The foreign policy of Russia—whether in its tsarist, its Soviet, or its democratic form—is an expression in some measure of certain relatively fixed geopolitical realities. As it began early in the fourteenth century to escape the confines of Muscovy—the principality with Moscow at its center—the expanding state soon encompassed vast and often forbidding territories. At its peak size, after more than four centuries of expansion, the Russian Empire (including Poland and Finland) covered just under 9 million square miles—over one-sixth of the earth’s land surface. After World War II, the Soviet Union, including portions of prewar Poland, Finland, and other East European states, as well as fragments of prewar Germany and Japan, had an area of about 8.6 million square miles. Today’s Russia, the successor to the largest of the USSR’s fifteen republics, has an area of 6,592,850 square miles—still the largest of any country in the world and almost twice the size of second-ranked Canada. From east to west, it spans more than 6,000 miles and 11 time zones; from north to south, it extends about 2,800 miles.
However, much of this vast land is inhospitable. Located in the high northern latitudes, with no mountain ranges in the north to shield it from frigid Arctic blasts, Russia experiences climatic extremes of bitter cold during the long winters and intense heat during the brief summers. Compared to North America, Russia extends considerably farther northward, with most of its land area north of 50° latitude. St. Petersburg, at 59.5° north, lies more northerly than Juneau, Alaska. Moscow, at 55.5° north, is situated somewhat more northerly than Edmonton, Alberta. Even the southernmost part of Russia, in the Caucasus, is just at 41° north—the same latitude as Cheyenne, Wyoming; Cleveland, Ohio; or New Haven, Connecticut. About one-half of the country is in the permafrost zone, where the subsoil is permanently frozen; most of Russia’s major ports and rivers are frozen for part of the year.
Although Russia is a country rich in natural resources, its harsh climate limits the ability to exploit them. Vast reserves of petroleum, natural gas, coal, gold, bauxite, and iron ore lie far from the most populated areas, and some are virtually inaccessible. Apart from its brutal effects on workers, the extreme cold hinders the operation of equipment, and the summer marshiness and omnipresent mud make transportation extremely difficult.
The largely unfavorable combinations of soil conditions, temperature ranges, and precipitation produce a situation in which less than 15 percent of the land is sown in crops. The northernmost soil and vegetation zone, known as the tundra, is a treeless plain, with poorly developed soils and little precipitation. The zone to the south of the tundra is the taiga, comprising well over half the country’s land. Its winters are cold and summers are hot; the soils are leached and not very fertile. Much of this rolling land is covered with coniferous forests. South of the taiga in European Russia is an area of mixed forests, with milder winters and more fertile soils. In the southern part of European Russia and Western Siberia are the steppes—grassy plains, with hot summers and cold winters. The soil is black and fertile (chernozem), and crops include wheat and sugar beets. The rest of the land is either semidesert or mountainous.
From west to east, the five geological regions of Russia are the European Plain, the Ural Mountains, the West Siberian Plain, the Central Siberian Plateau, and the Eastern Siberian Uplands. On the European side of Russia are the Caucasus Mountains, located between the Black and Caspian seas and reaching heights up to 18,510 feet (Mount Elbrus, the highest point in Europe). The Ural Mountains—the dividing line between Europe and Asia—are low and rounded, averaging 2,000 feet in height; they are rich in deposits of iron, copper, and other metals. The major Siberian mountain ranges are the Altai, in the southern part of western Siberia; the Sayan, in eastern Siberia; and the Verkhoyansk, in northeastern Siberia.
In European Russia, the major rivers flow north to south. In their northern reaches, they are frozen for six months each year; in the south, for about two months. From west to east, the largest river systems cutting across the European Plain are the Dniester, the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, and the Ural. The first two, largely in Ukraine but with Russian tributaries, empty into the Black Sea; the third flows into the Sea of Azov (which connects to the Black Sea). The latter two empty into the Caspian Sea, which is really a vast inland saltwater lake. The three major river systems in Siberia—the Ob, the Yenisei, and the Lena—flow south to north, to the Arctic Ocean. The Amur River flows easterly along the border with China and empties into the Pacific Ocean.
For over two centuries, Russia has been the most populated among the countries of Europe. (Although the European part of Russia constitutes a relatively small part of Russian territory, the largest proportion of the population lives there.) A combination of territorial expansion and rapid population growth propelled the population of the Russian Empire from 17.5 million in 1700 (second to France among the European states) to 37 million in 1800 (about 30 percent larger than France). By 1914, with 171 million people, Russia was two-and-one-half times larger than Germany, which ranked second in Europe. A combination of territorial loss, war, famine, and political persecution slowed the growth considerably, and in 1940 the Soviet Union had 194 million people. With more than 20 million lost in World War II, the USSR’s population had grown to 209 million by 1959. High birthrates among the non-Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union helped drive the population to about 290 million at the time of the dissolution of the USSR. Russia, which had 147.4 million in 1989, the time of the last official Soviet census, declined to about 145.2 million in the 2002 census and was estimated to be 141.4 million in mid-2007, although it increased—for the first time in many years—to 142.5 million in mid-2012. Of this total, ethnic Russians—who were barely one-half the population of the USSR at the time of its dissolution—make up just over 80 percent, and the rest is distributed among nearly 100 minority nationalities. Ten percent of the population in 2002 was reported as Muslim.
The natural decrease in population—attributed to an aging population, a sharp drop in the birthrate, environmental degradation, and poor public health—was partially offset by the migration of almost 8 million people into Russia from other areas of the former Soviet Union. However, this inflow had significantly slowed by the end of the 1990s, and the country’s population was expected to drop by 10 million between 1990 and 2020. The mortality rate (especially for men) increased sharply in the 1980s and early 1990s, to the point that the ratio of deaths to births stood at 1.8:1 in 2001. Without significant changes in these trends, Russia’s population at the middle of the twenty-first century will decline to 100 million (compared to an anticipated U.S. population almost four times higher)! In his first report as president on the state of his country, Vladimir Putin declared this demographic crisis to be the country’s most acute problem, endangering the very survival of the Russian nation. By the end of 2012, Putin could report that the birthrate had finally begun to exceed the death rate. Overall life expectancy actually grew 2.5 years in the period 2008–2012, but it was still much higher for women (76.1 years) than for men. Clearly, the sharp decline in Russia’s population, with its serious implications for the country’s security and economic health, continues to be a major challenge for the nation.
