It was an astonishingly blunt rebuff for the Tsar to make towards the French, who had offered him his best way to escape a showdown with the British and the Turks. The French approach was his last chance to avoid total isolation on the Continent. He had tried to build ties with the Austrians and Prussians at the end of January, sending Count Orlov to Vienna with a proposal that Russia would defend Austria against the Western powers (an obvious reference to Franz Joseph’s fears that Napoleon would stir up trouble for the Habsburgs in Italy) if they signed a declaration of neutrality together with Prussia and the other German states. But the Austrians were alarmed by the Russian offensive in the Balkans – they would not listen to the Tsar’s suggestion that they join in the partition of the Ottoman Empire – and made it clear that they would not cooperate with the Russians unless the Turkish borders remained unchanged. They were so concerned by the threat of a Serb rising in support of the Russian offensive that they placed 25,000 additional troops on their frontier with Serbia.41
By 9 February the Tsar knew that Orlov had failed in his mission. He had also learned that the Austrians were preparing to send their troops actually into Serbia to prevent its occupation by his troops. So it seems extraordinary that he should reject the one chance he had left – Napoleon’s overture – to avoid a war against the Western powers, a war he must have feared that he would lose, if Austria opposed Russia. It is tempting to believe, as some historians do, that Nicholas had finally lost all sense of proportion, that the tendency to mental disturbance with which he had been born – his impulsiveness and rash behaviour and melancholic irritability – had become mixed with the arrogance acquired by an autocratic ruler after almost thirty years of listening to sycophants.42 In the crisis of 1853–4 he behaved at times like a reckless gambler who overplays his hand: after years of patient play to build up Russia’s position in the Near East, he was risking everything on a war against the Turks, desperately staking his entire winnings on a single turn of the wheel.
But was this really gambling from his point of view? We know from Nicholas’s private writings that he took confidence from comparisons with 1812. He constantly referred to his older brother’s war against Napoleon as a reason why it was possible for Russia to fight alone against the world. ‘If Europe forces me to go to war,’ he wrote in February, ‘I will follow the example of my brother Alexander in 1812, I will venture into uncompromising war against it, I will retreat if necessary to behind the Urals, and will not put down arms as long as the feet of foreign forces trample anywhere on Russian land.’43
This was not a reasoned argument. It was not based on any calculation of the armed forces at his disposal or any careful thought about the practical difficulties the Russians would face in fighting against the superior forces of the European powers, difficulties often pointed out by Menshikov and his other senior commanders, who had warned him several times not to provoke war with Turkey and the Western powers by invading the Danubian principalities. It was a purely emotional reaction, based on the Tsar’s pride and arrogance, on his inflated sense of Russian power and prestige, and perhaps above all on his deeply held belief that he was engaged in a religious war to complete Russia’s providential mission in the world. In all sincerity Nicholas believed that he had been called by God to wage a holy war for the liberation of the Orthodox from Muslim rule, and nothing would divert him from this ‘divine cause’. As he explained to Frederick William, the Prussian king, in March 1854, he was prepared to fight this war alone, against the Western powers, if they sided with the Turks:
Waging war neither for worldly advantages nor for conquests, but for a solely Christian purpose, must I be left alone to fight under the banner of the Holy Cross and to see the others, who call themselves Christians, all unite around the Crescent to combat Christendom? … Nothing is left to me but to fight, to win, or to perish with honour, as a martyr of our holy faith, and when I say this I declare it in the name of all Russia.44
These were not the words of a reckless gambler; they were the calculations of a believer.
