The increasingly reactionary turn of Alexander I's final decade determined Russia's approach to a Greek revolt against Turkish rule in the early 1820s, the first important manifestation of the Eastern Question that would vex Europe's chancelleries with nagging regularity until the Great War. The Eastern Question asked what would happen to the Ottoman sultan's European possessions as his dynasty's grip weakened. Aside from Berlin (until the turn of the twentieth century, at any rate) all of the leading powers considered themselves to be vitally concerned with the fate of the Porte. Vienna, which also ruled over Orthodox minorities in the region, feared that successful emancipation from Turkish dominion of Balkan Christians might contaminate its own Slav subjects with the virus of nationalism. As naval powers, Britain and, to a lesser extent, France worried about the Turkish Straits, the maritime passage from Constantinople to the Dardanelles that linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. St Petersburg was similarly concerned about the security ofthe Straits, 'the key to the Russian house', lest Russia's Black Sea shores become vulnerable to hostile warships. But there were also important elements of Russian opinion that sympathised with the plight of Orthodox co-religionists in European Turkey.
These contradictory elements of tsarist Balkan diplomacy confronted each other during the Greekrisingthat eruptedin spring 1821. Alexander was initially shocked by Turkey's draconian repression of the insurgency, but, with some prodding from Prince Metternich, he gradually became more concerned about maintaining the status quo. Even if it involved a Muslim sultan, the principle of monarchical legitimacy overrode the rights of national minorities. To yield to subversion anywhere, the tsar feared, might open the floodgates to regicide and anarchy throughout the continent, not to mention shattering the post-war alliance system. A mutiny in his own Semenovskii Guards regiment in 1820 had only deepened Alexander's pessimism about a ubiquitous revolutionary 'empire of evil... more powerful than the might of Napoleon'.[175] Appeals from the insurgents for support against Turkey fell on deaf ears, and in 1822 the emperor sidelined a leading official in his own Foreign Ministry sympathetic to the revolt, the Ionian Count Ionnes Kapodistrias.
Nicholas I, who inherited the throne in 1825, tended to be equally loyal to the diplomatic status quo, despite some Near Eastern temptations early in his reign. At the same time, he kept on his older brother's foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode. More forceful and direct than Alexander and thoroughly immune to any idealistic temptations, Nicholas unambiguously opposed any challenges to the authority of his fellow sovereigns. Such tests were not long in coming. His own reign had begun inauspiciously with the Decembrist revolt, an attempted coup by Guards' officers with constitutionalist aspirations. Five years later, in 1830, a wave of revolutions beginning in France convulsed the continent. When Belgians rose against Dutch rule that year, Nicholas prepared to send troops to support King William I of Orange, who also happened to be his brother-in-law's father. However, such plans were cut short when a separatist revolt erupted in Poland, whose suppression required more immediate attention.
Deeply shaken by these and other disturbances, the tsar resolved to cooperate more closely with the other conservative powers to preserve the political order in Europe. In 1833 he met with the Austrian emperor, Francis II and Prussia's Crown Prince at the Bohemian town of Miinchengratz, where among other matters he signed a treaty on 6 (18) September offering to intervene in support of any sovereign threatened by internal disturbances. It was on the basis of this agreement that Nicholas intervened in Hungary to help the Habsburgs restore their rule in the waning days of a revolt that had begun during the European revolutions of 1848.
At mid-century, Russia still seemed to be the continent's dominant state. Unlike 1830, the disturbances of 1848 had not even touched Nicholas's empire, and his autocratic allies had successfully weathered the recent political storms. The only on-going military challenge was Imam Shamil's lengthy rebellion in the Caucasus Mountains. While it would take nearly another decade to pacify the region, the Islamic insurgency was largely dismissed as a colonial small war by the other powers and hardly diminished Russia's martial reputation. Yet his seeming invincibility began to cloud Nicholas's judgement. At the same time, the zeal of the 'Gendarme of Europe' to root out all enemies of monarchism, wherever they might lurk, earned him the almost universal dislike of his contemporaries abroad. Even the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, darkly muttered after Russia's Hungarian intervention that 'Europe would be astonished by the extent of Austria's ingratitude'.[176]When complications arose once again in Turkey in the early 1850s, Nicholas discovered to his cost that Machiavelli's celebrated maxim about the advantages of being feared was not always valid.
The Greek crisis had remained unresolved at the time of Alexander's death in 1825. Although Nicholas shared his brother's distaste for the rising, he negotiated with London and Paris to seek a solution. After a series of clashes, including an Anglo-French naval intervention and a brief, albeit difficult war with Turkey, by 1829 the Eastern Mediterranean was again at peace. According to the Treaty of Adrianople that Nicholas concluded with the sultan on September 2 (14) of that year, the Ottomans formally ceded Georgia, confirmed Greek as well as Serbian autonomy and granted substantial concessions in the Danubian principalities (the core of the future Romania), which became a virtual tsarist satellite. Meanwhile, St Petersburg also won important strategic gains, including control of the Danube River's mouth.
Impressive as they were, Nicholas's gains belied considerable restraint, given the magnitude of the Turkish rout. Although his forces were within striking distance of Constantinople, the tsar refrained from dealing the coup de grace. Order and legitimacy continued to be paramount in his considerations. A commission Nicholas convened that year to consider the Eastern Question unequivocally declared, 'that the advantages of the preservation of the Ottoman Empire in Europe outweigh the disadvantages and that, as a result, its destruction would be contrary to the interests of Russia'.[177]
Preserving the Ottoman Empire in Europe did not necessarily imply foregoing any advantages that St Petersburg might be able to extract from the Porte. Thus four years after Adrianople, Nicholas negotiated an even more favourable pact with the Ottomans, the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi on 26 June (8 July) 1833, in return for assistance in putting down a rebellion by the latter's Egyptian vassal. But the tsarist ascent in Turkey led to considerable alarm in
Britain, which saw a great outburst of Russophobia in the press. Yet another Turkish crisis in 1839 once again invited foreign intervention, now by Russia acting together with Britain and Austria. The outcome of this action was the Straits Convention of 1 (13) June 1841, which forced Russia to backtrack from its demands at Unkiar-Skelessi eight years earlier. For the next decade the Eastern Mediterranean remained relatively calm.
175
P. K. Grimsted,
177
In William C. Fuller,