RUSSIA ORIENTALIZED--EASTERN QUESTION
As Alexander left no sons, by the law of primogeniture his brother
Constantine, the next oldest in the family of Paul I., should have been
his successor. But Constantine had already privately renounced the
throne in favor of his brother Nicholas. The actual reason for this
renunciation was the Grand Duke's deep attachment to a Polish lady for
whom he was willing even to relinquish a crown. The letter announcing
his intention contained these words: "Being conscious that I have
neither genius, talents, nor energy necessary for my elevation, I beg
your Imperial Majesty to transfer this right to my brother Nicholas,
the next in succession." The document accepting the renunciation and
acknowledging Nicholas as his successor was safely deposited by
Alexander, its existence remaining a profound secret even to Nicholas
himself.
At the time of the Emperor's death Constantine, who was Viceroy of
Poland, was residing at Cracow. Nicholas, unaware of the
circumstances, immediately took the oath of allegiance to his brother
and also administered it to the troops at St. Petersburg. It required
some time for Constantine's letter to arrive, stating his immovable
determination to abide by the decision which would be found in his
letter to the late Emperor. There followed a contest of
generosity--Nicholas urging and protesting, and his brother refusing
the elevation. Three weeks passed--weeks of disastrous
uncertainty--with no acknowledged head to the Empire.
Such an opportunity was not to be neglected by the revolutionists in
the South nor their co-workers in the North. Pestel, the leader, had
long been organizing his recruits, and St. Petersburg and Moscow were
the centers of secret political societies. The time for action had
unexpectedly come. There must be a swift overturning: the entire
imperial family must be destroyed, and the Senate and Holy Synod must
be compelled to adopt the Constitution which had been prepared.
The hour appointed for the beginning of this direful programme was the
day when the senators and the troops should assemble to take the oath
of allegiance to Nicholas. The soldiers, who knew nothing of the plot,
were incited to refuse to take the oath on the ground that
Constantine's resignation was false, and that he was a prisoner and in
chains. Constantine was their friend and going to increase their pay.
One Moscow regiment openly shouted: "Long life to Constantine!" and
when a few conspirators cried "Long live the Constitution!" the
soldiers asked if that was Constantine's wife. So the ostensible cause
of the revolt, which soon became general, was a fidelity to their
rightful Emperor, who was being illegally deposed. Under this mask
worked Pestel and his co-conspirators, composed in large measure of men
of high intelligence and standing, including even government officials
and members of the aristocracy.
A few days were sufficient to overcome this abortive attempt at
revolution in Russia. Pestel, when he heard his death sentence, said,
"My greatest error is that I tried to gather the harvest before sowing
the seed"; and Ruileef, "I knew this enterprise would be my
destruction--but could no longer endure the sight of my country's
anguish under despotism." When we think of the magnitude of the
offense, the monstrous crime which was contemplated; and when we
remember that Nicholas was by nature the very incarnation of
unrestrained authority, the punishment seems comparatively light.
There was no vindictiveness, no wholesale slaughter. Five leaders were
deliberately and ignominiously hanged, and hundreds of their misguided
followers and sympathizers went into perpetual exile in Siberia--there
to expiate the folly of supposing that a handful of inexperienced
enthusiasts and doctrinaires could in their studies create new and
ideal conditions, and build up with one hand while they were recklessly
destroying with the other. Their aims were the abolition of serfdom,
the destruction of all existing institutions, and a perfect equality
under a constitutional government. They were definite and
sweeping--and so were the means for accomplishing them. Their benign
government was going to rest upon crime and violence. We should call
these men Nihilists now. There were among them writers and thinkers,
noble souls which, under the stress of oppression and sympathy, had
gone astray. They had failed, but they had proved that there were men
in Russia capable of dying for an ideal. When the cause had its
martyrs it had become sacred--and though it might sleep, it would not
die.
The man sitting upon the throne of Russia now was not torn by conflicts
between his ideals and inexorable circumstance. His natural instincts
and the conditions of his empire both pointed to the same simple
course--an unmitigated autocracy--an absolute rule supported by
military power. Instead of opening wider the doors leading into
Europe, he intended to close them, and if necessary even to lock them.
Instead of encouraging his people to be more European, he was going to
be the champion of a new Pan-Slavism and to strive to intensify the
Russian national traits. The time had come for this great empire to
turn its face away from the West and toward the East, where its true
interests were. Such a plan may not have been formulated by Nicholas,
but such were the policies instinctively pursued from the beginning of
his reign to its close.
