The Crimean War полностью

French anger at the Tsar’s persecution of the Catholics reached fever pitch in 1846, when reports arrived of the brutal treatment of the nuns of Minsk. In 1839, the Synod of Polotsk, in Belarus, had proclaimed the dissolution of the Greek Catholic Church, whose pro-Latin clergy had actively supported the Polish insurrection of 1831, and ordered all its property to be transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church. The leader of the Polotsk Synod was a pro-Russian bishop called Semashko, who had previously been chaplain to a convent of 245 nuns in Minsk. One of his first acts on taking over the episcopate was to order the nuns to submit to the Russian Church. According to the reports that arrived in France, when the nuns refused, Semashko had them arrested. With their hands and feet bound in irons, the nuns were taken to Vitebsk, where fifty of them were imprisoned and forced to perform heavy manual labour in their iron chains, and suffered dreadful torture and beatings by the guards. Then, in the spring of 1845, four of the sisters managed to escape. One of them, the abbess of the convent, Mother Makrena Mieczysławska, then aged 61, made her way to Poland, where she was helped by the Archbishop of Poznan, and then taken by his Church officials to Paris. She recounted her appalling tale to the Polish émigrés of the Hôtel Lambert group. Makrena next brought her account to Rome, and met with Pope Gregory XVI just before the Tsar’s visit to the Vatican in December 1845. It is said that Nicholas emerged from his audience with the Pope covered with shame and confusion, having had his denials of the persecution of the Catholic Ruthenians refuted by documents in which he himself had praised the ‘holy deeds’ of Semashko.

The story of the ‘martyred nuns’ of Minsk was first published in the French newspaper Le Correspondant in May 1846 and retold many times in popular pamphlets. It quickly spread throughout the Catholic world. Russian diplomats and government agents in Paris tried to discredit Makrena’s version of events, but a medical examination by papal authorities confirmed that she had indeed been beaten over many years. The story had a powerful and lasting impact on French Catholics as an illustration of how the Tsar was ‘spreading Orthodoxy to the West’ and converting Catholics ‘by force of arms’.²⁷ This idea was a major influence on French opinion in the Holy Lands dispute against Russia.^f

The fear of religious persecution was matched by the fear of a gargantuan Russia sweeping away European civilization. One of Czartoryski’s fellow-exiles, Count Valerian Krasinki, was the author of a series of pamphlets warning of the dangers to the West of a Russian Empire stretching from the Baltic and Adriatic seas to the Pacific Ocean. ‘Russia is an aggressive power,’ Krasinki wrote in one of his most widely circulated books, ‘and a single glance at the acquisitions she has made in the course of one century is sufficient to establish this fact beyond every controversy.’ Since the time of Peter the Great, he argued, Russia had swallowed up more than half of Sweden, territories from Poland equal to the size of the Austrian Empire, Turkish lands greater in size than the Kingdom of Prussia, and lands from Persia equal to the size of Great Britain. Since the first partition of Poland in 1772, Russia had advanced her frontier 1,370 kilometres towards Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Munich and Paris; 520 kilometres towards Constantinople; to within a few kilometres of the Swedish capital; and it had taken the Polish capital. The only way to safeguard the West from this Russian menace, he concluded, was through the restoration of a strong and independent Polish state.²⁸

The perception of Russian aggression and threat was amplified in France by the Marquis de Custine, whose entertaining travelogue La Russie en 1839 did more than any other publication to shape European attitudes towards Russia in the nineteenth century. An account of the nobleman’s impressions and reflections from a journey to Russia, it first appeared in Paris in 1843, was reprinted many times, and quickly went on to become an international best-seller. Custine had travelled to Russia with the specific purpose of writing a popular travel book to make his name as a writer. He had previously tried his hand at novels, plays and dramas without much success, so travel literature was his last chance to make a reputation for himself.