One feature characteristic of the Slavonic race must strike every
observer. Almost everywhere it confined itself to an inland country,
leaving the sea-borders to non-Slavonic tribes. Finno-Tartaric tribes
held the shores of the Black Sea, Lithuanians and Fins those of the
Baltic and White Sea. Wherever they touched the sea-board, as in the
Adriatic and part of the Baltic, the Slavonians had soon to submit to
foreign rule. The Russian people shared this common fate of the
Slavonian race. Their home, at the time they first appear in history,
was the country about the sources and upper course of the Volga and its
tributaries, the Dnieper, Don, and Northern Dwina. Nowhere did their
territory touch the sea except at the extremity of the Gulf of Finland.
Nor had they before Peter the Great proved able to conquer any maritime
outlet beside that of the White Sea, which, during three-fourths of the
year, is itself enchained and immovable. The spot where Petersburg now
stands had been for a thousand years past contested ground between Fins,
Swedes, and Russians. All the remaining extent of coast from Polangen,
near Memel, to Torrea, the whole coast of the Black Sea, from Akerman to
Redut Kaleh, has been conquered later on. And, as if to witness the
anti-maritime peculiarity of the Slavonic race, of all this line of
coast, no portion of the Baltic coast has really adopted Russian
nationality. Nor has the Circassian and Mingrelian east coast of the
Black Sea. It is only the coast of the White Sea, as far as it was worth
cultivating, some portion of the northern coast of the Black Sea, and
part of the coast of the Sea of Azof, that have really been peopled with
Russian inhabitants, who, however, despite the new circumstances in
which they are placed, still refrain from taking to the sea, and
obstinately stick to the land-lopers' traditions of their ancestors.
From the very outset, Peter the Great broke through all the traditions
of the Slavonic race. "It is water that Russia wants." These words he
addressed as a rebuke to Prince Cantemir are inscribed on the title-page
of his life. The conquest of the Sea of Azof was aimed at in his first
war with Turkey, the conquest of the Baltic in his war against Sweden,
the conquest of the Black Sea in his second war against the Porte, and
the conquest of the Caspian Sea in his fraudulent intervention in
Persia. For a system of local encroachment, land was sufficient; for a
system of universal aggression, water had become indispensable. It was
but by the conversion of Muscovy from a country wholly of land into a
sea-bordering empire, that the traditional limits of the Muscovite
policy could be superseded and merged into that bold synthesis which,
blending the encroaching method of the Mongol slave with the
world-conquering tendencies of the Mongol master, forms the life-spring
of modern Russian diplomacy.
It has been said that no great nation has ever existed, or been able to
exist, in such an inland position as that of the original empire of
Peter the Great; that none has ever submitted thus to see its coasts and
the mouths of its rivers torn away from it; that Russia could no more
leave the mouth of the Neva, the natural outlet for the produce of
Northern Russia, in the hands of the Swedes, than the mouths of the Don,
Dnieper, and Bug, and the Straits of Kertch, in the hands of nomadic and
plundering Tartars; that the Baltic provinces, from their very
geographical configuration, are naturally a corollary to whichever
nation holds the country behind them; that, in one word, Peter, in this
quarter, at least, but took hold of what was absolutely necessary for
the natural development of his country. From this point of view, Peter
the Great intended, by his war against Sweden, only rearing a Russian
Liverpool, and endowing it with its indispensable strip of coast.
But then, one great fact is slighted over, the _tour de force_ by which
he transferred the capital of the Empire from the inland centre to the
maritime extremity, the characteristic boldness with which he erected
the new capital on the first strip of Baltic coast he conquered, almost
within gunshot of the frontier, thus deliberately giving his dominions
an _eccentric centre_. To transfer the throne of the Czars from Moscow
to Petersburg was to place it in a position where it could not be safe,
even from insult, until the whole coast from Libau to Tornea was
subdued--a work not completed till 1809, by the conquest of Finland.
