What Was the Russian Imperial Foreign Policy?
On 22 October 1721, at the Trinity Cathedral in St. Petersburg, a herald read out the treaties of Nystad ending the Great Northern War, and the Russian ruling elite acclaimed Peter I as “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.” In the two centuries between that day and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, Russian foreign policy passed through five recognisable phases, but the underlying problems — security on a vast, exposed frontier, the need for warm-water outlets, the management of a multi-confessional empire — remained remarkably stable.
Themes
Five themes recur throughout the period.
The defense of the Orthodox Christian world. The Russian government claimed a special responsibility for Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman and Habsburg rule. The claim was codified in Article 7 of the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, used to justify the Greek revolt of the 1820s, and recycled for the Bulgarian campaign of 1877.
Territorial expansion. The empire grew through the Great Northern War (the Baltic), the partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), the wars against the Ottomans, the conquest of the Caucasus, the conquest of Central Asia, and the 1860 acquisition of the Amur and the 1860s-1880s acquisition of the Far East.
The balance of power. Catherine the Great’s “Greek Project” of the 1780s aimed to expel the Ottomans from Europe altogether. By the 1820s Russia was the principal guarantor of the post-Napoleonic order through the Holy Alliance, and by the 1900s it was balancing Germany and Austria-Hungary with the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.
The Eastern Question. Every nineteenth-century crisis — the Greek revolt, the 1853-1856 Crimean War, the 1875-1878 Balkan crisis, the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars — was a chapter in the long contest for the inheritance of a declining Ottoman Empire.
The Great Game. From the 1830s onward Russia and Britain competed for influence in Persia, Afghanistan, and the khanates of Central Asia (see Hopkins, The Great Game, 1990).
Periods
The first phase, the Petrine era, brought Russia onto the European stage and made the Baltic coast a Russian lake. The second, Catherine’s reign, doubled the empire’s territory through the partitions of Poland and the annexation of the Crimea and the northern Black Sea littoral. The third, the Napoleonic era, saw Russia briefly as the arbiter of Europe, occupying Paris in 1814. The fourth, the post-Napoleonic period, made Russia the conservative backbone of the Holy Alliance and the suppressor of every revolutionary tremor from 1820 to 1848. The fifth, the late imperial phase, was defined by the rise of Germany, the slow collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and a Russia increasingly dependent on French capital.
Figures
Peter the Great set the template. Catherine the Great realised most of the territorial gains. Alexander I played the leading role in the defeat of Napoleon. The foreign minister Karl Nesselrode managed Russian diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna and in the conservative years that followed. Alexander Gorchakov, foreign minister from 1856 to 1882, oversaw the repudiation of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris in 1870. Sergei Witte negotiated the Franco-Russian alliance and led the Russian delegation at Portsmouth in 1905. Alexander Izvolsky and Sergei Sazonov, the last two foreign ministers of the empire, mishandled the Bosnian crisis of 1908-1909 and walked Russia into the First World War in August 1914 (see Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, 2009).
The impact of the policy
By 1914 the empire was enmeshed in three overlapping systems: a Franco-Russian military alliance, the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 (which had ended the Central Asian phase of the Great Game), and a secret convention with Britain over the Straits. The combination made Russian mobilisation in 1914 a continental event, and the war that followed destroyed the imperial system altogether. Almost every boundary drawn between 1721 and 1917 — the Finnish border, the Polish partitions, the Romanian border, the Caucasian and Central Asian frontiers — became a source of friction in the twentieth century.