Before entering upon an analysis of the pamphlet headed, "_Truth is but
truth, as it is timed_," with which we shall conclude the _Introduction_
to the Diplomatic Revelations, some preliminary remarks on the general
history of Russian politics appear opportune.
The overwhelming influence of Russia has taken Europe at different
epochs by surprise, startled the peoples of the West, and been submitted
to as a fatality, or resisted only by convulsions. But alongside the
fascination exercised by Russia, there runs an ever-reviving scepticism,
dogging her like a shadow, growing with her growth, mingling shrill
notes of irony with the cries of agonising peoples, and mocking her very
grandeur as a histrionic attitude taken up to dazzle and to cheat. Other
empires have met with similar doubts in their infancy; Russia has become
a colossus without outliving them. She affords the only instance in
history of an immense empire, the very existence of whose power, even
after world-wide achievements, has never ceased to be treated like a
matter of faith rather than like a matter of fact. From the outset of
the eighteenth century to our days, no author, whether he intended to
exalt or to check Russia, thought it possible to dispense with first
proving her existence.
But whether we be spiritualists or materialists with respect to
Russia--whether we consider her power as a palpable fact, or as the mere
vision of the guilt-stricken consciences of the European peoples--the
question remains the same: "How did this power, or this phantom of a
power, contrive to assume such dimensions as to rouse on the one side
the passionate assertion, and on the other the angry denial of its
threatening the world with a rehearsal of Universal Monarchy?" At the
beginning of the eighteenth century Russia was regarded as a mushroom
creation extemporised by the genius of Peter the Great. Schloezer
thought it a discovery to have found out that she possessed a past; and
in modern times, writers, like Fallmerayer, unconsciously following in
the track beaten by Russian historians, have deliberately asserted that
the northern spectre which frightens the Europe of the nineteenth
century already overshadowed the Europe of the ninth century. With them
the policy of Russia begins with the first Ruriks, and has, with some
interruptions indeed, been systematically continued to the present hour.
Ancient maps of Russia are unfolded before us, displaying even larger
European dimensions than she can boast of now: her perpetual movement of
aggrandizement from the ninth to the eleventh century is anxiously
pointed out; we are shown Oleg launching 88,000 men against Byzantium,
fixing his shield as a trophy on the gate of that capital, and dictating
an ignominious treaty to the Lower Empire; Igor making it tributary;
Sviataslaff glorying, "the Greeks supply me with gold, costly stuffs,
rice, fruits and wine; Hungary furnishes cattle and horses; from Russia
I draw honey, wax, furs, and men"; Vladimir conquering the Crimea and
Livonia, extorting a daughter from the Greek Emperor, as Napoleon did
from the German Emperor, blending the military sway of a northern
conqueror with the theocratic despotism of the Porphyro-geniti, and
becoming at once the master of his subjects on earth, and their
protector in heaven.
Yet, in spite of the plausible parallelism suggested by these
reminiscences, the policy of the first Ruriks differs fundamentally from
that of modern Russia. It was nothing more nor less than the policy of
the German barbarians inundating Europe--the history of the modern
nations beginning only after the deluge has passed away. The Gothic
period of Russia in particular forms but a chapter of the Norman
conquests. As the empire of Charlemagne precedes the foundation of
modern France, Germany, and Italy, so the empire of the Ruriks precedes
the foundation of Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic Settlements, Turkey,
and Muscovy itself. The rapid movement of aggrandizement was not the
result of deep-laid schemes, but the natural offspring of the primitive
organization of Norman conquest--vassalship without fiefs, or fiefs
consisting only in tributes--the necessity of fresh conquests being kept
alive by the uninterrupted influx of new Varangian adventurers, panting
for glory and plunder. The chiefs, becoming anxious for repose, were
compelled by the Faithful Band to move on, and in Russian, as in French
Normandy, there arrived the moment when the chiefs despatched on new
predatory excursions their uncontrollable and insatiable
companions-in-arms with the single view to get rid of them. Warfare and
organization of conquest on the part of the first Ruriks differ in no
point from those of the Normans in the rest of Europe. If Slavonian
tribes were subjected not only by the sword, but also by mutual
convention, this singularity is due to the exceptional position of those
tribes, placed between a northern and eastern invasion, and embracing
the former as a protection from the latter. The same magic charm which
attracted other northern barbarians to the Rome of the West attracted
the Varangians to the Rome of the East. The very migration of the
Russian capital--Rurik fixing it at Novgorod, Oleg removing it to Kiev,
and Sviataslaff attempting to establish it in Bulgaria--proves beyond
doubt that the invader was only feeling his way, and considered Russia
as a mere halting-place from which to wander on in search of an empire
in the South. If modern Russia covets the possession of Constantinople
to establish her dominion over the world, the Ruriks were, on the
contrary, forced by the resistance of Byzantium, under Zimiskes,
definitively to establish their dominion in Russia.
