Let us rather observe this lad of ten, clad in an ancient cap, his father’s probably, shoes worn on bare feet, and nankeen breeches, held up by a single suspender, who had climbed over the wall at the very beginning of the truce, and has been roaming about the ravine, staring with dull curiosity at the French, and at the bodies which are lying on the earth, and plucking the blue wild-flowers with which the valley is studded. On his way home with a large bouquet, he held his nose because of the odor which the wind wafted to him, and paused beside a pile of corpses, which had been carried off the field, and stared long at one terrible headless body, which chanced to be the nearest to him. After standing there for a long while, he stepped[Pg 120] up closer, and touched with his foot the stiffened arm of the corpse which protruded. The arm swayed a little. He touched it again, and with more vigor. The arm swung back, and then fell into place again. And at once the boy uttered a shriek, hid his face in the flowers, and ran off to the fortifications as fast as he could go.
Yes, white flags are hung out from the bastion and the trenches, the flowery vale is filled with dead bodies, the splendid sun sinks into the blue sea, and the blue sea undulates and glitters in the golden rays of the sun. Thousands of people congregate, gaze, talk, and smile at each other. And why do not Christian people, who profess the one great law of love and self-sacrifice, when they behold what they have wrought, fall in repentance upon their knees before Him who, when he gave them life, implanted in the soul of each of them, together with a fear of death, a love of the good and the beautiful, and, with tears of joy and happiness, embrace each other like brothers? No! But it is a comfort to think that it was not we who began this war, that we are only defending our own country, our father-land. The white flags have been hauled in, and again the weapons of death and suffering are shrieking; again innocent blood is shed, and groans and curses are audible.
Leo Tolstoy, The Sebastopol Sketches
History does not repeat itself and analogies between past and present events are only certain when the events are treated as static and closed, and therefore susceptible to unthinking identification. Yet if we take the word in its original Greek sense, then analogy is a form of thinking, of reasoning, based on significantsimilarities between things and events across space and time; similarities which do not erase differences.
It is with this in mind that we share a selection of articles for the New York Tribune written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on the Crimean War of October 1853 – February 1856, with Russia’s current war in the Ukraine before us.
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Russia is decidedly a conquering nation, and was so for a century, until the great movement of 1789 called into potent activity an antagonist of formidable nature. We mean the European Revolution, the explosive force of democratic ideas and man’s native thirst for freedom. Since that epoch there have been in reality but two powers on the continent of Europe – Russia and Absolutism, the Revolution and Democracy. For the moment the Revolution seems to be suppressed, but it lives and is feared as deeply as ever. Witness the terror of the reaction at the news of the late rising at Milan. But let Russia get possession of Turkey, and her strength is increased nearly half, and she becomes superior to all the rest of Europe put together. Such an event would be an unspeakable calamity to the revolutionary cause. The maintenance of Turkish independence, or, in case of a possible dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the arrest of the Russian scheme of annexation, is a matter of the highest moment. In this instance the interests of the revolutionary Democracy and of England go hand in hand. Neither can permit the Tsar to make Constantinople one of his capitals, and we shall find that when driven to the wall, the one will resist him as determinedly as the other.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 12 April 1853.
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It is only of late that people in the west of Europe and in America have been enabled to form anything like a correct judgement of Turkish affairs. Up to the Greek insurrection Turkey was, to all intents and purposes, a terra incognita, and the common notions floating about among the public were based more upon the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment than upon any historical facts. Official diplomatic functionaries, having been on the spot, boasted a more accurate knowledge; but this, too, amounted to nothing, as none of these officials ever troubled himself to learn Turkish, South Slavonian or modern Greek, and they were one and all dependent upon the interested accounts of Greek interpreters and Frank merchants. Besides, intrigues of every sort were always on hand to occupy the time of these lounging diplomatists, among whom Joseph von Hammer, the German historian of Turkey, forms the only honourable exception. The business of these gentlemen was not with the people, the institutions, the social state of the country: it was exclusively with the court, and especially with the Fanariote Greeks, wily mediators between two parties, either of which was equally ignorant of the real condition, power and resources of the other. The traditional notions and opinions, founded upon such paltry information, formed for a long while and, strange to say, form to a great extent, even now, the groundwork for all the action of Western diplomacy with regard to Turkey.
But while England, France and, for a long time, even Austria, were groping in the dark for a defined Eastern policy, another power outwitted them all. Russia, herself semi-Asiatic, in her condition, manners, traditions and institutions, found men enough who could comprehend the real state and character of Turkey. Her religion was the same as that of nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Turkey in Europe; her language almost identical with that of seven millions of Turkish subjects; and the well-known facility with which a Russian learns to converse in, if not fully to appropriate, a foreign tongue made it an easy matter for her agents, well paid for the task, to acquaint themselves completely with Turkish affairs. Thus at a very early period the Russian government availed itself of its exceedingly favourable position in the south-east of Europe. Hundreds of Russian agents perambulated Turkey, pointing out to the Greek Christians the orthodox Emperor as the head, the natural protector and the ultimate liberator of the oppressed Eastern Church, and to the South Slavonians especially, pointing out that same emperor as the almighty Tsar, who was sooner or later to unite all the branches of the great Slav race under one sceptre, and to make them the ruling race of Europe. The clergy of the Greek Church very soon formed themselves into a vast conspiracy for the spread of these ideas. The Servian insurrection of 1809, the Greek rising in 1821, were more or less directly urged on by Russian gold and Russian influence; and wherever among the Turkish pashas the standard of revolt was raised against the Central government Russian intrigues and Russian funds were never wanting; and when thus internal Turkish questions had entirely perplexed the understanding of Western diplomatists, who knew no more about the real subject than about the man in the moon, then war was declared, Russian armies marched towards the Balkans, and portion by portion the Ottoman Empire was dismembered.
It is true that during the last thirty years much has been done towards general enlightenment concerning the state of Turkey. German philologists and critics have made us acquainted with its history and literature; English residents and English trade have collected a great deal of information as to the social condition of the Empire. But the diplomatic wiseacres seem to scorn all this, and to cling as obstinately as possible to the traditions engendered by the study of Eastern fairy-tales, improved upon by the no less wonderful accounts given by the most corrupt set of Greek mercenaries that ever existed.
And what has been the natural result? That in all essential points Russia has steadily, one after another, gained her ends, thanks to the ignorance, dullness and consequent inconsistency and cowardice of Western governments. From the battle of Navarino to the present Eastern crisis, the action of the Western powers has either been annihilated by squabbles among themselves – mostly arising from their common ignorance of Eastern matters, and from petty jealousies which must have been entirely incomprehensible to any Eastern understanding – or that action has been in the direct interest of Russia alone. And not only do the Greeks, both of Greece and Turkey, and the Slavonians, look to Russia as their natural protector; nay, even the government at Constantinople, despairing, time after time, to make its actual wants and real position understood by these Western ambassadors, who pride themselves upon their own utter incompetency to judge by their own eyes of Turkish matters, this very Turkish government has, in every instance, been obliged to throw itself upon the mercy of Russia, and to seek protection from that power which openly avows its firm intention to drive every Turk across the Bosphorus, and plant the cross of St Andrew upon the minarets of the Aya-Sofiyah.
In spite of diplomatic tradition, these constant and successful encroachments of Russia have at last roused in the Western cabinets of Europe a very dim and distant apprehension of the approaching danger. This apprehension has resulted in the great diplomatic nostrum, that the maintenance of the status quo in Turkey is a necessary condition of the peace of the world. The magniloquent incapacity of certain modern statesmen could not have confessed its ignorance and helplessness more plainly than in this axiom which, from always having remained a dead letter, has, during the short period of twenty years, been hallowed by tradition, and become as hoary and indisputable as King John’s Magna Carta. Maintain the status quo! Why, it was precisely to maintain the status quo that Russia stirred up Servia to revolt, made Greece independent, appropriated to herself the protectorate of Moldavia and Wallachia, and retained part of Armenia! England and France never stirred an inch when all this was done, and the only time they did move was to protect, in 1849, not Turkey, but the Hungarian refugees. In the eyes of European diplomacy, and even of the European press, the whole Eastern Question resolves itself into this dilemma; either the Russians at Constantinople, or the maintenance of the status quo – anything besides this alternative never enters their thoughts.
Look at the London press for illustration. We find The Times advocating the dismemberment of Turkey, and proclaiming the unfitness of the Turkish race to govern any longer in that beautiful corner of Europe. Skilful, as usual, The Times boldly attacks the old diplomatic tradition of the status quo, and declares its continuance impossible. The whole of the talent at the disposal of that paper is exerted to show this impossibility under different aspects, and to enlist British sympathies for a new crusade against the remnant of the Saracens. The merit of such an unscrupulous attack upon a time-hallowed and unmeaning phrase which two months ago was as yet sacred to The Times is undeniable. But whoever knows that paper knows also that this unwonted boldness is applied directly in the interest of Russia and Austria. The correct premises put forth in its columns as to the utter impossibility of maintaining Turkey in its present state serve no other purpose than to prepare the British public and the world for the moment when the principal paragraph of the will of Peter the Great – the conquest of the Bosphorus – will have become an accomplished fact.
The opposite opinion is represented by The Daily News, the organ of the Liberals. The Times, at least, seizes a new and correct feature of the question, in order afterwards to pervert it to an interested purpose. In the columns of the Liberal journal, on the other hand, reigns the plainest sense, but merely a sort of household sense. Indeed, it does not see farther than the very threshold of its own house. It clearly perceives that a dismemberment of Turkey under the present circumstances must bring the Russians to Constantinople, and that this would be a great misfortune for England; that it would threaten the peace of the world, ruin the Black Sea trade, and necessitate new armaments in the British stations and fleets of the Mediterranean. And in consequence The Daily News exerts itself to arouse the indignation and fear of the British public. Is not the partition of Turkey a crime equal to the partition of Poland? Have not the Christians more religious liberty in Turkey than in Austria and Russia? Is not the Turkish government a mild, paternal government, which allows the different nations and creeds and local corporations to regulate their own affairs? Is not Turkey a paradise compared with Austria and Russia? Are not life and property safe there? And is not British trade with Turkey larger than that with Austria and Russia put together, and does it not increase every year? And then goes on in dithyrambic strain, so far as The Daily News can be dithyrambic, with an apotheosis of Turkey, the Turks and everything Turkish, which must appear quite incomprehensible to most of its readers.
The key to this strange enthusiasm for the Turks is to be found in the works of David Urquhart, Esq, MP. This gentleman, of Scotch birth, with mediaeval and patriarchal recollections of home, and with a modem British civilised education, after having fought three years in Greece against the Turks, passed into their country and was the first thus to enamour himself of them. The romantic Highlander found himself at home again in the mountain ravines of the Pindus and Balkans, and his works on Turkey, although full of valuable information, may be summed up in the following three paradoxes, which are laid down almost literally thus: If Mr Urquhart were not a British subject, he would decidedly prefer being a Turk; if he were not a Presbyterian Calvinist, he would not belong to any other religion than Islamism; and thirdly, Britain and Turkey are the only two countries in the world which enjoy self-government and civil and religious liberty. This same Urquhart has since become the great Eastern authority for all English Liberals who object to Palmerston, and it is he who supplies The Daily News with the materials for these panegyrics upon Turkey.
