by Charles King
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the tsars worked first to mitigate and then to eliminate the ill effects of the insecure periphery, or krai (from which the name Ukraine derives). State funding mechanisms were put in place to buy back captives. Multiple lines of defense—earthworks, felled trees, ditches—were constructed on the northern edge of the steppe zone. Diplomatic overtures were made to the Crimean Tatars in an attempt to halt excursions by freelance raiders. Under Ivan the Terrible, Russian policies became more assertive. Ivan took the title of tsar of all Russia—no longer simply grand prince of Muscovy—and moved against the successors of the Golden Horde. The khanate of Kazan on the Volga fell in 1552, the khanate of Astrakhan on the Caspian in 1556, and the khanate of Siberia in 1581. Payment of tribute eventually ceased. Russian colonists were sent into the newly conquered lands, and relations were forged between the state and the Cossacks, with the tsar recognizing the authority of the Cossack leadership in exchange for protection of the expanding frontier.
If there was an ideology of conquest at this stage, it was not one of empire. There was no civilizing mission on the part of the Russian state, nor was there a clear sense that the move against the remnants of the Golden Horde crossed some basic line between civilization and savagery or even between Christianity and Islam. Rather, the more aggressive move toward the south and east began as a solution to a basic security problem, wed to a growing sense on the part of the Russians that they—not the khans—were the real heirs to the legacy of the Tatar—Mongols.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the steppe was hardly tame, but it had changed from an insecure frontier into something closer to a boundary. New defensive lines, pushed farther and farther south, checked large-scale assaults; and various Cossack hosts, now in league with Russia, launched their own punitive raids on the Tatars. In the middle of the century, Russia’s alliance with the Zaporozhian Cossacks enabled the acquisition of further territory in the west; in 1654, after supporting an uprising by the Cossacks and then winning a war against the Poles, the tsar claimed the Ukrainian steppeland, including the city of Kiev. With the acquisition of eastern Ukraine, the tsar’s influence extended over much of the old territory of the Golden Horde, from the shores of the Caspian across the steppe to the Dnepr. The Russian state still did not border on the Black Sea, but it controlled the two major access routes from the north, the Don and Dnepr rivers. This was the setting for the greatest change on the sea since the fall of Constantinople: the appearance of an organized, state-funded navy that could challenge the hegemony of the Ottomans.
A Flotilla on Azov
When Peter the Great ascended to the throne in 1689, his domains touched the oceans at only one port, at Arkhangel’sk on the White Sea, frozen for much of the year. The Baltic was the purview of Sweden; the Black Sea belonged to the Ottomans. Within about a century and a half, though, Russia had extended its reach across the Baltic and had developed a warm-water navy that could enter the Mediterranean, by way of Gibraltar, and saw action as far afield as Egypt. It had constructed ports and naval bases all across the northern littoral of the Black Sea, from Odessa in the west, to Sevastopol in Crimea, to Novorossiisk in the east. Russia had become, in short, a European naval power, and one that could begin to wrest full command of the sea away from Istanbul.
Peter was convinced that the greatness of the Russian state depended on securing access to the Black Sea, a major step toward weakening the ability of the Ottomans and the Tatar khans to threaten Russia’s new possessions in the south. The origins of the Russian naval presence on the sea were less than auspicious, however. Peter’s initial attempts to gain a foothold on the coast were abject failures. A campaign against the Ottoman fortress of Azov in 1695 ended in the rout of Russian and Cossack forces. The Ottomans and their allies had the strategic advantage of being able to support their army and provision their garrisons with naval forces, and the lesson for Peter was that Russia’s fortunes in the south depended fundamentally on the ability to meet the Ottomans on the water.