It may be objected that victors and vanquished amalgamated more quickly
in Russia than in any other conquest of the northern barbarians, that
the chiefs soon commingled themselves with the Slavonians--as shown by
their marriages and their names. But then, it should be recollected that
the Faithful Band, which formed at once their guard and their privy
council, remained exclusively composed of Varangians; that Vladimir,
who marks the summit, and Yaroslav, who marks the commencing decline of
Gothic Russia, were seated on her throne by the arms of the Varangians.
If any Slavonian influence is to be acknowledged in this epoch, it is
that of Novgorod, a Slavonian State, the traditions, policy, and
tendencies of which were so antagonistic to those of modern Russia that
the one could found her existence only on the ruins of the other. Under
Yaroslav the supremacy of the Varangians is broken, but simultaneously
with it disappears the conquering tendency of the first period, and the
decline of Gothic Russia begins. The history of that decline, more still
than that of the conquest and formation, proves the exclusively Gothic
character of the Empire of the Ruriks.
The incongruous, unwieldy, and precocious Empire heaped together by the
Ruriks, like the other empires of similar growth, is broken up into
appanages, divided and subdivided among the descendants of the
conquerors, dilacerated by feudal wars, rent to pieces by the
intervention of foreign peoples. The paramount authority of the Grand
Prince vanishes before the rival claims of seventy princes of the blood.
The attempt of Andrew of Susdal at recomposing some large limbs of the
empire by the removal of the capital from Kiev to Vladimir proves
successful only in propagating the decomposition from the South to the
centre. Andrew's third successor resigns even the last shadow of
supremacy, the title of Grand Prince, and the merely nominal homage
still offered him. The appanages to the South and to the West become by
turns Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian, Livonian, Swedish. Kiev itself, the
ancient capital, follows destinies of its own, after having dwindled
down from a seat of the Grand Princedom to the territory of a city.
Thus, the Russia of the Normans completely disappears from the stage,
and the few weak reminiscences in which it still outlived itself,
dissolve before the terrible apparition of Genghis Khan. The bloody mire
of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the
cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.
The Tartar yoke lasted from 1237 to 1462--more than two centuries; a
yoke not only crushing, but dishonouring and withering the very soul of
the people that fell its prey. The Mongol Tartars established a rule of
systematic terror, devastation and wholesale massacre forming its
institutions. Their numbers being scanty in proportion to their enormous
conquests, they wanted to magnify them by a halo of consternation, and
to thin, by wholesale slaughter, the populations which might rise in
their rear. In their creations of desert they were, besides, led by the
same economical principle which has depopulated the Highlands of
Scotland and the Campagna di Roma--the conversion of men into sheep, and
of fertile lands and populous abodes into pasturage.
The Tartar yoke had already lasted a hundred years before Muscovy
emerged from its obscurity. To entertain discord among the Russian
princes, and secure their servile submission, the Mongols had restored
the dignity of the Grand Princedom. The strife among the Russian princes
for this dignity was, as a modern author has it, "an abject strife--the
strife of slaves, whose chief weapon was calumny, and who were always
ready to denounce each other to their cruel rulers; wrangling for a
degraded throne, whence they could not move but with plundering,
parricidal hands--hands filled with gold and stained with gore; which
they dared not ascend without grovelling, nor retain but on their knees,
prostrate and trembling beneath the scimitar of a Tartar, always ready
to roll under his feet those servile crowns, and the heads by which they
were worn." It was in this infamous strife that the Moscow branch won at
last the race. In 1328 the crown of the Grand Princedom, wrested from
the branch of Tver by dint of denunciation and assassination, was picked
up at the feet of Usbeck Khan by Yury, the elder brother of Ivan Kalita.
