In this situation Russia tried to work with its potential rivals. Britain agreed to help the Greeks and an Anglo-Russian naval force sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino (1827). Turkey then declared war on Russia, and in 1828–29 the Russian army moved into the Balkans, going nearly to Constantinople. The resultant treaty forced Turkey to recognize Greek independence and autonomy for Serbia and the Rumanian principalities. Russian influence in Turkey now seemed predominant, a situation that was not to the liking of either France or Britain. For the time being the rise of Mohammed Ali in Ottoman Egypt and his establishment of a de facto independent state were more important as they threatened the collapse of the whole empire. Thus Russia supported Britain against France in 1840 to uphold the Ottoman Sultan against his subject in Egypt. For one last time Russian and British interests in the Ottoman Empire coincided.
A new element entered the scene with the 1848 revolutions in Europe, for Louis Napoleon was elected president of the new French republic. He soon proclaimed himself emperor as Napoleon III, and set out to restore the grandeur of France as it had been under the rule of his great uncle. He also needed the support of Catholic conservatives in France who were loyal to the Bourbons and suspicious of the Bonapartes. Looking for areas to affirm French power, Napoleon III elevated an obscure dispute over the control of the holy places in Palestine between Catholics and Orthodox into a major international issue. Nicholas was contemptuous of Napoleon III and slow to recognize the seriousness of British interests in the Ottoman Empire. Thus he presented the Turks with an ultimatum early in 1853 that led to war.
The Crimean War was actually rather inglorious for most of the participants. Though the Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed the Turkish navy at Sinop right at the start, it was no match for the British and French navies. The Russian army did well against the Turks in Asia Minor, but in the Crimea it was pushed back and forced to defend the main base at Sevastopol. The Russian Black Sea fleet had to be sunk to close the harbor to enemy ships. Russia had massive forces in theory but could not get them to the Crimea quickly and could not release enough of them in any case with long frontiers to defend. Obsolete weapons further complicated their task.
In spite of these obstacles, the Russian army and navy managed to hold Sevastopol for 349 days under intense bombardment. The Anglo-French forces were able to beat off Russian attempts to relieve the siege albeit with numerous catastrophes of which the charge of the Light Brigade was only the most famous. Sanitation and medical care were appalling on both sides, relieved only by the English hospitals reorganized by Florence Nightingale and the surgical work of the great Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov. As the slaughter continued at Sevastopol, the British navy tried to penetrate Russian defenses in the Baltic, but, frustrated by the powerful Russian fortresses at Sveaborg and Kronstadt, all it could do was burn Finnish coastal towns and capture the unfinished fort at Bomarsund in the Aland Islands. Other British ships attacked Russian monasteries in the White Sea and even tried to take Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. A squad of Cossacks beat them off.
During the war Austria’s open support of Russia’s enemies surprised Nicholas in view of his actions in 1849 and contributed to Russia’s diplomatic isolation. Normally friendly Prussia took an ambiguous position. Then in February, 1855, Nicholas I died. In September 1855, Sevastopol fell after the French army took the Malakhov kurgan, the heights overlooking the city, and in November the key Turkish fort of Kars in Asia Minor fell to the Russians. These events and the death of Nicholas set the stage for a peace conference in Paris, which ended the war.
As a military defeat, the outcome was hardly catastrophic for the Russians. Russia agreed to give up its claim of a legal right to protection of the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan, to give up its Black Sea fleet (in any case at the bottom of Sevastopol harbor), and to surrender a small strip of land on the Danube delta to Rumania. Only the second was a major concession, and naturally Russia made it its eventual aim to acquire the right to rebuild the fleet. For the time being there were more pressing issues, for the real defeat was in the revelation that the system of Nicholas I had failed to preserve Russia’s position as supreme land power in Europe that seemed guaranteed in 1815. The huge army could not move, it was too expensive for the treasury and its cost meant that it could not be modernized. Serfdom prevented the army from going over to a reserve system, as no one wanted serfs with military training. Nicholas’ army, his navy, and the state that maintained them had failed. This was the signal for reform, the most basic upheaval in Russian life between the time of Peter the Great and 1917.
10 Culture and Autocracy
One of the ironies of the reign of Nicholas I is that his unrelenting autocracy presided over the first great age of Russian culture. Nicholas realized to some extent the growing importance of Russian culture and the extremely high level it achieved in a short time, but he was more concerned to direct it in the proper conservative channels than to celebrate it. He abrogated the more tolerant censorship system of Alexander I in favor of one with the emphasis on combating subversion in religion and politics while retaining the paternalistic aspects of the older laws. The new structure remained under the Ministry of Education, but included a greater role for the bureaucracy and the more ominous Third Section. Its head, Alexander von Benckendorff, exercised erratic and arbitrary authority over publications while clumsily trying to encourage the appearance of pro-government material. Even with writers and artists well disposed toward the state, this policy was largely a failure, for Russian society was beginning to grow away from court and state tutelage, a process too fundamental for the actions of the tsar to stop. Some of the changes were even the result of state policy, particularly the support of the universities and the gymnasia, which produced a much larger and educated public, eager for the products of the new Russian culture. Another factor was the growth of commercial capitalism, which gradually brought into being a market for books and journals, concentrated in Petersburg and Moscow but slowly spreading to the provinces as well.
The cultural explosion took place in a number of areas. Painting and the visual arts remained largely bound to the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and thus indirectly to the court and its network of patronage. The Academy continued to favor large historical, classical, and Biblical canvases over the increasingly popular landscape and genre painting. It continued to supply paintings for official building projects like St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, or the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Nevertheless the Academy also offered for its students and graduates some possibility of travel and long residence in Italy, and many painters and sculptors took advantage of the opportunity. Karl Briullov, the best of the academy painters, returned from Italy and obtained many contracts for the decoration of churches and palaces as well as acquiring court and aristocratic patrons. Alexander Ivanov, in contrast stayed in Italy to avoid the halls of the Academy and fell under the influence of German romantic painting in its religious guise (the “Nazarenes”). The main result of his Italian years was an enormous painting, “Christ Appearing to the People,” which showed Nazarene influence but rejected the pseudo-medievalism of the Germans to depict the people whom Christ saved rather than a hieratic portrait of the Savior. Ivanov’s innovations seem minor today, but in the world of Nicholas I he had a great impact.