The Crimean War полностью

Having taken Kars, the Russians controlled more enemy territory than the allied powers. Alexander saw his victory at Kars as a counterbalance to the loss of Sevastopol, and now thought the time was right to put out peace feelers to the Austrians and the French. Direct contact was established between Paris and St Petersburg at the end of November, when Baron von Seebach, Nesselrode’s son-in-law, who looked after Russia’s interests in the French capital, was approached by Count Walewski, Napoleon’s cousin and Foreign Minister. Walewski was ‘personally well-inclined’ towards peace talks with Russia, Seebach reported back to Nesselrode, but had warned that Napoleon was ‘dominated by his fear of England’ and determined to maintain his alliance with that country. If Russia wanted peace, it would have to make proposals – starting with the limitation of Russia’s naval power in the Black Sea – that enabled France to overcome the reluctance of the British to start talks.⁴³

That was not going to be easy. With the fall of Kars, the British government was even more determined to go on with the war and take it into new theatres. In December the cabinet discussed sending half the force in the Crimea to Trebizond to cut off a potential Russian advance from Kars towards Erzurum and Anatolia. Plans for the operation were prepared for consideration by the allied war council in January. There was also talk of a major new campaign in the Baltic, where the destruction of the naval base at Sveaborg on 9 August had shown the allied leaders what could be achieved with steam-powered armoured ships and long-range guns. Beyond Westminster, there was an almost unanimous consensus that the fall of Sevastopol should be only the start of a broader war against Russia. Even Gladstone, a firm advocate of peace, was obliged to ackowledge that the British public did not want the war to end. The Russophobic press called on Palmerston to launch a spring campaign in the Baltic. It called for the destruction of Kronstadt, the blockade of St Petersburg, and the expulsion of the Russians from Finland: Russia was to be destroyed as a threat to European liberty and to British interests in the Near East.⁴⁴

Palmerston and his ‘war party’ had their own agenda for a broad crusade against Russia. It went well beyond the original objective of the war – the defence of Turkey – in its plans for the permanent containment and weakening of Russia as an imperial rival to Britain. ‘The main and real object of the war is to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia,’ Palmerston had written to Clarendon on 25 September. ‘We went to war not so much to keep the Sultan and his Musselmen in Turkey, as to keep the Russians out of Turkey; but we have an equally strong interest in keeping the Russians out of Norway and Sweden.’ Palmerston proposed continuing the war on a pan-European scale as well as in Asia ‘to contain the power of Russia’. As he saw it, the Baltic states, like Turkey, if they joined this enlarged war, would be established as ‘part of a long line of circumvallation to confine the future extension of Russia’. Palmerston insisted that Russia had ‘not yet been beaten half enough’ and demanded that the war go on for at least another year – until the Crimea and the Caucasus had been detached from Russia and Polish independence had been won.⁴⁵

It was not just a question of surrounding Russia with Western-aligned states, but of a broader ‘war of nationalities’ to break up the Russian Empire from within. The idea was first advanced by Palmerston in his memorandum to the cabinet in March 1854. Then he had proposed to return the Crimea and the Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire; to give Finland to Sweden, the Baltic provinces to Prussia, and Bessarabia to Austria; and to restore Poland as a kingdom independent from Russia. Such ideas had been discussed and tacitly acknowledged as the unofficial war aims of the British cabinet by various figures in the Westminster establishment during the Crimean War. The basic premise, as explained by the Duke of Argyll in a letter to Clarendon in October 1854, was that while the Four Points were ‘good and sufficient’ as war aims in so far as they allowed ‘for any amount of change or extension’, the dismemberment of Russia would become desirable and possible ‘if and when a successful war can place it within our reach’. With the fall of Sevastopol, these ideas were advanced once again within the inner circles of Palmerston’s war cabinet. ‘I suspect Palmerston would wish the war to glide imperceptibly into a war of nationalities, as it is called, but would not like to profess it openly now,’ the political diarist Charles Greville wrote on 6 December.⁴⁶