Dancing the Mazurka

One​ can imagine the dilemma this sound narrative history posed to a publisher looking for a catchy title. Even so, The First Cold War is an unhelpful one. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. Russia fought almost two dozen wars after 1783, but only the Crimean War of 1854-56 and the brief Anglo-Russian war of 1807 involved combat with Britain. More often they were allies, for fifteen years against Napoleon, and, at the end of the period, against rising German power. By any historical standard, as great powers they had very few clashing interests. Though both wanted to expand, they could do so for many thousands of miles across Asia without interfering with each other. The implication that Britain and Russia have always been at odds is a peculiar one, though current events give it extra appeal. Barbara Emerson’s book is weakest in considering the one point of real comparison between the mid-19th-century global order and the post-1945 one. During both periods, the greatest differences between Britain and Russia were not geopolitical but ideological – over the merits of liberal capitalism and representative liberal politics.

Relative to the other European powers, Britain and Russia were self-sufficient. They had an important common interest in preventing the domination of the Continent by France or Germany. Beyond that, they had distinct spheres of influence where neither was very interested in supporting the other. As a result, their occasional negotiations over forming an alliance were liable to be affected by misunderstandings. They preferred to proceed by pragmatic and often taciturn accommodations. After 1810, for example, Russia abandoned its brief wartime hostility to Britain because it was damaging its Baltic trade and because Napoleon was obviously a greater threat. Britain, meanwhile, made no serious attempt to prevent Russia’s five assaults on Polish independence between 1772 and 1863.

Books like Emerson’s have been unfashionable for some time. Historians don’t study diplomatic relations as much as diplomats think they should. The reader in search of general themes and patterns is left frustrated as crises arise, produce flurries of concern and are smoothed over. Hence the recourse to the ‘Cold War’ tag here. This is a pity, because the history of Anglo-Russian relations is interesting, not just in itself but because, when tensions have arisen, they have usually been prompted less by British or Russian behaviour than by extraneous factors. Emerson’s book is a treasure trove of information, but it would benefit from more interpretation than she offers. Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.

In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left British public debate since then. It was driven in this first incarnation by two distinct concerns, with Russian expansionism playing a secondary role in both. The first was a military preoccupation with the defence of India. The second was liberal pessimism about the state of European politics.

The extent of Indian territory under British control increased dramatically between 1790 and 1820, as the East India Company forced local princes to accept British protection. Though this process was driven mainly by ambition and greed, a subsidiary factor was Napoleon’s plan to ally with native leaders to challenge British rule. After 1810 Britain controlled the Indian Ocean, so Napoleon had to look elsewhere, but a school of military strategists continued to use the spectre of foreign attack to justify new territorial acquisitions on the Subcontinent. In 1801 Tsar Paul ordered 20,000 Cossacks to ride south from Orenburg with the aim of beating Britain to some of it – though they had no maps for beyond the Oxus. This quixotic venture helped convince his courtiers that he had gone mad, triggering his assassination and the Cossacks’ swift recall. Next, Russia fought a series of successful wars with Iran in the Caucasus, securing Georgia, Dagestan and most of Azerbaijan in 1813 and Eastern Armenia in 1828. Russia then attacked the Ottoman lands in the Western Caucasus and took the strategic centres of Bayazid, Kars and Erzurum before returning them after the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829. To some, this seemed to signal a grand mission of Asian domination.

Erzurum, Yerevan and Baku were a long way from India – even Baku was more than 1100 miles from Kabul. British military strategists did not fear the Russian conquest of India – the army officer George de Lacy Evans half-admitted as much in On the Designs of Russia (1828), Russophobia’s foundational text. His concern was that increasing Russian activity beyond India’s borders would ‘disturb and disaffect the public mind of that country towards us’ and force the East India Company to spend much more money on subduing a disaffected Indian population. In 1830, the company itself made the same point: the danger was ‘not so much actual invasion by Russia as the moral effect which would be produced among our own subjects … by the continued apprehension of that event’. It would also necessitate higher taxes.

Doubts about Indian loyalty were related to anxiety about the unreliability of the two empires that stood between Russia and India: the Ottoman and Iranian, both of which seemed to be riddled by immorality and to suffer from political incapacity. Fighting alongside the Ottoman army during the Napoleonic Wars had convinced British officers that corruption, duplicity and indiscipline were endemic to it. Few were surprised when Greek rebels succeeded in winning independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, supported by the Orthodox Church. It even seemed likely that Russia would soon regain Constantinople for Orthodoxy. The comparatively generous peace treaties Russia agreed with the Ottomans and Iranians after defeating them both between 1826 and 1829 implied that its new strategy was to prop up both empires as ‘weak neighbours’ which were dependent on Russia for survival and likely to do its bidding rather than follow the wishes of France or Britain. Traditionally, British diplomats had much less influence at the Ottoman court than French and Russian ones. In addition, the Foreign Office increasingly disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean to intimidate Ottoman and Iranian officials near the coast, but this highlighted its failure to wield the same influence in northern and eastern Iran, where it assumed Russia must be up to something similar.

