of Capodistrias for his compatriots or the traditional Russian dream of restoring the Cross of Orthodoxy to the dome of Saint Sophia. If these were the revelations with which the Baroness was exciting his capital, it is hardly surprising that Alexander told Golitsyn he wished to have a secret meeting with Julie. It was accordingly arranged that on 19 September he would receive tea and prophecy from her in a peasant’s house off the road to Tsarskoe Selo, on the outskirts of Petersburg. Although both Golitsyn and the Baroness’s secretary were present in the house there is no clear record of what was said. Alexander was once again showing that inscrutable blandness he had perfected in his youth: he listened attentively and said nothing of significance. When he left he told Julie, ‘I am setting out for Warsaw but in six weeks I will see you once more.’ To Golitsyn he remarked enigmatically that he had found the Baroness ‘as she had been in Paris’.58 They never met again, for by the time Alexander returned from Poland his mood had changed and she was no longer in favour. In the following spring the Tsar recommended her to leave the capital. After writing a last appeal (some two thousand words long) in which she urged him to lead a crusade to free the Christians of the East, she withdrew to exile in Latvia.59

  There is no doubt the Tsar’s religious conscience was racked with uncertainty over the Greek Question. In August 1821 Alexander told Capodistrias he could not go to war against Turkey because this was the very action which ‘the Paris directing committee’ of revolutionaries most desired in order to disrupt the growing understanding between the Great Powers.60 These were the sentiments which Metternich, the Emperor Francis and even Castlereagh were feeding to him in letters and despatches. In private, the Austrian Chancellor went so far as to declare, with characteristic lack of modesty, that there were two parties in Russia, the Metternichers and the Capodistrians and that Alexander was a Metternicher.61 But all these judgements over-simplified the Tsar’s dilemma. Basically there was a conflict in his mind between the old traditions of Orthodoxy and his conviction that Europe needed peace in order to purge its soul of the subversive doctrines of revolution. It may even be that the pietism he had shown in his talks with the Quakers made him question the natural assumption of the Orthodox hierarchy that a campaign on behalf of the Greeks would possess the merits of a Holy War. There
was no easy solution for an autocratic ruler pulled in opposing directions by the dictates of a Christian Providence which offered him a choice he could not understand. Brooding in melancholy day after day, he searched the Scriptures for revelation as he had done in the sombre hours of the struggle against the invader, but this time no apocalyptic vision leapt to the eye.62

  His silence alarmed the other European Powers. Throughout the closing months of 1821 and on into the New Year he allowed Capodistrias to draft all important despatches to Vienna. Hence there were moments when Metternich felt uneasy, suspecting that once the snows began to melt the Tsar would be unable and unwilling to resist the call of the war party in the capital for a march into the Balkans.63 But in the third week of February 1822 he finally decided in favour of a peaceful solution of the Greek Question. He wished the British and Austrian governments to sign a secret understanding with Russia, requiring the Sultan to observe existing treaty obligations and providing for the protection of the Greeks under Allied guarantee. Although Capodistrias remained in Russian service until midsummer, his influence was gone. Alexander relied primarily on Nesselrode (who had no interest in Greek affairs) and in Tatischev, whom he sent to Vienna in the spring of 1822 in order to collaborate as closely as possible with Metternich over the Eastern Question.64 Tatischev could not get the Tsar the pledges which he sought from Austria, and had he done so the British would have remained obdurate; but at least he was able to secure some assurance of diplomatic support. If Turkey rejected Russian demands for fulfilment of her treaty obligations, Metternich undertook to break off diplomatic relations with the Sultan provided that Britain, France and Prussia would follow suit. This was an empty concession, for the Allies would never have acted in concert with Russia and Austria over such a question (as Metternich well knew); but Alexander was impressed. He agreed to ministerial conferences in Vienna in the summer and made ready to set out on his travels again, for in the autumn there would be another Congress, this time in northern Italy.65