by Tom Anderson
Though the boy initially sulked and tried to escape, he was raised in the Cossack fashion, taking the second name Ivan after Pugachev’s father, and eventually fought beside them in wars against the Turks and (undeclared) conflicts with the Crimeans. Ivan née Heinrich became a huge, powerful figure who shaved his head in the Cossack fashion. He thus did not stand out from his Cossack fellows due to hair colour, but his German blood still showed in his bright blue eye—for which he was nicknamed ‘the Bald Impostor’. Under Peter III, Pugachev rose to become leader of the Don Cossacks and Heinrich continued to follow his would-be foster father.
When the Civil War broke out, the people of southern Russia elected to hedge their bets, waiting to see which side would come out on top before backing it. Heinrich, however, advocated supporting Paul from the start, arguing that the Potemkins would do to the Don and Caucasus just what they had to Yekaterinburg, filling it full of their favourites and ending the (relative) peace between the peoples there. Pugachev agreed, but was unwilling to commit his forces just yet. Heinrich stormed off and journeyed south, perhaps in search of his real parents at last, though if so it is thought he never found them.
What he found instead was a man of fine Georgian dress, who despite his two bodyguards was being overpowered by a gang of Russian bandits. Heinrich went into action and sabred down three of the bandits in the Cossack fashion before the rest could even react. Startled by the assault, the remaining bandits fled. One of the Georgian bodyguards died of his wounds, but the other survived—as did his master. The Georgian nobleman introduced himself as Prince Piotr Bagration, a scion of the Georgians’ ancient and sprawling royal family. He had been sent to the north from King George XII, who had signed a treaty placing Georgia under Russian protection back in the 1780s, but yet now Georgia was threatened by Ottoman encroachment[185] and the Russians had done nothing. Bagration had not even heard that Russia was deep in a civil war until a few days before.
His words gave Heinrich a wild idea, and he brought Bagration back to Pugachev. Together they hatched a plan, a plan not unlike the one that had been concocted in the court of King Charles XIII in Stockholm. They would assist one of the two sides, and be in a position to make their diverse demands at the end of the conflict. The Ottomans were beginning to make threatening moves towards Georgia, but Abdulhamid II remained a cautious ruler and would not commit to a direct invasion. On Prince Bagration’s advice, George XII thus agreed to all the Turks’ demands for vassalage at the time, committing the Georgian army to the north instead. The Georgians wintered in Rostov-on-Don, where they met up with Pugachev’s Cossack forces and Russian peasant levies who supported Paul. The new army was powerful, yet fragmented, and the Georgians would not submit to any general other than Bagration, while the Cossacks said the same for Pugachev. In the end, then the compromise solution was simple. The young Heinrich, the Bald Impostor, respected by all and yet not of any of the kindreds, led the army into battle.
In March 1798, Kiev fell to the new Romanovian army, followed by Voronezh and then Kazan in July, as Pugachev bit deeply into the heart of the Potemkinites’ natural territory.[186] At the same time, the Russo-Lithuanian fleet met the Swedes at the Battle of the Irbe Strait. Admiral Radziwiłł won a Pyrrhic victory, defeating Ehrensvärd at the cost of most of his own ships. Nonetheless, this was the signal for the Danes to step up their own efforts. With no further need to watch the Baltic for the return of the Swedes’ main force, the Danes left a squadron to bottle up Cronstedt’s remaining Swedish naval forces in Malmö and then deployed the rest of their fleet to a descent on Swedish Pomerania, conquering the German province and adding it to the Danish crown. The Swedes successfully defeated the small Danish force in Norway and besieged Christiania,[187] but at this point the Danes finally made a landing in Scania. King Johannes II and the Danish Diet proclaimed the return of the lands lost to Sweden in 1690 to Denmark, and the Swedes withdrew forces from Norway and Finland to prevent a further Danish breakout.
