Here is our purpose – Russian, Slavic, European, Christian! As Russians, we must capture Constantinople for our own security. As Slavs we must liberate millions of our older kinsmen, brothers in faith, educators and benefactors. As Europeans we must drive out the Turks. As Orthodox Christians, we must protect the Eastern Church and return to St Sophia its ecumenical cross.35
Nicholas remained opposed to these ideas officially. His Foreign Minister, Karl Nesselrode, was adamant that giving any signs of encouragement to the Balkan Slavs would alienate the Austrians, Russia’s oldest ally, and ruin the entente with the Western powers, leaving Russia isolated in the world. But judging from the notes that the Tsar made in the margins of Pogodin’s writings, it appears that privately, at least, he sympathized with his ideas.
Western fears of Russia were intensified by its violent reaction to the revolutions of 1848. In France, where the revolutionary wave began in February with the downfall of the July Monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic, the Left was united by the fear of Russian forces coming to the aid of the counter-revolutionary Right and restoring ‘order’ in Paris. Everybody waited for the Russian invasion. ‘I am learning Russian,’ wrote the playwright Prosper Mérimée to a friend in Italy. ‘Perhaps it will help me to converse with the Cossacks in the Tuileries.’ As democratic revolutions spread through the German and Habsburg lands that spring, it seemed to many (as Napoleon had once said) that either Europe would become republican, or it would be overrun by the Cossacks. The Continental revolutions appeared destined for a life-or-death struggle against Russia and Tsar Nicholas, the ‘gendarme of Europe’. In Germany, the newly elected deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly, the first German parliament, appealed for a union with France and for the creation of a European army to defend the Continent against a Russian invasion.36
For the Germans and the French, Poland was the first line of defence against Russia. Throughout the spring of 1848, there were declarations of support and calls for a war for the restoration of an independent Poland in the National Assembly in Paris. On 15 May the Assembly was invaded by a crowd of demonstrators angry at the rumours (which were true) that Alphonse de Lamartine, the Foreign Minister, had reached an understanding with the Russians over Poland. To cries of ‘Vive la Pologne!’ from the crowd, radical deputies took turns to declare their passionate support for a war of liberation to restore Poland to her pre-partition frontiers and expel the Russians from all Polish soil.37
Then, in July, the Russians moved against the Romanian revolution in Moldavia and Wallachia, which further inflamed the West. The revolution in the principalities had been anti-Russian from the start. Romanian liberals and nationalists were opposed to the Russiandominated administration that had been left in place by the departing tsarist troops following their occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1829–34. The liberal opposition was first centred in the boyar assemblies whose political rights had been severely limited by the Règlement organique imposed by the Russians before handing back the principalities to the sovereignty of the Ottomans. The rulers of the principalities, for instance, were no longer elected by the assemblies, but appointed by the Tsar. During the 1840s, when moderate leaders like Ion Campineanu were in exile, the national movement passed into the hands of a younger generation of activists – many of them boyar sons educated in Paris – who organized themselves in secret revolutionary societies along the lines of the Carbonari and the Jacobins.
It was the largest of these secret societies, the Fratja or ‘Brotherhood’, that burst onto the scene in the spring of 1848. In Bucharest and Ia
Alarmed by these developments, and fearing that the spirit of rebellion might spread to their own territories, in July the Russians occupied Moldavia with 14,000 troops to prevent the establishment of a revolutionary government like the one in Bucharest. They also brought up 30,000 soldiers from Bessarabia to the Wallachian border in preparation for a strike against the provisional government.
The revolutionaries in Bucharest appealed to Britain for support. The British consul, Robert Colquhoun, had been actively encouraging the national opposition against Russia, not because the Foreign Office wanted to promote Romanian independence but because it wanted to roll back the domination of Russia and restore Turkish sovereignty on a more liberal basis so that British interests could be better promoted in the principalities. The consulate in Bucharest had been one of the main meeting places for the revolutionaries. Britain had even smuggled in Polish exiles to organize an anti-Russian movement uniting Poles, Hungarians, Moldavians and Wallachians under British tutelage.38
Recognizing that the only hope for Wallachian independence was to prevent a Russian intervention, Colquhoun acted as a mediator between the revolutionary leaders and the Ottoman authorities in the hope of securing Turkish recognition of the provisional government. He assured the Ottoman commissioner Suleiman Pasha that the government in Bucharest would remain loyal to the Sultan – a calculated deception – and that its hatred of the Russians would serve Turkey well in any future war against Russia. Suleiman accepted Colquhoun’s reasoning and made a speech to cheering crowds in Bucharest in which he toasted the ‘Romanian nation’ and spoke about the possibility of the ‘union between Moldavia and Wallachia as a stake in the entrails of Russia’.39
This was a red rag to the Russian bull. Vladimir Titov, the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, demanded that the Sultan cease negotiations with the revolutionaries and restore order in Wallachia, or Russia would intervene. This was enough to bring about a Turkish volte-face at the start of September. A new commissioner, Fuad Efendi, was sent to put an end to the revolt with the help of the Russian General Alexander Duhamel. Fuad crossed into Wallachia and camped outside Bucharest with 12,000 Turkish soldiers, while Duhamel brought up the 30,000 Russian troops who had been mobilized in Bessarabia. On 25 September they moved together into Bucharest and easily defeated the small groups of rebels who fought them in the streets. The revolution was over.