The only argument which deserves a moment’s notice upon this side of the question is this: ‘It is said that Turkey is decaying; but where is the decay? Is not civilisation rapidly spreading in Turkey and trade extending? Where you see nothing but decay our statistics prove nothing but progress.’ Now it would be a great fallacy to put down the increasing Black Sea trade to the credit of Turkey alone; and yet this is done here, exactly as if the industrial and commercial capabilities of Holland, the high road to the greater part of Germany, were to be measured by her gross exports and imports, nine-tenths of which represent a mere transit. And yet, what every statistician would immediately, in the case of Holland, treat as a clumsy concoction, the whole of the Liberal press of England, including the learned Economist, tries, in the case of Turkey, to impose upon public credulity. And then, who are the traders in Turkey? Certainly not the Turks. Their way of promoting trade, when they were yet in their original nomadic state, consisted in robbing caravans; and now that they are a little more civilised it consists in all sorts of arbitrary and oppressive exactions. Remove all the Turks out of Europe, and trade will have no reason to suffer. And as to progress in general civilisation, who are they that carry out that progress in all parts of European Turkey? Not the Turks, for they are few and far between, and can hardly be said to be settled anywhere except in Constantinople and two or three small country districts. It is the Greek and Slavonic middle class in all the towns and trading posts who are the real support of whatever civilisation is effectually imported into the country. That part of the population is constantly rising in wealth and influence, and the Turks are more and more driven into the background. Were it not for their monopoly of civil and military power they would soon disappear. But that monopoly has become impossible for the future, and their power is turned into impotence except for obstructions in the way of progress. The fact is, they must be got rid of. To say that they cannot be got rid of except by putting Russians and Austrians in their place means as much as to say that the present political constitution of Europe will last for ever. Who will make such an assertion?
Originally published in New York Tribune, 19 April 1853.
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The Tsar has not only commenced war, he has already terminated his first campaign. The line of operations is no longer behind the Pruth, but along the Danube. Meanwhile, what are the Western powers about? They counsel, that is, compel, the Sultan to consider the war as peace. Their answers to the acts of the Autocrat are not cannons, but notes. The Emperor is assailed, not by the two fleets, but by no less than four projects of negotiation: one emanating from the English Cabinet, the other from the French, the third presented by Austria, and the fourth improvised by the ‘brother-in-law’ of Potsdam. The Tsar, it is hoped, will consent to select from this embarras de richesses that which is most suitable to his purposes. The (second) reply of M Drouyn de l’Huys to the (second) note of Count Nesselrode takes infinite pains to prove that ‘it was not England and France who made the first demonstration’. Russia only throws out so many notes to the Western diplomats, like bones to dogs, in order to set them at an innocent amusement, while she reaps the advantage of further gaining time. England and France, of course, catch the bait…
The English press has lost all countenance. ‘The Tsar cannot comprehend the courtesy which the Western powers have shown to him… He is incapable of courteous demeanour in his transactions with other powers.’ So says The Morning Advertiser. The Morning Post is exasperated because the Tsar takes so little note of the internal embarras of his opponents:
To have put forward, in the mere wantonness of insolence, a claim that possessed no character of immediate urgency, and to have done so without any reference to the inflammable state of Europe, was an indiscretion almost incredible.
The writer of the Money Market article in The Economist finds out ‘that men discover now to their cost how inconvenient it is that all the most secret interests of the world [that is, of the Exchange] are dependent upon the vagaries of one man’.
Yet in 1848 and 1849 you could see the bust of the Emperor of Russia side by side with the golden calf itself.
Meanwhile the position of the Sultan is becoming every hour more difficult and complicated. His financial embarrassments increase the more, as he bears all burdens, without reaping any of the good chances, of war. Popular enthusiasm turns round upon him for want of being directed against the Tsar. The fanaticism of the Mussulman threatens him with palace revolutions, while the fanaticism of the Greek menaces him with popular insurrections. The papers of today contain reports of a conspiracy directed against the Sultan’s life by Mussulman students belonging to the old Turkish party, who wanted to place Abdul-Aziz on the throne.
To sum up the Eastern Question in a few words. The Tsar, vexed and dissatisfied at seeing his immense empire confined to one sole port of export, and that even situated in a sea unnavigable through one half of the year, and assailable by Englishmen through the other half, is pushing the design of his ancestors, to get access to the Mediterranean; he is separating, one after the other, the remotest members of the Ottoman Empire from its main body, till at last Constantinople, the heart, must cease to beat. He repeats his periodical invasions as often as he thinks his designs on Turkey endangered by the apparent consolidation of the Turkish government, or by the more dangerous symptoms of self-emancipation manifest amongst the Slavonians. Counting on the cowardice and apprehensions of the Western powers, he bullies Europe, and pushes his demands as far as possible, in order to appear magnanimous afterwards, by contenting himself with what he immediately wanted.
The Western powers, on the other hand, inconsistent, pusillanimous, suspecting each other, commence by encouraging the Sultan to resist the Tsar, from fear of the encroachments of Russia, and terminate by compelling the former to yield, from fear of a general war giving rise to a general revolution. Too impotent and too timid to undertake the reconstruction of the Ottoman Empire by the establishment of a Greek Empire, or of a Federal Republic of Slavonic States, all they aim at is to maintain the status quo, that is, the state of putrefaction which forbids the Sultan to emancipate himself from the Tsar, and the Slavonians to emancipate themselves from the Sultan.
The revolutionary party can only congratulate itself on this state of things. The humiliation of the reactionary Western governments, and their manifest impotency to guard the interests of European civilisation against Russian encroachment, cannot fail to work out a wholesome indignation in the people who have suffered themselves, since 1849, to be subjected to the rule of counter-revolution. The approaching industrial crisis, also, is affected, and accelerated quite as much by this semi-Eastern complication as by the completely Eastern complication of China. While the prices of corn are rising, business in general is suspended, at the same time that the rate of exchange is setting against England, and gold is beginning to flow to the Continent. The stock of bullion in the Bank of France has fallen off between 9 June and 14 July to the extent of £2,200,000, which is more than the entire augmentation which had taken place during the preceding three months.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 5 August 1853.
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It is our policy to see that nothing new happens during the next four months, and I hope we shall accomplish it, because men in general prefer waiting; but the fifth must be fruitful in events.
Thus wrote Count Pozzo di Borgo on 28 November 1828, to Count Nesselrode, and Count Nesselrode is now acting on the same maxim. While the military assumption of the Principalities was completed by the assumption of their civil government by the Russians, while troops after troops are pouring into Bessarabia and the Crimea, a hint has been given to Austria that her mediation might be accepted, and another to Bonaparte that his proposals were likely to meet with a favourable reception from the Tsar. The Ministers at Paris and London were comforted with the prospect that Nicholas would condescend definitely to accept their excuses. All the Courts of Europe, transformed into so many Sultanas, were anxiously awaiting which of them the magnanimous Commander of the Faithful would throw his handkerchief to. Having kept them in this manner for weeks, many for months, in suspense, Nicholas suddenly makes the declaration that neither England, nor France, nor Austria, nor Prussia, has any business in his quarrel with Turkey, and that with Turkey alone he could negotiate. It was probably in order to facilitate his negotiations with Turkey that he recalled his Embassy from Constantinople. But while he declares that the powers are not to meddle in Russia’s concerns, we are informed, on the other hand, that the representatives of France, England, Austria and Prussia kill their time by meeting in conference at Vienna, and in hatching projects for the arrangement of the Eastern Question, neither the Turkish nor Russian Ambassador participating in these mock conferences. The Sultan had appointed, on the 8th inst, a warlike Ministry, in order to escape from his armed suspension, but was compelled by Lord Redcliffe to dismiss it on the same evening. He has now been so much confused that he intends to send an Austrian courier to St Petersburg with the mission of asking whether the Tsar would re-enter into direct negotiations. On the return of that courier and the answer he brings will depend whether Reschid Pasha is himself to go to St Petersburg. From St Petersburg he is to send new draft notes to Constantinople; the new draft notes are to be returned to St Petersburg, and nothing will be settled before the last answer is again returned from St Petersburg to Constantinople – and then the fifth month will have arrived, and no fleets can enter the Black Sea; and then the Tsar will quietly remain during the winter in the Principalities, where he pays with the same promises that still circulate there from his former occupations, and as far back as 1820.
You know that the Servian Minister Garaschanin has been removed at the instance of Russia. Russia insists now, following up that first triumph, on all anti-Russian officers being expelled from the service. This measure, in its turn, was intended to be followed by the reigning Prince Alexander being replaced by Prince Michael Obrenowich, the absolute tool of Russia and Russian interest. Prince Alexander, to escape from this calamity, and likewise under the pressure of Austria, has struck against the Sultan, and declared his intention of observing a strict neutrality. The Russian intrigues in Servia are thus described in the Presse of Paris:
Everybody knows that the Russian Consulate at Orsova – a miserable village where not a single Russian subject is to be found, but situated in the midst of a Servian population – is only a poor establishment, yet it is made the hotbed of Muscovite propaganda. The hand of Russia was judiciarily seized and established in the affair of Braila in 1840, and of John Lutzo in 1850, in the affair of the recent arrest of fourteen Russian officers, which arrest became the cause of the resignation of Garaschanin’s Ministry. It is likewise known that Prince Mentschikoff, during his stay at Constantinople, fomented similar intrigues through his agents at Broussa and Smyrna, to those in Thessalonia, Albania and Greece.
There is no more striking feature in the politics of Russia than the traditional identity, not only of her objects, but of her manner of pursuing them. There is no complication of the present Eastern Question, no transaction, no official note, which does not bear the stamp of quotation from known pages of history.
Russia has now no other pretext to urge against the Sultan except the treaty of Kainardji, although that treaty gave her, instead of a Protectorate over her co-religionists, only the right to build a chapel at Stamboul, and to implore the Sultan’s clemency for his Christian subjects, as Reschid Pasha justly urged against the Tsar in his note of the 14th inst. But already in 1774, when that treaty was signed, Russia intended to interpret it one day or the other in the sense of 1853. The then Austrian Internuncio at the Ottoman Porte, Baron Thugut, wrote in the year 1774 to his Court:
Henceforth Russia will always be in a situation to effect, whenever she may deem the opportunity favourable, and without much preliminary arrangement, a descent upon Constantinople from her ports on the Black Sea. In that case a conspiracy concerted in advance with the chiefs of the Greek religion would no doubt burst forth, and it would only remain for the Sultan to quit his palace at the first intelligence of this movement of the Russians, to fly into the depth of Asia, and abandon the throne of European Turkey to a more experienced possessor. When the capital shall have been conquered, terrorism and the faithful assistance of the Greek Christians will indubitably and easily reduce beneath the sceptre of Russia, the whole of the Archipelago, the coast of Asia Minor and all Greece, as far as the shore of the Adriatic. Then the possession of these countries, so much favoured by nature, with which no other part of the world can be compared in respect to the fertility and richness of the soil, will elevate Russia to a degree of superiority surpassing all the fabulous wonders which history relates of the grandeurs of the monarchies of ancient times.
