Well, I've been away a good long while this time. I've got an array of reasons for it, but the main one is simply that I've started my first real 9-5 job, and that's taken most of my energy lately. Not that I'm not grateful, considering how many of my grad school classmates have struggled to hang onto their jobs in the face of Covid; my job is pretty secure, and has honestly gotten easier now that I can work from home, but it still takes a lot out of me.
But I've adjusted, and managed to find the energy to put together another chapter, this time focused on Russia and the Caucasus. This isn't the 4-5 chapters in a row focused on France that I'd envisioned, but after so long I decided to go with the idea I could put together the most easily, so here we are. Next time I'll focus on Poland. Enjoy!
Chapter Forty-Five: One Step Forward…
Excerpted from The Road to War: 1830-1852 by Alexander Peterson, 1971.
As fears of Ottoman frailty and the threat of an expansionist Russia brought British and French foreign policy into alignment in the 1830’s, the balance of power inside Russia was also shifting, as the nominally advisory State Council established by Tsar Alexander extended its influence.
In 1828, Alexander’s successor Konstantin acceded to the Council’s suggestion that the State Secretaries, the leaders of its four departments, should also receive Ministerial appointments, so as to ensure policy would be implemented fully in accordance with the Tsar’s decisions. This change led to rather contrary results in practice, however, as the diffident Konstantin was misled or left in the dark by canny and experienced advisors.
In addition to entrenching its own influence, the Council also persuaded the Tsar to revise the rules for imperial succession. In 1797, Tsar Paul had codified a system of male-preference primogeniture, with the throne being awarded to a female line only if all legitimate male heirs were dead. In 1830, Konstantin revised the Romanov house laws into a system of absolute primogeniture, awarding rulership to the eldest surviving dynast, regardless of gender. [1]
This was a necessary concession on the Tsar’s part, for as much as the Council was able to steer Konstantin’s governmental decisions, they were less capable of controlling his personal life. His wife, the Princess Juliane of Saxe-Gotha-Saalfeld, had left the then-Grand Duke in 1799 due to his abusive treatment of her, and despite years of entreaties, Konstantin never managed to convince her to return to Russia. For the sake of royal continuity, the State Council entreated Konstantin to divorce Juliane and re-marry, but he never did so. And soon it was too late; the Tsar passed away May 13, 1833, without legitimate issue. [2]
With Konstantin dead, the next in line for the throne was Maria Pavlovna, the Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, but the State Council had reservations. Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode had grown wary of French intentions in the wake of the Egyptian Crisis, and felt that Maria’s ties to a Napoleonic satellite state were potentially compromising. Because of this, the Council pressured Maria to remove herself from consideration for the throne. In her place, Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna was coronated as Tsarina Catherine III.
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Catherine III, Empress of All Russia.
For the Council, Catherine was an ideal candidate for the throne not simply because of a lack of foreign entanglements, having been widowed for twenty years by 1833, but also as an embodiment of changing political currents in Russia. Mikhail Speranksy’s brainchild had drifted rightward as its membership expanded to include more members of the aristocracy.
For Nesselrode and his fellow conservatives, Catherine was deemed a fellow traveler, having sponsored Nikolay Karamzin’s 12-volume
History of the Russian State, an influential work that also served as a defense of Russian autocracy and a rejection of Western liberalism. Significantly, Karamzin emphasized the legacy of Ivan III as the foundation of Russian greatness, steering Russian historiography away from Peter the Great and his efforts at aping the political developments of Western Europe. With Catherine on the throne and Nesselrode and his allies dominating the State Council, Russia was poised for a course correction away from the Francophilia that followed Tilsit. [3]
In foreign policy, Catherine III deferred to Nesselrode’s judgment more often than not, agreeing with the Foreign Minister’s assessment that Britain and France’s thawing relations were cause for suspicion. Further adventures in the Balkans were too dangerous until the threat of an anti-Russian coalition was neutralised. Instead, Russia would be better-advised to extend its Asian frontiers, while consolidating strength in restive areas at home. And no territories in the Empire was quite so rebellious as Circassia and Dagestan.
Although Russia had seized nominal sovereignty over much of the Caucasus during the waning years of the Napoleonic Wars, the native Muslim tribes maintained a fierce insurgency. By the 1830’s, Russian generals had little to show for their efforts, as the Circassians and Dagestanis frustrated their occupiers with a mastery of irregular warfare and intimate knowledge of the local terrain.
What was worse, the rebels were soon to acquire some well-connected allies. British and French adventurers, brought together more by serendipity than by official coordination or orders, made their way into Circassia, hoping to undermine Russian control over the region. The unofficial leaders of the two groups, David Urquhart and Eugène Delacroix, had met several years earlier in Greece, both having traveled there to assist the rebellion against the Turks. Despite this shared experience, the two men came away from that conflict with vastly different worldviews. Urquhart had quickly grown disillusioned with the Armatoloi, and gravitated towards the Turks, an attachment that only grew stronger once the French and Russians interceded against them. Delacroix, for his part, held onto his faith in the Greeks, even promoting their cause through a series of Romantic poems he sent back home. [4]
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David Urquhart and Eugène Delacroix did their utmost to organise the Circassian tribes into a potent anti-Russian fighting force.
After parting ways, both Urquhart and Delacroix retained a strong interest in developments in the Near East, an interest they channeled into diplomatic careers. In 1830, Urquhart secured an appointment on a British mission to Turkey seeking to address the ongoing Egyptian Crisis. It was during this time in Constantinople that he became aware of the plight of the Muslim inhabitants of the Caucasus. Upon returning home, the young attaché took it upon himself to sound the alarm about Russian designs in the region, and the injustice faced by the citizens of the small mountain nation staring down the barrel of the Tsar’s might. His lobbying found its most sympathetic ears among Knatchbull’s Conservatives, but members of the Canningite and Whig coalitions were also swayed, providing cover for Urquhart’s future activities.
Delacroix, for his part, was less of an activist than Urquhart. In the years after leaving Greece, he slowly rose through the ranks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He, too, would find himself returning to the Near East in the early 1830’s, but he did so under orders from his superiors to shore up Turkish security and combat Russian influence clandestinely. The Hellenophilic part-time poet was less than enthused about his mandate, which made his discovery of the Circassian cause all the more fortuitous: by arming and organising the Caucasian rebels, France could stymie the Russians without indirectly imperiling the Greeks.
And so in early 1834, both Urquhart and Delacroix made their way to Circassia to personally oversee their respective operations. Their hosts made no secret of the other side’s presence, and so the two former comrades-in-arms reunited in the most unlikely of places. The Frenchman and the Scot may have enjoyed disparate geopolitical outlooks, but they shared a romanticism and love of adventure that did more to bring them together than politics could to divide them.
The two came to an arrangement that would prevent the British and French delegations from inadvertently duplicating each other’s efforts or otherwise alerting the Russians to their activities. Urquhart and his allies were condoned rather than sanctioned by their government, which would make it harder to organise deliveries of weapons and other supplies. Delacroix’s Foreign Affairs contacts could focus on material support, while Urquhart would provide pro-Circassian propaganda for audiences back home, as well as working to coordinate disparate rebel forces to face the Russians as a unified front. Both men recognised the greater importance of their mission: should they succeed in securing Circassian independence, the Russians would lose a valuable bridgehead from which to invade Turkey, Persia, or even British India.
It took over a year for the Russians to become aware of the Western support flowing into Circassia, but after a French gunrunner was detained attempting to enter the port of Sunjuk-Kale by a Russian brig in February 1835, the question of Anglo-French encirclement assumed centrality in St. Petersburg. Eventually, Nesselrode came to a solution that was every bit as audacious as the adventurers he sought to combat. It was fear of growing Russian power that had driven the British and French towards cooperation in Asia. Therefore, the best way to end that cooperation would be for the Russian threat to diminish, allowing the traditional enmity between London and Paris to resume. To break the Anglo-French Entente, the Russians would have to feign defeat in the Caucasus.