"St. Petersburg is the window from which Russia can overlook Europe,"
said Algarotti. It was from the first a defiance to the Europeans, an
incentive to further conquest to the Russians. The fortifications in our
own days of Russian Poland are only a further step in the execution of
the same idea. Modlin, Warsaw, Ivangorod, are more than citadels to keep
a rebellious country in check. They are the same menace to the west
which Petersburg, in its immediate bearing, was a hundred years ago to
the north. They are to transform Russia into Panslavonia, as the Baltic
provinces were to transform Muscovy into Russia.
Petersburg, the _eccentric centre_ of the empire, pointed at once to a
periphery still to be drawn.
It is, then, not the mere conquest of the Baltic provinces which
separates the policy of Peter the Great from that of his ancestors, but
it is the transfer of the capital which reveals the true meaning of his
Baltic conquests. Petersburg was not like Muscovy, the centre of a race,
but the seat of a government; not the slow work of a people, but the
instantaneous creation of a man; not the medium from which the
peculiarities of an inland people radiate, but the maritime extremity
where they are lost; not the traditionary nucleus of a national
development, but the deliberately chosen abode of a cosmopolitan
intrigue. By the transfer of the capital, Peter cut off the natural
ligaments which bound up the encroaching system of the old Muscovite
Czars with the natural abilities and aspirations of the great Russian
race. By planting his capital on the margin of a sea, he put to open
defiance the anti-maritime instincts of that race, and degraded it to a
mere weight in his political mechanism. Since the 16th century Muscovy
had made no important acquisitions but on the side of Siberia, and to
the 16th century the dubious conquests made towards the west and the
south were only brought about by direct agency on the east. By the
transfer of the capital, Peter proclaimed that he, on the contrary,
intended working on the east and the immediately neighbouring countries
through the agency of the west. If the agency through the east was
narrowly circumscribed by the stationary character and the limited
relations of Asiatic peoples, the agency through the west became at once
illimited and universal from the movable character and the all-sided
relations of Western Europe. The transfer of the capital denoted this
intended change of agency, which the conquest of the Baltic provinces
afforded the means of achieving, by securing at once to Russia the
supremacy among the neighbouring Northern States; by putting it into
immediate and constant contact with all points of Europe; by laying the
basis of a material bond with the maritime Powers, which by this
conquest became dependent on Russia for their naval stores; a dependence
not existing as long as Muscovy, the country that produced the great
bulk of the naval stores, had got no outlets of its own; while Sweden,
the Power that held these outlets, had not got the country lying behind
them.
If the Muscovite Czars, who worked their encroachments by the agency
principally of the Tartar Khans, were obliged to _tartarize_ Muscovy,
Peter the Great, who resolved upon working through the agency of the
west, was obliged to _civilize_ Russia. In grasping upon the Baltic
provinces, he seized at once the tools necessary for this process. They
afforded him not only the diplomatists and the generals, the brains with
which to execute his system of political and military action on the
west, they yielded him, at the same time, a crop of bureaucrats,
schoolmasters, and drill-sergeants, who were to drill Russians into that
varnish of civilization that adapts them to the technical appliances of
the Western peoples, without imbuing them with their ideas.
Neither the Sea of Azof, nor the Black Sea, nor the Caspian Sea, could
open to Peter this direct passage to Europe. Besides, during his
lifetime still Taganrog, Azof, the Black Sea, with its new-formed
Russian fleets, ports, and dockyards, were again abandoned or given up
to the Turk. The Persian conquest, too, proved a premature enterprise.
Of the four wars which fill the military life of Peter the Great, his
first war, that against Turkey, the fruits of which were lost in a
second Turkish war, continued in one respect the traditionary struggle
with the Tartars. In another respect, it was but the prelude to the war
against Sweden, of which the second Turkish war forms an episode and the
Persian war an epilogue. Thus the war against Sweden, lasting during
twenty-one years, almost absorbs the military life of Peter the Great.