In 1774, as now, Russia was tempting the ambition of Austria with the prospect of Bosnia, Servia and Albania being incorporated with her. The same Baron Thugut writes thus on this subject:
Such aggrandisement of the Austrian territory would not excite the jealousy of Russia. The reason is that the requisition which Austria would make of Bosnia, Servia, etc, although of great importance under other circumstances, would not be of the least utility to Russia, the moment the remainder of the Ottoman Empire should have fallen into her hands. For these provinces are inhabited almost entirely by Mohammedans and Greek Christians: the former would not be tolerated as residents there; the latter, considering the close vicinity of the Oriental Russian Empire, would not hesitate to emigrate thither; or if they remained their faithlessness to Austria would occasion continuous troubles; and thus an extension of territory, without intrinsic strength, so far from augmenting the power of the Emperor of Austria would only serve to weaken it.
Politicians are wont to refer to the Testament of Peter I, in order to show the traditional policy of Russia in general, and particularly with regard to her views on Constantinople. They might have gone back still further. More than eight centuries ago, Sviataslaff, the yet Pagan Grand Duke of Russia, declared in an assembly of his Boyards, that ‘not only Bulgaria, but the Greek Empire in Europe, together with Bohemia and Hungary, ought to undergo the rule of Russia’. Sviataslaff conquered Silistria and threatened Constantinople, AD 769, as Nicholas did in 1828. The Rurik dynasty transferred, soon after the foundation of the Russian Empire, their capital from Novgorod to Kiev, in order to be nearer to Byzantium. In the eleventh century Kiev imitated in all things Constantinople, and was called the second Constantinople, thus expressing the everlasting aspirations of Russia. The religion and civilisation of Russia are of Byzantine off-spring, and that she should have aimed at subduing the Byzantine Empire, then in the same decay as the Ottoman Empire is in now, was more natural than that the German Emperors should have aimed at the conquest of Rome and Italy. The unity, then, in the objects of Russian policy, is given by her historical past, by her geographical conditions, and by her necessity of gaining open seaports in the Archipelago as in the Baltic, if she wants to maintain her supremacy in Europe. But the traditional manner in which Russia pursues those objects is far from meriting that tribute of admiration paid to it by European politicians. If the success of her hereditary policy proves the weakness of the Western powers, the stereotyped mannerism of that policy proves the intrinsic barbarism of Russia herself. Who would not laugh at the idea of French politics being conducted on the Testament of Richelieu, or the Capitularies of Charlemagne? Go through the most celebrated documents of Russian diplomacy, and you will find that shrewd, judicious, cunning, subtle as it is in discovering the weak points of European kings, ministers and courts, its wisdom is at a complete deadlock as often as the historical movements of the Western peoples themselves are concerned. Prince Lieven judged very accurately of the character of the good Aberdeen when he speculated on his connivance with the Tsar, but he was grossly mistaken in his judgement of the English people when he predicted the continuance of Tory rule on the eve of the Reform movement in 1831. Count Pozzo di Borgo judged very correctly of Charles X, but he made the greatest blunder with regard to the French people when he induced his ‘august master’ to treat with that king about the partition of Europe on the eve of his expulsion from France. Russian policy, with its traditional craft, cheats and subterfuges, may impose upon the European Courts which are themselves but traditional things, but it will prove utterly powerless with the revolutionised peoples.
At Beirut the Americans have abstracted another Hungarian refugee from the claws of the Austrian eagle. It is cheering to see the American intervention in Europe beginning just with the Eastern Question. Besides the commercial and military importance resulting from the situation of Constantinople, there are other important considerations, making its possession the hotly controverted and permanent subject of dispute between the East and the West – and America is the youngest and most vigorous representative of the West.
Constantinople is the eternal city – the Rome of the East. Under the ancient Greek Emperors, Eastern civilisation amalgamated there so far with Western civilisation, as to make this centre of a theoretical Empire the effectual bar against European progress. When the Greek Emperors were turned out by the Sultans of Iconium, the genius of the ancient Byzantine Empire survived this change of dynasties, and if the Sultan were to be supplanted by the Tsar, the Bas-Empire would be restored to life with more demoralising influences than under the ancient Emperors, and with more aggressive power than under the Sultan. The Tsar would be for Byzantine civilisation what Russian adventurers were for centuries to the Emperors of the Lower Empire – the Corps de garde of their soldiers. The struggle between Western Europe and Russia about the possession of Constantinople involves the question whether Byzantinism is to fall before Western civilisation, or whether its antagonism shall revive in a more terrible and conquering form than ever before. Constantinople is the golden bridge thrown between the West and the East, and Western civilisation cannot, like the sun, go round the world without passing that bridge; and it cannot pass it without a struggle with Russia. The Sultan holds Constantinople only in trust for the Revolution, and the present nominal dignitaries of Western Europe, themselves finding the last stronghold of their ‘order’ on the shores of the Neva, can do nothing but keep the question in suspense until Russia has to meet her real antagonist, the Revolution. The Revolution which will break the Rome of the West will also overpower the demoniac influences of the Rome of the East.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 12 August 1853.
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Those readers who have followed with any attention the expositions which from time to time The Tribune has given of the Eastern Question, will not be surprised at the exhibit which our statement of yesterday makes of the great lever of Russian aggrandisement. They will have learned before that the idea of Russian diplomatic supremacy owes its efficacy to the imbecility and the timidity of the Western nations, and that the belief in Russia’s superior military power is hardly less a delusion. But they were, perhaps, scarcely prepared for the strong and sudden light in which our informant held up this phantasm as an element relied upon in the calculations of the Imperial government. Bully Turkey and her supporters – France and England – we are told, was relied on to the last by the Tsar as sufficient to bend them to his demands. Accordingly, instead of sending into the Principalities a force of 120,000 men, as we were first informed had been done, or of 70,000, which we afterwards assured was the whole number, we now learn that he sent only 50,000, or the army corps of General Dannenberg alone – a fact there was reason to suspect before, since no other general commanding an army corps has been heard of in any of the actions fought there, and it is well known that long after hostilities began neither Luders nor Osten-Sacken had crossed the Pruth. The same state of facts has also been indicated by the disgrace of Mentschikoff, reported from Sweden and Paris, and most conclusively confirmed by our informant, and by the Prince’s setting off in a most inclement season of the year, as a courier, to convey to the Tsar the news of Nachimoff’s victory over the squadron of Omer Pasha. When a man of seventy years of age voluntarily undertakes such a journey, riding night and day, there can be no doubt that he has some most imperative reason for propitiating the favour of the monarch.
But the great point is that Nicholas has perfectly relied upon bullying Turkey and her allies. This has been manifest throughout the affair, though never before avowed by any authority claiming to express the feeling of the Russian Court itself. It has been a bullying business all along. The appearance and conduct of Mentschikoff at Constantinople were simply those of a bully; the manifestoes of Nesselrode were the menaces of a bully; and the entry of Gortschakoff into the Principalities with a single army corps was nothing but the bold presumption of a bully. It has all justified by the result. England, especially, has been imposed on. She has been bullied, and is so still. She has not dared to declare her soul to be her own from the beginning to the present day. France, too, has been bullied, though not so seriously. But both together have been frightened out of the only policy which could at once have guaranteed the preservation of peace, while maintaining their own respectability. To the arrogance of the Autocrat they have replied with symptoms of cowardice. They have encouraged the very assumptions they have deprecated, just as poltroons always encourage bullies to be overbearing. If, at the outset, they had used a manly style of language adequate to the position they hold, and the pretensions they set up before the world; if they had proved that bluster and swagger could not impose on them, the Autocrat would not only have refrained from attempting it, but would have entertained for them a very different feeling from that contempt which must now animate his bosom. At that time, to show that they seriously meant to preserve Turkey intact, and were ready to back up their intention with the last reason of kings – fleets and armies, was the sure means of maintaining peace. There is only one way to deal with a power like Russia, and that is the fearless way.
It is not to be denied that Turkey, the weak state, has shown more true courage, as well as more wise statesmanship, than either of her powerful allies. She has risen to the height of the occasion; they have cowered beneath it. She has rejected the demands of her hereditary foe, not with braggadocio, but with grave and worthy earnestness and dignity; they have faltered and sought to evade the crisis. She has acted with decision; they have prevented her from acting with effect. For we may justly attribute the delays and hesitation shown in the manoeuvres of Omer Pasha to the paralysing and temporising influence of Lord Redcliffe and M de la Cour, over the Divan. At the moment when he was opening the campaign, they procured orders to be sent to him to delay the beginning of hostilities. Just when he was surprising Europe by advantages gained over the enemy, they prepared new terms of mediation and asked for an armistice. Thus at every step they have exhibited that dread of Russia on which we are assured the Emperor and his advisers have continually placed their dependence. They have been bullied, and have accordingly done their utmost to bring on the very evil they are so afraid of. If there be a general war, it will not be the fault of Turkey, but next to Russia, of France and England. They might have prevented it infallibly, but they did not.
As matters now stand we incline to follow our wishes and predict peace. The decision rests with the Tsar, and peace is his interest. The prestige of his diplomacy and the renown of his arms can be maintained in peace much more easily and safely than in war. The naval success of Nachimoff enables him to cease fighting with more than an equal share of victory on his side. A general breaking up of Europe has its possibility of loss and even of destruction for him as well as for Turkey, while even if he triumphs, it must be at a far heavier cost than that of his recent vast acquisitions of power and influence. The bullying system is much less expensive than actual warfare, as we see illustrated in the small army under Gortschakoff. There is, then, a considerable chance that some one of the schemes of mediation already on foot, or to be generated during the winter, may be fixed on. Then the work of Russian encroachments in Europe will once again be confined to the slower but surer processes of diplomacy and intrigue, animated by unscrupulous arrogance on one side, and aided by weakness and pusillanimity on the other. In view of such a possibility it is impossible not to agree with Mr Douglas when he assigns to Russia the attributes of the future, and to Western Europe those of the past. There is an energy and vigour in that despotic government and that barbarous race which we seek in vain among the monarchies of the older states. But if we look a little deeper into the cause of this relative weakness, we find it full of encouragement. Western Europe is feeble and timid because her governments feel that they are outgrown and no longer believed in by their people. The nations are beyond their rulers, and trust in them no more. It is not that they are really imbecile, but that there is new wine working in the old bottles. With a worthier and more equal social state, with the abolition of caste and privilege, with free political constitutions, unfettered industry and emancipated thought, the people of the West will rise again to power and unity of purpose, while the Russian Colossus itself will be shattered by the progress of the masses and the explosive force of ideas. There is no good reason to fear the conquest of Europe by the Cossacks. The very divisions and apparent weakness which would seem to render such an event easy are the sure pledge of its impossibility.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 30 December 1853.