The origins of Russian foreign policy can be traced to the period (1462–1505) when Ivan III (Ivan the Great) reigned over the Muscovite state. The year 1480 saw the formal collapse of the two-and-one-half-century-long “Tatar yoke,” as the dominion of the Mongol warrior Genghis Khan and his successors over Russia is popularly known. Ivan already had begun to undermine Tatar power through his policy of “collecting of the Russian lands.” The thriving trade center of Novgorod was subjected to Moscow’s rule in the 1470s, and the regions around Perm and Tver were incorporated in the following decade. Ivan’s westward conquests embroiled him in wars with Poland, which continued under his son Vasily III (ruled 1505–1533), who brought Smolensk into Moscow’s orbit in 1514.
Ivan the Great was the first ruler of Moscow to use the title “tsar.” His wife Sophia, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, encouraged him to claim the title, which was derived from “Caesar” and was meant—in the wake of the fall of Constantinople to the infidel Turks—to convey supremacy over both the spiritual and the earthly realms. Tsar Ivan was determined to build a strong central state based on his hegemony over other princely families—a policy that drove him to acquire additional lands with which to reward his followers. This linkage of strong rule at the center and expansionism continued under Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) who ruled from 1533 to 1584. His reign saw the further strengthening of autocracy, symbolized in the institution of the Oprichnina (special realm), which had features of a secret police force as well as a parallel administrative structure subordinate personally to the tsar.
Externally, Ivan IV began the expansion of Muscovite power into non-Russian territories through the conquest in the 1550s of the southern Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, thereby gaining access to the Caspian Sea. Ivan also sought, unsuccessfully, to defeat the last remnant of the Tatar Empire, on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. Even more bitter failure was experienced on Muscovy’s western frontier when the Peace of Yam Zapolie with Poland in 1582, and a treaty with Sweden a year later confirmed the loss of prior territorial gains in Livonia (much of present-day Latvia and Estonia), on the Baltic seacoast. Perhaps the most significant of Ivan IV’s expansions, however, was the first stage of the conquest of Siberia, which began in 1581. Experiencing only spotty resistance from nomadic tribes, Moscow’s forces reached the Ob and Irtysh rivers by the end of the decade. Moving in a northeasterly direction, the entire Siberian conquest, from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean, was accomplished before the midpoint of the 1600s.
The three decades following Ivan the Terrible’s death were turbulent times for the young Muscovite state. Ivan’s weak son, Fyodor I, left no heir, and was succeeded by the ruthless boyar Boris Godunov. Boris’s demise, in the midst of terrible famine, ushered in the so-called Time of Troubles, which climaxed with the occupation of Moscow by Polish forces. With the expulsion of the Poles, a new tsar, Michael I, was elected in 1613, and the dynasty of the Romanovs began its lengthy occupancy of the Russian throne. Michael and his son Alexis (ruled 1645–1676) fought eight more wars with Poland, the fruit of which was the incorporation into the Muscovite state of the eastern part of Ukraine, including its capital, the seat of “old Rus,” Kiev.
The full flowering of Russian foreign policy took place under the strong leadership of Alexis’s son, Peter I (Peter the Great), who reigned from 1689 to 1725. Not only did Peter transform his country into one of the great powers of Europe, but also in 1721 he renamed it the Russian Empire and dubbed himself emperor of Russia. Fascinated by the sea from an early age, Peter dreamed of acquiring ports and building a great navy. Frustrated in his efforts to wrest the fortress of Azov on the Black Sea from the Turks, Peter enjoyed his greatest military successes in the Great Northern War against Sweden (1700–1721), and fought in the interests of acquiring a coast and ports on the Baltic Sea, for both military and commercial purposes. As early as 1703, Peter began building a new city on the marshlands near the Baltic Sea, which he named St. Petersburg; in 1713, he made it his capital.
Although the ultimately decisive battle against Charles XII of Sweden was fought in 1709 at Poltava, the war was ended only in 1721 by the Treaty of Nystad, which effectively confirmed Sweden’s decline and its replacement by Russia as a great European power. The treaty formalized Russia’s incorporation of Livonia, Ingria (the area southwest of St. Petersburg), and parts of Finland.
Moving Russia’s capital westward was only one way in which Peter the Great brought Russia into a European orbit. He himself made two lengthy journeys to Europe, and he brought back many ideas on how to “Westernize” his country. These changes had a far-reaching impact on the administrative structure, educational system, and economy of Russia.
Peter’s forays southward were less enduring. He first acquired and then lost access to the Black Sea in wars with Turkey. A war against Persia in 1722–1723 resulted in the acquisition of the western shores of the Caspian Sea, including the town of Baku, but these gains were relinquished by his successors. Nor was there territorial expansion in the Far East during Peter’s time. The Treaty of Nerchinsk, concluded with China in the same year Peter assumed power, kept Mongolia in the Chinese sphere of influence and confined Russia’s colonization to the area north of the Amur River. Supplemented just after Peter’s death by the Treaty of Kyakhta, which established certain trade and diplomatic regulations, the agreement at Nerchinsk effectively delimited Russian and Chinese spheres for the next century and a half.
Six monarchs (three women and three men) ruled the Russian Empire in the thirty-seven years between the death of Peter the Great and the beginning of the next significant period in Russian foreign policy: the reign of Catherine the Great. During this interim, Russia participated in three wars: it fought another war with Turkey (1738–1739), at last gaining a Black Sea coast through the Treaty of Belgrade; it fought again with Sweden, gaining the Finnish city of Vyborg in the Peace of Abo (1743); and it participated, from 1757 to 1762, in the Seven Years War in Europe, first on the side of Austria and then as an ally of Prussia.