Whether we consider its purpose, its results, or its endurance, we may
justly call it _the_ war of Peter the Great. His whole creation hinges
upon the conquest of the Baltic coast.
Now, suppose we were altogether ignorant of the details of his
operations, military and diplomatic. The mere fact that the conversion
of Muscovy into Russia was brought about by its transformation from a
half-Asiatic inland country into the paramount maritime Power of the
Baltic, would it not enforce upon us the conclusion that England, the
greatest maritime Power of that epoch--a maritime Power lying, too, at
the very gates of the Baltic, where, since the middle of the 17th
century, she had maintained the attitude of supreme arbiter--that
England must have had her hand in this great change, that she must have
proved the main prop or the main impediment of the plans of Peter the
Great, that during the long protracted and deadly struggle between
Sweden and Russia she must have turned the balance, that if we do not
find her straining every nerve in order to save the Swede we may be sure
of her having employed all the means at her disposal for furthering the
Muscovite? And yet, in what is commonly called history, England does
hardly appear on the plan of this grand drama, and is represented as a
spectator rather than as an actor. Real history will show that the
Khans of the Golden Horde were no more instrumental in realizing the
plans of Ivan III. and his predecessors than the rulers of England were
in realizing the plans of Peter I. and his successors.
The pamphlets which we have reprinted, written as they were by English
contemporaries of Peter the Great, are far from concurring in the common
delusions of later historians. They emphatically denounce England as the
mightiest tool of Russia. The same position is taken up by the pamphlet
of which we shall now give a short analysis, and with which we shall
conclude the introduction to the diplomatic revelations. It is entitled,
"_Truth is but Truth as it is timed; or, our Ministry's present measures
against the Muscovite vindicated_, etc., etc. Humbly dedicated to the
House of C., London, 1719."
The former pamphlets we have reprinted, were written at, or shortly
after, the time when, to use the words of a modern admirer of Russia,
"Peter traversed the Baltic Sea as master at the head of the combined
squadrons of all the northern Powers, England included, which gloried in
sailing under his orders." In 1719, however, when _Truth is but Truth_
was published, the face of affairs seemed altogether changed. Charles
XII. was dead, and the English Government now pretended to side with
Sweden, and to wage war against Russia. There are other circumstances
connected with this anonymous pamphlet which claim particular notice. It
purports to be an extract from a relation, which, on his return from
Muscovy, in August, 1715, its author, by order of George I., drew up and
handed over to Viscount Townshend, then Secretary of State.
"It happens," says he, "to be an advantage that at present I may
own to have been the first so happy to foresee, or honest to
forewarn our Court here, of the absolute necessity of our then
breaking with the Czar, and shutting him out again of the Baltic."
"My relation discovered his aim as to other States, and even to the
German Empire, to which, although an inland Power, he had offered
to annex Livonia as an Electorate, so that he could but be admitted
as an elector. It drew attention to the Czar's then contemplated
assumption of the title of Autocrator. Being head of the Greek
Church he would be owned by the other potentates as head of the
Greek Empire. I am not to say how reluctant we would be to
acknowledge that title, since we have already made an ambassador
treat him with the title of Imperial Majesty, which the Swede has
never yet condescended to."
For some time attached to the British Embassy in Muscovy, our author, as
he states, was later on "_dismissed the service, because the Czar
desired it_," having made sure that
"I had given our Court such light into his affairs as is contained
in this paper; for which I beg leave to appeal to the King, and to
vouch the Viscount Townshend, who heard his Majesty give that
vindication." "And yet, notwithstanding all this, I have been for
these five years past kept soliciting for a very long arrear still
due, and whereof I contracted the greatest part in executing a
commission for her late Majesty."
The anti-Muscovite attitude, suddenly assumed by the Stanhope Cabinet,
our author looks to in rather a sceptic mood.