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A certain class of writers have been wont to attribute to the Emperor of Russia the possession of extraordinary powers of mind, and especially of that far-reaching, comprehensive judgement which marks the really great statesman. It is difficult to see how such illusions could be derived from any truthful view of his character, or from any part of his history; but the most obstinate of his admirers must, we think, now question the justice of their conclusions. Russia is now in a difficult and most humiliating position. Her armies are defeated in Turkey, and, after immense losses of men and means, are retreating within her own frontiers; her possessions in Asia, the fruit of many years’ effort and vast expenditure, are partly lost and wholly imperilled; her foreign commerce is destroyed, and her home industry injured by turning the national attention and the people’s energies to a useless and disastrous war; her navy is imprisoned, and her fortresses menaced; and she must even regard as an advantage an intervention which, whatever its other benefits, interposes an effectual barrier to the realisation of her ambitious dreams, and renders impossible a renewal of her attack on Turkey, because that would involve a direct collision with Germany, as well as with the Western powers. And all this is the work of this great statesman and wise ruler Nicholas I. Praise of this headstrong imperial blunderer’s mental gifts must hereafter be considerably qualified, if indulged in at all.
The defeat at Silistria is not enough to destroy the reputation of the Tsar, or of his army, any more than the defeat at Oltenitza, Tchetalea or Karakul, for a defeat is something that the wisest foresight and the most complete preparations cannot always prevent. But apart from this there is a fact which stands out with greater prominence than any other in the whole course of the late remarkable siege and the Russian retreat which followed it. It is this – that the Russian army, with its enormous numbers and its whole swarms of officers, cannot afford leaders to take the place of Paskevitch, Gortschakoff, being each over seventy, and Luders, the youngest, being over sixty – and likely as they were to die a natural death any day; such is the narrowness and imbecility of the system on which the Tsar has managed his vast military establishment that we can affirm it as a positive and undeniable fact, that there is hardly a single officer who could step into the vacated place of either of these generals, and carry with him confidence of the army and the nation. For years the Emperor, with an unaccountable blindness which seemed, indeed, to fall little short of stupidity, has directed his efforts to the real injury and depression of the service for whose improvement and perfection he fancied he was doing the utmost. Thus he has limited promotion to mere parade martinets, whose principal merit consists in stolid obedience and ready servility, added to accuracy of eyesight in detecting a fault in the buttons and button-holes of the uniform – constantly preferring such sticks to men of real military ability and intellectual superiority. Years of the dullest service, such as garrison duty and daily parade, and not youth, activity and the study and acquirement of military science, have been the exclusive titles to the Tsar’s favour and to advancement. Thus the army is commanded on the average by old valetudinarians, or by ignorant corporals, who might manage a platoon, but have not brains and knowledge enough to direct the extensive and complicated movements of a campaign.
The same narrow-mindedness and presumption appear throughout the Tsar’s whole management of this Eastern Question. Everyone can now see that he began the war in an unwise and inadequate manner. Indeed, his very first military demonstration was totally absurd and unequal to the purpose in hand. He ought to have known that Europe would not allow the destruction of Turkey, and should, therefore, either have kept quiet, biding his time, or have crossed the Pruth, not with between forty and fifty thousand men, as he did last year, when during the whole winter he had only one army corps in the Principalities, but should have pounced at once with his most powerful masses upon Turkey, reaching across the Balkans before the Turks could have gathered together their scattered forces, and before the Western powers could have combined in their opposition and sent fleets of troops. To strike by surprise and terror ought to have been his aim, instead of engaging in such an imbecile manner his nation in a gigantic struggle. But Nicholas is growing old, and has all the faults of decrepit age. One of the reasons which prevented him from putting all his resources into action at once was that he feared the cost of such an effort. Now he will lose a hundred times as much money, and without results. Penny-wisdom in such an affair is no wisdom at all.
When the Russian forces first crossed the Pruth, the Tsar had no doubt – as we happened to know and took occasion to state at the time – that he could bully all Europe, and reap laurels at small expense. His diplomatic agents, too, encouraged him in this foolish opinion. The most mischievous of these accessories to the Great Russian blunder has proved to be the Russian Minister at Paris, Kisseleff, whose dispatches were full of the most satisfactory accounts concerning the friendly and pacific intentions of Louis Napoleon. Kisseleff having resided for more than twenty-eight years in the French capital, very naturally dreaded the idea of being recalled from the position where he led an epicurean life. The Tsar, accordingly, who delights to read adulatory and flattering reports from his agents, caught at the first bait, and any dispatch smelling of a disagreeable truth from any quarter was discredited, treated with contempt, and did nothing but injury with the Autocrat to the faithful and able diplomatist sending it. Thus nearly all the Russian diplomatic reports were full of encomiums on the Imperial sagacity, to which Europe bowed, as they assured his Majesty, with respect and admiration. In one word we are able to affirm that, since 1851, Nicholas has never had laid before him a truthful account of the state of Europe, and of the feelings of the other governments towards him and Russia; and if his numerous agents misled him in such a manner, the reason was that this was the most, nay the only, palatable dish for his political appetite. He craved universal adulation; now he tastes its bitter and poisonous fruits.
We do not put any faith in the rumour of his abdication, a thing totally impossible and unwarranted; but, on the other hand, only a miracle can extricate him from the difficulties now heaped on him and Russia by his pride, shallowness and imbecility.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 11 July 1854.
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With the middle classes both of France and England this war is decidedly unpopular. With the French bourgeoisie it was so from the beginning, because this class has been ever since 2 December in full opposition against the government of the ‘saviour of society’. In England the middle class was divided. The great bulk had transferred their national hatred from the French to the Russians, and although John Bull can do a little annexation business himself now and then in India, he has no idea of allowing other people to do the same in other neighbourhoods in an uncomfortable proximity to himself or his possessions. Russia was the country which in this respect had long since attracted his anxious notice. The enormously increasing British trade to the Levant, and through Trebizond to Inner Asia, makes the free navigation of the Dardanelles a point of the highest importance to England. The growing value of the Danubian countries as granaries forbids England to allow their gradual absorption into Russia, and the closing of the navigation of the Danube by the same power. Russian grains form already a too important item in British consumption, and an annexation of the corn-producing frontier countries by Russia would make Great Britain entirely dependent upon her and the United States, while it would establish these two countries as the regulators of the corn-market of the world. Besides, there are always some vague and alarming rumours afloat about Russian progress in Central Asia, got up by interested Indian politicians or terrified visionaries, and credited by the general geographical ignorance of the British public. Thus, when Russia began her aggression upon Turkey, the national hatred broke forth in a blaze, and never, perhaps, was a war so popular as this. The peace party was for a moment interdicted from speaking; even the mass of its own members went along with the popular current. Whoever knew the character of the English must have felt certain that this warlike enthusiasm could be of but short duration, at least so far as the middle class was concerned; as soon as the effects of the war should become taxable upon their pockets, mercantile sense was sure to overcome national pride, and the loss of immediate individual profits was sure to outweigh the certainty of losing gradually great national advantages. The Peelites, adverse to the war, not so much out of real love of peace as from a narrowness and timidity of mind which holds in horror all great crises and all decisive action, did their best to hasten the great moment when every British merchant and manufacturer could calculate to a farthing what the war would cost him, individually, per annum. Mr Gladstone, scorning the vulgar idea of a loan, at once doubled the income tax, and stopped financial reform. The result came to light at once. The peace party raised their heads again. John Bright dared popular feeling with his own well-known spirit and tenacity until he succeeded in bringing the manufacturing districts round to him. In London the feeling is still more in favour of the war, but the progress of the peace party is visible even here; besides, it must be recollected that the peace society never at any time commanded any mentionable influence in the capital. Its agitation, however, is increasing in all parts of the country, and another year of doubled taxation, with a loan – for this is now considered to be unavoidable – will break down whatever is left of warlike spirit among the manufacturing and trading classes.
With the mass of the people in both countries, the case is entirely different. The peasantry in France have ever since 1789 been the great supporters of war and warlike glory. They are sure this time not to feel much of the pressure of the war; for the conscription, in a country where the land is infinitesimally subdivided among small proprietors, not only frees the agricultural districts from surplus labour, but also gives to some 20,000 young men every year the opportunity of earning a round sum of money by engaging to serve as substitutes. A protracted war only would be felt. As to war taxes, the Emperor cannot impose them upon the peasantry without risking his crown and his life. His only means of maintaining Bonapartism among them is to buy them up by freedom from war taxation, and thus for some years to come they may be exempted from this sort of pressure. In England the case is similar. Agricultural labour is generally oversupplied, and furnishes the mass of soldiery, which only at a later period of the war receives a strong admixture of the rowdy class from the town. Trade being tolerably good, and a good many agricultural improvements being carried out when the war began, the quota of agricultural recruits was, in this instance, supplied more sparingly than before, and the town element is decidedly preponderant in the present militia. But even what has been withdrawn had kept wages up, and the sympathy of the villagers is always accompanying soldiers who come from among them, and who are now transformed into heroes. Taxation, in its direct shape, does not touch the small farmers and labourers, and until an increase of indirect imposts can reach them sensibly, several years of war must have passed. Among these people the war enthusiasm is as strong as ever, and there is not a village where is not to be found some new beer-shop with the sign of ‘The Heroes of the Alma’, or some such motto, and where are not in almost every house wonderful prints of Alma, Inkerman, the charge at Balaklava, portraits of Lord Raglan and others, to adorn the walls. But if in France the great preponderance of the small farmers (four-fifths of the population), and their peculiar relation to Louis Napoleon, give to their opinions a great deal of importance, in England that one-third of the population forming the country people has scarcely any influence except as a tail and chorus to the aristocratic landed proprietors.
The industrial working population has in both countries almost the same peculiar position with regard to this war. Both British and French proletarians are filled with an honourable national spirit, though they are more or less free from the antiquated national prejudices common in both countries to the peasantry. They have little immediate interest in the war, save that if the victories of their countrymen flatter their national pride, the conduct of the war, foolhardy and presumptuous as regards France, timid and stupid as regards England, offers them a fair opportunity of agitating against the existing governments and governing classes. But the main point with them is this: that this war, coinciding with a commercial crisis, only the first developments of which have, as yet, been seen, conducted by hands and heads unequal to the task, gaining at the same time European dimensions, will and must bring about events which will enable the proletarian class to resume that position which they lost to France by the battle of June 1848, and that not only as far as France is concerned, but for all Central Europe, England included.
In France, indeed, there can be no doubt that every fresh revolutionary storm must bring sooner or later the working class to power; in England things are fast approaching a similar state. There is an aristocracy willing to carry on the war, but unfit to do so, and completely put to the blush by last winter’s mismanagement. There is a middle class unwilling to carry on that war which cannot be put a stop to, sacrificing everything to peace, and thereby proclaiming their own incapacity to govern England. If events turn out the one, with its different fractions, and do not admit the other, there remain but two classes upon which power can devolve – the petty bourgeoisie, the small trading class, whose want of energy and decision has shown itself on every occasion when it was called upon to come from words to deeds – and the working class, which has been constantly reproached with showing far too much energy and decision when proceeding to action as a class.
Which of these classes will be the one to carry England through the present struggle, and the complications about to arise from it?
Originally published in New York Tribune, 27 April 1855.
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(From Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, edited by Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz, and published by George Allen and Unwin, London, 1953, pp 121-202. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.)
