What Was the Congress of Vienna’s Effect on Russia?
The Congress of Vienna met in the Hofburg from November 1814 to June 1815, with European powers — Russia, Britain, Austria, Prussia, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, the Ottoman Empire — represented by a small army of diplomats. Tsar Alexander I was the most important single figure at the Congress, having led the allied armies to Paris in March 1814. The settlement he helped to negotiate — the Final Act of 9 June 1815, the new map of Europe, and the Holy Alliance of 26 September 1815 — was the high point of the Russian Empire’s nineteenth-century influence, and the most successful Russian diplomatic venture in modern history (see Kissinger, A World Restored, 1957).
Russia’s gains
The Russian delegation was led by Alexander himself, with the experienced Count Karl Robert Nesselrode as his principal adviser. The Russian position was defined by Alexander’s two main objectives: the recovery of the Polish-Lithuanian territories that Russia had acquired in the Partitions and had lost in 1807-1812, and the establishment of a system of European cooperation that would prevent a recurrence of the Napoleonic Wars. The first objective was achieved in the Polish settlement: Russia gained the greater part of the Duchy of Warsaw (the part previously under Prussian and Austrian rule) as the “Congress Kingdom of Poland” — about 1.3 million inhabitants — in personal union with the Russian tsar, who took the title King of Poland. The second objective was achieved in the Holy Alliance, the agreement of 26 September 1815 between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, by which the three sovereigns undertook to govern their states in accordance with Christian principles.
The Russian position in Europe was, accordingly, extraordinarily strong. The Russian army had marched on Paris; the Russian fleet had operated in the Mediterranean; the Russian flag had been raised on Spitsbergen. Russia’s influence in the German states, in the Ottoman Empire, in the Austrian Empire, and in the French restored monarchy was, by 1815, the chief external determinant of European politics (Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 2007).
The Polish question
The Congress Kingdom of Poland was the most important Russian gain. Alexander gave the Kingdom a constitution — the Polish Constitution of 27 November 1815 — that provided for a separate Polish government, a separate Polish army (limited to 30,000 men), a separate Polish educational system, and a Diet that would meet every two years. The Kingdom was, in theory, governed by a separate viceroy (initially the Polish general Józef Zajączek) under the Russian tsar as King of Poland. In practice, the Russian administration of the Kingdom was increasingly centralised, and the constitution was the central grievance of Polish nationalism throughout the period. The November Uprising of 1830, the January Uprising of 1863, and the Polish question in the late nineteenth century were all, in this sense, consequences of the Congress (Leslie, The History of Poland since 1863, 1980).
The Holy Alliance
The Holy Alliance was the most controversial product of the Congress. It was drafted in Alexander’s own hand, with the help of Baroness Julia Krüdener, and proposed to Francis I of Austria and Frederick William III of Prussia on 25 September 1815. The treaty bound the three sovereigns to govern their states in accordance with Christian principles and to maintain the European order. The Alliance was widely criticised at the time — the British foreign secretary Castlereagh dismissed it as “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense” — and the British government refused to join. The Ottoman Empire also declined.
The Alliance, however, became the centre of a broader system of European cooperation, the “Concert of Europe,” that included Britain and France as well. The four-power meetings of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822) were the working institutions of the post-Napoleonic order; in the latter two, the powers discussed the question of intervention in the Spanish liberal revolution and the Italian Carbonari. Russia, Austria, and Prussia, in particular, used the Concert to justify the Austrian intervention in Naples and the French intervention in Spain. The system worked for thirty-eight years — until the Crimean War of 1853-1856 (Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918, 1954).
The Russian political consequences
The Congress also had a more subtle effect on Russian political life. The young Russian officers who had marched to Paris in 1814 returned home with the liberal and constitutional ideas they had absorbed in the west. The four “constitutional coteries” of the Russian officers in the 1810s and 1820s — the “Union of Welfare,” the “Union of Salvation,” the “Northern” and “Southern” societies — fed directly into the Decembrist Revolt of 14 December 1825. The Decembrists’ rebellion was, in this sense, a delayed consequence of the Congress: it was the first time the Russian imperial political system came under direct challenge from the European political vocabulary of the post-Napoleonic period.
The Congress also shaped the Russian imperial position in the rest of the nineteenth century. The 1815 settlement was the framework within which Russia defined its interests in the Balkans, in the Ottoman Empire, in Central Asia, and in the Pacific. The Russian position as the senior conservative great power — the “gendarme of Europe” — was a position Alexander had defined at the Congress, and his successors, particularly Nicholas I, were its defenders for the next forty years. The Russian position in 1914 was, in this sense, a working-out of the choices made at the Congress (Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, 2009).