With the accession of Catherine II in 1762, Russia withdrew into neutrality as the war reached its conclusion. But the empress was soon pursuing an active foreign policy, which resulted in adding significant territories to the Russian Empire. Catherine was a full partner in European continental politics, demonstrating Russia’s dominance in its immediate neighborhood through its victory in yet another war with Sweden (1787–1790) and through three partitions of Poland (in 1772, 1793, and 1795). The partitions gave Catherine White Russia (Belorussia, or Belarus), Lithuania, and western Ukraine; in all, about two-thirds of former Poland was transferred to the Russian Empire.
Equally impressive expansion in the south was produced by two wars with Turkey (1768–1774 and 1787–1792). The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774) and the Treaty of Jassy (1792) gave Russia much of the northern Black Sea coastline, including Azov and Crimea, and extending as far eastward as the mouth of the Dniester River. As one of the fruits of these victories, the great Black Sea port of Odessa was founded in 1796, the year of Catherine’s death. By that time she had added another 200,000 square miles to her realm.
Thanks in part to the relative stability of European military organization and technique, Russia had been able to catch up with its Western neighbors by borrowing expertise from them. Indeed, it now had advantages by virtue of the sheer size of its population and by its willingness to spend about three-fourths of the state’s finances on the military. This was clearly demonstrated during the course of the Napoleonic wars, at the end of which Russia’s army—with a force of 800,000—was superior to any other on the continent. Not until the Industrial Revolution changed the scale of European warfare during the nineteenth century would Russia fall behind again.1
Russia’s power gave Alexander I (1801–1825) a major role to play at the Congress of Vienna (1815), which constructed post-Napoleonic Europe. By this time, yet another European land (Finland) had been added to the empire, and wars with Turkey and Persia had led to the incorporation of Bessarabia, Baku, and Georgia. Although his tutors had filled his head with Enlightenment ideas, Alexander’s multinational empire gave him a vested interest in suppressing nationalism and preserving the status quo. The Holy Alliance, largely his creation, emerged from Vienna as the embodiment of the principle of legitimism, and Russia began to play its role as the “gendarme of Europe.” This policy was even more evident under Alexander’s successor, his brother Nicholas I, who ruled with an iron hand from 1825 to 1855. “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism” were the guiding ideas of his regime. In 1849, Nicholas sent 200,000 Russian troops to suppress a revolution in Hungary, thus ensuring that one of the last vestiges of the great revolutionary wave of 1848 in Europe would not spread to the Russian Empire.
The conservatism of Nicholas I did not translate into a purely defensive foreign policy. He and his ministers were devoted to the objective of expanding Russia’s realms southward—to capture Constantinople and seize control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits, thereby controlling passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Russia’s growing naval base at Sevastopol would have greater strategic significance if the tsar, rather than the Turkish sultan, controlled the passage of warships in and out of Russia’s back door. The Ottoman Empire, in Russia’s eyes, was the “sick man of Europe,” and Russia was eager to make arrangements to inherit his territory before he died.
In the cause of protecting the sultan’s Orthodox Christian subjects in Greece, who had been struggling for independence since 1821, the Russians went to war against Turkey in 1828, concluding hostilities the following year in the Peace of Adrianople. Its terms not only declared Greek independence but transferred Turkish possessions in the Caucasus to the tsar, brought Russia’s frontier to the southern mouth of the Danube, and gave her a protectorate over the Orthodox Christians inhabiting the Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Walachia.
Apparently, for Nicholas, not only were the principles of legitimism and defense of the status quo to be subordinated when Russian strategic interests dictated, but struggles for national liberation of Christians under Muslim rule were to be treated differently from nationalist revolts within the Muslim family. In 1833 he responded affirmatively to the Ottoman sultan’s call for assistance in putting down a revolt by Mohammed Ali, his vassal in Egypt. The tsar’s reward was the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, which gave Russia the right to use the straits for passage of its warships but denied the right to other nations. Britain and France were disturbed by the strategic importance of the concessions thus handed to the tsar. Together with the Austrians and Prussians, they insisted upon a multilateral arrangement (the London Convention of 1841), which reversed the terms of Unkiar Skelessi and closed the straits to all foreign warships in time of peace.
Conflicting ambitions of the Russians, British, and French in the Near East reopened the struggle for strategic advantage in the Ottoman lands. When French President (soon to be emperor) Louis Napoleon won a concession from the sultan for protection of Catholics and Christian holy places in Palestine, Tsar Nicholas demanded similar privileges in defense of Orthodox Christians. Having failed to persuade the British to join in an outright partition of the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas proceeded to demand a Russian protectorate in Turkey. Encouraged by Britain, the Turks declared war on Russia in October 1853, and the British and French joined them six months later.
Neither side distinguished itself militarily in the Crimean War, but the Russian performance was especially dismal. Despite its growth in population (from 51 million in 1816 to 76 million in 1860) and in textile and iron production, Russia was falling far behind in economic strength. While Russian iron production doubled in the first part of the nineteenth century, that of Britain increased thirtyfold. A lack of capital or consumer demand and the absence of a sufficiently large middle class seriously impeded Russia’s industrial takeoff. While Russia had little more than 500 miles of railroads in 1850, the United States had 8,500 miles. And none of Russia’s railroads extended south of Moscow. The tsar had to rely on horse transport to move his army to the Crimea, taking as long as three months to move troops to the front, whereas the British and French could reach it by sea in three weeks. The army—thought to be the strongest in Europe at the time of the Hungarian revolution of 1849—was soon exposed as shockingly backward, with inadequate weaponry and poor leadership, and with many of its large contingents tied down in internal policing duties.2
Following the death of Nicholas I, his son Alexander II (ruled 1855–1881) agreed to the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1856), which ended the Crimean War and stripped Russia of many of its recent territorial gains. The tsar ceded the mouths of the Danube and part of Bessarabia, and he forfeited some of his conquests in the Caucasus. The Danubian principalities were placed under the joint guarantee of the powers, and the Black Sea was neutralized. Turkey was admitted to the Concert of Europe, and the powers promised to respect its integrity and independence. Russia, thus frustrated in its ambitions toward the south, turned its attention inward, toward reform, and confined its external expansion to Asia, where resistance was weaker.