Reading the past through the present: Marx and Engels on the Crimean War
Let us rather observe this lad of ten, clad in an ancient cap, his father’s probably, shoes worn on bare feet, and nankeen breeches, held up by a single suspender, who had climbed over the wall at the very beginning of the truce, and has been roaming about the ravine, staring with dull curiosity at the French, and at the bodies which are lying on the earth, and plucking the blue wild-flowers with which the valley is studded. On his way home with a large bouquet, he held his nose because of the odor which the wind wafted to him, and paused beside a pile of corpses, which had been carried off the field, and stared long at one terrible headless body, which chanced to be the nearest to him. After standing there for a long while, he stepped[Pg 120] up closer, and touched with his foot the stiffened arm of the corpse which protruded. The arm swayed a little. He touched it again, and with more vigor. The arm swung back, and then fell into place again. And at once the boy uttered a shriek, hid his face in the flowers, and ran off to the fortifications as fast as he could go.
Yes, white flags are hung out from the bastion and the trenches, the flowery vale is filled with dead bodies, the splendid sun sinks into the blue sea, and the blue sea undulates and glitters in the golden rays of the sun. Thousands of people congregate, gaze, talk, and smile at each other. And why do not Christian people, who profess the one great law of love and self-sacrifice, when they behold what they have wrought, fall in repentance upon their knees before Him who, when he gave them life, implanted in the soul of each of them, together with a fear of death, a love of the good and the beautiful, and, with tears of joy and happiness, embrace each other like brothers? No! But it is a comfort to think that it was not we who began this war, that we are only defending our own country, our father-land. The white flags have been hauled in, and again the weapons of death and suffering are shrieking; again innocent blood is shed, and groans and curses are audible.
Leo Tolstoy, The Sebastopol Sketches
History does not repeat itself and analogies between past and present events are only certain when the events are treated as static and closed, and therefore susceptible to unthinking identification. Yet if we take the word in its original Greek sense, then analogy is a form of thinking, of reasoning, based on significant similarities between things and events across space and time; similarities which do not erase differences.
It is with this in mind that we share a selection of articles for the New York Tribune written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on the Crimean War of October 1853 – February 1856, with Russia’s current war in the Ukraine before us.
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Russia is decidedly a conquering nation, and was so for a century, until the great movement of 1789 called into potent activity an antagonist of formidable nature. We mean the European Revolution, the explosive force of democratic ideas and man’s native thirst for freedom. Since that epoch there have been in reality but two powers on the continent of Europe – Russia and Absolutism, the Revolution and Democracy. For the moment the Revolution seems to be suppressed, but it lives and is feared as deeply as ever. Witness the terror of the reaction at the news of the late rising at Milan. But let Russia get possession of Turkey, and her strength is increased nearly half, and she becomes superior to all the rest of Europe put together. Such an event would be an unspeakable calamity to the revolutionary cause. The maintenance of Turkish independence, or, in case of a possible dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the arrest of the Russian scheme of annexation, is a matter of the highest moment. In this instance the interests of the revolutionary Democracy and of England go hand in hand. Neither can permit the Tsar to make Constantinople one of his capitals, and we shall find that when driven to the wall, the one will resist him as determinedly as the other.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 12 April 1853.
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It is only of late that people in the west of Europe and in America have been enabled to form anything like a correct judgement of Turkish affairs. Up to the Greek insurrection Turkey was, to all intents and purposes, a terra incognita, and the common notions floating about among the public were based more upon the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment than upon any historical facts. Official diplomatic functionaries, having been on the spot, boasted a more accurate knowledge; but this, too, amounted to nothing, as none of these officials ever troubled himself to learn Turkish, South Slavonian or modern Greek, and they were one and all dependent upon the interested accounts of Greek interpreters and Frank merchants. Besides, intrigues of every sort were always on hand to occupy the time of these lounging diplomatists, among whom Joseph von Hammer, the German historian of Turkey, forms the only honourable exception. The business of these gentlemen was not with the people, the institutions, the social state of the country: it was exclusively with the court, and especially with the Fanariote Greeks, wily mediators between two parties, either of which was equally ignorant of the real condition, power and resources of the other. The traditional notions and opinions, founded upon such paltry information, formed for a long while and, strange to say, form to a great extent, even now, the groundwork for all the action of Western diplomacy with regard to Turkey.
But while England, France and, for a long time, even Austria, were groping in the dark for a defined Eastern policy, another power outwitted them all. Russia, herself semi-Asiatic, in her condition, manners, traditions and institutions, found men enough who could comprehend the real state and character of Turkey. Her religion was the same as that of nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Turkey in Europe; her language almost identical with that of seven millions of Turkish subjects; and the well-known facility with which a Russian learns to converse in, if not fully to appropriate, a foreign tongue made it an easy matter for her agents, well paid for the task, to acquaint themselves completely with Turkish affairs. Thus at a very early period the Russian government availed itself of its exceedingly favourable position in the south-east of Europe. Hundreds of Russian agents perambulated Turkey, pointing out to the Greek Christians the orthodox Emperor as the head, the natural protector and the ultimate liberator of the oppressed Eastern Church, and to the South Slavonians especially, pointing out that same emperor as the almighty Tsar, who was sooner or later to unite all the branches of the great Slav race under one sceptre, and to make them the ruling race of Europe. The clergy of the Greek Church very soon formed themselves into a vast conspiracy for the spread of these ideas. The Servian insurrection of 1809, the Greek rising in 1821, were more or less directly urged on by Russian gold and Russian influence; and wherever among the Turkish pashas the standard of revolt was raised against the Central government Russian intrigues and Russian funds were never wanting; and when thus internal Turkish questions had entirely perplexed the understanding of Western diplomatists, who knew no more about the real subject than about the man in the moon, then war was declared, Russian armies marched towards the Balkans, and portion by portion the Ottoman Empire was dismembered.
It is true that during the last thirty years much has been done towards general enlightenment concerning the state of Turkey. German philologists and critics have made us acquainted with its history and literature; English residents and English trade have collected a great deal of information as to the social condition of the Empire. But the diplomatic wiseacres seem to scorn all this, and to cling as obstinately as possible to the traditions engendered by the study of Eastern fairy-tales, improved upon by the no less wonderful accounts given by the most corrupt set of Greek mercenaries that ever existed.
And what has been the natural result? That in all essential points Russia has steadily, one after another, gained her ends, thanks to the ignorance, dullness and consequent inconsistency and cowardice of Western governments. From the battle of Navarino to the present Eastern crisis, the action of the Western powers has either been annihilated by squabbles among themselves – mostly arising from their common ignorance of Eastern matters, and from petty jealousies which must have been entirely incomprehensible to any Eastern understanding – or that action has been in the direct interest of Russia alone. And not only do the Greeks, both of Greece and Turkey, and the Slavonians, look to Russia as their natural protector; nay, even the government at Constantinople, despairing, time after time, to make its actual wants and real position understood by these Western ambassadors, who pride themselves upon their own utter incompetency to judge by their own eyes of Turkish matters, this very Turkish government has, in every instance, been obliged to throw itself upon the mercy of Russia, and to seek protection from that power which openly avows its firm intention to drive every Turk across the Bosphorus, and plant the cross of St Andrew upon the minarets of the Aya-Sofiyah.
In spite of diplomatic tradition, these constant and successful encroachments of Russia have at last roused in the Western cabinets of Europe a very dim and distant apprehension of the approaching danger. This apprehension has resulted in the great diplomatic nostrum, that the maintenance of the status quo in Turkey is a necessary condition of the peace of the world. The magniloquent incapacity of certain modern statesmen could not have confessed its ignorance and helplessness more plainly than in this axiom which, from always having remained a dead letter, has, during the short period of twenty years, been hallowed by tradition, and become as hoary and indisputable as King John’s Magna Carta. Maintain the status quo! Why, it was precisely to maintain the status quo that Russia stirred up Servia to revolt, made Greece independent, appropriated to herself the protectorate of Moldavia and Wallachia, and retained part of Armenia! England and France never stirred an inch when all this was done, and the only time they did move was to protect, in 1849, not Turkey, but the Hungarian refugees. In the eyes of European diplomacy, and even of the European press, the whole Eastern Question resolves itself into this dilemma; either the Russians at Constantinople, or the maintenance of the status quo – anything besides this alternative never enters their thoughts.
Look at the London press for illustration. We find The Times advocating the dismemberment of Turkey, and proclaiming the unfitness of the Turkish race to govern any longer in that beautiful corner of Europe. Skilful, as usual, The Times boldly attacks the old diplomatic tradition of the status quo, and declares its continuance impossible. The whole of the talent at the disposal of that paper is exerted to show this impossibility under different aspects, and to enlist British sympathies for a new crusade against the remnant of the Saracens. The merit of such an unscrupulous attack upon a time-hallowed and unmeaning phrase which two months ago was as yet sacred to The Times is undeniable. But whoever knows that paper knows also that this unwonted boldness is applied directly in the interest of Russia and Austria. The correct premises put forth in its columns as to the utter impossibility of maintaining Turkey in its present state serve no other purpose than to prepare the British public and the world for the moment when the principal paragraph of the will of Peter the Great – the conquest of the Bosphorus – will have become an accomplished fact.
The opposite opinion is represented by The Daily News, the organ of the Liberals. The Times, at least, seizes a new and correct feature of the question, in order afterwards to pervert it to an interested purpose. In the columns of the Liberal journal, on the other hand, reigns the plainest sense, but merely a sort of household sense. Indeed, it does not see farther than the very threshold of its own house. It clearly perceives that a dismemberment of Turkey under the present circumstances must bring the Russians to Constantinople, and that this would be a great misfortune for England; that it would threaten the peace of the world, ruin the Black Sea trade, and necessitate new armaments in the British stations and fleets of the Mediterranean. And in consequence The Daily News exerts itself to arouse the indignation and fear of the British public. Is not the partition of Turkey a crime equal to the partition of Poland? Have not the Christians more religious liberty in Turkey than in Austria and Russia? Is not the Turkish government a mild, paternal government, which allows the different nations and creeds and local corporations to regulate their own affairs? Is not Turkey a paradise compared with Austria and Russia? Are not life and property safe there? And is not British trade with Turkey larger than that with Austria and Russia put together, and does it not increase every year? And then goes on in dithyrambic strain, so far as The Daily News can be dithyrambic, with an apotheosis of Turkey, the Turks and everything Turkish, which must appear quite incomprehensible to most of its readers.
The key to this strange enthusiasm for the Turks is to be found in the works of David Urquhart, Esq, MP. This gentleman, of Scotch birth, with mediaeval and patriarchal recollections of home, and with a modem British civilised education, after having fought three years in Greece against the Turks, passed into their country and was the first thus to enamour himself of them. The romantic Highlander found himself at home again in the mountain ravines of the Pindus and Balkans, and his works on Turkey, although full of valuable information, may be summed up in the following three paradoxes, which are laid down almost literally thus: If Mr Urquhart were not a British subject, he would decidedly prefer being a Turk; if he were not a Presbyterian Calvinist, he would not belong to any other religion than Islamism; and thirdly, Britain and Turkey are the only two countries in the world which enjoy self-government and civil and religious liberty. This same Urquhart has since become the great Eastern authority for all English Liberals who object to Palmerston, and it is he who supplies The Daily News with the materials for these panegyrics upon Turkey.
