by Tom Anderson
While Alexander Potemkin had been defeated, Paul had been forced to respond to this angry popular feeling by making concessions to the idea of a Slavic identity. He discouraged and then officially banned French as the court language (though of course this took several years to implement) and had scholars focusing on codifying a sufficiently ‘refined’ Russian grammar for official business. At the same time, though, he partially owed his victory (and later the quelling of the Klimentov rebellion) to Heinz Kautzman and others among the German settlers in Russia. Excessive anti-French propaganda and fanning the flames of anti-Semitic pogroms could only go so far to hide this contradiction. Beneath it all, the cultural war was still raging, if turned down to a low flame.
Paul’s own opinion was that the strategy of his fathers had been wrong; yes, Russia must become more enlightened and developed if she was to survive and prosper, but it had been wrong to hold up the notion of a European identity to society and declare “this is how you must be”. There were historical precedents, after all. The Old Believers had refused to follow Orthodox Church reforms more than a century before and there were still thousands of them around – falling into line was not inevitable. No; rather than bringing Russia to Europe, Paul knew that Europe must be brought to Russia. The “European” identity must be redefined to include Russia while allowing for only minor alterations to the Russian character and culture. Once that was accomplished, osmosis would handle the rest. The French Revolution provided an excellent opportunity, with a nation that was once the heart and wellspring of European enlightenment and culture replaced by what Edmund Burke termed “the new barbarism”. If one such dramatic change could be made to the definition of European, why not another in the opposite direction?
It is of course rather charitable to attribute such notions to Paul himself – while the Emperor knew the end result he wanted, and was a competent enough ruler, he was no great thinker. He did, however, employ ministers who were, foremost among them being Prince Arkady Evgenevich Voloshin, Minister for the Interior, who masterminded this scheme. It helped that Russia had favourable relationships with other nations considered already to lie within the European identity, such as Denmark or (to a lesser extent) Lithuania and Courland. Voloshin had printers disseminating propaganda that contrasted the ravages of the French Jacobins with the ‘slow yet steady progress’ of Russian society, highlighting the gradual emancipation of the serfs (and ignoring the fact that this had provoked the Klimentov rebellion and much muttering since then). The message was targeted primarily at the Germanies; Voloshin’s general strategy to stabilise his Emperor’s rule was to eventually have Russian troops marching through the German lands as part of a multi-national force and be accepted as liberators from French tyranny. Then, once Germans and Russians were united in mutual acceptance of the other’s culture and civilisation, that should break down the tensions which the relationships with Kautzman and other German-Russians caused among the former Potemkinite supporters.
Of course this scheme did not come off quite as its creators had planned. The first thing to go wrong was the death of Mehmet Ali Pasha, the Turkish Grand Vizier, in February 1806. Given the nature of Ottoman politics, it seems quite likely that he was poisoned, although this is not entirely certain. Mehmet Ali had secured a strong position for himself after the victories of the Austro-Turkish War, unassailable by conventional political means, and perhaps had been unwise enough to let his guard down.
Mehmet Ali’s former dominance of the court politics of the Sublime Porte meant that no opposition faction was strong enough to gain power without a period of bloody chaos and infighting. Perhaps this would be limited to a wave of assassinations and street fights in Constantinople, perhaps it would degenerate into full-blown civil war. To forestall such a crisis, Sultan Murad V quickly appointed Damat Melek Pasha, the heroic general of the Bosnian front, to the position of Grand Vizier. A Bosniak himself, Damat Melek was far from the first non-Turkish Ottoman to hold the position, yet his “rustic” ways alienated parts of the court. This was perhaps balanced by the support he gained from the Janissaries. Nonetheless, he soon proved as vigorous and ruthless in the political arena as on the battlefield.
Predictably, the former general’s own stance on foreign policy turned towards war. The relative powers of the grand vizier and the sultan had varied considerably from the reign of one sultan to the next, and under Murad V their influence was roughly equal. Damat Melek had been furious when the Ottoman government had agreed to withdraw its influence from the Georgian states in 1801 in exchange for buying Russian neutrality during the Austro-Turkish War. While he recognised the daunting prospect of fighting two enemies, at the time he had argued that Russia had only just emerged from her civil war, could not face even a cursory conflict with the Porte, and would have backed down if pressed.
