Russia's Empires by Philip Longworth

Author:Philip Longworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books

10

The Romantic Age of Empire

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not a propitious age for empires. It was the age when Britain lost most of North America, Spain her vast possessions in Latin America, and Portugal Brazil. France’s empire shrank too, and by then the Dutch were already out of the reckoning as an imperial power of world scale. Yet, against the current, Russia’s empire grew, and, as if to symbolize its world role and continuing ambitions, in 1803–4 a Russian ship circumnavigated the globe for the first time.

The prospects had not seemed so bright even a short while before. In 1800 Russian forces had to make a difficult withdrawal from Italy through Switzerland. The Malta project was abandoned, and Russian ships were forced out of the Mediterranean altogether. Finally, in 1812, Russia lost not only Poland but western Russia and indeed Moscow itself to Napoleon’s army. Despite these dramatic reverses, however, the nineteenth century then saw Russia bound back to become master of half of Europe and a third of Asia again and to make significant additional imperial gains.3241 Paradoxically, both the reverses and the advances were precipitated by the same factor: the impact of revolutionary France.

Napoleon destroyed the strategic balance in Europe, and persuaded powers which might otherwise have been hostile to Russia to co-operate with it, against France. When Napoleon crushed the allied armies in a series of brilliant campaigns in central Europe, the Emperor Alexander, who met him on a raft near Tilsit, reluctantly contrived a deal with him in 1807. This effectively divided Europe into French and Russian spheres, though it was not to hold beyond 1811. France’s embargo on Britain hurt Russia’s trading interests, its threat of reviving an independent Poland threatened to destabilize Russia’s western frontier again, and Alexander would not be treated as a satellite. In the meantime, however, he made the most of the opportunities which Tilsit had presented to him. In 1808–9 Finland was annexed from Sweden and in 1811 Bessarabia was taken from the Turks. Meanwhile the advance in the Caucasus had been resumed.

The figure who symbolized this, the most romantic, phase in the conquest of the Caucasus was General Pavel Tsitsianov, commander of the entire Caucasian front from the Cossack lines of the Terek and Kuban in the north to Georgia in the south. Although middle-aged, Tsitsianov was a romantic sort of hero: proud, brave and cruel, a dashing man of action, subservient to no one – not even the Tsar. Arguing that St Petersburg was too far away to dictate policy and approve decisions, he insisted on wide discretionary powers – and got them. Young Tsar Alexander agreed that central-government policies should be submitted to the general for approval, and that Tsitsianov need report significant actions only once they had been taken.

Tsitsianov strengthened Russia’s hold on Georgia, and set out to push the frontiers south through Azerbaydzhan to Persia – and as far as Tabriz if he could. With this in mind, he decided to

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