The only argument which deserves a moment’s notice upon this side of the question is this: ‘It is said that Turkey is decaying; but where is the decay? Is not civilisation rapidly spreading in Turkey and trade extending? Where you see nothing but decay our statistics prove nothing but progress.’ Now it would be a great fallacy to put down the increasing Black Sea trade to the credit of Turkey alone; and yet this is done here, exactly as if the industrial and commercial capabilities of Holland, the high road to the greater part of Germany, were to be measured by her gross exports and imports, nine-tenths of which represent a mere transit. And yet, what every statistician would immediately, in the case of Holland, treat as a clumsy concoction, the whole of the Liberal press of England, including the learned Economist, tries, in the case of Turkey, to impose upon public credulity. And then, who are the traders in Turkey? Certainly not the Turks. Their way of promoting trade, when they were yet in their original nomadic state, consisted in robbing caravans; and now that they are a little more civilised it consists in all sorts of arbitrary and oppressive exactions. Remove all the Turks out of Europe, and trade will have no reason to suffer. And as to progress in general civilisation, who are they that carry out that progress in all parts of European Turkey? Not the Turks, for they are few and far between, and can hardly be said to be settled anywhere except in Constantinople and two or three small country districts. It is the Greek and Slavonic middle class in all the towns and trading posts who are the real support of whatever civilisation is effectually imported into the country. That part of the population is constantly rising in wealth and influence, and the Turks are more and more driven into the background. Were it not for their monopoly of civil and military power they would soon disappear. But that monopoly has become impossible for the future, and their power is turned into impotence except for obstructions in the way of progress. The fact is, they must be got rid of. To say that they cannot be got rid of except by putting Russians and Austrians in their place means as much as to say that the present political constitution of Europe will last for ever. Who will make such an assertion?
Originally published in New York Tribune, 19 April 1853.
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The Tsar has not only commenced war, he has already terminated his first campaign. The line of operations is no longer behind the Pruth, but along the Danube. Meanwhile, what are the Western powers about? They counsel, that is, compel, the Sultan to consider the war as peace. Their answers to the acts of the Autocrat are not cannons, but notes. The Emperor is assailed, not by the two fleets, but by no less than four projects of negotiation: one emanating from the English Cabinet, the other from the French, the third presented by Austria, and the fourth improvised by the ‘brother-in-law’ of Potsdam. The Tsar, it is hoped, will consent to select from this embarras de richesses that which is most suitable to his purposes. The (second) reply of M Drouyn de l’Huys to the (second) note of Count Nesselrode takes infinite pains to prove that ‘it was not England and France who made the first demonstration’. Russia only throws out so many notes to the Western diplomats, like bones to dogs, in order to set them at an innocent amusement, while she reaps the advantage of further gaining time. England and France, of course, catch the bait…
The English press has lost all countenance. ‘The Tsar cannot comprehend the courtesy which the Western powers have shown to him… He is incapable of courteous demeanour in his transactions with other powers.’ So says The Morning Advertiser. The Morning Post is exasperated because the Tsar takes so little note of the internal embarras of his opponents:
To have put forward, in the mere wantonness of insolence, a claim that possessed no character of immediate urgency, and to have done so without any reference to the inflammable state of Europe, was an indiscretion almost incredible.
The writer of the Money Market article in The Economist finds out ‘that men discover now to their cost how inconvenient it is that all the most secret interests of the world [that is, of the Exchange] are dependent upon the vagaries of one man’.
Yet in 1848 and 1849 you could see the bust of the Emperor of Russia side by side with the golden calf itself.
Meanwhile the position of the Sultan is becoming every hour more difficult and complicated. His financial embarrassments increase the more, as he bears all burdens, without reaping any of the good chances, of war. Popular enthusiasm turns round upon him for want of being directed against the Tsar. The fanaticism of the Mussulman threatens him with palace revolutions, while the fanaticism of the Greek menaces him with popular insurrections. The papers of today contain reports of a conspiracy directed against the Sultan’s life by Mussulman students belonging to the old Turkish party, who wanted to place Abdul-Aziz on the throne.
To sum up the Eastern Question in a few words. The Tsar, vexed and dissatisfied at seeing his immense empire confined to one sole port of export, and that even situated in a sea unnavigable through one half of the year, and assailable by Englishmen through the other half, is pushing the design of his ancestors, to get access to the Mediterranean; he is separating, one after the other, the remotest members of the Ottoman Empire from its main body, till at last Constantinople, the heart, must cease to beat. He repeats his periodical invasions as often as he thinks his designs on Turkey endangered by the apparent consolidation of the Turkish government, or by the more dangerous symptoms of self-emancipation manifest amongst the Slavonians. Counting on the cowardice and apprehensions of the Western powers, he bullies Europe, and pushes his demands as far as possible, in order to appear magnanimous afterwards, by contenting himself with what he immediately wanted.
The Western powers, on the other hand, inconsistent, pusillanimous, suspecting each other, commence by encouraging the Sultan to resist the Tsar, from fear of the encroachments of Russia, and terminate by compelling the former to yield, from fear of a general war giving rise to a general revolution. Too impotent and too timid to undertake the reconstruction of the Ottoman Empire by the establishment of a Greek Empire, or of a Federal Republic of Slavonic States, all they aim at is to maintain the status quo, that is, the state of putrefaction which forbids the Sultan to emancipate himself from the Tsar, and the Slavonians to emancipate themselves from the Sultan.
The revolutionary party can only congratulate itself on this state of things. The humiliation of the reactionary Western governments, and their manifest impotency to guard the interests of European civilisation against Russian encroachment, cannot fail to work out a wholesome indignation in the people who have suffered themselves, since 1849, to be subjected to the rule of counter-revolution. The approaching industrial crisis, also, is affected, and accelerated quite as much by this semi-Eastern complication as by the completely Eastern complication of China. While the prices of corn are rising, business in general is suspended, at the same time that the rate of exchange is setting against England, and gold is beginning to flow to the Continent. The stock of bullion in the Bank of France has fallen off between 9 June and 14 July to the extent of £2,200,000, which is more than the entire augmentation which had taken place during the preceding three months.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 5 August 1853.
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It is our policy to see that nothing new happens during the next four months, and I hope we shall accomplish it, because men in general prefer waiting; but the fifth must be fruitful in events.
Thus wrote Count Pozzo di Borgo on 28 November 1828, to Count Nesselrode, and Count Nesselrode is now acting on the same maxim. While the military assumption of the Principalities was completed by the assumption of their civil government by the Russians, while troops after troops are pouring into Bessarabia and the Crimea, a hint has been given to Austria that her mediation might be accepted, and another to Bonaparte that his proposals were likely to meet with a favourable reception from the Tsar. The Ministers at Paris and London were comforted with the prospect that Nicholas would condescend definitely to accept their excuses. All the Courts of Europe, transformed into so many Sultanas, were anxiously awaiting which of them the magnanimous Commander of the Faithful would throw his handkerchief to. Having kept them in this manner for weeks, many for months, in suspense, Nicholas suddenly makes the declaration that neither England, nor France, nor Austria, nor Prussia, has any business in his quarrel with Turkey, and that with Turkey alone he could negotiate. It was probably in order to facilitate his negotiations with Turkey that he recalled his Embassy from Constantinople. But while he declares that the powers are not to meddle in Russia’s concerns, we are informed, on the other hand, that the representatives of France, England, Austria and Prussia kill their time by meeting in conference at Vienna, and in hatching projects for the arrangement of the Eastern Question, neither the Turkish nor Russian Ambassador participating in these mock conferences. The Sultan had appointed, on the 8th inst, a warlike Ministry, in order to escape from his armed suspension, but was compelled by Lord Redcliffe to dismiss it on the same evening. He has now been so much confused that he intends to send an Austrian courier to St Petersburg with the mission of asking whether the Tsar would re-enter into direct negotiations. On the return of that courier and the answer he brings will depend whether Reschid Pasha is himself to go to St Petersburg. From St Petersburg he is to send new draft notes to Constantinople; the new draft notes are to be returned to St Petersburg, and nothing will be settled before the last answer is again returned from St Petersburg to Constantinople – and then the fifth month will have arrived, and no fleets can enter the Black Sea; and then the Tsar will quietly remain during the winter in the Principalities, where he pays with the same promises that still circulate there from his former occupations, and as far back as 1820.
You know that the Servian Minister Garaschanin has been removed at the instance of Russia. Russia insists now, following up that first triumph, on all anti-Russian officers being expelled from the service. This measure, in its turn, was intended to be followed by the reigning Prince Alexander being replaced by Prince Michael Obrenowich, the absolute tool of Russia and Russian interest. Prince Alexander, to escape from this calamity, and likewise under the pressure of Austria, has struck against the Sultan, and declared his intention of observing a strict neutrality. The Russian intrigues in Servia are thus described in the Presse of Paris:
Everybody knows that the Russian Consulate at Orsova – a miserable village where not a single Russian subject is to be found, but situated in the midst of a Servian population – is only a poor establishment, yet it is made the hotbed of Muscovite propaganda. The hand of Russia was judiciarily seized and established in the affair of Braila in 1840, and of John Lutzo in 1850, in the affair of the recent arrest of fourteen Russian officers, which arrest became the cause of the resignation of Garaschanin’s Ministry. It is likewise known that Prince Mentschikoff, during his stay at Constantinople, fomented similar intrigues through his agents at Broussa and Smyrna, to those in Thessalonia, Albania and Greece.
There is no more striking feature in the politics of Russia than the traditional identity, not only of her objects, but of her manner of pursuing them. There is no complication of the present Eastern Question, no transaction, no official note, which does not bear the stamp of quotation from known pages of history.
Russia has now no other pretext to urge against the Sultan except the treaty of Kainardji, although that treaty gave her, instead of a Protectorate over her co-religionists, only the right to build a chapel at Stamboul, and to implore the Sultan’s clemency for his Christian subjects, as Reschid Pasha justly urged against the Tsar in his note of the 14th inst. But already in 1774, when that treaty was signed, Russia intended to interpret it one day or the other in the sense of 1853. The then Austrian Internuncio at the Ottoman Porte, Baron Thugut, wrote in the year 1774 to his Court:
Henceforth Russia will always be in a situation to effect, whenever she may deem the opportunity favourable, and without much preliminary arrangement, a descent upon Constantinople from her ports on the Black Sea. In that case a conspiracy concerted in advance with the chiefs of the Greek religion would no doubt burst forth, and it would only remain for the Sultan to quit his palace at the first intelligence of this movement of the Russians, to fly into the depth of Asia, and abandon the throne of European Turkey to a more experienced possessor. When the capital shall have been conquered, terrorism and the faithful assistance of the Greek Christians will indubitably and easily reduce beneath the sceptre of Russia, the whole of the Archipelago, the coast of Asia Minor and all Greece, as far as the shore of the Adriatic. Then the possession of these countries, so much favoured by nature, with which no other part of the world can be compared in respect to the fertility and richness of the soil, will elevate Russia to a degree of superiority surpassing all the fabulous wonders which history relates of the grandeurs of the monarchies of ancient times.
