Empires Apart (18 page)

It is worth stepping back from a gradual chronological approach to Russian history to consider the grand sweep of imperial expansion that continued through to the twentieth century. Over the next 250 years there were victories and, less often, defeats that each left their particular marks, but none individually changed the current that Ivan the Terrible set in motion.

After the conquests of Yermak and his successors in the east, Russian eyes turned west again towards the kingdoms of Poland and Sweden, then both far larger than the states of the same name today. Sweden surrounded the whole Baltic; Poland encompassed a great swathe of eastern Europe. In the 1650s, helped by Cossack rebels, Russia took north-eastern Ukraine, including Kiev, from Poland. Then Estonia, parts of Latvia and the site of the future St Petersburg were taken from Sweden. This was particularly important as, following the pattern of the Siberian conquests, the Teutonic nobility of these territories were absorbed into the Russian aristocracy and played a major part in political
and cultural life. Towards the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth Poland was again the victim of Russian expansion, losing Belorussia, Lithuania and most of what remained of Ukraine. (Poland in particular suffered from Russian imperial ambition in the nineteenth century. Having been on the losing side in the Napoleonic wars, it was taken by Russia in the Vienna Settlement of 1815 and rebellions against the new masters were bloodily suppressed.) At the same time the other frontiers were not forgotten, as Catherine the Great expanded to the Black Sea and seized Crimea from the Turks. Moldavia (also known as Bessarabia) was seized from the Ottomans and Finland from the Swedes.

For a while Russia rested on its western conquests and turned its eyes south-eastwards again. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were seized from the Turks and Persians between 1803 and 1828. Russian forces then moved east, facing easier targets as they seized the lands of the Turkmen, Uzbek, Kirghiz and Tadzhek. Even farther east territory was taken from the Chinese, including the port of Vladivostok.

With the coming of the Russian Revolution expansion went into reverse for a while (with the odd exception of the Bolshevik conquest of Mongolia), only to spring into action again after the Second World War when the swathe of ‘Soviet bloc' territories from eastern Germany through to the Balkans fell into Russian hands.

Purely in quantitative terms the growth of Russia is startling. As previously mentioned, in 1300 the Duchy of Muscovy covered some 7,500 square miles, while in 1462 Ivan III inherited 166,000 square miles. The growth continued. In 1533 Ivan IV inherited almost 1.1m square miles, and by the end of the century the figure had reached 2.1m square miles: Russia was already as large as the rest of Europe put together. In the next fifty years another 3.8m square miles of largely Siberian territory was added. Russia was by far the largest state in the world and indeed the Russian empire is the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known. Between 1550 and 1700 Russia gained an average of 13,500 square miles a year – as Richard Pipes puts it that is equivalent to adding a country the size of Holland to its empire every year for 150 years. (But as
Pipes also points out most of this territory was almost empty: even in the most developed areas in the west of its empire the population density stood at only one to three people per square mile in the sixteenth century compared with one to thirty in much of western Europe.)

The details of its imperial expansion form the core of Russian history, but it is easy to get lost in that detail and lose sight of the overall picture. One of the reasons that the scale of the Russian empire has rarely registered in the west is because of the division between western Christendom and barbarian east that first appeared at Châlons. When Yermak first crossed the Urals Europeans knew more about South America than they knew about eastern Siberia. Maps of the period show improbable kingdoms populated by mythical creatures. Even today the geography of Russia remains unfamiliar. Most educated Europeans could locate the Mississippi, but how many even know that the Ob and Lena are two of the world's mightiest rivers? Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan sound so much more alien than the equally un-English Arkansas and Utah.

