Unlike Nesselrode, a firm supporter of the Holy Alliance and its legitimist principles, Gorchakov took a pragmatic view of Russia’s role on the Continent. In his opinion, Russia should not form alliances that committed it to general principles, such as the defence of legitimate monarchies, as it had done before the Crimean War. The war had shown that Russia could not rely in any way on the solidarity of legitimate European monarchies. Nesselrode’s policy had made Russia vulnerable to the failings of other governments, Austria in particular, a power Gorchakov despised from his time as ambassador in Vienna. Instead, Gorchakov believed Russia should focus its diplomacy on its own national interests, and ally with other powers regardless of their ideology to further those interests. Here was a new type of diplomacy, the realpolitik later practised by Bismarck.
The Russians tested the Paris Treaty from the start, focusing on minor issues which they could exploit to open up divisions in the Crimean alliance. In May 1856 they claimed ownership of a lighthouse on tiny Serpent Island, in Turkish waters near the mouth of the Danube delta, and landed seven men with an officer to take up residence in the lighthouse. Walewski was inclined to let the Russians have the insignificant island, but Palmerston was adamant that they had to be ejected, on the grounds that they were infringing Turkish sovereignty. When the captain of a British ship made contact with the Turks on Serpent Island, he was told that they did not mind the Russians being there: they saw them as guests and were happy to sell them their supplies. Palmerston put his foot down. ‘We must avoid the fatal mistake made by Aberdeen in permitting the early movements and indications of Russian aggression to go on unnoticed and unrepressed,’ he wrote to Clarendon on 7 August. Orders were prepared to send the gunboats in to remove the Russians physically, but John Wodehouse, the British envoy in St Petersburg, was doubtful whether Britain had the right to do this, and the Queen shared these doubts, so Palmerston backed down and diplomatic pressure was used instead. Gorchakov insisted that the island had been owned by the Russians since 1833, and appealed to the French, who were thus manoeuvred into a position of international mediation between Britain and Russia.28
Meanwhile, the Russians launched a second challenge to the Paris Treaty in connection with the border between Russian Bessarabia and Turkish-controlled Moldavia. By an accident of mapping and confusion over names, the allies had drawn the border running to the south of an old village called Bolgrad, 3 kilometres to the north of New Bolgrad, a market town situated on the shores of Lake Yalpuk, which runs into the Danube. The Russians made use of the lack of clarity, claiming that they should be given both Bolgrads, and thus joint ownership of Lake Yalpuk. Palmerston insisted that the border should remain at the old village – the intention of the treaty having been to deprive the Russians of access to the Danube. He urged the French to remain firm and show a united front against the Russians, who would otherwise exploit their differences. But the French were happy to concede the Russian claim as a matter of good faith, though they then proposed that the boundary should run along a narrow strip of land between the market town and Lake Yalpuk, thereby granting more territory to the Russians but depriving them of access to the lake. Once again, the French acted as intermediaries between Russia and Britain.
By mid-November the Duc de Morny had persuaded Gorchakov to give up Russia’s claim to Serpent Island, provided Russia was given New Bolgrad, without access to the lake, and territorial compensation for their loss in a form decided by the French Emperor. The deal was linked to a proposal by the Tsar and Gorchakov (drawn up with the help of Morny in St Petersburg) for a Franco-Russian convention for the protection of the neutrality of the Black Sea and the Danubian principalities, as set out in the Paris Treaty, but now necessitated, it was claimed by the Russians, ‘by the fact that the treaty has been violated by England and Austria’, who had ‘tried to cheat’ the Russians of legitimate possessions in the Danube area. Morny recommended the Russian proposal to Napoleon and passed on to the French Emperor a promise made to him by Gorchakov: Russia would support French acquisitions on the European continent if France signed the convention. ‘Mark well,’ Morny wrote, ‘Russia is the only power that will ratify the territorial gains of France. I have already been assured of that. Try and get the same from the English! And who knows, with our demanding and capricious people, one day we might have to come to Russia for their satisfaction.’ Details of the Russian attitude to French territorial acquisitions had been outlined in a secret instruction to Count Kiselev, the former governor of the Danubian principalities who became ambassador to France after the Crimean War: protocol required that a senior statesman represent the Tsar’s new policy of friendship towards France. Should Napoleon direct his attention to the Italian peninsula, Kiselev was told, Russia ‘would consent in advance to the reunion of Nice and Savoy with France, as well as to the union of Lombardy with Sardinia’. If his ambitions were directed to the Rhine, Russia would ‘use its good offices’ to help the French, while continuing to honour its commitments to Prussia.29
A conference of the powers’ representatives in Paris brought about a speedy resolution of the two disputes in January 1857: Turkish ownership of Serpent Island was confirmed with an international commission to control the lighthouse; and New Bolgrad was given to Moldavia, with Russia compensated by a boundary change elsewhere in Bessarabia. On the face of it, the Russians had been forced to back down on both issues, but they had scored a political victory by weakening the bonds of the Crimean alliance. The French had made it clear that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was of secondary significance to them, and they were ready to enter into a deal with the Russians to redraw the European map.
Over the next eighteen months a number of high-level Russian visitors appeared in France. In 1857, the Grand Duke Constantine, the Tsar’s younger brother and the admiral in charge of the much-needed reform of the Russian navy after the Crimean War, made a trip to Paris, having decided that a partnership with France was the best way to get the technical assistance Russia needed to modernize its backward fleet (he gave to French firms all the orders that could not be fulfilled by Russian shipbuilders). On his way, he stopped at the Bay of Villafranca, near Nice, where he negotiated an agreement with Cavour for the Odessa Shipping Company to rent a coaling station from the Turin government, thereby providing Russia with a foothold in the Mediterranean.bd Napoleon gave a splendid reception to the Grand Duke in Paris, and drew him into private conversations about the future of Europe. The French Emperor knew that the Grand Duke was trying to assert himself as a force in Russian foreign policy, and that he had pan-Slav views at odds with those of Gorchakov, so he played to his political ambitions. Napoleon referred specifically to the possibility of an Italian uprising against the Austrians and the eventual unification of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership, and talked about the likelihood of Christian uprisings in the Ottoman Empire, a subject of great interest to Constantine, suggesting that in both cases it would suit their interests to encourage the formation of smaller nation states.30