"I do not pretend to foreclose, by this paper, the Ministry of that
applause due to them from the public, when they shall satisfy us as
to what the motives were which made them, till but yesterday,
straiten the Swede in everything, although then our ally as much as
now; or strengthen, by all the ways they could, the Czar, although
under no tie, but barely that of amity with Great Britain.... At
the minute I write this I learn that the gentleman who brought the
Muscovites, not yet three years ago, as a royal navy, not under our
protection, on their first appearance in the Baltic, is again
authorized by the persons now in power, to give the Czar a second
meeting in these seas. For what reason or to what good end?"
The gentleman hinted at is Admiral Norris, whose Baltic campaign against
Peter I. seems, indeed, to be the original pattern upon which the recent
naval campaigns of Admirals Napier and Dundas were cut out.
The restoration to Sweden of the Baltic provinces is required by the
commercial as well as the political interest of Great Britain. Such is
the pith of our author's argument:
"Trade is become the very life of our State; and what food is to
life, naval stores are to a fleet. The whole trade we drive with
all the other nations of the earth, at best, is but lucrative;
this, of the north, is indispensably needful, and may not be
improperly termed the _sacra embole_ of Great Britain, as being
its chiefest foreign vent, for the support of all our trade, and
our safety at home. As woollen manufactures and minerals are the
staple commodities of Great Britain, so are likewise naval stores
those of Muscovy, as also of all those very provinces in the Baltic
which the Czar has so lately wrested from the crown of Sweden.
Since those provinces have been in the Czar's possession, Pernan is
entirely waste. At Revel we have not one British merchant left, and
all the trade which was formerly at Narwa is now brought to
Petersburg.... The Swede could never possibly engross the trade of
our subjects, because those seaports in his hands were but so many
thoroughfares from whence these commodities were uttered, the
places of their produce or manufacture lying behind those ports, in
the dominions of the Czar. But, if left to the Czar, these Baltic
ports are no more thoroughfares, but peculiar magazines from the
inland countries of the Czar's own dominions. Having already
Archangel in the White Sea, to leave him but any seaport in the
Baltic were to put no less in his hands than the _two keys of the
general magazines of all the naval stores of Europe_; it being
known that Danes, Swedes, Poles, and Prussians have but single and
distinct branches of those commodities in their several dominions.
If the Czar should thus engross 'the supply of what we cannot do
without,' where then is our fleet? Or, indeed, where is the
security for all our trade to any part of the earth besides?"
If, then, the interest of British commerce requires to exclude the Czar
from the Baltic, the interest of our State ought to be no less a spur to
quicken us to that attempt. By the interest of our State I would be
understood to mean neither the party measures of a Ministry, nor any
foreign motives of a Court, but precisely what is, and ever must be, the
immediate concern, either for the safety, ease, dignity, or emolument of
the Crown, as well as the common weal of Great Britain. With respect to
the Baltic, it has "from the earliest period of our naval power" always
been considered a fundamental interest of our State: first, to prevent
the rise there of any new maritime Power; and, secondly, to maintain the
balance of power between Denmark and Sweden.
"One instance of the wisdom and foresight of our _then truly
British statesmen_ is the peace at Stalboa, in the year 1617. James
the First was the mediator of that treaty, by which the Muscovite
was obliged to give up all the provinces which he then was
possessed of in the Baltic, and to be barely an inland Power on
this side of Europe."
The same policy of preventing a new maritime Power from starting in the
Baltic was acted upon by Sweden and Denmark.
"Who knows not that the Emperor's attempt to get a seaport in
Pomerania weighed no less with the great Gustavus than any other
motive for carrying his arms even into the bowels of the house of
Austria? What befel, at the times of Charles Gustavus, the crown of
Poland itself, who, besides it being in those days by far the
mightiest of any of the northern Powers, had then a long stretch of
coast on, and some ports in, the Baltic? The Danes, though then in
alliance with Poland, would never allow them, even for their
assistance against the Swedes, to have a fleet in the Baltic, but
destroyed the Polish ships wherever they could meet them."
