The Crimean War полностью

The ‘Testament’ was a forgery. It was created sometime in the early eighteenth century by various Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian figures connected to France and the Ottomans, and it went through several drafts before the finished version ended up in the French Foreign Ministry archives during the 1760s. For reasons of foreign policy, the French were disposed to believe in the authenticity of the ‘Testament’: their main allies in Eastern Europe (Sweden, Poland and Turkey) had all been weakened by Russia. The belief that the ‘Testament’ reflected Russia’s aims formed the basis of France’s foreign policy throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹²

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.