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 well: 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