Not only are Asiatic Russia and its colonies unfamiliar but the Europe that Russia faced to its west seems strangely disconcerting to modern readers. There are few natural frontiers in the world, and especially so in central and eastern Europe. Modern countries like Ukraine and Belarus simply did not exist. Others have changed beyond recognition. The largest country in medieval Europe was not France or Spain but the union of Poland and Lithuania. In the early medieval period the kings of England still ruled over large parts of what is today France (indeed in 1415, two years after the merger of Poland and Lithuania, the English victory at Agincourt seemed to confirm that position). The Iberian peninsula was still divided between Christian and Muslim. Germany as a nation was unheard of. The path of Russian imperialism is difficult to follow precisely because the patchwork of nation states kept changing. Furthermore, although Muscovy emerged from Mongol rule as the leader of a unified Russian state, what Russian histories often overlook is that the Russia that entered the Mongol realm was not the Russia that emerged centuries later. Much of what had been Russia was liberated
not by Muscovy but by Lithuania. The all-powerful Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which soon incorporated Poland, ensured that much of Kievan Rus was oriented not eastwards to the relative barbarism of post-Mongol Muscovy but to the self-consciously civilised Catholic west. For centuries afterwards Russia was obsessed by regaining Kiev and the lands we now know as Ukraine and Belarus. Not until the Second World War were the last remnants of these territories ‘returned' to Russian rule, by which time their inhabitants felt anything but Russian; and half a century later they were independent again.

Although the motivation behind this imperial expansion may have been largely economic, few have been crude enough to proclaim their imperial ambitions in purely mercenary terms. Just as American imperialism was cloaked in the philosophical robes of John O'Sullivan's ‘manifest destiny', so Russia proclaimed a manifest destiny of its own. Ivan III told the Lithuanian Grand Prince that Kiev and other parts of Ukraine then held by the grand prince were ‘all the land of Rus' and ‘by God's will, since the days of old, are our patrimony inherited from our ancestors'. At least Ivan III had the justification that Ukraine had once been Rus, but Ivan IV used the same manifest destiny argument in the Livonian wars when invading territory that had never been part of Kievan Rus. Later the doctrine of ‘Slavophilism' was developed, which proclaimed the right and duty of the Russian people to occupy the various territories they had conquered.

Ivan the Terrible and his grandfather Ivan the Great started this gigantic imperial adventure, but it could easily have stalled on Ivan IV's death. In the Times of Troubles Russian imperial ambitions could have been snuffed out by the two regional superpowers, Sweden and Poland, but in the Romanovs Russia stumbled upon a dynasty that would not merely protect the empire but bring it to undreamt-of glories. The reigns of the first two Romanov tsars, Michael and Alexis, were crucial in reestablishing the power and character of Rus and Muscovy.

When sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov ascended the throne Russia's imperial glories must have been the last thing on his mind. His first priority was survival, and his initial position was incredibly weak. He did not even have the power to select his own wife: when he chose the beautiful Maria Khlopfa, members of a rival family had her drugged and dispatched with her family into Siberian exile. Michael did, however, have a loving patron, his father. Filaret had not been considered for tsar himself for two reasons: he was already head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and at the time he was a captive of the Poles. Michael and Filaret were soon powerful enough to dispense with the national assembly (unlike the head of state in England, Charles I, who tried the same thing eight years later and ended up with neither state nor head).

Around them Europe was in flux. In 1683 western civilisation was yet again saved from the barbarous east when the Polish leader Jan Sobieski defeated the Ottoman Turks outside Vienna. Michael, Filaret and Michael's successor Alexis not only flexed Russia's military might but played a skilful diplomatic game, which resulted in Sweden selling back Novgorod and, of immense psychological importance, Poland being forced to give up Kiev. Alexis started a tradition to be followed assiduously later by America and Russia alike: funding opposition groups in exile in the hope that one day they would return home as grateful allies. In the case of Alexis that meant bankrolling Charles II of England in exile in Holland after the execution of his father.