Whether that is true or not is questionable, but Damat Melek nonetheless advocated a confrontational policy with Russia, seeking both to regain influence over the Caucasus and also the Khanate of the Crimea. In the latter case, the Khanate had gone from being an Ottoman vassal to a Russian puppet after the Russo-Turkish War of 1771-1776, then shifted back in Constantinople’s direction during the Russian Civil War as the Ottomans extended their influence. However, Khan Devlet V had tried with limited success to play the two sides off each other in order to retain as much independence as his country, small and surrounded by two great powers, could. He desperately wanted to avoid another war; the new Jewish population of Crimea, having fled there after the Great Pogrom, concurred. Both knew that, despite the Black Sea being an Ottoman lake, it was likely that the Caucasus would be the primary front of the war and the Ottomans would be unable or unwilling to hold against a Russian invasion of the Khanate from Ruthenia. After all, they could always get the war-torn ruins of Crimea restored at the bargaining table after victory elsewhere – better, in fact, for the Porte, for that would mean they could install a far more pliable Khan than Devlet and fill the country with more loyal Ottoman settlers…
The Russians reacted to the new Ottoman aggression by massing troops in Ruthenia and the northern Caucasus. As before when quelling the Klimentov rebellion, Kautzman and his Germans were carefully not positioned at the spearhead, and neither was the Lithuanian contingent sent by Grand Duke Peter, Paul’s son. It was imperative for Voloshin’s cultural programme that the Russians be seen to get all the glory. And now war seemed inevitable. That was not so much a bad thing from Emperor Paul’s perspective. The country had sufficiently recovered from the damage it had suffered during the Civil War; a ‘good’ war against the undeniably loathsome Turk now would help reunite the Empire’s fractured society, and the Russians had a decent shot at victory, rolling back the control that the Ottomans had gained during the Civil War. Neutral, knowledgeable commentators such as the Prussian observer and diarist Johannes Bachstein generally thought the two sides were about evenly matched: both had learned a lot in recent wars, though the Russians had taken more from those lessons; the Ottoman victory in the Austro-Turkish War had tended to wipe away any awkward questions about the circumstances leading up to it. Further, the Russians were in a better strategic position for the initial attacks, but the Donanmasi, the Ottoman Navy, controlled the Black Sea. It is questionable which side would have triumphed, though most modern scholars consider an Ottoman victory somewhat more likely, after an exhaustive slugging match which would have wrecked the Crimea and perhaps the Caucasus as well. As it is, we shall never know.
Even as newly conscripted Russian regiments assembled in Kiev and Rostov,[133] though, the crisis imploded, superseded by another. In April 1806, Shah-Advocate Ali Zand Shah of Persia died after succumbing to an infected insect bite. This came at the worst possible time for any attempt to reconcile to a peaceful solution in the ongoing Turco-Persian rancour over the matter of the Pirate Coast.[134] The Ottomans enjoyed at least nominal authority over the coastal emirates, and thus the Persians held Constantinople responsible for the increasing pirate
attacks on Persian ships sailing from Bandar Abbas[135] to trade, primarily with Indian states, Oman and the Zanj lands in East Africa[136] (in practice, it is possible that these attacks were sponsored by Oman rather than the Ottomans, fearful of the Persians usurping their African colonies).
