1762–1852
Whatever apprehensions the nations of the West may have harbored during Peter’s time about the growing strength and international prominence of their neighbor to the east, these fears were heightened all the more during the thirty-four year reign of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), who took a powerful hold on the military Peter had established.
Whereas Peter had looked westward to advance Russian’s culture, economy, and political outlook, Catherine now looked west and south with the purely aggressive aim of expanding Russia’s borders. She made military conquest her aim. Now indeed were the fears of the rest of Europe justified, and Poland and the crumbling Ottoman Empire were the first victims to fall prey to her territorial thirsts. Russia’s suspicion from without and fear of encirclement were indeed paranoias bred early into the national consciousness, as was the militaristic means of attempting to combat it.
From within the ranks of her own came one of Catherine’s most valiant and legendary allies against Russia’s European enemies. They were known as “adventurers,” or Cossacks.
Their ancestors had been Ukrainian serfs, who, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the late 16th century, had fled from the abject servitude imposed upon them, and with others of their kind had migrated eastward to the border steppes in the valley of the Don river. These vagabond farmers pioneered communities independent of the tsar’s rule, eventually colonizing large regions, settling villages and towns. They were a fierce and independent lot from the beginning, defying the serfdom and authority of Ivan and the early Romanovs, and forging for themselves an identity of free-spirited ferocity. If the tsar remained a latter-day portraiture of the Mongol Khans who had ruled this land for two centuries, then the Cossacks in like manner gave vivid representation to those yet earlier fiery barbarous Vikings, whose blood had also infused the peoples of these regions. Stormy and fervent fighters and conquerors they indeed were, Vikings at heart. Yet the sleek wicked ships with which their ancestors plundered the northern coastlines, the Cossacks exchanged for the mighty wingless Pegasus, on whose backs they could roam and subdue the southern plains of the Ukraine and Russia.
When the reach of the tsar’s hand began to encroach upon the self-governing Cossacks in the 17th and 18th centuries, rather than attempt to subdue them by force—a notion unlikely even for “the tsar of all the Russias”—the Caesars of Moscow chose instead to offer a compromise. In exchange for military service in his army, the Cossacks would be allowed to retain a good deal of their independence and would face taxes less stringent than the crippling tributes exacted from the rest of the serfs and peasants throughout the land.
The Cossacks could not have been a more amiable breed for such an arrangement. They had already proven well enough that they made good fighters. And for the next two centuries their reputation as the best horsemen in the land served their tsars well. In numerous wars and skirmishes, cavalry forces of largely Cossack origin played determining and pivotal roles.
If the Cossacks were feared by many of these, so too were they despised and looked down upon by those considering themselves their social superiors. In their turn, Cossacks looked down upon those below them in Russia’s widely divergent social scale. Religion, too, played a key role in the fomenting of hatreds and prejudices, and the Russian Jew came in for more than his due share of persecution, as have those of God’s scattered chosen people in all lands and throughout all time.
Military service, whatever its hardships and disciplines, did nothing to tame this passionate and sometimes savage horse-riding mixture of Slav, Scandinavian, and Mongol. The allegiance of the Cossack was to none but himself. They were not always well-treated for their service, and they were willing enough to join rebellions whose causes suited them. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, with all its political foment of revolution and independence, this fearsome breed would prove as unmanageable to Russia’s tsars as it had once been useful.
Indeed, new ideas and independent thinking were on the winds sweeping across Europe in the nineteenth century. Russia was far from a homogeneous collection of a single race. Those who made up this great diversity, though they would slumber for yet a while longer, would one day begin to awaken to their ethnic and historical desire for autonomy. The inhabitants of Russia’s vast borders came from a diversity of blood, history, culture, and language, the mixing of which provided a constant tinderbox of strife and prejudice. Every ethnic group within this vast array stretching over eight thousand miles hated and was hated by some other different people. “Russians” they may have been to the rest of the world. But within those expansive borders, the people themselves remained staunchly Lithuanians, Bulgars, Rumanians, Latvians, Cossacks, Estonians, Ukranians, Modavians, Kazakhs, Yakuts, and numerous others of large and small geographical and historical significance.
However, during the early years of the nineteenth century, these internal differences remained mostly silent, awaiting the future to express themselves. During the years when Napoleon was conquering Europe and revolution was abroad in the land, Russia remained uniformly united behind mingled territorial and religious objectives. Though Byzantium was by now dead, the “second Rome” had refused altogether to die, and had in fact continued to thrive under the Turks. Catherine’s predecessors had always hungered not merely to don the religious mantle of Constantinople’s heritage, but to possess its land and buildings and riches and vital seaport as well. Religious motives may have been one thing, but they hardly interested Catherine the Great. She set out to seize the region once and for all, making no spiritual pretense of her aim. And she was successful in achieving a portion of that long-coveted goal, by taking the Crimea and most of the northern shore of the Black Sea.
But Constantinople was not so weak that Catherine could stretch her conquests quite that far. Nor would the rest of Europe have allowed that ancient and strategic city and the Turkish straits to come under Russian dominion. Russian thirst for dominance in the region thus went unsatisfied despite Catherine’s acquisitions, and from that time on into the mid-1800’s a long series of flimsy treaties temporarily kept the unpredictable Russian bear at bay.
Russia continued to feel it possessed a historic and religious claim to the entire region, including Constantinople itself. Yet the stronger the bear from the East became, the more determined grew the rest of Europe to keep it from taking hold of that claim. The region of the Black Sea, Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and the Dardanelles, therefore, became a tinderbox for East-West conflict among the military powers of Europe. What Catherine had begun had become a festering sore which would lead to the Crimean War in 1853, as well as future conflicts, gradually involving more and more of the nations of the world in a constant flux of self-serving alliances.
Eventually, the conflict would contribute to sending a world into war with itself, and cause unrest, leading to the eruption of cataclysmic revolution in Russia, changing the direction of the earth’s history forever.