The need for internal political, economic, and social reform in Russia had long been debated by the intelligentsia, who were roughly divided into two camps: Westernizers and Slavophiles. The former group, ashamed of Russia’s past and present and attracted by the ideas of the French Revolution, believed that Russia’s great mission could be fulfilled only by advancing further on the road Peter the Great had pioneered: imitation of the West. A tragic fate had been suffered in December 1825, at the time of the accession of Nicholas I, by a group of young officers, students, professionals, and nobles (the Decembrists), who had sought to force Westernization on Russia through revolution. In their wake, writers as diverse as the liberal Granovskii, the romantic Herzen, and the radical realist Belinskii continued to insist that Russia must follow the West.
The Slavophiles did not dispute that Russia was backward and needed change, but they saw its salvation not in servile imitation of the West, with its materialism and its ideas of rationalism and individualism. Rather, they sought a return to what they regarded as Russia’s true traditions—the faith of its people and the people’s sense of belonging to a community. Russia’s faults, the Slavophiles believed, were traceable to Peter’s introduction of foreign models and his subordination of the Orthodox Church to the state. According to thinkers such as Karamzin, Kirevskii, and Aksakov, a reformed Russia could fulfill its mission by helping to civilize the West. The most influential book to insist on the uniqueness of Russia and its mission was Nicholas Danilevskii’s Russia and Europe (1871).
Both sides idealized their models. As the Slavophiles readily pointed out, the real West was a grimmer place than Westernizers claimed, but it was just as true that Russia’s traditions were not as happy as the Slavophiles imagined.3 The debate over the extent of Russia’s “special mission,” and whether the Western experience was something to imitate or avoid, lasted for much of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it resurfaced in arguments among Russian Marxists as the century opened, and in debates among post-Soviet Russian writers and politicians as it closed.
With Russia’s weaknesses so sharply exposed in the Crimean War, Alexander II introduced a series of significant reforms, many of which seem designed to avoid the more radical changes urged by both Westernizers and Slavophiles. The most important of these was the emancipation of the serfs, proclaimed in February 1861. This was followed in the next few years by financial, educational, judicial, and administrative reforms, and by an edict to reduce censorship. The change in the legal status of the peasantry was slow to produce benefits in increased agricultural production, but the reforms did have a more noticeable impact in spurring railway construction and industrialization of the economy under state sponsorship. Although the reforms allowed Russia to close some of the distance between itself and the rest of Europe, in its class structure and in the total absence of constitutional or popular rule, Russia remained a rigid and centralized autocracy.
In the wake of its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, Russia pursued an especially active policy in Asia and the Far East. Russian incursions into Chinese territory in the Amur River region, in violation of the provisions of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, actually began just prior to the war and were intensified during the conflict, in anticipation of an Anglo-French naval attack. After the war, the annexation of the Amur region was legalized in 1858, but the Russians pressed further into Chinese territory, founding Vladivostok in 1860. That same year, the Treaty of Peking established a new border along the Ussuri River. China thus formally ceded to Russia the territory south to Vladivostok. The Russo-Chinese border in the Central Asian region of Turkestan was also revised, allowing the Russians to shift their attention there.
Over the course of two decades, from the time of the capture of Tashkent in 1865 until the conquest of Merv in 1884, Russia penetrated further into Central Asia and subdued and incorporated Transcaspia and Turkestan. The initial conquests were justified by Russia to the other powers by citing the need to defend its subjects and settlements against raids and robbery by subjects of the ruling khans, with each new expansion of the boundary bringing Russia into contact with new raiders. While securing the frontier may indeed have been the initial aim, these territories possessed mineral wealth and were a source of raw cotton. In light of the simultaneous Anglo-Russian conflicts of interest in the Balkans, Russia’s policy of expansion in Central Asia also served to bring useful pressures to bear on the British, who feared that Russia would press all the way into India. These concerns were at least temporarily alleviated in 1885, when the two countries signed an agreement delineating the northern boundary of Afghanistan, effectively making it the terminus of the Russian advance.
In contrast to the steadiness of Russia’s expansion on the Eurasian landmass, this period also witnessed an important withdrawal from an area to which Tsar Alexander II apparently felt Russia had overextended itself. Russian fur traders had begun to work in the Aleutian Islands and the southern coast of Alaska as early as the 1760s. The Russian American Company in 1799 was given a monopoly over hunting and commerce southward to the fifty-fifth parallel (the southern tip of present-day Alaska). In 1812 the company established a new base for hunting and food supply at Fort Ross, just seventy miles north of San Francisco. Although pressured by both Spain and Mexico, the Russians did not abandon Fort Ross until 1841. The vulnerability of these North American possessions became evident to Russia during the Crimean War, just as the economic benefits began to disappear. Hostility toward Britain influenced the decision to sell Alaska to the United States instead; this was accomplished in 1867, for a price of $7.2 million.
The hiatus in Russian activity in Turkey and the Balkans came to an end in the 1870s. At the beginning of the decade, Russia seized an opportunity (in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War) unilaterally to abrogate the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris. This action was supported the following year by a convention recognizing the right of both Russia and Turkey to maintain naval forces in the Black Sea. Russian territorial ambitions stirred again at mid-decade, with the occurrence of uprisings against Turkey in Bulgaria and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and with the outbreak of war between Turkey and Serbia.