The Swedes continued to control Livonia, but their discomfiture elsewhere persuaded Paul to risk his Russo-Lithuanian army further east. Vitebsk was retaken in August against only a token Potemkinite force, but it was once more near the ruins of Smolensk that the main Potemkinite army met the Romanovians. The battle lasted three days, and was fiercer and bloodier than any other in that war. Finally, on the third day, the Potemkinites broke the Romanovian line in two and a cavalry charge led by Alexander Potemkin himself encircled Barclay’s command staff. At this perilous moment, rumours came from the rear that the forces of the mysterious Bald Impostor had taken, and were sacking, Moscow. The rumours were exaggerated, though indeed the Cossack and Georgian forces were moving into the region around September. The rumours spread through the Potemkinite army and morale collapsed. Many of the Potemkins’ soldiers were Muscovites recruited there after their initial triumphant entry, and the knowledge that their city and families were under threat caused the whole of the Potemkins’ Muscovite-manned left wing to crumble. Barclay escaped, and the Lithuanians swept around in a decisive pincer movement. It was the turn of Alexander to be trapped. Ivan Potemkin and Sergei Saltykov escaped with the bulk of their army, but the brash young claimant emperor was in enemy hands.
Paul’s following decision has been cited by many as questionable, and perhaps not unlike his father’s to exile Catherine to Yekaterinburg. Rather than summarily executing Alexander Potemkin for treason, he offered him possession of the Duchy of Courland if he would call off his forces and reocgnise Paul as Emperor. This was a rather ambitious offer, given that Courland had been Swedish before the war and was now deep in Swedish-controlled territory. Alexander Potemkin accepted, giving up his claim to the throne. It is very possible that at the time he viewed this as his only choice, and intended to go back on his word later, but events rendered any such assumption irrelevant.
By the early months of 1799, the Potemkinite army was shattered. Rumour belatedly became fact as Moscow indeed was taken by the Bald Impostor’s forces, while Kamenski and Kurakin successfully held off the Swedes and then threw their weakened army back into Finland, forces being stripped from it to hold back the Danes in Scania. Ivan Potemkin, dithering over whether he should try to fall back to Yekaterinburg and try again, was captured along with Sergei Saltykov near Nizhny Novgorod. The civil war was over—both far more abruptly than anyone would have guessed, and with an outcome that would have seemed starkly not so many months before. Paul was restored to his throne.
The newly restored Emperor realised that the great strength of the Potemkins was in their partnership, and so separated the two. Paul exiled Ivan and Sergei Saltykov to Yakutsk with orders for them to develop the area as they had Yekaterinburg. Saltykov was originally planned to be executed, but the sentence was reduced to exile after his relative Nikolai Saltykov spoke in his defence to the Emperor. It is difficult to judge in retrospect whether the choice of Yakutsk was driven by a deliberate policy judgement to support the efforts of men like Benyovsky and Lebedev in their Far Eastern trade missions, or whether it was simply Paul finding a map of his empire and pointing at the most inhospitable-looking part of it he could find.
Paul returned to Moscow in May 1799 and met with the Bald Impostor, who gave him certain demands: liberty for the Cossacks, support for the Georgians against the Turks, and the emancipation of the serfs. Paul argued and negotiated for days, but in the end a settlement was hammered out. Otherwise, as was unspoken but well known, the Bald Impostor would have held the city and fought Paul for it.
It was the end of 1799 before Sweden left the war, the Russo-Lithuanians not only having retaken Livonia but now had begun to invade Courland and Swedish Prussia. In truth Sweden was still in a relatively strong position, having held back the Danes in Scania and almost flung them back into the Baltic, but Stockholm was now paralysed by a constitutional crisis. Charles XIII was assassinated by a madman on October 30th and he left no heir, threatening to plunge Sweden into a civil war or a war of su
ccession. The Danish Diet entered into hurried, secret negotiations with the Swedish Riksdag, and a treaty was quickly agreed. The Swedes would accept Johannes II of Denmark as King, re-creating the Union of Kalmar. In exchange, the Danes would only annex the western half of Scania which was still the most culturally Danish, and would ensure that the Swedes retained Finland (which the Russians were not yet in a position to invade). The Swedes had already lost Pomerania, Swedish Prussia and Courland, but it was clear that this was best settlement Sweden would get while in such a weak constitutional position. The Riksdag grudgingly agreed.
