The Pamir Mountains, at the intersection of Turkestan, Afghanistan, British India and Xinjiang, marked Imperial Russia's furthest advance into Central Asia. As long as tsarist territory abutted onto small, independent fiefdoms such as the khanates, Russian armies pressed forward. By the 1890s, its borders had reached those of the more established states of Afghanistan and China. In the case of the former, England's interest in maintaining buffers between Russia and India effectively precluded further advances, and the borders remained fixed.
Alexander II's dramatic conquests in Asia marked the culmination of a process that had begun over three centuries earlier with Ivan IV's storm of the Khanate of Kazan. Because these lands were contiguous to Russia's own territory, because the advance seemed so inexorable and because it was carried out by a somewhat exotic autocracy, Western contemporaries often imputed sinister motives to tsarist expansion. Yet Russian imperialism in Asia was nothing more than a manifestation of the global European drive to impose colonial hegemony over nations with less effective armed forces, a process that had begun in the era of Christopher Columbus.
As with the broader phenomenon of modern imperialism, there have been many explanations for Alexander II's small wars. These include an apocryphal testament by Peter the Great, orthodox Marxist logic involving Central Asian cotton fields, and the German historian Dietrich Geyer's hypothesis about a 'compensatory psychological need' as balm for the wounds inflicted on national pride by the Crimean debacle.[180] Perhaps the most creative conjecture was offered by Interior Minister Petr Valuev in 1865, 'General Cherniaev took Tashkent. No one knows why or to what end . . . There is something erotic about our goings on at the distant periphery of the empire. On the Amur, the Ussuri, and now Tashkent.'13
Whatever its parentage, it is clear that the push into Asia under Alexander II did not follow some nefarious master plan. Much of it was carried out by ambitious officers eager to advance their careers, even to the point of insubordination. When successful, Oriental conquest often brought glory and imperial favour. At the same time, tsarist diplomats remained attentive to the wider international implications of Russia's actions on the frontier. Thus, after a ten-year occupation of the Ili River valley in Xinjiang, ostensibly to help suppress a Muslim rising against Qing rule, Russia returned part of the territory to China according to the Treaty of St Petersburg on i2 (24) February i88i. Meanwhile, the prospect of British aggression, not to mention its increasing economic burden, had already led the emperor to sell his North American colony of Alaska to the United States in 1867.
In Europe, the first priority of Alexander II's diplomacy was to extricate his empire from its Crimean isolation. Even as the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, there were overtures from the French Emperor Napoleon III for a rapprochement with his former combatant. In September 1857 the two sovereigns met in Stuttgart and informally agreed to co-operate on various European questions. The Franco-Russian entente was motivated by mutual antipathy to Austria. Alexander II felt deeply betrayed by Vienna's decision to back his enemies during the Crimean War, while Napoleon III hoped to diminish Habsburg influence in Italy, where that dynasty's possessions were becoming increasingly tenuous. The dalliance came to an abrupt end, however, when the Catholic Second Empire emotionally supported a second Polish revolt against tsarist rule in 1863.
Prussia's Protestant King Wilhelm I, whose subjects also included Poles, harboured no such sympathies for the Catholic insurgents. As the rising gained momentum, he sent a trusted general, Count Albert von Alvensleben- Erxleben, to St Petersburg to offer his kingdom's military co-operation. The resultant Alvensleben Convention of 27 January (8 February) 1863 was not a major factor in restoring order. Yet it provided an important boost to Russian prestige and helped Gorchakov head off efforts by Paris, London and Vienna to intervene in the crisis. Over the coming years, Berlin also proved to be the most stalwart supporter of the foreign minister's efforts to repeal the Black Sea clauses. Prince Gorchakov finally succeeded in this ambition in 1870, during the confusion of the Franco-Prussian War. In return, Russia maintained a
13 Petr Aleksandrovich Valuev, Dnevnik, ed. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1961), vol. II, pp. 60-1.
benevolent neutrality during Prussia's campaigns against Austria of 1866 and France four years later. Tsarist diplomacy thereby helped Wilhelm I realise his dream of uniting Germany into an empire in 1871, a development whose strategic implications soon became apparent to the Russian General Staff.
The two autocracies were bound by more than pure self-interest. Ideology and dynastic ties (Wilhelm I was Alexander II's uncle) also helped foster cordiality between the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns. As a couple the union was relatively harmonious. The efforts of the new German Empire's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to establish a menage a trois with the Habsburgs proved less successful. Endeavouring to secure Germany's eastern flank, Bismarck negotiated a Dreikaiserbund (three emperors' league) in 1873. Neither an alliance nor a formal treaty, the coalition was nothing more than a vague statement of intent to co-operate along the lines of the old Holy Alliance. Too much had changed in the intervening decades for a full restoration of pre-Crimean solidarity between the three empires. Whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century Russia had been the continent's dominant power, after 1871 Germany had a more valid claim to that distinction. More important, the two junior partners had very divergent aims in the Balkans. When forced to choose, Berlin invariably favoured Teutonic Vienna over Slavic St Petersburg.
Alexander II's reign ended, as it had begun, with a major setback in the Near East. Russia's fourth war with Turkey in the nineteenth century erupted over another anti-Turkish rising among its restive Slavic subjects in 1875. Harsh repression in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria horrified the Christian powers, but there was considerable reluctance to become involved once again in a Balkan conflict. For the first time, public opinion in Russia was also making an impact on tsarist policy, as Pan-Slavs noisily agitated in the press for military support to emancipate the sultan's Orthodox subjects. Gorchakov, now close to his eightieth birthday and in failing health, tried to head off a confrontation through the Dreikaiserbund, but more bellicose passions among his compatriots and the Porte's refusal to compromise forced Alexander's hand. Despite some misgivings, the tsar declared war on Turkey on 12 (24) April 1877. After an unexpectedly arduous march through the Bulgarian highlands, in February 1878 Russian troops reached San Stefano, virtually at the gates of Constantinople.
As in 1829, the Ottoman capital was for the taking. However, on this occasion it was the threat of British intervention, underscored by the presence of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Squadron at anchor in nearby Turkish waters, that discouraged Russian troops from completing their advance. Count Ignat'ev, now ambassador to the Porte, therefore negotiated an end to the conflict with the Treaty of San Stefano on 19 February (3 March) 1878. Although it halted the fighting, the agreement failed to placate London or Vienna. Most alarming to them was the provision of a large Bulgarian state, presumably a Russian satellite, which would dominate the Balkans. Within a few months the European powers met in neutral Germany to negotiate a more acceptable settlement.
180
Dietrich Geyer,