Napoleon I was particularly influenced by the ‘Testament’. His senior foreign policy advisers freely cited its ideas and phraseology, claiming, in the words of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the Foreign Minister of the Directory and the Consulate (1795–1804), that ‘the entire system [of the Russian Empire] constantly followed since Peter I … tends to crush Europe anew under a flood of barbarians’. Such ideas were expressed even more explictly by Alexandre d’Hauterive, an influential figure in the Foreign Ministry who had the confidence of Bonaparte:
Russia in time of war seeks to conquer her neighbours; in time of peace she seeks to keep not only her neighbours but all the countries of the world in a confusion of mistrust, agitation and discord … All that this power has usurped in Europe and Asia is well known. She tries to destroy the Ottoman Empire; she tries to destroy the German Empire. Russia will not proceed directly to her goal … but she will in an underhanded manner undermine the bases [of the Ottoman Empire]; she will foment intrigues; she will promote rebellion in the provinces … In so doing, she will not cease to profess the most benevolent sentiments for the Sublime Porte; she will constantly call herself the friend, the protectress of the Ottoman Empire. Russia will similarly attack … the house of Austria … Then there will be no more the court of Vienna [sic]; then we, the Western nations, we will have lost one of the barriers most capable of defending us against the incursions of Russia.13
The ‘Testament’ was published by the French in 1812, the year of their invasion of Russia, and from that point on was widely reproduced and cited throughout Europe as conclusive evidence of Russia’s expansionist foreign policy. It was republished on the eve of every war involving Russia on the European continent – in 1854, 1878, 1914 and 1941 – and was cited during the Cold War to explain the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union. On the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 it was cited in the Christian Science Monitor, Time magazine and the British House of Commons as an explanation of the origins of Moscow’s aims.14
Nowhere was its influence more evident than in Britain, where fantastic fears of the Russian threat – and not just to India – were a journalistic staple. ‘A very general persuasion has long been entertained by the Russians that they are destined to be the rulers of the world, and this idea has been more than once stated in publications in the Russian language,’ declared the Morning Chronicle in 1817. Even serious periodicals succumbed to the view that Russia’s defeat of Napoleon had set it on a course to dominate the world. Looking back on the events of recent years, the Edinburgh Review thought in 1817 that it ‘would have seemed far less extravagant to predict the entry of a Russian army into Delhi, or even Calcutta, than its entry into Paris’.15 British fears were supported by the amateur opinions and impressions of travel writers on Russia and the East, a literary genre that enjoyed something of a boom in the early nineteenth century. These travel books not only dominated public perceptions of Russia but also provided a good deal of the working knowledge on which Whitehall shaped its policies towards that country.
One of the earliest and most controversial of such travelogues was A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia in the Year 1817 by Sir Robert Wilson, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had served briefly as a commissioner in the Russian army. Wilson made a number of extravagant claims – incapable of demonstration or disproof – which he presented as the fruit of his inside knowledge of the tsarist government: that Russia was determined to drive the Turks from Europe, conquer Persia, advance on India, and dominate the world. Wilson’s speculations were so wild that in some quarters they were ridiculed (The Times suggested that Russia might advance to the Cape of Good Hope, the South Pole and the Moon) but the extremity of his argument guaranteed attention for his pamphlet, and it was widely debated and reviewed. The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review – the most read and respected journals in government circles – agreed that Wilson had overestimated the immediate threat of Russia but nonetheless praised him for raising the issue and thought that the conduct of that country henceforth merited the ‘careful scrutiny of distrust’.16 In other words, the general premise of Wilson’s extreme views – that Russian expansionism was a danger to the world – was now to be accepted.
From this point on the phantom threat of Russia entered into the political discourse of Britain as a reality. The idea that Russia had a plan for the domination of the Near East and potentially the conquest of the British Empire began to appear with regularity in pamphlets, which in turn were later cited as objective evidence by Russophobic propagandists in the 1830s and 1840s.
The most influential of these pamphlets was On the Designs of Russia, previously discussed, by the future Crimean War commander George de Lacy Evans, which first laid out the danger posed by Russia’s activities in Asia Minor. But this pamphlet was notable for another reason as welclass="underline" it was here that de Lacy Evans advanced the earliest detailed plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire, a programme that would be taken up again by the cabinet during the Crimean War. He advocated a preventive war against Russia to block its aggressive intentions. He proposed attacking Russia in Poland, Finland, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, where it was most vulnerable. His eight-point plan reads almost like a blueprint of the larger British aims against Russia during the Crimean War:
1. Cut off trade to Russia so that the nobles would lose their profits and turn against the tsarist government.
2. Destroy the naval depots at Kronstadt, Sevastopol, etc.
3. Launch a series of ‘predatory and properly supported incursions along her maritime frontiers, especially in the Black Sea, within the shores of which, and even in the rear of her line of military posts, she has a host of unsubdued, armed, indomitable mountaineer enemies …’.
4. Help the Persians to reclaim the Caucasus.
5. Send a large corps of troops and a fleet to the Gulf of Finland ‘to menace the flanks and reserve of the Russian armies of Poland and Finland’.
6. Finance revolutionaries to ‘create insurrections and a serf war’.
7. Bombard St Petersburg, ‘if that be practicable’.
8. Send arms to Poland and Finland ‘for their liberation from Russia’.17
David Urquhart, the famous Turcophile, also advocated a preventive war against Russia. No writer did more to prepare the British public for the Crimean War. A Scotsman educated at Oxford in Classics, Urquhart first encountered the Eastern Question in 1827, when, at the age of 22, he enrolled in a group of volunteers to fight for the Greek cause. He travelled widely in European Turkey, became enamoured of the virtues of the Turks, learned Turkish and modern Greek, adopted Turkish dress, and quickly gained a reputation as something of an expert on Turkey through his reports on that country which were published in the Morning Courier during 1831. Making use of a family friendship with Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King William IV, Urquhart got himself attached to Stratford Canning’s mission to Constantinople to negotiate a final settlement of the Greek boundary in November 1831. During his time there he became convinced of the threat posed by Russian intervention in Turkey. Encouraged by his patrons at the court, he wrote Turkey and Its Resources (1833), in which he denied that the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse and highlighted the commercial opportunities awaiting Britain if it gave aid to Turkey and protected it from Russian aggression. The success of the book earned Urquhart the favour of Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary in Lord Grey’s government (1830–34), and a new appointment to the Turkish capital as part of a secret mission to examine the possibilities for British trade in the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, southern Russia and Afghanistan.