The Indian army’s concern about a power vacuum in Central Asia prompted a series of bored, fame-hungry officers to play what one of them, Arthur Conolly, christened the Great Game. This involved trying to win influence with local rulers in the Central Asian khanates, in an attempt to replicate what their naval colleagues were doing on the coast. Without naval and commercial power to back them up, however, this ended as always seemed probable: Conolly and Charles Stoddart were beheaded in the main square of Bukhara, and Alexander Burnes hacked to death outside his house in Kabul. These misfortunes discouraged further heroics, but did nothing to assuage British fears. In 1837, Iran tried to compensate for its losses to Russia in the north by strengthening its position to the east, and attacked Herat on the Afghan border. The Indian government, fearing that Russia would get involved, made two military responses. The naval response – occupying a Gulf island – paid off, and the Iranian attack was abandoned. The other response embroiled the Indian army in local factional politics in Afghanistan, and ended in disaster. In retaliation, Britain took aggressive steps to secure its Indian borders during the 1840s, conquering Sindh and the Punjab, and strengthening its influence in southern Iran.

In the 1860s, Russia made its own conquests east of the Caspian Sea, taking control of Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent; a Russian province of Turkestan was created in 1867. From 1879, the Transcaspian railway line began to connect these cities with the sea, and in 1884 the fertile region around Merv, only 260 miles from Herat, was taken in order to consolidate the railway. This expansion was justified partly by the khanates’ past enslavement of Russian subjects, and partly as revenge for Asian tribesmen’s subjugation of Rus in the medieval period, but it was really an attempt to find a more stable and easily defended frontier on the steppe. By 1875, when Frederick Burnaby travelled to Khiva to try to work out what the Russians intended to do next, he had the benefit of a Russian railway for part of the journey. The British and Indian governments were relaxed about Russian expansion in this area. In 1865, the foreign secretary, Earl Russell, told the veteran Russian diplomat Philipp von Brunnow that he was ‘always for the regular civilised Power against the irregular and barbarous states’, and that Britain would shed no tears for the emir of Bukhara. The viceroy of India, Sir John Lawrence, compared Russian plans for these regions with Britain’s improved relations with the Afghan tribes and the Iranian government.

For the rest of the century, most ministries believed that Britain and Russia could co-operate in Central Asia and that occasional tensions generated by ambitious officers on the ground could be resolved by cool-headed diplomacy. The glaring exception to this rule was provided by Disraeli’s viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, whose impatient enthusiasm and desire for tribal leaders to show him loyalty dragged Britain into a second Afghan military disaster in 1878. Lytton’s ill-judged policy wasn’t the result of Russian provocation in Asia so much as of Ottoman atrocities against Christians in Bulgaria, which triggered another Russian invasion of the Balkans. Assuming that Britain would soon be at war with the Russians in Europe, Lytton thought he could win fame by making Afghan Muslims tractable allies against their infidel; he was wrong on both counts. At home, meanwhile, the press peddled excited theories about Russia’s ambitions for world domination, which Disraeli happily indulged in order to show that in his genius he could stop its armies reaching even the Mediterranean. He, Bismarck and other European leaders duly put Russia in its place at the Congress of Berlin.

Russian control of Merv produced a flurry of British alarm about the Russian-Afghan border in 1885, but the upshot was an international commission to agree where it would be set. The frontier proposed by the boundary commission in 1887-88 held until 1979, thus proving the diplomats’ point that the vacuum of the 1830s and 1840s was much more destabilising than the European powers’ subsequent carve-up, especially since the local tribes retained so much practical independence. Between 1893 and 1896, Britain made similar agreements over the Afghan-Indian border, known as the Durand Line, and with Russia over the boundary in the Pamir mountains. One of the border peaks was named Mount Concord.

The region where agreement between Britain and Russia proved most difficult was Iran, but this was chiefly the result of Iran’s pride in its long independence. Russia was used to taking advantage of its geographical proximity to exercise influence in Tehran, but the shah was conscious of Britain’s commercial and naval power in the south of his kingdom and carried on playing both powers off against each other. All three were accustomed to stately and inconsequential shadow boxing. The more energetic British diplomats hoped to engineer an Anglo-Russian guarantee of Iranian territorial integrity that would also facilitate British commercial development. Many Russians worried that capitalist penetration would entrench British influence in the long run, while British officers feared that the new railways would give the Russians access to Herat. In the 1890s, therefore, the idea of a guarantee got nowhere and Anglo-Russian mutual suspicion reached a new high. But patient diplomacy eventually resulted in 1907 in an Anglo-Russian entente. Both sides now recognised that exaggerated fears about the other’s intentions were leading to escalating defence costs, especially after Russia’s chastening defeat by Japan in the war of 1904-5. Britain and Russia agreed to establish spheres of influence in an independent Iran and to welcome commercial development there, while Russia agreed to respect British interests in Afghanistan and the existence of Tibet as a buffer state.

