The origins of the Crimean War, Russia's most catastrophic entanglement in the Eastern Question, remain a source of lively controversy. What is clear is that the conflict began, almost innocuously, over a French attempt in 1850 to extend the Catholic Church's rights to maintain the Holy Places, sacred sites of Christendom in Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Motivated by President Louis Napoleon's effort to court domestic political support, the ploy elicited a strong response from Nicholas, who insisted on the prerogatives of the Orthodox Church. Although none of the powers sought war, the tsar's clumsy diplomacy, the intransigence of the sultan and the machinations of Stratford Canning, Britain's Russophobe minister to Constantinople, all helped transform a 'quarrel of monks' into the first major clash among the powers since Waterloo.
The Crimean War itself was more a diplomatic than a military defeat for Russia. The fighting, which eventually focused on the Black Sea naval bastion of Sebastopol, was marked by colossal inefficiency, blunders and incompetence among all combatants. Although Sebastopol eventually fell to the combined forces of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia, the siege had taken nearly a year, and logistics made further action against Russia exceedingly difficult. It was only when Austria sided with the allies towards the end of 1855 that St Petersburg was forced to sue for peace.
The moderate terms of the Peace of Paris, which the combatants concluded on 18 (30) March 1856, reflected the relatively inconclusive nature of the Crimean campaign. St Petersburg was forced to return the Danubian region of Bessarabia, annexed in 1812, to the Porte and generally saw its influence in the Balkans decline. More galling were the so-called Black Sea clauses that demilitarised these waters, severely restricting tsarist freedom of action on its south-western frontier. Yet if the allies refrained from exacting a heavy penalty on their foe, Russia's setback in the Crimea was a devastating blow to Romanov prestige. Nicholas's army, feared by many as the mailed fist of Europe's most formidable autocracy, had proven to be a paper tiger. Not for nearly another century, and then under a very different regime, would Russia regain its pre-eminent standing on the continent.
Recueillement
Defeat in the Crimea broke both Nicholas's order and its creator. Profoundly depressed by the humiliations inflicted on his beloved military, the emperor easily succumbed to a cold in February 1855 and was succeeded by his son, Alexander II. The new tsar clearly understood the link between backwardness at home and weakness abroad, and largely withdrew from European affairs to concentrate on reforming his empire. As his foreign minister, Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov, famously put it, 'La Russie ne boude pas, elle se recueille' (Russia is not sulking, it is recovering its strength).6 Rather than battling the chimera of revolution, Alexander II's diplomacy endeavoured to repair the damage done by the recent war. In Europe, this amounted to ending St Petersburg's isolation and abrogating the distasteful Black Sea clauses.
Recueillement, orthe avoidance offoreign complications to focus on domestic renewal, did not apply to all of the empire's frontiers. To the east Alexander II oversaw dramatic advances on the Pacific and in Central Asia. Already in the waning years of Nicholas I's reign, the ambitious governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Count Nikolai Murav'ev, had begun to take advantage of the Qing dynasty's growing infirmity to penetrate its northern Manchurian marches. As would often prove the case in Central Asia during the coming decades, the count was acting on his own, but his master turned a blind eye to his colonial ambitions.
When in 1858 Peking suffered defeat during the Second Opium War with Britain and France, Count Nikolai Ignat'ev, a skilled diplomat who fully shared Murav'ev's enthusiastic imperialism, benefited from the Middle Kingdom's malaise to negotiate vast annexations of the latter's territory. The Treaties of Aigun and Peking, signed on 28 May (9 June) 1858 and 2 (14) November 1860, respectively, ceded the right bank of the Amur River and the area east of the Ussuri River, thereby expanding Russian rule southwards to the north-eastern tip of Korea. Count Murav'ev modestly named a port he founded in his new acquisition Vladivostok (ruler of the East).
Russian gains in Central Asia were no less spectacular. In the early nineteenth century, a string of fortifications, stretching from the northern tip of the Caspian Sea to the fortress of Semipalatinsk on the border with the northwestern Chinese territories of Xinjiang, marked the southward extent of Russia's march into Central Asia. The arid plains beyond were ruled by the archaic khanates of Kokand, Khiva and Bokhara. Collectively known to Russians as
6 Constantinde Grunwald, Troissiecles de diplomatie russe (Paris: Callman-Levi, 1945), p. 198.
Turkestan7 together with the Kazakh Steppe, this troika of Islamic fiefdoms had prospered as transit points for caravans traversing the Great Silk Road in an earlier age. However, they had long since degenerated into internecine strife, and now seemed to derive the bulk of their wealth from raiding overland commerce and taking Russian subjects as slaves.
The final defeat of Shamil in 1859 and the 'pacification' of the Caucasus had freed a large army for action elsewhere. At the same time, martial glory in Central Asia promised to restore some lustre to Russia's badly tarnished military prestige. In i860 tsarist troops began to engage the Khanate of Kokand. The first major city to fall was Tashkent, which a force led by General Mikhail Cherniaev took in 1865. Three years later General Konstantin von Kaufmann marched through the gates of Tamerlane's fabled capital of Samarkand and within short order Kokand and Bokhara submitted to Russian protection. Finally, in 1873 Kaufmann also subdued the remaining Khanate of Khiva. Rather than being annexed outright, Khiva and Bokhara were made protectorates and retained internal autonomy under their traditional rulers.
During the Central Asian campaigns, Prince Gorchakov sought to reassure the other European powers that his sovereign's Asian policy was largely defensive and aimed primarily to establish a border secure against the restive tribes beyond. In an oft-quoted circular of 1864, Prince Gorchakov stated:
The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilised states which find themselves in contact with half-savage, nomadic populations... In such cases, it always happens that interests ofsecurity ofborders and ofcommercial relations demand of the more civilised state that it asserts a certain dominion over others, who with their nomadic and turbulent customs are most uncomfortable neighbours.
He went on to promise that Russia's frontier would be fixed in order to avoid 'the danger of being carried away, as is almost inevitable, by a series of repressive measures and reprisals, into an unlimited extension of territory'.8
London remained unconvinced by Gorchakov's logic. Many of its strategists feared that the Russian advance into Central Asia threatened India, and until the early twentieth century, halting what appeared to be Russia's inexorable advance on 'the most splendid appanage of the British Crown'9 was
7 Not to be confused with Eastern Turkestan, as the Islamic western Chinese region of Xinjiang was then known.
8 A. M. Gorchakov, memorandum, 21 November 1864, in D. C. B. Lieven (ed.), British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print (University Press of America, 1983-9), part I, series A, 1, p. 287.
9 G. N. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889), p. 14.
a prime directive of Whitehall's foreign policy. To the British, this conflict came to be known as the Great Game, whose stakes, in the words of Queen Victoria, were nothing less than 'a question of Russian or British supremacy in the world'.[178] Like the Cold War waged in the latter half of the twentieth century between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Great Game involved very little direct combat between the adversaries. Instead, the conflict was largely waged through proxies and involved considerable intrigue and espionage. Count Nesselrode aptly described the rivalry as a 'tournament of shadows'.[179]
179
M. Edwardes,