The youngest general in Alexander’s entourage was Major-General Count Christoph von Lieven. Calm, tactful, self-effacing and hardworking, Lieven occupied the modest-sounding job of head of the emperor’s personal military secretariat. In reality this was a position of great power. Paul I had introduced into Russia the Prussian system of military administration, whereby the monarch operated as his own commander-in-chief and ran the army through his adjutant-general, who in principle was no more than a glorified secretary. The actual minister of war sat in Berlin, rarely met the king, and ensured that the army had proper boots. Even in Prussia, the king’s adjutant-general inevitably accrued great power. In Russia neither Paul nor Alexander could equal Frederick’s detailed knowledge of military affairs. That necessarily increased the role of their adjutant-general, Lieven, whom one historian rightly called the ‘first deputy of the emperor for military affairs’.55
Though his family’s medieval origins were Livonian rather than German, Lieven is best defined as a member of the Baltic German aristocracy. As was true of many Baltic German generals and senior officials, however, Lieven’s identity was mixed but his loyalties were unequivocal. Being German above all meant that he was a convinced Lutheran, with all that religion’s stress on duty, hard work and obedience. Born in Kiev, of which his father was the military governor, he was educated in Petersburg and spent his entire adult life at the imperial court and as an ambassador. Not surprisingly, his two preferred languages were French – the lingua franca of international high society – and Russian, the language of the army. His political loyalties were entirely Russian but to an even greater extent than most Balts this meant a strong personal loyalty to Alexander I and to the Romanov family.56
This personal link owed something to the fact that Christoph Lieven was an officer of the Semenovsky Guards Regiment, of which Alexander had been colonel-in-chief from adolescence. Founded by Peter the Great in 1683, along with their sister regiment, the Preobrazhenskys, the Semenovskys provided many of Alexander’s closest aides, including Lieven’s former deputy, Prince Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky. In a system of government made up of many networks and ‘families’, the Semenovskys were one of the emperor’s private followings. It was this regiment which had been on guard around the palace on the night of Paul I’s overthrow.
Above all, however, Lieven’s life and loyalties were determined by the fact that his mother was the closest friend of the Dowager Empress Marie, Alexander’s mother; she was her chief lady-in-waiting and the governess of the imperial children, who remained devoted to Charlotta Lieven throughout their adult lives. One of her former charges, the Grand Duchess Anna – later the Queen of the Netherlands – wrote: ‘Was it not her exclusive privilege to scold the family, for this is granted neither by decree nor by hereditary title?’ Links to the imperial family of this strength were literally golden. Titles, estates and patronage rained on the heads of Charlotta and her children. Christoph’s elder brother was a general who served subsequently as Minister of Education. His younger sibling, Johann, had distinguished himself in 1807 and been wounded at the battle of Eylau. Leo Tolstoy’s novel opens at the soirée of Anna Scherer, devoted confidante of the Empress Marie. In real life the closest equivalent to Anna Scherer was Charlotta Lieven.57
Alexander and Napoleon talked on their own for almost two hours during their first meeting on 25 June. Both men were experts in flattery and seduction, and each was intent on winning the other’s sympathy and goodwill. No doubt many ideas were floated which neither monarch would readily have committed to paper, let alone enshrined in a treaty. In the older literature, Russian as well as French, it is sometimes said that Alexander was bowled over by Napoleon and that this partly explains the terms of the Franco-Russian treaties. One has to be very careful in taking Alexander’s admiration of Napoleon at face value, however, particularly when he was speaking to French diplomats. The secret instructions he gave to Kurakin and Lobanov after he had held a number of discussions with the French emperor were rooted in a coolly realistic grasp of the interests, weaknesses and strengths of both Russia and Napoleon.58
In the end Alexander got most of what he wanted in the treaties agreed at Tilsit. Above all, he gained a peace which would be more than a temporary truce, without paying the vanquished side’s usual price of territorial concessions and a war indemnity.59 Apart from this, his overriding concern was to save Prussia, both out of a sense of loyalty to the Prussian king and queen, and because Russia wanted Prussia as an ally against further French expansion eastwards. To achieve this goal Alexander would have to pay a high price. The French now occupied the whole of Prussia and there was no chance that the Russian army could regain it. Napoleon would have preferred to partition Prussia, leaving its eastern – largely Polish – territories to Alexander and distributing the rest of the kingdom among his German clients.
Prussia’s survival was therefore a victory for Russian diplomacy, though an equivocal one. Prussia lost half her territory and population. Her Polish provinces became a new small state, the so-called Duchy of Warsaw. Its ruler was to be the King of Saxony, whose ancestors had been kings of Poland for much of the eighteenth century. The new duchy would be totally obedient to Napoleon and was potentially very dangerous for Russia, both as a base for a future invasion across the empire’s western border and as a source of hope for all Poles who dreamed of the restoration of the Polish kingdom in all its former territories. Forced to reduce its army and pay a vast war indemnity, the newly truncated Prussia was too vulnerable to Napoleon’s power to act as a defensive barrier for Russia, as became clear in 1811–12. Nevertheless, Alexander’s insistence on preserving Prussia was to prove hugely important in 1813, when the Prussians played a vital role in Napoleon’s overthrow.
The main price paid by Russia for Prussia’s survival was agreeing to join Napoleon’s war with Britain. Above all, this meant adherence to Napoleon’s Continental System and therefore the exclusion of British ships and goods from Russian ports. By the terms of the Treaty of Tilsit the Russians were also bound to impose the Continental System on the Swedes, if necessary by war. In June 1807 Alexander was angry at Britain’s failure to support the Russian war effort but he certainly did not want conflict with London and understood the damage it would do to the economy and the state’s finances. He believed, however, that at this moment Russia had no room for manoeuvre between Britain and France, and that subordinating Russia’s economic interests to Napoleon’s overriding concern – in other words blockading British trade – was the only way to ensure an acceptable peace. The emperor comforted himself with the hope that if British trade was excluded from the continent and Napoleon’s terms were moderate, then London would probably make peace. A compromise peace which checked both British expansion outside Europe and French advances on the continent would of course serve Russia’s interests perfectly. Alexander could take more realistic comfort from the fact that the Tilsit treaties did not bind Russia to military action against Britain and that a successful war with Sweden might allow the annexation of Finland, and thereby make Petersburg much more secure against any future Swedish attack.60
The one area where Alexander may have made an unnecessary concession to Napoleon was Russia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire. Egged on by France, the Ottomans had been at war with Russia since 1806, hoping to use Russia’s defeat at Austerlitz to regain some of the provinces lost in the previous three decades. In the Tilsit treaties France pledged itself to mediate between Russia and the Ottomans, and to support her new ally should the Turks prove intransigent. Alexander hoped that Napoleon would accept Russian predominance in the Ottoman Empire to balance France’s domination of western and central Europe. In reality, for all Napoleon’s grandiose talk about Russo-French collaboration in the Orient and about the impending demise of the Ottoman Empire, his basic policy was to block Russian expansion. No doubt he would have pursued this policy quietly whatever the Treaty of Tilsit said. Giving him a role as mediator merely allowed him more opportunities to realize his goal.61