The Liberal government’s 1907 entente was a high-handed imperialist gesture: there was minimal Iranian or Afghan consultation. Nonetheless, it was a triumph for diplomatic rationality over the neuroses of the Anglo-Indian military class. It also seemed to represent a decisive moment in the lengthy battle to impose on Russia and Asia the practices and principles of European diplomacy, including a respect for fixed boundaries and international agreements to uphold them.

In Asia, Russophobia was driven mainly by suspicious Indian military officials. In Europe, it was prompted by liberal pessimism in the face of Continental military autocracy. Having struggled so ineffectually for so long to contain Napoleon’s megalomania, after 1815 liberals anticipated a new assault from the powers of Eastern Europe, led by Russia, which since the late 18th century had forced the partition of Poland and expanded into the Crimea, Ukraine and the Balkans. Tsar Alexander regarded himself as Europe’s saviour and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the 1760s, British visitors had published accounts of Russians’ ‘infamous frauds and cruel extortions’, the inhumanity of serfdom and the instruments of torture in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. De Lacy Evans’s book presented Russia as a perfect autocracy, divided between slaves and masters, and focused exclusively on military expansion and colonisation.

This image of barbaric absolutism gained greatly from the severe suppression of the Polish rebellion of 1830 by 180,000 Russian troops. Eight thousand Polish exiles took up residence in Paris and London, many of them well-connected political and military figures who would publicise the national cause for years to come. Liberal MPs made rhetorical condemnations of the tsar: Daniel O’Connell described him as an Attila out to wreck Western civilisation, a ‘scourge of God’; for Joseph Hume, he was ‘a monster in human form’. When, in 1833, Russia briefly occupied Constantinople, in response to the advance of the Egyptian viceroy Mehemet Ali, all the conditions for the creation of the Russophobia movement were in place.

Yet there were severe limits to the power of Russophobia. The rhetoric of O’Connell and Hume was aimed less at the tsar than at the British government, which had failed to do enough to help Poland. Ministers were prepared to leave Eastern Europe to Russia, Prussia and Austria, in return for those powers keeping away from Belgium, Spain and Portugal. British co-operation with Orléanist France in these regions after the 1830 revolution helped to establish an idea of a constitutionalist ‘West’ in which Britain could achieve its essential security objectives (a subject I discussed in the LRB of 21 April 2022). Few Britons had an appetite for costly intervention in Poland.

Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary during the 1830s, was keen to defuse tensions with Russia over the Ottoman Empire, and had no difficulty working with it in the international crisis of 1839-40 caused by Mehemet Ali’s continuing ambitions. The heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Alexander, visited England in 1839 and taught a smitten Queen Victoria (whose godfather was his uncle) to dance the mazurka. Alexander donated £300 to the Jockey Club and a race at Newmarket was named the Cesarewitch in his honour. Horses remained a bond between the British and Russian aristocracies. During the state visit of 1844, Nicholas I was so entranced by the prestige of the Ascot Gold Cup that he provided 500 guineas for the purchase of an elaborate piece of silver for each year’s winner, and the race was briefly renamed the Emperor’s Plate (the Crimean War ended his donations). Urbane Russian ambassadors had enjoyed a good reception in Britain ever since the Anglophile Semyon Vorontsov had charmed his way through the French wars and married his daughter to the earl of Pembroke (the Peelite politician Sidney Herbert was their son).

The most high-profile Liberals of the 1830s (and future decades) were too confident of their own policies to be Russophobes. The philosophical radicals who grouped themselves around Lord Durham prided themselves on applying rational intelligence to hard facts and statistics. Durham looked at Russia and saw ‘weakness where the world imagines strength’. The government sent him to Russia in 1832 and again in 1835, to persuade the tsar’s officials that Britain and Russia could work together. His other objective was to counter domestic alarms. His report of 1836 used the information he had collected to prove that Russia was not the threat to world peace that the Russophobes (or bombastic Russians) implied. He described Russia as a clumsy, slow-moving giant, which could use climate and terrain to build an ‘impregnable fortification’ against the likes of Napoleon, but which posed no threat as an attacker. Its strengths were balanced by severe weaknesses: a scattered population, inadequate communications, poor educational standards. It lacked Britain’s concentrated energy and efficient organisation. Its army was too thinly stretched: a wise Russian leader would realise that if he attacked the Ottomans again, prompting war with Britain or France, Poland would immediately rise. Its trade was limited and extremely vulnerable in the event of war with Britain, while the European money market would not fund a lengthy military campaign. Its navy was an expensive toy, icebound for most of the year, and deficient in seamanship and equipment.