The Danes thus made peace with Sweden on December 4th, and warned the Russians that Sweden, and hence Finland, was now a direct possession of King Johannes II (as John IV of Sweden). The Russians were in no position to dispute this, and so the Treaty of Klaipeda (restored, of course, to Lithuania) ended the war on the last day of the 18th century, December 31st 1799 (O.S. Russian calendar) –
Courland to become an independent Duchy once more, under Alexander Potemkin as Duke.
Swedish Prussia to be transferred to Lithuania (the Kingdom of Prussia protested at this, seeing the territory as rightfully its own, but was in no position to enforce this protest with arms).
Livonia to remain an integral part of Russia.
Paul is Emperor Paul I of Russia.
Peter son of Paul is Grand Duke Petras I of Lithuania.
Johannes II of Denmark is also John IV of Sweden, including Finland.
Swedish Pomerania transferred to Denmark.
Emancipation of Russia’s serfs, initially in the southern governorates only (later expanded in 1805 to include the provinces east of the Urals, to encourage settlement of the ‘Eastern Road’)
Liberty for Cossacks, and the protectorate status of Georgia to be enforced by military action against the Turks.
So the Great Baltic War ended, and like all wars, sowed the seeds for the next.
Chapter 32: Three Lions and One Tiger
“Folly awaits the man who seeks to conquer the heart of India. Indeed, he should consider himself fortunate if India does not conquer his heart.”
– John Pitt, Governor-General of British India
*
From: “India in the Age of Revolution” by Dr Anders Ohlmarks (1974, authorised English translation 1980)—
Ever since the start of penetration by European trading companies in the sixteenth century, India had been considered ‘elsewhere’ by European powers, more so even than the Americas. A war might be declared in Europe yet its participants amiably work alongside one another other in India, or – more commonly – the reverse. Certainly, it was difficult to tell what constituted a war between Europeans in India, as the wars in question were usually, at least on some level, a conflict between rival Indian nations each backed by a trading company.
Initially the Portuguese and Dutch had dominated the India trade, but by the eighteenth century they had been sidelined by the British and French. Just as they had in America, the two great powers of the century fought their Wars of Supremacy (as the English have it) in India, with the French generally allied to the Marathas and the Keralan states, and the British to the Nizam of Haidarabad, the Nawab of the Carnatic and the Nawab of Bengal. This volatile situation shifted as the dynamic century rolled on. First the French took Madras in the War of the Austrian Succession and proceeded to conquer British Cuddalore as well, reducing the Nawab of the Carnatic to a French puppet.
The French East India Company, under Dupleix and then Rochambeau, moved its headquarters from the old French trading post of Pondicherry to the far better equipped former British Fort St George at Madras. The British withdrew from southern India altogether, save for the Northern Circars (which they ran on behalf of the Nizam of Haidarabad) and fought a war against the treacherous Nawab of Bengal, eventually unseating him and replacing him with six invented principalities in the pocket of the Company. Aside from capturing French Chandranagore in the process (and thus ejecting French influence from Bengal) this had so consumed British efforts in India that the French had crept further ahead, despite the FEIC’s relative dearth of funding from Paris compared to the BEIC’s from London. Dupleix in particular was a genius at running colonies and trade agreements with no help whatsoever from home, and the systems he set up would go on to serve French India well.
By the 1780s, the Maratha Empire had collapsed following defeat by the Afghans and allied Indian Muslims in the 1760s, after the Marathas’ Rajasthani allies deserted them at the last minute at the Third Battle of Panipat. The Empire had been reorganised as a looser Confederacy, with the Peshwas losing their former power. French influence declined among the Marathas as their previously universal treaties and trade agreements were vetoed by the new local rulers. Instead, the French under Rochambeau focused on expanding their influence into southern India, cementing an alliance with the Kingdoms of Mysore, and Travancore. Travancore’s coastal neighbour Cochin allied with the British during the War of the Austrian Succession, and in the aftermath of the British defeat was largely absorbed by French-backed Mysore.