These events further fanned the flames of the burgeoning Pan-Slavist movement, which transformed the Slavophile ideology into a foreign policy. Since the fifteenth century, Russian churchmen had regarded Moscow as the “Third Rome,” but the nineteenth century brought the notion that the tsar, as head of the Russian Orthodox Church, had a special mission to protect Orthodox Christians against the excesses of Ottoman rule. Pan-Slavists disagreed on whether “Slavdom” included only those who were Orthodox, or all who spoke a Slavic tongue. They also were divided between the Greater Slav idea (with all Slav nations treated as equals) and the Lesser Slav idea (emphasizing the dominant role of the Russian state and the Orthodox religion). The 1863 revolt of the Poles against Russian rule, suppressed with great fury by the tsar, diminished the appeal of the Greater Slav idea. The foreign policy consequences of the Lesser Slav idea—although it was imperialistic—were distinctly less risky in that the object of Russia’s liberating zeal would be the Slavic subjects of the sultan, rather than those who lived under Austro-Hungarian or German rule.4
With the eruption of the Balkan conflict, amid great popular excitement, the Russian government allowed the public collection of funds for the anti-Turkish cause and permitted Russian army officers to enlist as volunteers against the Turks. The defeat of the Serbs provoked a rare public speech by the tsar, in which he referred to the sufferings of Christians in the Balkans and the “cause of Slavdom,” ending with the prayer: “May God help us to fulfill our sacred mission.”5 A few months later, Russia declared war on Turkey, and in March 1878 it was able to dictate peace terms in the Treaty of San Stefano. By its terms, the independence of Serbia and Montenegro was recognized and both received territory; Romania was declared independent; Bulgaria was granted autonomy under an elected prince and Russian military occupation; and Bulgaria was to be substantially enlarged to include most of Macedonia and an Aegean seacoast. Russia received Ardahan, Kars, Batum, and Bayazid from Turkey.
Like the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi forty-five years before, the Treaty of San Stefano was distinctly not to the liking of most of the other great powers, and they proceeded to call an international meeting to force Russia to modify its terms. With German Chancellor Bismarck as the “honest broker,” the Congress of Berlin (June 1878) left Russian Pan-Slavists furious (especially at Germany and Austria) and left the nationalist aspirations of Serbia and Bulgaria unfulfilled. The size of Bulgaria was significantly reduced, and Serbia and Montenegro also lost territory. Austria was given a mandate to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russia kept Batum, Kars, and Ardahan and gained southern Bessarabia from Romania (thereby ensuring Romanian hostility).
Aware that a frustrated and isolated Russia could go shopping for allies among Germany’s enemies, in the wake of the Congress of Berlin, Bismarck devised a plan whereby Russia could achieve some of its security objectives in the Black Sea in return for alignment with the German powers. Germany and Austria had formed an alliance in 1879, and Bismarck proceeded to revive the idea of the Three Emperors’ League (Dreikaiserbund). Temporarily delayed by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the three-way alliance was finally implemented by his son and heir, Alexander III (ruled 1881–1894). The highly secret treaty, signed in June 1881, effectively protected Russia against attack in the Black Sea by stating that if Turkey violated the principle of closure of the straits, the three powers would warn the sultan that he had put himself in a state of war with the aggrieved power (Russia). The three powers also agreed that modifications in the territorial status quo in Turkey should take place only after agreement among them, though Austria reserved the right to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina whenever it saw fit. The treaty was renewed once, in 1884, but was allowed to lapse in 1887 because of the tsar’s growing dissatisfaction with Austrian policy.
Determined to keep Russia away from France, Bismarck devised a secret treaty (the “Reinsurance Treaty”) in which the two empires promised each other neutrality if either became involved in a war with a third power, with the exception of an aggressive war of Germany against France or of Russia against Austria. In Russia’s interests, the treaty once more reaffirmed the principle of closure of the straits, but also it went further, promising German moral and diplomatic support “to the measures which His Majesty may deem it necessary to take to control the key of his empire” (i.e., the entrance to the Black Sea). The Germans also recognized Russia’s predominant influence in Bulgaria and promised to aid in reestablishing a pro-Russian government there.
The Reinsurance Treaty came up for renewal in 1890, in the wake of Bismarck’s dismissal as chancellor, and the young Kaiser Wilhelm II was persuaded by his new advisers to allow it to lapse. This proved a fatal mistake, as it virtually drove the Russians into the arms of the French, setting the stage for the transformation of the European system into a rigid bipolarity of opposing coalitions. The initial Franco-Russian convention of August 1891 was only a vague agreement that the two states would discuss measures to be taken if the peace were endangered or if either were menaced. The following year the Russians agreed in principle to a draft military convention. The actual formalization occurred only at the end of 1893—and not as a treaty, which would have required legislative ratification in France, but as a highly secret military convention. It provided that if France were attacked by Germany, or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia would employ all available forces against Germany; if Russia were attacked by Germany, or by Austria supported by Germany, France would employ all available forces against Germany. Specific levels of troop commitments were specified in the agreement. Additionally, if the forces of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, Italy) or any one member of it mobilized, France and Russia were committed to mobilize without delay.
With the maintenance of the status quo in the Balkans seemingly ensured for the time being, Russia again turned its attention eastward, with the powerful finance minister, Count Sergei Witte, as lead strategist. In 1891, Russia decided to build a 5,000-mile railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, for both strategic and commercial reasons, but since Vladivostok is not ice-free, Russia also renewed its interest in obtaining such a port, either in Korea (Pusan) or on the Liaotung Peninsula. These ambitions directly conflicted with those of Japan, which feared being cut off from the vast Chinese market. Taking matters into its own hands, Japan launched a war against China in 1894, as a result of which it took from China the offshore islands of Formosa and the Pescadores as well as the Liaotung Peninsula. Determined to drive Japan back off the mainland and prevent the premature partition of China, Count Witte enlisted German and French assistance in pressuring Japan to yield the peninsula.
At the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1896, the Chinese ambassador was induced by a bribe to accept a fifteen-year defensive alliance whereby Russia undertook to defend China from attack and China agreed that a Russian railway could be built across Manchuria to Vladivostok (the Chinese Eastern Railway). Two years later, to the great consternation of the Japanese, China granted Russia a twenty-five-year lease of the Liaotung Peninsula, including Dairen and Port Arthur. Japan sought a conciliatory solution, proposing a division of spoils, in true imperialist fashion, with Japan to be granted predominant influence in Korea in return for recognizing Russia’s primacy in Manchuria. Confident of its superior position (though unprepared for war), Russia refused the offer.