In particular, several influential Persian leaders expressed outrage at the attack of July 5th 1804, in which Arab pirates sailing from Abu Dhabi took, amid much bloodshed, a Persian ship carrying not trade cargo but peaceful hajjis on their way to Mecca. Among them was the third son of the Grand Vizier, Mirza Reza Khan Sadeghi. Mirza Reza demanded blood, but Ali Zand Shah attempted to resolve things. This was not merely due to his celebrated pacifism (at least by early 19th century standards) but because he was concerned about the West Durrani Empire, which was once more eyeing the lands west of Herat that it had once possessed and then lost to the Zands. War on two fronts was the last thing Persia needed, particularly considering the simmering rebellions among the Turkmen in the north.[137]
However, Ali Zand Shah’s death meant his more hot-blooded son Zaki Mohammed Shah succeeded him as Shah-Advocate, and Zaki Mohammed concurred with Mirza Reza. In October of that year, war was joined. The Persians attacked Mesopotamia and battled the Donanmasi in the Persian Gulf. Historically the Persians had rarely possessed much naval strength, and while this strength had slowly increased under the Zands, the Donanmasi and its Arab irregular allies far outmatched what Persia could field. Oman remained studiously neutral but privately took a pro-Ottoman stance, further closing the seas to Persia. However, with assistance from their Portuguese allies trickling in (sometimes taking the form of Portuguese East India Company ships fighting under Persian flag), the Persians at least managed to prevent the Ottomans from sweeping them from the seas to the extent of being able to launch an amphibious descent on Persian core territory.
But this was unneeded. The Persian army was in the process of reorganisation, and things remained chaotic, for the army establishment was still divided over the merits of the European training methods and new breakthroughs in firearms that the Portuguese had provided. Furthermore, for all its benefits, the period of peace that Ali Zand Shah had presided over also meant the Persians were less experienced in warfare than the Ottomans, their only real conflicts in recent history being with the Durranis and Turkmen rebels. Neither of those more irregular sets of warriors prepared them for facing disciplined, organised Ottoman troops.
Therefore the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09 ended in an Ottoman victory, helped along by Ali Zand Shah’s predictions coming true: the Durranis indeed sallied from Herat in an attempt to (re)take Nishapur and Mashhad. However, matters worsened when the Khan of Kalat also entered the war and besieged the key port of Jask, eventually taking it. Zaki Mohammed Shah submitted to a punishing peace, which involved ceding Azerbaijan,[138] Khuzestan and Ilam to the Ottomans. This put the Turks within spitting distance of a Caspian Sea coast, alarming the Russians. St Petersburg repeatedly considered intervening in the war. Although relations with Persia were correct at best, backing Shiraz[139] against Constantinople seemed the lesser of two evils, and would give the Russians a better chance of victory in the originally planned war. However, problems arose, primarily with how to publicly present this move; Voloshin had been ready to present a war for the defence of the motherland in the face of the heathen, a heady mix to make the people forget their former differences and unite in opposition. An opportunistic war of revenge amidst a diplomatic kerfuffle between Muslims was quite another kettle of fish, and ran the risk of spiralling out of control.
A more important reason why the Russians did not move was the course of events further west. Voloshin and Paul had indeed planned to intervene in the Jacobin Wars at some point, preferably after the French and their opponents had exhausted each other and the Russians could take all the glory. However, it appeared events had overtaken them. By late 1806 it seemed that the war was winding down to a stalemate; there were French reverses in Germany, Italy and Spain, yet the Republic was clearly far from collapse. Alarmists in the Russian ministries advocated that intervention had to be made now, before it was too late and the ideological war petered out into an anticlimactic peace. Of course, this was before the “Le Grand Crabe” invasions of Flanders and Britain by France a few months later, which expanded the war once more and ultimately brought about the doom of the Republic, but as of yet even the plans for these remained unknown to St Petersburg. Russia hesitated between two wars, only in the end to get involved in a third.
News reached St Petersburg in November of two important events on the heels of each other: Moritz Benyovsky’s triumphs against the Japanese[140] and his successful inveigling of Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company trade into the ensuing civil war; and the death of Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin at the hands of the Chinese army amid that great Empire also succumbing to a war of succession. Although Paul had been a great supporter of the Lebedev-Benyovsky venture when he had sat the throne of Lithuania, this alarmed him. It was one thing to poke a stick into as distant and irrelevant a place as Japan, but China was another matter. Sino-Russian relations were vitally important to St Petersburg and wars had been fought before. On the other hand, it had been the Chinese who moved this time. In the past, Paul’s father Peter III and his predecessor Empress Elizabeth had reacted to Chinese sweeps of the Amur valley with ignored diplomatic protests at best, before waiting a few months and then quietly sending in more settlers beneath the languid gaze of the only intermittently interested Qing dynasty. But this was different, both in scale and in reaction; the planned execution of Lebedev, and the fight to the death with the Chinese army outside Beijing, could not be ignored. Furthermore, Benyovsky’s successes in Japan, along with those of Aleksandr Baranov and Boris Dmitrevich Leskov in Russian America [Alaska], convinced Paul that the potential trade wealth about to be unlocked in the East was sufficient to be worth fighting for. Even worth risking relations with China over – and besides, that horse had already bolted.