Ivan I. Kalita, and Ivan III., surnamed the Great, personate Muscovy
rising by means of the Tartar yoke, and Muscovy getting an independent
power by the disappearance of the Tartar rule. The whole policy of
Muscovy, from its first entrance into the historical arena, is resumed
in the history of these two individuals.
The policy of Ivan Kalita was simply this: to play the abject tool of
the Khan, thus to borrow his power, and then to turn it round upon his
princely rivals and his own subjects. To attain this end, he had to
insinuate himself with the Tartars by dint of cynical adulation, by
frequent journeys to the Golden Horde, by humble prayers for the hand of
Mongol princesses, by a display of unbounded zeal for the Khan's
interest, by the unscrupulous execution of his orders, by atrocious
calumnies against his own kinsfolk, by blending in himself the
characters of the Tartar's hangman, sycophant, and slave-in-chief. He
perplexed the Khan by continuous revelations of secret plots. Whenever
the branch of Tver betrayed a velleite of national independence, he
hurried to the Horde to denounce it. Wherever he met with resistance, he
introduced the Tartar to trample it down. But it was not sufficient to
act a character; to make it acceptable, gold was required. Perpetual
bribery of the Khan and his grandees was the only sure foundation upon
which to raise his fabric of deception and usurpation. But how was the
slave to get the money wherewith to bribe the master? He persuaded the
Khan to instal him his tax-gatherer throughout all the Russian
appanages. Once invested with this function, he extorted money under
false pretences. The wealth accumulated by the dread held out of the
Tartar name, he used to corrupt the Tartars themselves. By a bribe he
induced the primate to transfer his episcopal seat from Vladimir to
Moscow, thus making the latter the capital of the empire, because the
religious capital, and coupling the power of the Church with that of his
throne. By a bribe he allured the Boyards of the rival princes into
treason against their chiefs, and attracted them to himself as their
centre. By the joint influence of the Mahometan Tartar, the Greek
Church, and the Boyards, he unites the princes holding appanages into a
crusade against the most dangerous of them--the prince of Tver; and then
having driven his recent allies by bold attempts at usurpation into
resistance against himself, into a war for the public good, he draws not
the sword but hurries to the Khan. By bribes and delusion again, he
seduces him into assassinating his kindred rivals under the most cruel
torments. It was the traditional policy of the Tartar to check the
Russian princes the one by the other, to feed their dissensions, to
cause their forces to equiponderate, and to allow none to consolidate
himself. Ivan Kalita converts the Khan into the tool by which he rids
himself of his most dangerous competitors, and weighs down every
obstacle to his own usurping march. He does not conquer the appanages,
but surreptitiously turns the rights of the Tartar conquest to his
exclusive profit. He secures the succession of his son through the same
means by which he had raised the Grand Princedom of Muscovy, that
strange compound of princedom and serfdom. During his whole reign he
swerves not once from the line of policy he had traced to himself;
clinging to it with a tenacious firmness, and executing it with
methodical boldness. Thus he becomes the founder of the Muscovite power,
and characteristically his people call him Kalita--that is, the purse,
because it was the purse and not the sword with which he cut his way.
The very period of his reign witnesses the sudden growth of the
Lithuanian power which dismembers the Russian appanages from the West,
while the Tartar squeezes them into one mass from the East. Ivan, while
he dared not repulse the one disgrace, seemed anxious to exaggerate the
other. He was not to be seduced from following up his ends by the
allurements of glory, the pangs of conscience, or the lassitude of
humiliation. His whole system may be expressed in a few words: the
machiavelism of the usurping slave. His own weakness--his slavery--he
turned into the mainspring of his strength.
The policy traced by Ivan I. Kalita is that of his successors; they had
only to enlarge the circle of its application. They followed it up
laboriously, gradually, inflexibly. From Ivan I. Kalita, we may,
therefore, pass at once to Ivan III., surnamed the Great.