Seeking a European partner in its quest to block Russian expansion in the Far East, Japan concluded an alliance with Britain in 1902. The following year, as the first trains passed over his Trans-Siberian Railway, Count Witte was dismissed. In the face of growing internal political unrest, Witte’s rival in the tsar’s court, V.K. Plehve, counseled an even more aggressive policy, arguing that Russia needed “a little victorious war to stop the revolutionary tide.”6 In February 1904, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Besieged for most of the year, the city fell to the Japanese in December. Further military reversals followed, as the Russians lost a major land battle at Mukden and suffered the loss of a naval fleet of thirty-two vessels in the Tsushima Straits in May 1905. By this time, fueled by humiliation in the Far East, a revolution had erupted in Russia, and the government was impelled to seek an end to the war with Japan. With U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt serving as mediator, a settlement was reached at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in September 1905. By its terms, the Russians retained their influence in northern Manchuria and escaped the payment of indemnity, but were forced to recognize Japanese preponderance in Korea and to cede to Japan the southern half of Sakhalin Island as well as their rights in the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur. Two years later Russia signed a convention with Japan explicitly renouncing interest in Korea and southern Manchuria, in return for Japanese recognition of Russia’s special interests in northern Manchuria and Outer Mongolia.
Ironically, the forcible limitation placed on St. Petersburg’s expansionist ambitions in the Far East removed a point of contention between Russia and Britain and helped open the way to the Anglo-Russian Entente, concluded in August 1907. The two powers settled their remaining imperial differences, with Britain recognizing a Russian sphere of interest in northern Persia, Russia recognizing preponderant British influence in Afghanistan, and both sides recognizing Chinese suzerainty in Tibet. Britain also assured the tsar that it would not obstruct Russia’s long-standing desire to open up the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits to Russian warships in the Black Sea, thus facilitating a revival of Russian interests in the Balkans.
More sensitive than ever to public opinion in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, the Russian government again took up the banner of Pan-Slavism. The fervor for liberation of the southern Slavs ultimately halted a possible agreement between Russia and Austria, negotiated secretly between their foreign ministers, Alexander Izvolskii and Count von Aehrenthal, in which Austria would have supported a change in the rules governing passage through the straits in return for Russian approval of Austria’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. When Austria rushed to proclaim the annexation in October 1908, the Pan-Slavist outcry in Russia led Prime Minister Peter Stolypin to direct Izvolskii to condemn the Austrian action and instead champion Serbia’s claims on these Slavic lands. The ensuing diplomatic crisis hardened the lines between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente in Europe, ruined the prospects for a peaceful accommodation of Russian ambitions in the straits, and strengthened Russia’s determination to create a barrier against further Austrian influence in the Balkans.
When war finally broke out in the Balkans in August 1914, sparked by the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, it quickly escalated into a European war and then to a world war that none of the great powers truly wanted. Research in Russian archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union reveals that Russian diplomacy and military strategy more actively contributed to the outbreak of World War I than had theretofore been recognized by scholars. Under the guiding hand of Sergei Sazonov, Russia’s foreign minister (supported by Tsar Nicholas II), Russia anticipated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and deliberately risked war with Germany in order to incorporate Constantinople and the straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus into the Russian Empire.7 By many indicators, Russia was in a much stronger position for a war than it had been earlier. Its population was three times that of Germany and four times that of Britain, and Russia’s standing army was the largest in Europe, with 1.3 million front-line troops and up to 5 million reserves. Russia’s industrial output was growing at an average annual rate of 5 percent between 1860 and 1913, and ranked fourth in the world. Railway construction was proceeding at great speed, and Russia was the world’s second largest producer of oil.
However, as Paul Kennedy has noted, Russia was “simultaneously powerful and weak.”8 Much of its industry was devoted to food and textiles, and output per capita amounted to only one-quarter of Germany’s and one-sixth of Britain’s. Given the population growth, annual real national product was expanding by only 1 percent per capita. Eighty percent of the population worked in the inefficient agricultural sector. The average Russian’s income was about one-quarter of the average Englishman’s, but the average Russian was forced to part with over half of his income for defense. Industrialization had been carried out with forced savings from the population as well as substantial foreign borrowing; Russia’s foreign debt was the largest in the world. Most decisively, Russian strength was further undermined by the weakness and ineptitude of its government, starting with Tsar Nicholas II, “a Potemkin village in person.”9
His great-grandfather’s (and namesake’s) war in the Crimea had exposed Russia’s weaknesses, as had his own war against the upstart Japanese, and yet the tsar and his advisers missed every opportunity to turn away from the path that ultimately not only devastated the country but destroyed the regime itself, in the process opening the way to communist revolution and to the imposition of the Soviet state on the Russian Empire.
Having sketched the broad outlines of Russian foreign policy under the tsars, we can now turn to a search for patterns in tsarist diplomacy, and for explanations of how these were shaped by peculiarities of Russia’s geography, of the organization of the tsarist state, of ideology, and of the prevailing norms and characteristics of the international system.
Not surprisingly, the dominant theme most analysts find in the foreign policy of Russia under the tsars is that of expansionism. This is sometimes expressed in a tendency to fill internal vacuums, and sometimes in a push toward the open sea. There are variations in the explanations given for this four-centuries-long pattern of expanding the boundaries of the Russian state. Some analysts stress factors that portray Russia as an unprovoked aggressor fulfilling some messianic or autocratic urge, and others depict a regime haunted by its vulnerability to invasion and obsessed with the search for security.