Initially, many commercial liberals had distrusted Russia because it wanted to maintain high tariff walls in its expanded empire. But from the late 1830s, this economic policy seemed increasingly counter-productive. As liberals became more confident about the spread of British commercial power, they assumed that freer trade would sweep all before it, and force Russia to lower its tariffs. For Richard Cobden, opening the Ottoman Empire to European trade would nullify any threat from an increase of Russian influence there. Liberal cabinet ministers like the 3rd Earl Grey thought Russophobic press stories absurd, because Russia relied on physical force, whereas Britain’s strengths were human intelligence, education, communications and technology. As the 19th century went on, the Russian threat was bound to recede; time was the greatest ally of liberal, capitalist Britain.

Palmerston’s foreign policy was intended to counter any threat to British dominance of the world’s seas; his fundamental goal, and achievement, was to keep France and Russia at odds. The Crimean War was caused by ideological tensions stemming from the 1848 Revolutions: the emergence of the assertive Napoleon III in France, as well as increased Russian paranoia about the revolutionary threat in Europe. Palmerston became convinced that Russia would manipulate Balkan Christian grievances to trigger an Ottoman war, though he hoped those grievances could be mitigated by improvements in Ottoman governance. He also believed that the only way Britain could stop Russia from imposing intolerable pressure on the Ottomans was by sending the fleet decisively towards Constantinople. He was unable to persuade a divided coalition cabinet to pursue this policy, however, with the result that the European powers drifted into war.

After Britain and France’s initial focus on the Black Sea theatre, where they had limited success, Britain’s more telling contribution to wartime strategy emerged in 1855. As Andrew Lambert has shown, it focused on the Baltic, and aimed to use British naval strength to exploit Russian economic weakness. Britain had the naval power to blockade and bombard ports, immobilising enemy fleets and imposing huge economic pressure. Its overt planning for a naval expedition towards St Petersburg, and its treaty with Sweden, made inflation-ridden Russia realise it had to agree to peace.

When Russia made its next aggressive move against the Ottomans in 1876, Britain again relied on economic and naval strength to force it to the peace table. Disraeli’s first response was to show that he had learned from the mixed messages Britain had sent Russia in 1853: a reinforced fleet was despatched to the Constantinople area in May 1876, to signal that Britain would not accept the Eastern powers’ bullying of the Ottomans. The aim was to stop a Russo-Ottoman war, but in 1877 Russian domestic pressure, and Ottoman pride, proved too strong. Russia hoped for a swift victory to erase the pain of 1856, and gambled successfully that French military weakness and anti-Ottoman public feeling in Britain would prevent a re-emergence of the Crimean War coalition. But the Ottoman resistance at Plevna gave Disraeli the chance to play a longer game. He calculated that Russia was too weak economically to sustain a second year of fighting, and that the suggestion of one would force it to concede. In February 1878, his parliamentary majority backed a large vote of credit for military preparations. Then in the spring he called Indian troops to Malta, suggesting that many more soldiers might follow, and that the small size of Britain’s domestic standing army would not prevent a well-funded military campaign. Russia quickly agreed to an international congress to settle the Balkan issue.

These 19th-century​ debates and interactions have cast a long shadow. The old tropes about Russian autocracy, inhumanity and ambition are still available for those in the contemporary West who seek public support for a stronger containment policy and higher defence spending. The Russian state also exploits them in order to emphasise its power, ruthlessness and unpredictability. Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics – the cyber attacks and dissemination of false information on the internet – are designed to suggest an unsleeping ambition to invade our lives. Vladimir Putin’s domestic powerbase is built on his ability to instil fear, in dissidents, rivals and bureaucrats. His project to maintain the world’s last great colonial empire involves expending young lives on a scale no Western democracy could accept.

For the last two hundred years, Western fears about Russia have ultimately stemmed from politics more than geopolitics: from liberal distrust of the unpredictability and violence of absolutism. Westerners have worried, to varying degrees, about the Russian state’s ability to ignore the principles and processes they have tried to establish for the peaceful resolution of international disagreements. We now face an American president who is equally keen on rule-breaking and unpredictability. If Russia and the US can find common cause, it is likely to be to the detriment not just of Ukraine but also of Europe. It suits both parties to marginalise Europe’s role in international diplomacy. But their willingness to compromise with each other also reflects the limits of their own global power. Europe, for its part, has enough economic power to make a stand against Putin’s further ambitions, if it chooses to exercise it. Western European politicians have lived alongside absolutists for a long time and despite much hostile rhetoric on both sides, they have usually managed to deal transactionally and rationally with each other.