Thus Russia reached the middle of the century with autocracy and serfdom intact, but there was ever-growing ferment under the surface, both in society at large and among the ruling elite. Change was inevitable, but Nicholas was immoveable. The downfall of his system came from the area he considered his greatest success, foreign policy.
Russia’s foreign policy was intimately bound up with its imperial structure and its overall imperial aims. Along the Western boundary, Russia was a status quo power; its only aim was to maintain control over what it already held. In Finland and the Baltic provinces, this aim was easily satisfied. Though Nicholas never called the Finnish diet, the rest of the autonomous Finnish government remained in place and built up the country, the new capital in Helsinki with its modern university and other institutions. The Baltic provinces were quiet as well, with a newly free peasantry and a combination of imperial central and local noble government. The problem in the west was Poland, for the 1815 Constitution provided for a diet, a Polish army, and a local government only generally subject to Russian control. Increasing conflict between Warsaw and St. Petersburg and the impact of the July Revolution of 1830 in France led to an uprising in November 1830 and a full-scale war. The Russian army crushed the Polish revolt and Nicholas abolished the constitution, retaining only the Polish legal system under Russian administrators. Nicholas warned the Poles that they must give up the idea of separate statehood. Eighteen years later the revolution in Germany and Hungary brought the tsar back to the fray, for the Habsburgs, defeated by the Hungarian rebels, called on him to rescue them. Nicholas marched his army into Hungary, the first Russian military expedition in Europe since 1814, and the Hungarians had to surrender. Nicholas would pay dearly for this act of monarchical solidarity.
In the south, Russia confronted a situation infinitely more complicated if ultimately less dangerous. In Alexander’s reign Russia had taken control of Georgia and then conquered Azerbaidzhan from Iran. An Iranian attempt at revenge in 1826 led to a short war that brought Russia a more defensible border that included the khanate of Erevan, an Iranian vassal state on part of the territory of medieval Armenia. After the end of the war in 1828 Russian policy varied in each of these areas. The most obvious partner was the numerous Georgian nobility, and the Russians set out to include them in the empire’s elite. To do this, the new rulers first had to reorganize the Georgian nobility along more “European” lines, abolishing the various types of dependency and vassalage within the nobility, making all nobles equal. New schools appeared, with curricula the same as Russian gymnasia, and the higher Georgian aristocracy entered the elite schools in St. Petersburg. The viceroys of the Caucasus even set up operas and introduced other European entertainments and forms of sociability to Europeanize the “oriental” Georgians. Russian rule affected the Armenians of Georgia as well. The small Armenian nobility of Georgia acquired the same status as Russian and Georgian nobles, and Russian administrators freed the largely Armenian townspeople from serfdom. In the khanate of Erevan, as in the Azeri khanates, most land belonged to the khans and now came under the Russian state. Thus the peasantry continued on their lands, paying taxes to the tsar rather than the khans, while much of Muslim elite left for Iran. The khanate of Erevan was unique in all the lands once under the Armenian kings, for on its territory was the great monastery at Echmiadzin and the residence of the Katolikos (head) of the Armenian Church. The Russian administration granted the Armenian Church, in spite of its dogmatic disagreements with Orthodoxy, the right to maintain an extensive system of schools under its own supervision, a privilege highly unusual in the Russian empire. Even more important, the khanate in 1828 was only about twenty percent Armenian: most of the population were Kurdish or Turkic nomads. Under Russian rule Armenians from Ottoman and Iranian territories migrated to the Erevan area, so that they formed a majority by the end of the century. In other words, in Transcaucasia the Russian Empire once again relied on the local nobility where it could find one, and in its absence on the Armenian Church and the local notables of the Azeri towns.
Transcaucasia was fairly quiet once Russia established control. The lands on the north slopes of the Caucasus range, however, were another story. The North Caucasus was the domain of a series of semi-nomadic mountain peoples, the most important of whom were the Circassians and the many tribes of Dagestan. Starting in 1817 the Russian army began to build new lines of forts and move south toward the high mountains, encountering continuous resistance from the Circassians. Around 1830 the center of warfare shifted east to Dagestan, to the Murids, the “disciples” of a purified Islam. In 1834 the Avar warrior Shamil became their leader, taking the war against the Russians into Chechnia and the northern parts of Dagestan while conflict with the Circassians still continued farther west. By the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 the Russian army had pushed Shamil into his stronghold in the high mountains of Dagestan, but had subdued neither him nor the Circassians. This was not a war of great engagements and Russia never had more than 60,000 troops in the entire area before 1856. It was a guerilla war of raids and counter-raids, of kidnapping and the siege of small remote forts and villages. In many ways its importance came not from local events but from its proximity to the main front of Russian foreign policy, the Ottoman Empire.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had been the main direction of Russian expansion. By the time of the Greek revolt of 1821, however, Russian policy faced a number of dilemmas. The new Russian boundaries in the West created the need to defend a vast expanse that had few roads and no natural defenses along the frontier. Russia had an army of 800,000 men – the largest army in Europe – but most of it was deployed on the western border and could not be easily moved south in case of war. Further territory in the Balkans would be very far away from Russia’s home bases and even more difficult to control and defend. Prudence dictated a stationary policy and the maintenance of existing boundaries in the south. At the same time, the Christian subjects of the Turks were becoming increasingly restive, and all of them were Orthodox, potential allies in any imaginable conflict. Yet they were also influenced by the political events in Western Europe and the Greek rebels imagined their future under some type of constitutional monarchy, anathema to both Alexander and Nicholas. Russia could also not afford to let the Ottoman Empire collapse, for it was not the only power interested in the area. France had long possessed major commercial interests in the eastern Mediterranean and in 1830 began the conquest of Algeria. Even more serious was British rivalry, for Britain, completing the conquest of India, had become the first world superpower and considered itself privileged to dictate the shape of the world wherever it chose. The Anglo-Russian rivalry began to turn into a long-standing conflict, an early “cold war” that lasted until 1907. A collapse of the Ottomans could lead to British or French control of the Balkans, so Nicholas preferred to maintain a weak neighbor under Russian influence, rather like Catherine’s policy toward Poland before 1788.