Russia’s geopolitical situation partially explains several facets of Russian expansionism. The vastness and openness of the Russian landmass, and the absence of natural barriers within or around it, help to account for the obsessive concern by Russia’s rulers for its security, as these factors permitted easy invasion by neighboring powers and, alternatively, relatively easy outward expansion of Russian power. On those occasions when invasion has occurred—most notably, by Napoleon in 1812 and by Hitler in 1941–1943—Russian military commanders have had the luxury of being able to trade space for time, while enlisting the harsh climate as their ally in defeating the invader. Conversely, long distances have sometimes turned into logistical nightmares for Russian generals seeking to move forces or supplies to the front. This was especially so prior to the development of a network of railways in the country (as in the Crimean War), but it remains true in the absence of an all-weather network of highways, on terrain where mud can be a greater impediment than snow or ice.
Finally, from the time of Peter the Great, when Russia’s aspirations for naval power were born, the absence of ice-free ports often has been cited as a motive for Russian expansion toward the Baltic and Black seas and toward the warmer waters of the Pacific Ocean. Of equal importance for enhanced naval maneuverability is Russia’s need for ports that provide access to open waters leading to the major oceans. Ships leaving the Baltic Sea ports must pass through narrow straits between Denmark and Sweden to reach the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Naval forces leaving the Black Sea for the Mediterranean must pass through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, where the rights of passage were subject to treaty restrictions for long periods. In the Far East, Vladivostok is icebound for part of the year, and ships departing southward toward the Pacific Ocean must pass through Tsushima Strait. Had Russia fulfilled its ambition of acquiring Pusan in Korea, it would have controlled this strait. Only during the period when Port Arthur and Dairen were under Russian control was ice-free passage to the Yellow Sea and the Pacific possible.
Another familiar theory is that Russian expansionism was a product of the particular type of regime—that internal despotism found its outward expression in relentless expansion, and that incorporation of numerous subject nationalities required unusually heavy militarization to maintain central control. No checks and balances existed to question or block the tsars’ decisions to devote enormous sums of state revenues to the armed forces. In Henry Kissinger’s words:
The absolute nature of the Tsar’s powers enabled Russia’s rulers to conduct foreign policy both arbitrarily and idiosyncratically…. To sustain their rule and to surmount tensions among the empire’s various populations, all of Russia’s rulers invoked the myth of some vast, foreign threat, which, in time, turned into another of the self-fulfilling prophecies that doomed the stability of Europe.10
Certainly, both Ivan III and Ivan IV found that the necessities of state building were well served by expansion, as they sought to acquire new lands with which to reward their nobles. The process by which the Muscovite state was transformed into the Russian Empire by Peter I also reveals linkages between perceived internal requirements and external policies. But during the reigns of Catherine II and Alexander I, the Russian regime was not noticeably different in type from others in Europe, and it is difficult to argue that Russian foreign policies departed from the balance-of-power policies that were being pursued elsewhere.
By the time Nicholas I ascended the throne, Russia already was lagging behind the other major European powers in permitting constitutional change and expanding democracy, and this gap grew considerably over the ensuing decades. Henry Kissinger argues that “even when Russia was pursuing legitimacy, its attitudes were more messianic—and therefore imperialistic—than those of the other conservative courts.”11 An alternative view, however, would argue that policies of conservatism and preservation of dynastic legitimacy were better served by a stance of preserving the status quo than by upsetting it through expansion.12
Analysts who perceive a connection between regime type and expansionist policy also argue that the strong state bureaucracy and central control in Russia produced a diplomatic style that was at considerable variance with European great power norms. They describe Russian diplomacy as more secretive and suspicious, untrustworthy, and displaying unusual hostility toward the Western powers—characteristics that are said to have carried over to the Soviet period. Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Russophobic foreign secretary and prime minister in the mid-nineteenth century, stated the case for Russian untrustworthiness in 1860:
The Russian government perpetually declares that Russia wants no increases of territory, that the Russian dominions are already too large. But while making these declarations in the most solemn manner, every year [it] adds large tracts of territory to the Russian dominions not for the purpose of adding territory but carefully directed to occupation of certain strategical points, as starting points for further encroachments or as posts from whence some neighboring states may be kept under control or may be threatened with invasion.13
Denigrating tsarist diplomacy, Kissinger describes Russia’s foreign ministers as “little more than servants of a volatile and easily distracted autocrat, for whose favor they had to compete amidst many overriding domestic concerns.”14 Even when the tsar was a dominant personality, Kissinger observes, the autocratic system of policymaking weighed against coherence in policy, while the tsar’s “princely lifestyle” made it difficult for him to concentrate attention on foreign issues over a sustained period.
Russia’s greatest fault, in Kissinger’s view, lay in the unwillingness of the tsars to abide by the maxims of the prevailing international system—balance-of-power politics—which resulted in a Russian expansionism that proceeded without self-imposed limits.
But Russia seemed impelled to expand by a rhythm all its own, containable only by the deployment of a superior force, and usually by war. Throughout numerous crises, a reasonable settlement often seemed well within Russia’s reach, much better in fact than what ultimately emerged. Yet Russia always preferred the risk of defeat to compromise… . Russia on the march rarely exhibited a sense of limits.15
In similar fashion, Kissinger and other analysts have commented on Russia’s tendency when confronted with superior force or war in Europe to turn toward expansion in Asia, and to return to European objectives when more favorable circumstances prevailed.
Instances in Russian history suggest the existence of a greater sense of prudence—and a greater devotion to pragmatic, balance-of-power politics—than this analysis allows. It is true that Russia’s wars were not solely defensive—undertaken out of a search for security alone—and that Russia would attack or take territory from neighboring states that were not currently threatening it. However, Russia’s targets were invariably states or tribal entities that its rulers perceived to be weaker than itself, and possibly exposed to the ambitions of other states if preemptive moves were not taken. Examples are the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, Peter I’s war against Persia, various wars against Turkey, and acquisition of territory from a weakened Chinese Empire by means of what Beijing has long seen as “unequal treaties.”