In 1774, as now, Russia was tempting the ambition of Austria with the prospect of Bosnia, Servia and Albania being incorporated with her. The same Baron Thugut writes thus on this subject:
Such aggrandisement of the Austrian territory would not excite the jealousy of Russia. The reason is that the requisition which Austria would make of Bosnia, Servia, etc, although of great importance under other circumstances, would not be of the least utility to Russia, the moment the remainder of the Ottoman Empire should have fallen into her hands. For these provinces are inhabited almost entirely by Mohammedans and Greek Christians: the former would not be tolerated as residents there; the latter, considering the close vicinity of the Oriental Russian Empire, would not hesitate to emigrate thither; or if they remained their faithlessness to Austria would occasion continuous troubles; and thus an extension of territory, without intrinsic strength, so far from augmenting the power of the Emperor of Austria would only serve to weaken it.
Politicians are wont to refer to the Testament of Peter I, in order to show the traditional policy of Russia in general, and particularly with regard to her views on Constantinople. They might have gone back still further. More than eight centuries ago, Sviataslaff, the yet Pagan Grand Duke of Russia, declared in an assembly of his Boyards, that ‘not only Bulgaria, but the Greek Empire in Europe, together with Bohemia and Hungary, ought to undergo the rule of Russia’. Sviataslaff conquered Silistria and threatened Constantinople, AD 769, as Nicholas did in 1828. The Rurik dynasty transferred, soon after the foundation of the Russian Empire, their capital from Novgorod to Kiev, in order to be nearer to Byzantium. In the eleventh century Kiev imitated in all things Constantinople, and was called the second Constantinople, thus expressing the everlasting aspirations of Russia. The religion and civilisation of Russia are of Byzantine off-spring, and that she should have aimed at subduing the Byzantine Empire, then in the same decay as the Ottoman Empire is in now, was more natural than that the German Emperors should have aimed at the conquest of Rome and Italy. The unity, then, in the objects of Russian policy, is given by her historical past, by her geographical conditions, and by her necessity of gaining open seaports in the Archipelago as in the Baltic, if she wants to maintain her supremacy in Europe. But the traditional manner in which Russia pursues those objects is far from meriting that tribute of admiration paid to it by European politicians. If the success of her hereditary policy proves the weakness of the Western powers, the stereotyped mannerism of that policy proves the intrinsic barbarism of Russia herself. Who would not laugh at the idea of French politics being conducted on the Testament of Richelieu, or the Capitularies of Charlemagne? Go through the most celebrated documents of Russian diplomacy, and you will find that shrewd, judicious, cunning, subtle as it is in discovering the weak points of European kings, ministers and courts, its wisdom is at a complete deadlock as often as the historical movements of the Western peoples themselves are concerned. Prince Lieven judged very accurately of the character of the good Aberdeen when he speculated on his connivance with the Tsar, but he was grossly mistaken in his judgement of the English people when he predicted the continuance of Tory rule on the eve of the Reform movement in 1831. Count Pozzo di Borgo judged very correctly of Charles X, but he made the greatest blunder with regard to the French people when he induced his ‘august master’ to treat with that king about the partition of Europe on the eve of his expulsion from France. Russian policy, with its traditional craft, cheats and subterfuges, may impose upon the European Courts which are themselves but traditional things, but it will prove utterly powerless with the revolutionised peoples.
At Beirut the Americans have abstracted another Hungarian refugee from the claws of the Austrian eagle. It is cheering to see the American intervention in Europe beginning just with the Eastern Question. Besides the commercial and military importance resulting from the situation of Constantinople, there are other important considerations, making its possession the hotly controverted and permanent subject of dispute between the East and the West – and America is the youngest and most vigorous representative of the West.
Constantinople is the eternal city – the Rome of the East. Under the ancient Greek Emperors, Eastern civilisation amalgamated there so far with Western civilisation, as to make this centre of a theoretical Empire the effectual bar against European progress. When the Greek Emperors were turned out by the Sultans of Iconium, the genius of the ancient Byzantine Empire survived this change of dynasties, and if the Sultan were to be supplanted by the Tsar, the Bas-Empire would be restored to life with more demoralising influences than under the ancient Emperors, and with more aggressive power than under the Sultan. The Tsar would be for Byzantine civilisation what Russian adventurers were for centuries to the Emperors of the Lower Empire – the Corps de garde of their soldiers. The struggle between Western Europe and Russia about the possession of Constantinople involves the question whether Byzantinism is to fall before Western civilisation, or whether its antagonism shall revive in a more terrible and conquering form than ever before. Constantinople is the golden bridge thrown between the West and the East, and Western civilisation cannot, like the sun, go round the world without passing that bridge; and it cannot pass it without a struggle with Russia. The Sultan holds Constantinople only in trust for the Revolution, and the present nominal dignitaries of Western Europe, themselves finding the last stronghold of their ‘order’ on the shores of the Neva, can do nothing but keep the question in suspense until Russia has to meet her real antagonist, the Revolution. The Revolution which will break the Rome of the West will also overpower the demoniac influences of the Rome of the East.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 12 August 1853.
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Those readers who have followed with any attention the expositions which from time to time The Tribune has given of the Eastern Question, will not be surprised at the exhibit which our statement of yesterday makes of the great lever of Russian aggrandisement. They will have learned before that the idea of Russian diplomatic supremacy owes its efficacy to the imbecility and the timidity of the Western nations, and that the belief in Russia’s superior military power is hardly less a delusion. But they were, perhaps, scarcely prepared for the strong and sudden light in which our informant held up this phantasm as an element relied upon in the calculations of the Imperial government. Bully Turkey and her supporters – France and England – we are told, was relied on to the last by the Tsar as sufficient to bend them to his demands. Accordingly, instead of sending into the Principalities a force of 120,000 men, as we were first informed had been done, or of 70,000, which we afterwards assured was the whole number, we now learn that he sent only 50,000, or the army corps of General Dannenberg alone – a fact there was reason to suspect before, since no other general commanding an army corps has been heard of in any of the actions fought there, and it is well known that long after hostilities began neither Luders nor Osten-Sacken had crossed the Pruth. The same state of facts has also been indicated by the disgrace of Mentschikoff, reported from Sweden and Paris, and most conclusively confirmed by our informant, and by the Prince’s setting off in a most inclement season of the year, as a courier, to convey to the Tsar the news of Nachimoff’s victory over the squadron of Omer Pasha. When a man of seventy years of age voluntarily undertakes such a journey, riding night and day, there can be no doubt that he has some most imperative reason for propitiating the favour of the monarch.
But the great point is that Nicholas has perfectly relied upon bullying Turkey and her allies. This has been manifest throughout the affair, though never before avowed by any authority claiming to express the feeling of the Russian Court itself. It has been a bullying business all along. The appearance and conduct of Mentschikoff at Constantinople were simply those of a bully; the manifestoes of Nesselrode were the menaces of a bully; and the entry of Gortschakoff into the Principalities with a single army corps was nothing but the bold presumption of a bully. It has all justified by the result. England, especially, has been imposed on. She has been bullied, and is so still. She has not dared to declare her soul to be her own from the beginning to the present day. France, too, has been bullied, though not so seriously. But both together have been frightened out of the only policy which could at once have guaranteed the preservation of peace, while maintaining their own respectability. To the arrogance of the Autocrat they have replied with symptoms of cowardice. They have encouraged the very assumptions they have deprecated, just as poltroons always encourage bullies to be overbearing. If, at the outset, they had used a manly style of language adequate to the position they hold, and the pretensions they set up before the world; if they had proved that bluster and swagger could not impose on them, the Autocrat would not only have refrained from attempting it, but would have entertained for them a very different feeling from that contempt which must now animate his bosom. At that time, to show that they seriously meant to preserve Turkey intact, and were ready to back up their intention with the last reason of kings – fleets and armies, was the sure means of maintaining peace. There is only one way to deal with a power like Russia, and that is the fearless way.
It is not to be denied that Turkey, the weak state, has shown more true courage, as well as more wise statesmanship, than either of her powerful allies. She has risen to the height of the occasion; they have cowered beneath it. She has rejected the demands of her hereditary foe, not with braggadocio, but with grave and worthy earnestness and dignity; they have faltered and sought to evade the crisis. She has acted with decision; they have prevented her from acting with effect. For we may justly attribute the delays and hesitation shown in the manoeuvres of Omer Pasha to the paralysing and temporising influence of Lord Redcliffe and M de la Cour, over the Divan. At the moment when he was opening the campaign, they procured orders to be sent to him to delay the beginning of hostilities. Just when he was surprising Europe by advantages gained over the enemy, they prepared new terms of mediation and asked for an armistice. Thus at every step they have exhibited that dread of Russia on which we are assured the Emperor and his advisers have continually placed their dependence. They have been bullied, and have accordingly done their utmost to bring on the very evil they are so afraid of. If there be a general war, it will not be the fault of Turkey, but next to Russia, of France and England. They might have prevented it infallibly, but they did not.
As matters now stand we incline to follow our wishes and predict peace. The decision rests with the Tsar, and peace is his interest. The prestige of his diplomacy and the renown of his arms can be maintained in peace much more easily and safely than in war. The naval success of Nachimoff enables him to cease fighting with more than an equal share of victory on his side. A general breaking up of Europe has its possibility of loss and even of destruction for him as well as for Turkey, while even if he triumphs, it must be at a far heavier cost than that of his recent vast acquisitions of power and influence. The bullying system is much less expensive than actual warfare, as we see illustrated in the small army under Gortschakoff. There is, then, a considerable chance that some one of the schemes of mediation already on foot, or to be generated during the winter, may be fixed on. Then the work of Russian encroachments in Europe will once again be confined to the slower but surer processes of diplomacy and intrigue, animated by unscrupulous arrogance on one side, and aided by weakness and pusillanimity on the other. In view of such a possibility it is impossible not to agree with Mr Douglas when he assigns to Russia the attributes of the future, and to Western Europe those of the past. There is an energy and vigour in that despotic government and that barbarous race which we seek in vain among the monarchies of the older states. But if we look a little deeper into the cause of this relative weakness, we find it full of encouragement. Western Europe is feeble and timid because her governments feel that they are outgrown and no longer believed in by their people. The nations are beyond their rulers, and trust in them no more. It is not that they are really imbecile, but that there is new wine working in the old bottles. With a worthier and more equal social state, with the abolition of caste and privilege, with free political constitutions, unfettered industry and emancipated thought, the people of the West will rise again to power and unity of purpose, while the Russian Colossus itself will be shattered by the progress of the masses and the explosive force of ideas. There is no good reason to fear the conquest of Europe by the Cossacks. The very divisions and apparent weakness which would seem to render such an event easy are the sure pledge of its impossibility.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 30 December 1853.
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A certain class of writers have been wont to attribute to the Emperor of Russia the possession of extraordinary powers of mind, and especially of that far-reaching, comprehensive judgement which marks the really great statesman. It is difficult to see how such illusions could be derived from any truthful view of his character, or from any part of his history; but the most obstinate of his admirers must, we think, now question the justice of their conclusions. Russia is now in a difficult and most humiliating position. Her armies are defeated in Turkey, and, after immense losses of men and means, are retreating within her own frontiers; her possessions in Asia, the fruit of many years’ effort and vast expenditure, are partly lost and wholly imperilled; her foreign commerce is destroyed, and her home industry injured by turning the national attention and the people’s energies to a useless and disastrous war; her navy is imprisoned, and her fortresses menaced; and she must even regard as an advantage an intervention which, whatever its other benefits, interposes an effectual barrier to the realisation of her ambitious dreams, and renders impossible a renewal of her attack on Turkey, because that would involve a direct collision with Germany, as well as with the Western powers. And all this is the work of this great statesman and wise ruler Nicholas I. Praise of this headstrong imperial blunderer’s mental gifts must hereafter be considerably qualified, if indulged in at all.
The defeat at Silistria is not enough to destroy the reputation of the Tsar, or of his army, any more than the defeat at Oltenitza, Tchetalea or Karakul, for a defeat is something that the wisest foresight and the most complete preparations cannot always prevent. But apart from this there is a fact which stands out with greater prominence than any other in the whole course of the late remarkable siege and the Russian retreat which followed it. It is this – that the Russian army, with its enormous numbers and its whole swarms of officers, cannot afford leaders to take the place of Paskevitch, Gortschakoff, being each over seventy, and Luders, the youngest, being over sixty – and likely as they were to die a natural death any day; such is the narrowness and imbecility of the system on which the Tsar has managed his vast military establishment that we can affirm it as a positive and undeniable fact, that there is hardly a single officer who could step into the vacated place of either of these generals, and carry with him confidence of the army and the nation. For years the Emperor, with an unaccountable blindness which seemed, indeed, to fall little short of stupidity, has directed his efforts to the real injury and depression of the service for whose improvement and perfection he fancied he was doing the utmost. Thus he has limited promotion to mere parade martinets, whose principal merit consists in stolid obedience and ready servility, added to accuracy of eyesight in detecting a fault in the buttons and button-holes of the uniform – constantly preferring such sticks to men of real military ability and intellectual superiority. Years of the dullest service, such as garrison duty and daily parade, and not youth, activity and the study and acquirement of military science, have been the exclusive titles to the Tsar’s favour and to advancement. Thus the army is commanded on the average by old valetudinarians, or by ignorant corporals, who might manage a platoon, but have not brains and knowledge enough to direct the extensive and complicated movements of a campaign.
The same narrow-mindedness and presumption appear throughout the Tsar’s whole management of this Eastern Question. Everyone can now see that he began the war in an unwise and inadequate manner. Indeed, his very first military demonstration was totally absurd and unequal to the purpose in hand. He ought to have known that Europe would not allow the destruction of Turkey, and should, therefore, either have kept quiet, biding his time, or have crossed the Pruth, not with between forty and fifty thousand men, as he did last year, when during the whole winter he had only one army corps in the Principalities, but should have pounced at once with his most powerful masses upon Turkey, reaching across the Balkans before the Turks could have gathered together their scattered forces, and before the Western powers could have combined in their opposition and sent fleets of troops. To strike by surprise and terror ought to have been his aim, instead of engaging in such an imbecile manner his nation in a gigantic struggle. But Nicholas is growing old, and has all the faults of decrepit age. One of the reasons which prevented him from putting all his resources into action at once was that he feared the cost of such an effort. Now he will lose a hundred times as much money, and without results. Penny-wisdom in such an affair is no wisdom at all.
When the Russian forces first crossed the Pruth, the Tsar had no doubt – as we happened to know and took occasion to state at the time – that he could bully all Europe, and reap laurels at small expense. His diplomatic agents, too, encouraged him in this foolish opinion. The most mischievous of these accessories to the Great Russian blunder has proved to be the Russian Minister at Paris, Kisseleff, whose dispatches were full of the most satisfactory accounts concerning the friendly and pacific intentions of Louis Napoleon. Kisseleff having resided for more than twenty-eight years in the French capital, very naturally dreaded the idea of being recalled from the position where he led an epicurean life. The Tsar, accordingly, who delights to read adulatory and flattering reports from his agents, caught at the first bait, and any dispatch smelling of a disagreeable truth from any quarter was discredited, treated with contempt, and did nothing but injury with the Autocrat to the faithful and able diplomatist sending it. Thus nearly all the Russian diplomatic reports were full of encomiums on the Imperial sagacity, to which Europe bowed, as they assured his Majesty, with respect and admiration. In one word we are able to affirm that, since 1851, Nicholas has never had laid before him a truthful account of the state of Europe, and of the feelings of the other governments towards him and Russia; and if his numerous agents misled him in such a manner, the reason was that this was the most, nay the only, palatable dish for his political appetite. He craved universal adulation; now he tastes its bitter and poisonous fruits.
We do not put any faith in the rumour of his abdication, a thing totally impossible and unwarranted; but, on the other hand, only a miracle can extricate him from the difficulties now heaped on him and Russia by his pride, shallowness and imbecility.
Originally published in New York Tribune, 11 July 1854.
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With the middle classes both of France and England this war is decidedly unpopular. With the French bourgeoisie it was so from the beginning, because this class has been ever since 2 December in full opposition against the government of the ‘saviour of society’. In England the middle class was divided. The great bulk had transferred their national hatred from the French to the Russians, and although John Bull can do a little annexation business himself now and then in India, he has no idea of allowing other people to do the same in other neighbourhoods in an uncomfortable proximity to himself or his possessions. Russia was the country which in this respect had long since attracted his anxious notice. The enormously increasing British trade to the Levant, and through Trebizond to Inner Asia, makes the free navigation of the Dardanelles a point of the highest importance to England. The growing value of the Danubian countries as granaries forbids England to allow their gradual absorption into Russia, and the closing of the navigation of the Danube by the same power. Russian grains form already a too important item in British consumption, and an annexation of the corn-producing frontier countries by Russia would make Great Britain entirely dependent upon her and the United States, while it would establish these two countries as the regulators of the corn-market of the world. Besides, there are always some vague and alarming rumours afloat about Russian progress in Central Asia, got up by interested Indian politicians or terrified visionaries, and credited by the general geographical ignorance of the British public. Thus, when Russia began her aggression upon Turkey, the national hatred broke forth in a blaze, and never, perhaps, was a war so popular as this. The peace party was for a moment interdicted from speaking; even the mass of its own members went along with the popular current. Whoever knew the character of the English must have felt certain that this warlike enthusiasm could be of but short duration, at least so far as the middle class was concerned; as soon as the effects of the war should become taxable upon their pockets, mercantile sense was sure to overcome national pride, and the loss of immediate individual profits was sure to outweigh the certainty of losing gradually great national advantages. The Peelites, adverse to the war, not so much out of real love of peace as from a narrowness and timidity of mind which holds in horror all great crises and all decisive action, did their best to hasten the great moment when every British merchant and manufacturer could calculate to a farthing what the war would cost him, individually, per annum. Mr Gladstone, scorning the vulgar idea of a loan, at once doubled the income tax, and stopped financial reform. The result came to light at once. The peace party raised their heads again. John Bright dared popular feeling with his own well-known spirit and tenacity until he succeeded in bringing the manufacturing districts round to him. In London the feeling is still more in favour of the war, but the progress of the peace party is visible even here; besides, it must be recollected that the peace society never at any time commanded any mentionable influence in the capital. Its agitation, however, is increasing in all parts of the country, and another year of doubled taxation, with a loan – for this is now considered to be unavoidable – will break down whatever is left of warlike spirit among the manufacturing and trading classes.
With the mass of the people in both countries, the case is entirely different. The peasantry in France have ever since 1789 been the great supporters of war and warlike glory. They are sure this time not to feel much of the pressure of the war; for the conscription, in a country where the land is infinitesimally subdivided among small proprietors, not only frees the agricultural districts from surplus labour, but also gives to some 20,000 young men every year the opportunity of earning a round sum of money by engaging to serve as substitutes. A protracted war only would be felt. As to war taxes, the Emperor cannot impose them upon the peasantry without risking his crown and his life. His only means of maintaining Bonapartism among them is to buy them up by freedom from war taxation, and thus for some years to come they may be exempted from this sort of pressure. In England the case is similar. Agricultural labour is generally oversupplied, and furnishes the mass of soldiery, which only at a later period of the war receives a strong admixture of the rowdy class from the town. Trade being tolerably good, and a good many agricultural improvements being carried out when the war began, the quota of agricultural recruits was, in this instance, supplied more sparingly than before, and the town element is decidedly preponderant in the present militia. But even what has been withdrawn had kept wages up, and the sympathy of the villagers is always accompanying soldiers who come from among them, and who are now transformed into heroes. Taxation, in its direct shape, does not touch the small farmers and labourers, and until an increase of indirect imposts can reach them sensibly, several years of war must have passed. Among these people the war enthusiasm is as strong as ever, and there is not a village where is not to be found some new beer-shop with the sign of ‘The Heroes of the Alma’, or some such motto, and where are not in almost every house wonderful prints of Alma, Inkerman, the charge at Balaklava, portraits of Lord Raglan and others, to adorn the walls. But if in France the great preponderance of the small farmers (four-fifths of the population), and their peculiar relation to Louis Napoleon, give to their opinions a great deal of importance, in England that one-third of the population forming the country people has scarcely any influence except as a tail and chorus to the aristocratic landed proprietors.
The industrial working population has in both countries almost the same peculiar position with regard to this war. Both British and French proletarians are filled with an honourable national spirit, though they are more or less free from the antiquated national prejudices common in both countries to the peasantry. They have little immediate interest in the war, save that if the victories of their countrymen flatter their national pride, the conduct of the war, foolhardy and presumptuous as regards France, timid and stupid as regards England, offers them a fair opportunity of agitating against the existing governments and governing classes. But the main point with them is this: that this war, coinciding with a commercial crisis, only the first developments of which have, as yet, been seen, conducted by hands and heads unequal to the task, gaining at the same time European dimensions, will and must bring about events which will enable the proletarian class to resume that position which they lost to France by the battle of June 1848, and that not only as far as France is concerned, but for all Central Europe, England included.
In France, indeed, there can be no doubt that every fresh revolutionary storm must bring sooner or later the working class to power; in England things are fast approaching a similar state. There is an aristocracy willing to carry on the war, but unfit to do so, and completely put to the blush by last winter’s mismanagement. There is a middle class unwilling to carry on that war which cannot be put a stop to, sacrificing everything to peace, and thereby proclaiming their own incapacity to govern England. If events turn out the one, with its different fractions, and do not admit the other, there remain but two classes upon which power can devolve – the petty bourgeoisie, the small trading class, whose want of energy and decision has shown itself on every occasion when it was called upon to come from words to deeds – and the working class, which has been constantly reproached with showing far too much energy and decision when proceeding to action as a class.
Which of these classes will be the one to carry England through the present struggle, and the complications about to arise from it?
Originally published in New York Tribune, 27 April 1855.
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(From Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, edited by Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz, and published by George Allen and Unwin, London, 1953, pp 121-202. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.)