If the Russo-French alliance was to survive, however, the key group which Napoleon needed to cultivate in Petersburg was what Caulaincourt called the ‘Old Russians’ and whom one might realistically call the Russian isolationists. In almost all cases ethnic Russians and often from the older generation, these men saw no reason why Russia should involve itself in European affairs because of (as they would have whispered) Alexander’s infatuation with Queen Louise of Prussia or his fantasies of universal peace and brotherhood. In some cases a desire to avoid diplomatic and military entanglement in Europe went along with a dislike of Frenchified manners and values invading Russian society and ‘subverting’ its traditions. Many of the aristocratic isolationists, however, were highly cultivated men, as much at ease conversing in French as in Russian. Often isolationism also had its own aggressive strategic agenda. It saw expansion to the south against the Ottomans as Russia’s truly national interest and objective, looking back to the victorious wars of Catherine II as a model for future Russian grand strategy. Isolationists also recalled that the great leaders of Russian southward expansion under Catherine – field-marshals Petr Rumiantsev, Grigorii Potemkin and Alexander Suvorov – were all ethnic Russians, unlike so many of the men who commanded Alexander’s armies in the Napoleonic era.
There were parallels between these Russian isolationists and eighteenth-century British debates about grand strategy. Many English politicians demanded a truly ‘national’ policy of colonial and maritime expansion, and denounced involvement on the continent of Europe as mere pandering to the Hanoverian dynasty. Opinions which could be shouted from the rooftops in Britain could only be whispered in Russia. Nor were the Romanovs as obviously foreign as the Hanoverians. But when the male line of the dynasty died out in 1730, the succession had passed down through a daughter of Peter the Great who had married into the princely house of Holstein. The deference of Peter III and his son Paul I to the ‘Great Frederick’ and his Prussian army suggested to some Old Russians that a distinctly German and poisonous element had entered the Romanovs’ bloodstream. In August 1809, thoroughly disillusioned by Alexander’s foreign policy, Field-Marshal Prince Prozorovsky wrote to Prince Serge Golitsyn, fellow ‘Old Russian’ aristocrat and veteran of Catherine’s wars, that if Napoleon continued to trick and weaken Russia then no doubt the Prozorovskys and Golitsyns would hang on to their estates one way or another but the ‘House of Holstein’ would cease to sit on the Russian throne.12
The parallels between Russian and British debates on strategy reflected a basic common geopolitical reality. Britain and Russia were great powers on the European periphery. For both countries it was more profitable to use their power outside Europe, where pickings were easier and other European rivals found it almost impossible to intervene. Acquisitions in the European heartland were far more expensive to acquire and defend. By 1800, however, if both Britain and Russia could benefit from their peripheral position the key advantages rested with Britain. In terms of the security of the two empires’ core territory, the seas were a better barrier than the plains of Poland and Belorussia. To an extent, what Poland was to Russia, Ireland was to the English, in other words a vulnerable frontier territory inhabited by religious and historical enemies. Having expropriated almost the entire native elite, however, the English were confident that the Irish back door into Britain was secure unless the country was invaded by a large French army. The power of the Royal Navy made it almost certain that it would not be. No Russian statesman could feel a similar security about Poland.13