Therefore, in February 1807 – before the news of Le Grand Crabe reached St Petersburg – the Great Eastern Adventure was launched. This was one of the greatest projects in Russian history, and essentially represents the answer to the problem “how does one move 75,000 soldiers from A to B, where A is European Russia and B is the back of beyond near Yakutsk?” It was organised scientifically, placed under the command of the forward-thinking general Evgeny Serafimovich Kuleshov and backed up by a large number of theoreticians and experienced war organisers – most of them German or Italian exiles fleeing the conflicts raging across their homelands. Fortunately for them, the route between Moscow and Yakutsk had already been codified and expanded over the past two decades thanks to the activities of the Pacific Company and its predecessors, and now there was usually at least a beaten track every step of the way from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan to Perm to Yekaterinburg to Omsk to Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk and finally on to Yakutsk. Yet the movement of the odd caravan and escort company was far from what that route was now playing host to.
The largest problem was logistics, keeping such a large number of men fed and protecting them from the cold (the expedition set off in winter, despite the conditions, as that meant the more swampy regions along the way would be frozen and safe to move over). Despite the traditional Russian lackadaisical approach to such matters, believing the best solution to soldiers’ problems was to give them a damn good thrashing, under Kuleshov a more rational approach was taken, based in many ways on the works of Coulomb (not that the Russians would admit that for ideological reasons, of course). Everything was planned in advance, with caches of food and water being concealed by advance scouts to eke the men through the more barren parts of the vast route. It was a journey that few armies since that of the Mongol Khans had made, and they had not been encumbered with field artillery.
The fact that the Russians lost ‘only’ six thousand men to the cold, starvation, disease and other problems on this epic trek is often cited as a triumph
of strategic organisation. Though as one contemporary commentator waggishly put it, the Russian success could also be attributed to them examining the conduct of French (and other to a lesser extent) generals in the Jacobin Wars, especially the Spanish front, and labelling this “How Not To Do It”.
The Russian land army was supplemented by a Lithuanian force that went by sea, sailing around almost the entirety of the Old World to reach the Pacific Company’s area of operations. This, too, built upon the many voyages along this long, awkward route that had been made under the Company’s auspices; the Lithuanians had long since graduated from the experienced foreign navigators that Paul had hired when he was Grand Duke, and possessed a cadre of their own. Their fleet had also expanded, being part of a strategy by the Russians to contest the Baltic with Denmark in the event the alliance ended (as historical inevitability suggested it must). More globally the expanded fleet also sought to move into the Mediterranean or even the Indian Ocean to hit the Ottomans from several sides in the event of a war, particularly given that the Russians had no chance of challenging the Ottomans on the Black Sea as they lacked many significant ports there. Now, though, it came in useful for what was swiftly – and, at first, pejoratively – dubbed the Great Eastern Adventure.
Therefore by 1808, when Russia finally did intervene in the Jacobin Wars, a somewhat reduced force remained to be sent along with the Danes’ to France. It was only good fortune that saw the Russians and their allies play such a decisive role in the Battle of Paris that they obtained correspondingly great influence at the Congress of Copenhagen, indeed virtually gaining an Atlantic port in the form of Bayonne in the Kingdom of Navarre. All of which served the Tsar’s interests and ultimate goals, yet it seemed to Paul that even now any control he had ever had over Benyovsky’s venture, at the eastern end of his allegedly autocratic realm, had long since slipped away…