Prior to the disastrous slide into World War I, when confronted with the possibility of going to war with a stronger state, Russia would pull back. Nicholas I found himself at war with Britain and France in the Crimea only because they came to the defense of the “sick man” on the Ottoman throne. Both Alexander II and Nicholas II had occasion to back away from possible wars with Austria in the Balkans, and Nicholas II, having suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of a Japanese state that had been widely perceived as inferior in strength, sought entente with Britain soon after that war, rather than undertake another costly conflict.
Unlike the successor Soviet regime, imperial Russia’s expansionist ambitions were not global; even the expansion into North America soon was regarded as too costly to sustain. As Martin Malia argues, a “pragmatic geopolitical motivation accounts for most of Russia’s constant westward expansion from the mid-17th century to Alexander I … the Russian imperial regime saw no further than the Vistula, the Straits, Iran, or the Yalu.”16
If tsarist Russia was not following the maxims of the balance-of-power system, how did it formulate and justify its expansionist policies? The answer, Kissinger and others believe, is that Russian expansion was largely motivated by ideology—alternatively viewed either as the triad of autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism or as a messianic Pan-Slavism. Russia’s distinctive approach to foreign policy, it is argued, arises not from a sense of insecurity, but from ideology. In Kissinger’s words, Russia for most of its history “has been a cause looking for opportunity.”17 Again stressing the continuity between the tsarist and Soviet periods, Kissinger describes Russian exceptionalism as a paradox:
Unlike the states of Western Europe, which Russia simultaneously admired, despised, and envied, Russia perceived itself not as a nation but as a cause, beyond geopolitics, impelled by faith, and held together by arms. After the Revolution, the passionate sense of mission was transferred to the Communist International.
The paradox of Russian history lies in the continuing ambivalence between messianic drive and a pervasive sense of insecurity. In its ultimate aberration, this ambivalence generated a fear that, unless the empire expanded, it would implode.18
As Kissinger notes, tsarist Russia’s attitudes toward the West were ambivalent—a complex mix of hostility and admiration. At least in part, this ambivalence reflects a duality in what “the West” represents. As Bruce Porter has written, there was not only the liberal West of the Enlightenment, so beloved by many Russian “Westernizers,” but also the other West—“the militarized, regimented, technological juggernaut” embodied by the armies of Charles XII, Frederick the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Kaiser Wilhelm. Whereas Russia’s internal cohesion and the power of the state were threatened whenever it emulated the reforming, democratizing West, the frequent interaction with the military might of the West helped ensure that “this was the West that Russia actually emulated.”19
However accurate are Kissinger’s insights on this point, he nevertheless overstates the extent to which the “passionate sense of mission” was a characteristic of official attitudes, as opposed to an undercurrent in society. As Hugh Seton-Watson demonstrates in his study of the foreign policy of Imperial Russia, occasionally the tsar would permit manifestations of Pan-Slavism to be expressed, when it suited his policy; but also he could turn it off again, if it threatened to get out of hand.20 Much of Russia’s expansion had nothing at all to do with Slavic brotherhood, but resulted from a quite pragmatic quest for gold and other valuable minerals, furs, or trading pathways to the storied markets of the Orient.
Martin Malia, a scholar who argues that Russian exceptionalism was largely confined to the Soviet period, makes the case against ascribing Russian expansionism largely to ideological motives:
In fact, however, Russian foreign policy under the old regime was no more ideological than that of any other European powers. Like all other powers, Russia was expansionist, but essentially for geopolitical reasons.
Indeed, there was probably more ideology in the Western overseas expression of this expansionism than in its Russian, continental, and Eurasian forms… .
Russian foreign policy under the old regime did have an ideological component, but only toward the end. Until the early 20th century, pan-Slav ideology was much more the property of society than of the government, which succumbed to it only in the immediate buildup to 1914… . It was with the October Revolution that Russia’s international role changed fundamentally to a messianic ideology.21
Clearly, no single motive force can be found to explain tsarist Russian expansionism; rather, the influences of geography, regime type, the international system, and ideology all weigh in, though in different proportions at different times. As we will see in Chapter 3, there are features of tsarist diplomacy that did carry over to the Soviet period, but also there are characteristics that did not. In evaluating the legacy of the tsars, one can, however, surmise that certain lessons could be drawn from the history of the Russian Empire to help guide the foreign policy of both communist and democratic successors. From the Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century through the Crimean and Russo-Japanese wars until World War I, Russian history teaches the dangers that overextension and war pose for internal stability. Sometimes undertaken to divert popular attention from internal problems, war more often than not exacerbates these problems—ultimately, for the tsars, causing the collapse of an empire once regarded as the mightiest in Europe.
1. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 94–95.
2. Ibid., pp. 170–74.
3. Hugh Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1952), pp. 22–24.
4. Ibid., pp. 90–93.
5. Ibid., p. 102.
6. Quoted in ibid., p. 213.
7. See the revisionist book The Russian Origins of the First World War, by Sean McMeekin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). This traditional Russian war aim was repudiated by the Bolsheviks, who took power in 1917. One of their popular antiwar slogans was, “We don’t want the Dardanelles,” p. 231.
8. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 233. Much of the following paragraph is drawn from pp. 232–41 of this book.
9. Ibid., p. 240.
10. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 140.
11. Ibid., p. 141.
12. Martin Malia, “Tradition, Ideology, and Pragmatism in the Formation of Russian Foreign Policy,” in The Emergence of Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Leon Aron and Kenneth M. Jensen (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1994), p. 41.
13. Quoted in John P. LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917:The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 368.
14. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 175.
15. Ibid., pp. 172–73.
16. Malia, “Tradition, Ideology, and Pragmatism,” pp. 41, 45.
17. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 25.
18. Ibid., p. 143.
19. Bruce D. Porter, “Russia and Europe After the Cold War: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policies,” in The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy After the Cold War, ed. Celeste A. Wallander (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), p. 126.
20. Seton-Watson, Decline of Imperial Russia, pp. 317–18.
21. Malia, “Tradition, Ideology, and Pragmatism,” pp. 40–41, 43.