Azov was a critical military target. The fortress commanded the lower reaches of the Don river, blocking Russian passage to the Sea of Azov, and thus to the wider Black Sea. If Russian ships were ever to sail beyond the river’s mouth, taking the fortress was the first step. Shortly after his first failed attack on Azov, Peter launched a program to outfit a naval force of galleys and gunboats that could assist in a new campaign. A prototype galley was delivered from Holland, and on that model, other ships were assembled near Moscow and transported overland in sections to Voronezh on the upper Don. By the summer of 1696, Peter had created a flotilla of some two dozen warships and smaller craft. In early May, the ships left Voronezh and floated down the Don, accompanied by a small detachment of Cossack boats, toward another encounter with the Ottoman garrison. A Swiss, François Lefort, served as admiral of the entire fleet, while Peter himself took the lower-level position of commanding a division of galleys.6
Even before the Russian forces arrived, Cossack boats had already been harassing Ottoman ships that were attempting to resupply the garrison. By late June, the entire Russian armada had arrived off Azov, and the appearance in force of the Russians, along with continual Cossack sea raids, dissuaded the Ottoman ships at the mouth of the river from attempting to break through to the fortress. Land forces laid siege, and in about a month the Ottoman garrison surrendered. Azov had been taken before—by the Cossacks alone in 1637—but the contrast with the earlier conquest was extraordinary. When the Cossacks overran the fortress and offered it up to Tsar Mikhail Romanov, the tsar refused the gift for fear that it would spark off a wider conflict with the Ottomans, a war that would surely have ended in a Russian defeat. Mikhail grandson, however, took Azov himself, in no small measure because of his newly constructed navy.
The success of the Azov campaign encouraged Russia’s shipbuilding efforts, and after the conclusion of a truce with the Ottomans in 1698, the Russians now had the ability to put their ships to trial on open water, on the Sea of Azov. Shipyards at Voronezh and other points nearer the mouth of the Don produced warships at incredible speed. Most of the old galleys used in Peter’s campaign were replaced by sailing ships of up to fifty-eight guns. In 1699 the newly outfitted Russian fleet consisted of ten ships and two galleys; by 1702 fifteen more gunships had been added. In all, between 1695 and 1711, fifty-eight battleships were laid down on the Don and its tributaries.7 An ambitious project to dig a canal between the Volga and Don rivers—a plan to connect the Black and Caspian seas that the Ottomans themselves had once entertained—was begun under the direction of a British engineer.8 Peter was now putting to use the skills that he had acquired on his celebrated embassy to the shipbuilding centers of western Europe in the late 1690s.
Throughout the first two decades of the eighteenth century, Peter’s attentions were often pulled in different directions. In a long-running war with Sweden, the theater of battle was dangerously close to the new capital of St. Petersburg. Significant resources were devoted to bolstering naval strength in the Baltic, which would eventually become the centerpiece of Russia’s naval power. The project to build a southern navy soon fell by the wayside. Ships rotted at anchor, and the canal plan, fraught with financial problems, was abandoned. Russian ships never managed to move beyond the shallow Sea of Azov; the approach to the Black Sea was guarded by Ottoman fortresses on the Kerch strait.
The taking of Azov had been a resounding victory, but Peter’s attempts to repeat that success elsewhere were disastrous. In 1710 Peter formed an alliance with Dimitrie Cantemir, prince of Moldova and technically a vassal of the Ottomans, to launch a new war against the sultan. Victory would mean an effectively independent Moldovan principality, allied with Russia, and unfettered access to the Danube river. The war was a short-lived adventure. The combined Russian and Moldovan forces were annihilated in short order by the Ottoman army, and the Peace of the Prut, signed in 1711, had major consequences for both allies. The historic
al right of Moldovan princes to control their own affairs was ended, and directly appointed administrators were sent from Istanbul. (A similar arrangement, known as the Phanariot system, was put in place in Wallachia in 1716.) For Russia, the price of defeat was the loss of all the possessions along the sea as well as the scuppering of the Azov fleet. Some of the ships were handed over to the Ottomans, the rest destroyed. The Azov fortress was ceded back to the sultan. The Russian naval presence in the south was now effectively back to where it had been fifteen years before.
Peter’s early experiment on the Don and the Sea of Azov was not for naught, however. The Azov fleet demonstrated once and for all that the Ottomans could be defeated with the right combination of land and naval forces, targeted against key fortresses on the northern shore. In fact, the disaster of the 1710—11 campaign was due in part to the fact that Peter and Cantemir attempted to meet the Ottomans on the open field, rather than engage in a coordinated land and sea attack on a critical outpost, as had happened at Azov. The vulnerability of the Ottomans on the sea had been clear from the Cossack campaigns of the seventeenth century, but after the building of the Azov fleet, it was evident that the Russian state could also achieve strategically what Cossack raiders had managed to do haphazardly much earlier. It also convinced any skeptical Russian nobles and administrators that European naval technology, and even European captains and sailors, were vital to the modernization of Russia’s fighting forces.
The reigns of Peter’s immediate successors were taken up with the frequent back-and-forth conquest and surrender of fortresses and territory. Russia launched a new attack on the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars in 1736 and managed to secure control once again of Azov, as well as the fortress of Ochakov at the mouth of the Dnepr river. In the peace treaty that ended the war, however, Russia was forced to relinquish its territorial conquests and, while retaining Azov, agreed to dismantle the defenses and keep no warships on the sea.
It was not until the reign of Catherine the Great that the results of Peter’s early ventures to the south would be fully realized. The great change in Catherine’s policy was that, far more than among any of her predecessors, Russian actions were driven by a clear ideology of imperial conquest. The security problems of the “wild field” had been reduced, if not eliminated, during the late seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ukraine east of the Dnepr river had been taken into the Russian state—now properly an empire—and Peter’s successors had also added a small bit of steppeland north of Crimea, almost to the Dnestr river. Tatar raiding had diminished, and the Cossacks had become an effective, if inconstant, frontier ally. For Catherine and her advisers, however, particularly the resourceful and colorful Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the culmination of Russia’s modernization was to be not simply the taming of the steppe but the elimination of the Ottoman threat once and for all through the restoration of Christian sovereignty over Contantinople.
The first step in this plan was to win control of the sea, and in 1768 Catherine launched the first of two wars against the Ottomans during her reign. Russian land forces pushed around the northwest coast, occupying Wallachia and Moldova; another detachment moved south into Crimea and, in short order, defeated the army of the Crimean khan. In the most spectacular move of the war, Catherine dispatched her Baltic fleet, the pride of Russian seafaring since Peter, around Europe into the Mediterranean and, in a surprise attack, sank much of the Ottoman navy in the Aegean in the summer of 1770.
The treaty of Kuciik Kaynarca ended the war in July 1774. Russia received several major fortresses around the sea, including Azov and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov (which gave Russia effective command of that body of water), Kerch and Yenikale on the Straits of Kerch (which opened up a secure route to the Black Sea), and Kinburn at the mouth of the Dnepr (which guarded the route between the Dnepr estuary and the wider sea). In times of peace, Russian ships could now sail down either the Don or the Dnepr, the two most important northern water-ways, and enter the sea. Russian merchant ships were given the right to sail “free and unmolested” all the way across the sea and through the Straits into the Mediterranean. Russia now held a secure footing all along the north shore. The influence of the sultan was whittled down to command of only a few fortresses and the title of religious leader, or caliph, of the Muslim Tatars.
Cleopatra Processes South
After the military victories of Catherine’s first major war with the sultan and the diplomatic victories of the Kucuk Kaynarca treaty, the expansion of Russian interest in the newly acquired lands was rapid. The Zaporozhian Cossacks, formerly treated as an ally of the tsar in the south, were now subordinated to Russian imperial control; the Cossack headquarters on an island in the Dnepr river was destroyed in 1775, a move that brought the entire river under the control of the Russian state. Crimea, long a dependency of the Ottomans, had been made independent in the peace treaty, but this nominal status was in the main a mask for Russian influence; in 1783 Catherine formally annexed the region by simply posting an announcement that the khan and his people were now subjects of the Russian emperor. The pretext had been the inability of the Tatars to govern themselves—even though the khans had never actually asked for the independence thrust upon them a decade earlier—but the result was the further expansion of Russian territory toward the sea and weakening of the remnants of Ottoman power on the northern shore. The degree to which the frontier had now become part of an expanding European empire was to become abundantly clear only a few years later.
Catherine desired to survey the lineaments of her new possessions, and in the first half of 1787 she journeyed from St. Petersburg to Crimea in a procession that deserves to be counted among the grandest displays of sovereign majesty in the age of enlightened despotism. Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, the French ambassador to the Russian court, accompanied the empress on her journey and left a famous account in his memoirs.9
Segur was acquainted with all the personages of note in his day. He had known Washington, Kosciuszko, and Lafayette (his nephew) when he served as an officer with the Continental Army; he had corresponded with Frederick the Great and Joseph II; he had been attached to the courts of Louis XV and XVI. But his time with the “Cleopatra of the North,” as he called her, was quite unlike anything he had witnessed before. “Nothing less resembles ordinary travelling, than the journeys of a court,” Segur wrote. “Travelling alone, one sees men, countries, customs, establishments such as they really are; but in accompanying a monarch, the traveller finds every thing prepared, disguised, coloured for the purposes of display; and in the words and actions of men under such circumstances he scarcely discovers more sincerity than in manifestoes of politicians.”10
The party that set off from St. Petersburg in January 1787 was a mobile court. Fourteen carriages and nearly 200 sleds carried Catherine, her many guests, and their belongings. At each stop along the route, hundreds of fresh horses were waiting to be harnessed for the next leg of the journey. Because of the bitter cold, everyone was wrapped in bearskin blankets and fur pelisses, with sable hats bobbing as the company rushed along the icy roadways. Catherine’s habit was to rise each morning at six o’clock, confer with her ministers, breakfast, then set off at nine for a full day of traveling, leaving plenty of time to acknowledge her subjects, who assembled at the entrances to the cities to witness the spectacle.
As Segur observed, this entire display was designed not only to celebrate the triumphs over the barbarous Turks, but also to convince Catherine’s new subjects as well as her foreign guests that Russia—or at least its empress—could no longer be counted among the savage nations of the world. “She knew at that time many people, especially in France and at Paris, still looked upon Russia as an Asiatic country, poor, plunged in ignorance, darkness and barbarity; that they affected to confound the new and European Russia with the Asiatic and savage Muscovy.” The pomp of the procession was calculated to convince all concerned that the empress’s “little household,” as she called it—her empire
—was on the road to improvement and that a portion of the Black Sea now lay squarely within her enlightened domain.11
Catherine’s route took her down the Dnepr river to Kiev and from there on to Crimea. At each stop, a magnificent palace was hastily erected for the empress by her chief minister and paramour, Prince Potemkin, where she could entertain the visiting dignitaries who came to join her procession, including the king of Poland and Joseph II of Austria. Trees were uprooted and put in a more appealing arrangement. Villages were spruced up and peasants dragooned into expressing their spontaneous joy at the sight of the sovereign. A flotilla of river boats, including seven massive galleys, with perhaps 3,000 crew, oarsmen, and guards, was assembled to ferry the party down the Dnepr, while special music was performed by ensembles on the decks.12
It was like a magic theatre,” Segur wrote, “where ancient and modern times seemed to be mingled and confounded with one another, where civilization went hand in hand with barbarism, and the contrast was rendered the more extraordinary by the marked difference and great variety of the manners, figures and costume of the persons who composed the whole.”13 There were princes and merchants, army officers in full-dress uniforms, mounted Cossack lancers, Tatar nobles now bowing before their new sovereign, princes of Georgia bringing tribute to the Christian empress, and envoys from the nomads of the steppe. In addition to the parades, military displays, and courtly entertainments, the grand diversions arranged by Potemkin could be truly impressive. At one point, a hill at the edge of the Dnepr was cut with a long ditch, which was then filled with flammable material. At night, a mass of fireworks was set off on the summit, so that the fire spread down the ditch to the bottom of the hill, a manmade volcano that thrilled the assembled dignitaries.14