Mysore at that time was under the rule of the Hindoo Wodeyar dynasty, but during the 1760s a Muslim soldier, Haidar Ali, rose to prominence after heroic deeds during the Mysorean invasion and conquest of Bangalore. Haidar Ali became effective chief minister of the King and soon usurped most of his power. He formed a strategic alliance with the French against British-backed Haidarabad, and went on to mostly win the Mysore-Haidarabad Wars of the 1770s and 80s. Mysore had become the most powerful state in India, with the Marathas decaying into ineffectiveness and Haidarabad on the back foot. Haidar Ali’s son Tippoo Sultan, who first rose to prominence as a general of the Mysorean army, was a remarkable visionary. Noting Travancore’s successful expulsion of the Dutch East India Company, he foresaw a time when India could be entirely freed from the European trading companies – under Mysorean leadership, naturally. But the Tippoo ably understood the problems of ruling over Mysore’s new empire in southern India, with the mish-mash of peoples, languages and religions. Kerala alone included Portuguese Catholics, Jews, Thomasite Syrian Orthodox Christians and some Protestants in addition to the more common religions of southern India such as Sunni Islam, Hindooism and Jainism. To that end, the Tippoo (though a devout Muslim himself) allowed the building of churches and Hindoo shrines in Mysorean cities.
The Tippoo was a realistic thinker and decided that the path to being free of European interference was to first assist the French in ejecting the British from southern India, and then to turn on them. It was hardly a remarkable event in India, which had weathered and absorbed countless waves of invaders since before the time of Ashoka, successively turning each group against one another. By 1790, the Tippoo judged, the British had ceased to be a serious threat south of Masoolipatam, and all that remained was to wait until the French became vulnerable. He did not have long to wait…
News of the French Revolution was slow to travel around the world, even by the standards of the day—despite the obvious importance of the event. The reason for this was chiefly that, thanks to Leo Bone’s trickery at Toulon and mutinies in Quiberon and Marseilles, most of the former Royal French Navy was out of the Revolutionary government’s hands. The government of the Marquess of Rockingham in Britain allowed this relatively large number of ships to dock in British ports, resulting in riots in Portsmouth and Chatham due to fights between British and French sailors who had been shooting at each other only about eight years previously. Thereafter, the Rockingham ministry removed the French ships from the major English ports and instead commissioned the Royal Engineers to expand secondary ports, such as Liverpool, Kingston-upon-Hull and Lowestoft. This was a significant event in those towns’ histories, paving the way for their later importance as trading ports in the nineteenth century, and traces of this history remain in the French names of some of the streets laid down at the time. A portion of the French Royal Navy eventually removed to Louisiana, but the majority remained
under the direct control of the Dauphin in London, who hoped that it might be used for a seaborne invasion to support a rising of royalists in France.
In any case, this meant that the Revolutionaries had few ships to spare and the British, with their great naval numerical superiority, were capable of blockading Republican French ports. The Jacobins did send ships out to bring news of the Revolution to the French colonies, but few of these got through the blockade. Those which did manage the feat typically only did so after several years of unsuccessful attempts, leaving while inclement weather disabled the British blockade. So it was that by the time L’Épurateur, a second-rate ship of the line of seventy guns (formerly the Bordeaux) reached Madras in May 1798, confused reports of the French Revolution had already been filtering through India for years. Some of these came from Zand Persia, which retained extensive trading links with much of India, and had enthusiastically embraced discussion of Revolutionary principles and adoption of some of them in a milder form. Other reports, usually rather biased, came from East Indiamen and Royal Naval ships calling in to Indian ports after hearing the news from Britain.