As to the maintenance of the balance of power between the established
maritime States of the Baltic, the tradition of British policy is no
less clear. "When the Swedish power gave us some uneasiness there by
threatening to crush Denmark," the honour of our country was kept up by
retrieving the then inequality of the balance of power.
The Commonwealth of England sent in a squadron to the Baltic which
brought on the treaty of Roskild (1658), afterwards confirmed at
Copenhagen (1660). The fire of straw kindled by the Danes in the times
of King William III. was as speedily quenched by George Rock in the
treaty of Copenhagen.
Such was the hereditary British policy.
"It never entered into the mind of the politicians of those times
in order to bring the scale again to rights, to find out the happy
_expedient of raising a third naval Power_ for framing a juster
balance in the Baltic.... Who has taken this counsel against Tyre,
the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers
are the honourables of the earth? _Ego autem neminem nomino, quare
irasci mihi nemo poterit, nisi qui ante de se noluerit confiteri._
Posterity will be under some difficulty to believe that this could
be the _work of any of the persons now in power_ ... that _we_ have
opened; _St. Petersburg to the Czar solely at our own expense, and
without any risk to him_...."
The safest line of policy would be to return to the treaty of Itolbowa,
and to suffer the Muscovite no longer "to nestle in the Baltic." Yet,
it may be said, that in "the present state of affairs" it would be
"difficult to retrieve the advantage we have lost by not curbing, when
it was more easy, the growth of the Muscovite power." A middle course
may be thought more convenient.
"If we should find it consistent with the welfare of our State that
the Muscovite have an inlet into the Baltic, as having, of all the
princes of Europe, a country that can be made most beneficial to
its prince, by uttering its produce to foreign markets. In this
case, it were but reasonable to expect, on the other hand, that in
return for our complying so far with his interest, for the
improvement of his country, his Czarish Majesty, on his part,
should demand nothing that may tend to the disturbance of another;
and, therefore, contenting himself with ships of trade, should
demand none of war."
"We should thus preclude his hopes of being ever more than an
inland Power," but "obviate every objection of using the Czar worse
than any Sovereign Prince may expect. I shall not for this give an
instance of a Republic of Genoa, or another in the Baltic itself,
of the Duke of Courland; but will assign Poland and Prussia, who,
though both now crowned heads, have ever contented themselves with
the freedom of an open traffic, without insisting on a fleet. Or
the treaty of Falczin, between the Turk and Muscovite, by which
Peter was forced not only to restore Asoph, and to part with all
his men-of-war in those parts, but also to content himself with the
bare freedom of traffic in the Black Sea. Even an inlet in the
Baltic for trade is much beyond what he could morally have promised
himself not yet so long ago on the issue of his war with Sweden."
If the Czar refuse to agree to such "a healing temperament," we shall
have "nothing to regret but the time we lost to exert all the means that
Heaven has made us master of, to reduce him to a peace advantageous to
Great Britain." War would become inevitable. In that case
"it ought no less to animate our Ministry to pursue their present
measures, than fire with indignation the breast of every honest
Briton that a Czar of Muscovy, who owes his naval skill to our
instructions, and his grandeur to our forbearance, should so soon
deny to Great Britain the terms which so few years ago he was fain
to take up with from the Sublime Porte."
"'Tis every way our interest to have the Swede restored to those
provinces which the Muscovite has wrested from that crown in the
Baltic. _Great Britain can no longer hold the balance in that
sea_," since she "_has raised the Muscovite to be a maritime Power
there_.... Had we performed the articles of our alliance made by
King William with the crown of Sweden, that gallant nation would
ever have been a bar strong enough against the Czar coming into the
Baltic.... Time must confirm us, that the Muscovite's _expulsion
from the Baltic_ is _now_ the principal end of our Ministry."
Butler & Tanner. The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.