Such an attitude naturally brought him at once into conflict with
Turkey, with which country he was almost immediately at war. Of course
no one suspected him of sentimental sympathy when he espoused the cause
of Greece in the picturesque struggle with the Turks which brought
Western Europe at last to her rescue. It was only a part of a much
larger plan, and when Nicholas had proclaimed himself the Protector of
the Orthodox Christians in the East, he had placed himself in a
relation to the Eastern Question which could be held by no other
sovereign in Europe; for persecuted Christians in the East were not
Catholic but Orthodox; and was not he the head of the Orthodox Church?
It was to secure this first move in the game of diplomacy that Russia
joined England and France, and placed the struggling little state of
Greece upon its feet in 1832.
But the conditions in Western Europe were unfavorable to the tranquil
pursuit of autocratic ends. Charles X. had presumed too far upon the
patient submission of the French people. In 1830 Paris was in a state
of insurrection; Charles, the last of the Bourbons, had abdicated; and
Louis Philippe, under a new liberal Constitution _approved by the
people_, was King of the French. The indignation of Nicholas at this
overturning was still greater when the epidemic of revolt spread to
Belgium and to Italy, and then leaped, as such epidemics will, across
the intervening space to Russian Poland. The surface calm in that
unhappy state ruled by the Grand Duke Constantine swiftly vanished and
revealed an entire people waiting for the day when, at any cost, they
might make one more stand for freedom. The plan was a desperate one.
It was to assassinate Constantine, who had relinquished a throne rather
than leave them; to induce Lithuania, their old ally, to join them; and
to create an independent Polish state which would bar the Russians from
entering Europe.
In 1831 the brief struggle was ended, and Europe had received the
historic announcement, "Order reigns at Warsaw." Not only Warsaw, but
Poland, was at the feet of the Emperor. Confiscations, imprisonments,
and banishments to Siberia were the least terrible of the punishments.
Every germ of a Polish nationality was destroyed--the army and the Diet
effaced, Russian systems of taxes, justice, and coinage, and the metric
system of weights and measures used in Russia were introduced,--the
Julian Calendar superseded the one adopted all over the world--the
University of Warsaw was carried to Moscow, and the Polish language was
prohibited to be taught in the schools. Indemnity and pardon were
offered to those who abjured the Roman Catholic faith, and many were
received into the bosom of the National Orthodox Church; those refusing
this offer of clemency being subjected to great cruelties. Poland was
no more. Polish exiles were scattered all over Europe. In France,
Hungary, Italy, wherever there were lovers of freedom, there were
thousands of these emigrants without a country, living illustrations of
what an unrestrained despotism might do, and everywhere intensifying
the desires of patriots to achieve political freedom in their own lands.
Nicholas, as the chief representative of conservatism in Europe, looked
upon France with especial aversion. Paris was the center of these
pernicious movements which periodically shook Europe to its
foundations. It had overthrown his ally Charles X., and had been the
direct cause of the insurrection in Poland which had cost him thousands
of rubles and lives; and now nowhere else was such sympathetic welcome
given to the Polish refugees, thousands of whom were in the French
army. His relations with Louis Philippe became strained, and he was
looking about for an opportunity to manifest his ill will. In the
meantime he addressed himself to what he considered the _reforms_ in
his own empire. He was going to establish a sort of political
quarantine to keep out European influences. It was forbidden to send
young men to Western universities--the term of absence in foreign
countries was limited to five years for nobles, three for Russian
subjects. The Russian language, literature, and history were to be
given prominence over all studies in the schools. German free-thought
was especially disliked by him. His instincts were not mistaken, for
what the Encyclopedists had been to the Revolution of 1789, the new
school of thought in Germany would be to that of 1848. So from his
point of view he was wise in excluding philosophy from the universities
and permitting it to be taught only by ecclesiastics.
The Khedive of Egypt, who ruled under a Turkish protectorate, in 1832
was at war with his master the Sultan. It suited the Emperor of Russia
at this time to do the Sultan a kindness, so he joined him in bringing
the Khedive to terms, and as his reward received a secret promise from
the Porte to close the Dardanelles in case of war against Russia--to
permit no foreign warships to pass through upon any pretext. There was
indignation in Europe when this was known, and out of the whole
imbroglio there came just what Nicholas and his minister Nesselrode had
intended--a joint protection of Turkey by the Great Powers, from which
France was excluded on account of her avowed sympathy for the Khedive
in the recent troubles.