The cost of Nesselrode’s deception was clear enough: an independent Circassian state would emerge under British and French guidance, impeding Russian expansion further south. But such a state could also serve Russian interests in the long run: after all, the problems of pacifying Circassia extended beyond the battlefield. The tribal structures in Circassia were exceptional in their lack of firm social hierarchy: following a civil war of sorts in the late 18th Century that deposed the local aristocracy, the three largest tribes, the Natukhai, Shapsugs and Abedzeks, all operated via informal assemblies rather than any firm state structure. While this lack of central leadership may have impeded coordinated resistance to some degree, it also made any kind of formal surrender equally impossible. [5]
The Circassian statelessness frustrated Russian commanders, who would frequently find temporary success in pacifying certain areas, only for the inhabitants to revolt again at the earliest opportunity. If Urquhart and Delacroix could create order where there was lawlessness, all in the name of better opposing the Russian occupiers, then the governing bodies they created could subsequently fall under Russian political influence, allowing the Tsar’s forces to return.
The first step in this strategy would be to relax naval patrols in the Sunjuk-Kale region and halt the construction of new fortifications along the Black Sea coast. Fort Adler was left half-finished, while the previously finished Fort Aleksandriya would be abandoned by 1840. This lightening of security restrictions would ease the efforts of the Anglo-French agents, hopefully paving the way towards a unified Circassia in the process.
To the disappointment of all involved, political consolidation of Circassia remained a difficult task. Two of Urquhart’s contacts, Sefer-Bei Zanoko and Kazbech Tuguzhoko, commanded respect among the Natukhai and the Shapsugs, but they had trouble parlaying that respect into deeper cooperation. At the Scotsman’s advice, the two were among the signatories to a Circassian Declaration of Independence, which vested authority into for the insurgency into a council of elected leaders, but organising an actual election was nearly impossible under the circumstances. For the moment, little changed in the Circassian political arena despite Urquhart’s best efforts.
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This Circassian national flag was also designed by Urquhart.
Nevertheless, the seeds for something greater had been planted, and thanks to Nesselrode’s machinations, they would be given space to grow. The same could not be said for the nationalist movement taking shape at the other end of the Tsarina’s domain.
[1] What goes unsaid here is that Catherine was lobbying for this change behind the scenes as well. In addition to matching Nesselrode’s conservatism, she has the added benefit of having adult children by her prior marriage, which fixes continuity concerns for good.
[2] Konstantin staying away from Poland and his second wife was necessary for him to remain in the line of succession, but I could never decide who he might wed instead. Sidestepping towards Catherine Pavlovna gave me the double benefit of getting to play with an interesting OTL personality while also not having to definitively resolve this question.
[3] Catherine supported this project IOTL. This new conservative bent in Russian politics will have major implications for the codification of Russian law that took place in the OTL 1830’s, which I’ll touch on in more detail next chapter.
[4] David Urquhart’s life story here is pretty much OTL, but Delacroix is a bit of a departure. In real life, he’s known as one of the great Romantic painters, but Talleyrand was a close family friend, and quite possibly his illegitimate father as well, so ITTL Eugène capitalizes on that connection to give himself a leg up in a diplomatic career instead.
[5] One thing I wanted to explore at points ITTL is the flavorful and unusual social and political arrangements you can find at the local level in certain corners of the world that either got stamped out at some point or simply forgotten over time. The loose and libertarian society of the Circassians is one example I knew a bit about, so it was an easy choice to include.
Of course, another big theme of this story is the tendency of modernity to paper over these kinds of unique traditions in favor of more homogenous and more “efficient” forms of government, which is represented here by Urquhart and Delacroix’s attempts to cobble together a proper state with which to fight the Russians. Luckily for the Circassians, they’ve been given some breathing room to hash out these questions on their own, so we’ll certainly be back here to see what comes of this experiment later on.