At the commencement of his reign (1462-1505) Ivan III. was still a
tributary to the Tartars; his authority was still contested by the
princes holding appanages; Novgorod, the head of the Russian republics,
reigned over the north of Russia; Poland-Lithuania was striving for the
conquest of Muscovy; lastly, the Livonian knights were not yet disarmed.
At the end of his reign we behold Ivan III. seated on an independent
throne, at his side the daughter of the last emperor of Byzantium, at
his feet Kasan, and the remnant of the Golden Horde flocking to his
court; Novgorod and the other Russian republics enslaved--Lithuania
diminished, and its king a tool in Ivan's hands--the Livonian knights
vanquished. Astonished Europe, at the commencement of Ivan's reign,
hardly aware of the existence of Muscovy, hemmed in between the Tartar
and the Lithuanian, was dazzled by the sudden appearance of an immense
empire on its eastern confines, and Sultan Bajazet himself, before whom
Europe trembled, heard for the first time the haughty language of the
Muscovite. How, then, did Ivan accomplish these high deeds? Was he a
hero? The Russian historians themselves show him up a confessed coward.
Let us shortly survey his principal contests, in the sequence in which
he undertook and concluded them--his contests with the Tartars, with
Novgorod, with the princes holding appanages, and lastly with
Lithuania-Poland.
Ivan rescued Muscovy from the Tartar yoke, not by one bold stroke, but
by the patient labour of about twenty years. He did not break the yoke,
but disengaged himself by stealth. Its overthrow, accordingly, has more
the look of the work of nature than the deed of man. When the Tartar
monster expired at last, Ivan appeared at its deathbed like a physician,
who prognosticated and speculated on death rather than like a warrior
who imparted it. The character of every people enlarges with its
enfranchisement from a foreign yoke; that of Muscovy in the hands of
Ivan seems to diminish. Compare only Spain in its struggles against the
Arabs with Muscovy in its struggles against the Tartars.
At the period of Ivan's accession to the throne, the Golden Horde had
long since been weakened, internally by fierce feuds, externally by the
separation from them of the Nogay Tartars, the eruption of Timour
Tamerlane, the rise of the Cossacks, and the hostility of the Crimean
Tartars. Muscovy, on the contrary, by steadily pursuing the policy
traced by Ivan Kalita, had grown to a mighty mass, crushed, but at the
same time compactly united by the Tartar chain. The Khans, as if struck
by a charm, had continued to remain instruments of Muscovite
aggrandizement and concentration. By calculation they had added to the
power of the Greek Church, which, in the hand of the Muscovite grand
princes, proved the deadliest weapon against them.
In rising against the Horde, the Muscovite had not to invent but only to
imitate the Tartars themselves. But Ivan did not rise. He humbly
acknowledged himself a slave of the Golden Horde. By bribing a Tartar
woman he seduced the Khan into commanding the withdrawal from Muscovy of
the Mongol residents. By similar and imperceptible and surreptitious
steps he duped the Khan into successive concessions, all ruinous to his
sway. He thus did not conquer, but filch strength. He does not drive,
but manoeuvre his enemy out of his strongholds. Still continuing to
prostrate himself before the Khan's envoys, and to proclaim himself his
tributary, he eludes the payment of the tribute under false pretences,
employing all the stratagems of a fugitive slave who dare not front his
owner, but only steal out of his reach. At last the Mongol awakes from
his torpor, and the hour of battle sounds. Ivan, trembling at the mere
semblance of an armed encounter, attempts to hide himself behind his own
fear, and to disarm the fury of his enemy by withdrawing the object upon
which to wreak his vengeance. He is only saved by the intervention of
the Crimean Tartars, his allies. Against a second invasion of the Horde,
he ostentatiously gathers together such disproportionate forces that the
mere rumour of their number parries the attack. At the third invasion,
from the midst of 200,000 men, he absconds a disgraced deserter.