Alexis was followed first by his sickly son Fyodor, who soon died, and then by one of the towering figures in Russian history, Peter the Great. The succession was not a smooth one, illustrating once again the fragile threads of autocracy. Any one of three half-siblings could have come out on top, and the transition was characteristically violent, pitting the family of Alexis's first wife, the Miloslavskys, against the family of his second wife, the Naryshkins. The Miloslavskys wanted Alexis's retarded son Ivan on the throne or, failing that, his sister Sophia, but the ten-year-old Peter was acknowledged tsar by the Moscow mob. His mother Natalya Naryshkin was appointed regent, but the Miloslavskys had Peter's
chief advisor hacked to death in the young tsar's presence and had the head of the Naryshkin family tortured and thrown to the mob. Sophia then became regent to Peter and Ivan as joint tsars (Ivan V being unkindly known to history as Ivan the Fool, although being a fool did not stop him fathering two daughters, one of whom would ascend the imperial throne). Sophia effectively ruled as Russia's first empress until Peter, at the age of seventeen, managed to enlist the support of the Scottish mercenary commanding the Moscow guards and had Sophia banished to a monastery. When Ivan died Peter became undisputed autocrat and started to change the face of Russia for ever.

Peter the Great was the first famous Romanov. Many European and American texts suggest that his greatness arose from his willingness to take on the most important task they appear to consider any Russian leader can perform: he ‘opened Russia to the west'. Peter was the first great westerniser, the tsar who cast off the blinkers of prejudice and superstition and took Russia into the modern world. He toured the capitals of western Europe and immersed himself in the traditions, culture and values of the west. Whether working as a humble apprentice in the shipyards of Holland or studying the arts of civilisation at Woolwich Arsenal, Peter supposedly typified the hands-on, real world leadership style more characteristic of new world entrepreneurs than old world autocrats.

Peter's famous visit to the west is frequently pictured as one of the great turning points of world history. Certainly he returned home inspired to change the course of Russian history, but not necessarily in the directions his admirers claim. This visit was not a Victorian Grand Tour peregrinating around the wonders of ancient Rome and Greece; Peter's primary objective was not cultural but imperial. He wanted to learn the military secrets of the western powers in order to strengthen his empire, if necessary at their expense. His choice of England was influenced less by an interest in the workings of a nascent constitutional monarchy than in the lessons to be learnt from the brutal English colonisation of Ireland (his visit came just eight years after the battle of the Boyne, where the military power of Irish Catholicism had been annihilated). He was accompanied
not by scholars and artists but by two hundred largely boorish and often drunken hangers-on, and he returned to Russia not when he was satisfied that he had learnt all there was to learn but when summoned home by news of a military revolt (news sent to him by the gloriously entitled Minister of Flogging and Torture). His reaction to the revolt showed nothing of western liberalism and everything of Ivan the Terrible. Peter had hundreds of his opponents roasted alive, broken on the wheel or flogged to death, with their bodies left to rot on street corner displays throughout Moscow.

In terms of geographical size Russia's days of breakneck expansion were over by 1700. But much of the vast new empire was sparsely populated Siberian tundra whose rich natural resources could only be exploited with enormous difficulty. Like Ivan the Terrible before him, Peter's covetous eyes turned west.

At the time Sweden was one of the greatest military powers in Europe. Although it had lost its fledgling American colony half a century earlier, it still dominated northern Europe, and its new king Charles XII, just eighteen when war commenced, was to prove himself a military genius. In launching the twenty-two year long Great Northern War against Sweden Peter set himself on a course that would, if successful, change the balance of power for ever. But to reach that point Peter had to defeat a man whose tactical brilliance and personal courage would soon be the talk of the continent.

Peter moved first, seizing Swedish territory on the eastern side of the Baltic and laying siege to the coastal city of Narva. Charles, after defeating Peter's Danish allies in a stunningly swift campaign, landed 150 miles away with a force just a quarter of Peter's. There was no chance that Charles would attack the Russian troops, especially as the weather was ghastly, so Peter left the siege to confer with his other allies, the Poles. While he was away Charles achieved the impossible. He force-marched his troops through raging blizzards and then launched a frontal attack against all the odds. The Swedish king had horses shot from under him and after the battle found a musket ball caught in his clothing. Part of the
Russian army was routed and the rest, itself larger than the total Swedish force, capitulated. The Russians lost 8,000 troops; ten generals, including the commander in chief, were captured.