The great game of diplomacy had begun. Nicholas, for the sake of
humiliating France, had allied himself with England, his natural enemy,
and had assumed the part of Protector of an Ottoman integrity which he
more than anyone else had tried to destroy! There were to be many
strange roles played in this Eastern drama--many surprises for
Christendom; and for Nicholas the surprise of a crushing defeat a few
years later to which France contributed, possibly in retaliation for
this humiliation.
The Ottoman Empire had reached its zenith in 1550 under Suleyman the
Magnificent, when, with its eastern frontier in the heart of Asia, its
European frontier touching Russia and Austria, it held in its grasp
Egypt, the northern coast of Africa, and almost every city famous in
biblical and classical history. Then commenced a decline; and when its
terrible Janizaries were a source of danger instead of defense, when
its own Sultan was compelled to destroy them in 1826 for the protection
of his empire, it was only a helpless mass in the throes of dissolution.
But Turkey as a living and advancing power was less alarming to Europe
than Turkey as a perishing one. Lying at the gateway between the East
and the West, it occupied the most commanding strategic position in
Europe. If that position were held by a living instead of a dying
power, that power would be master of the Continent. No one state would
ever be permitted by the rest to reach such an ascendency; and the next
alternative of a division of the territory after the manner of Poland,
was fraught with almost as much danger. The only hope for the peace of
Europe was to keep in its integrity this crumbling wreck of a wicked,
crime-stained old empire. Such was the policy now inaugurated by
Russia, Great Britain, Austria, and Prussia; and such in brief is the
"Eastern Question," which for more than half a century has overshadowed
all others in European diplomacy, and more than any other has strained
the conscience and the moral sense of Christian nations. We wish we
might say that one nation had been able to resist this invitation to a
moral turpitude masked by diplomatic subterfuges. But there is not one.
Although the question of the balance of power was of importance to all,
it was England and Russia to whom the interests involved in the Eastern
Question were most vital. Every year which made England's Indian
Empire a more important possession also increased the necessity for her
having free access to it; while Russian policy more and more revolved
about an actual and a potential empire in the East. So just because
they were natural enemies they became allies, each desiring to tie the
other's hands by the principle of Ottoman integrity.
But daily and noiselessly the Russian outposts crept toward the East;
first into Persia, then stretching out the left hand toward Khiva,
pressing on through Bokhara into Chinese territory; and then, with a
prescience of coming events which should make Western Europe tremble
before such a subtle instinct for power, Russia obtained from the
Chinese Emperor the privilege of establishing at Canton a school of
instruction where Russian youths--prohibited from attending European
universities--might learn the Chinese language and become familiarized
with Chinese methods! But this was the sort of instinct that impels a
glacier to creep surely toward a lower level. Not content with owning
half of Europe and all of Northern Asia, the Russian glacier was moving
noiselessly,--as all things must,--on the line of least resistance,
toward the East.
The Emperor Nicholas, who comprehended so well the secret of imperial
expansion, and so little understood the expanding qualities within his
empire, was an impressive object to look upon. With his colossal
stature and his imposing presence, always tightly buttoned in his
uniform, he carried with him an air of majesty never to be forgotten if
once it was seen. But while he supposed he was extinguishing the
living forces and arresting the advancing power of mind in his empire,
a new world was maturing beneath the smooth hard surface he had
created. The Russian intellect, in spite of all, was blossoming from
seed scattered long before his time. There were historians, and poets,
and romanticists, and classicists, just as in the rest of Europe.
There were the conservative writers who felt contempt for the West, and
for the new, and who believed Russia was as much better before Ivan
III. than after, as Ivan the Great was superior to Peter the Great; and
there were Pushkin and Gogol, and Koltsof and Turguenief, whom they
hated, because their voice was the voice of the New Russia.
Turguenief, who with smothered sense of Russia's oppression was then
girding himself for his battle with serfdom, says: "My proof used to
come back to me from the censor half erased, and stained with red ink
like blood. Ah! they were painful times!" But in spite of all,
Russian genius was spreading its wings, and perhaps from this very
repression was to come that passionate intensity which makes it so
great.