Reluctantly dragged back, he attempts to haggle for conditions of
slavery, and at last, pouring into his army his own servile fear, he
involves it in a general and disorderly flight. Muscovy was then
anxiously awaiting its irretrievable doom, when it suddenly hears that
by an attack on their capital made by the Crimean Khan, the Golden Horde
has been forced to withdraw, and has, on its retreat, been destroyed by
the Cossacks and Nogay Tartars. Thus defeat was turned into success, and
Ivan had overthrown the Golden Horde, not by fighting it himself, but by
challenging it through a feigned desire of combat into offensive
movements, which exhausted its remnants of vitality and exposed it to
the fatal blows of the tribes of its own race whom he had managed to
turn into his allies. He caught one Tartar with another Tartar. As the
immense danger he had himself summoned proved unable to betray him into
one single trait of manhood, so his miraculous triumph did not infatuate
him even for one moment. With cautious circumspection he dared not
incorporate Kasan with Muscovy, but made it over to sovereigns belonging
to the family of Menghi-Ghirei, his Crimean ally, to hold it, as it
were, in trust for Muscovy. With the spoils of the vanquished Tartar, he
enchained the victorious Tartar. But if too prudent to assume, with the
eye-witnesses of his disgrace, the airs of a conqueror, this impostor
did fully understand how the downfall of the Tartar empire must dazzle
at a distance--with what halo of glory it would encircle him, and how it
would facilitate a magnificent entry among the European Powers.
Accordingly he assumed abroad the theatrical attitude of the conqueror,
and, indeed, succeeded in hiding under a mask of proud susceptibility
and irritable haughtiness the obtrusiveness of the Mongol serf, who
still remembered kissing the stirrup of the Khan's meanest envoy. He
aped in more subdued tone the voice of his old masters, which terrified
his soul. Some standing phrases of modern Russian diplomacy, such as the
magnanimity, the wounded dignity of the master, are borrowed from the
diplomatic instructions of Ivan III.
After the surrender of Kasan, he set out on a long-planned expedition
against Novgorod, the head of the Russian republics. If the overthrow of
the Tartar yoke was, in his eyes, the first condition of Muscovite
greatness, the overthrow of Russian freedom was the second. As the
republic of Viatka had declared itself neutral between Muscovy and the
Horde, and the republic of Tskof, with its twelve cities, had shown
symptoms of disaffection, Ivan flattered the latter and affected to
forget the former, meanwhile concentrating all his forces against
Novgorod the Great, with the doom of which he knew the fate of the rest
of the Russian republics to be sealed. By the prospect of sharing in
this rich booty, he drew after him the princes holding appanages, while
he inveigled the boyards by working upon their blind hatred of
Novgorodian democracy. Thus he contrived to march three armies upon
Novgorod and to overwhelm it by disproportionate force. But then, in
order not to keep his word to the princes, not to forfeit his immutable
"Vos non vobis," at the same time apprehensive, lest Novgorod should not
yet have become digestible from the want of preparatory treatment, he
thought fit to exhibit a sudden moderation; to content himself with a
ransom and the acknowledgment of his suzerainty; but into the act of
submission of the republic he smuggled some ambiguous words which made
him its supreme judge and legislator. Then he fomented the dissensions
between the patricians and plebeians raging as well in Novgorod as at
Florence. Of some complaints of the plebeians he took occasion to
introduce himself again into the city, to have its nobles, whom he knew
to be hostile to himself, sent to Moscow loaded with chains, and to
break the ancient law of the republic that "none of its citizens should
ever be tried or punished out of the limits of its own territory." From
that moment he became supreme arbiter. "Never," say the annalists,
"never since Rurik had such an event happened; never had the grand
princes of Kiev and Vladimir seen the Novgorodians come and submit to
them as their judges. Ivan alone could reduce Novgorod to that degree of
humiliation." Seven years were employed by Ivan to corrupt the republic
by the exercise of his judicial authority. Then, when he found its
strength worn out, he thought the moment ripe for declaring himself. To
doff his own mask of moderation, he wanted, on the part of Novgorod, a
breach of the peace. As he had simulated calm endurance, so he
simulated now a sudden burst of passion. Having bribed an envoy of the
republic to address him during a public audience with the name of
sovereign, he claimed, at once, all the rights of a despot--the
self-annihilation of the republic.