Who are our allies in Europe (
By declaring war on us, the Turks have destroyed all the old treaties defining our relations, so we can now demand the liberation of the Slavs, and bring this about by war, as they themselves have chosen war (
If we do not liberate the Slavs and bring them under our protection, then our enemies, the English and the French … will do so instead. In Serbia, Bulgaria and Bosnia, they are active everywhere among the Slavs, with their Western parties, and if they succeed, where will we be then? (
Yes! If we fail to use this favourable opportunity, if we sacrifice the Slavs and betray their hopes, or leave their fate to be decided by other powers, then we will have ranged against us not one lunatic Poland but ten of them (which our enemies desire and are working to arrange) … (
With the Slavs as enemies, Russia would become a ‘second-rate power’, argued Pogodin, whose final sentences were three times underlined by Nicholas:
The greatest moment in Russia’s history has arrived – greater perhaps even than the days of Poltavan and Borodino. If Russia does not advance it will fall back – that is the law of history. But can Russia really fall? Would God allow that? No! He is guiding the great Russian soul, and we see that in the glorious pages we have dedicated to Him in the History of our Fatherland. Surely He would not allow it to be said: Peter founded the dominion of Russia in the East, Catherine consolidated it, Alexander expanded it, and Nicholas betrayed it to the Latins.
No, that cannot be, and will not be. With God on our side, we cannot go back.10
To get him to embrace his pan-Slav ideology Pogodin had cleverly appealed to the Tsar’s belief in his divine mission to defend the Orthodox as well as to his growing alienation from the West. In his November memorandum to his ministers, Nicholas had declared that Russia had no option but to turn towards the Slavs, because the Western powers, and Britain in particular, had sided with the Turks against Russia’s ‘holy cause’.
We call on all the Christians to join us in the struggle for their liberation from centuries of Ottoman oppression. We declare our support for the independence of the Moldavian-Wallachians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Bosnians and Greeks … . I see no other way to bring an end to the hostility of the British, because it is unlikely that after such a declaration they would continue to ally with the Turks and fight with them against Christians.11
Nicholas continued to have doubts about the pan-Slav cause: he did not share Pogodin’s illusions about the number of Slav troops it was possible to mobilize in the Balkans; and ideologically he remained opposed to the idea of stirring revolutionary uprisings, preferring instead to proclaim his support for the liberation of the Slavs on religious principles. But the more the West expressed its opposition to Russia’s occupation of the principalities, the more he was inclined to gamble everything on a grand alliance of the Orthodox, even threatening to support Slav revolts against the Austrians, if they should join the West against Russia. Religious conviction made the old Tsar rash and reckless, risking all the gains Russia had made in the Near East over many decades of diplomacy and fighting on a gamble with the Slavs.12
Hopeful of a Serb uprising, the Tsar favoured marching south-west from Bucharest towards Rusçuk, so that his troops would be close enough to aid the Serbs if they rose up, instead of concentrating on the Turkish fortress of Silistria, further to the east on the Danube, as preferred by Paskevich. As Nicholas explained in a letter to Paskevich, he wanted to subordinate his military strategy to the larger cause of the liberation of the Slavs, which a Serb uprising would begin:
