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An essay in universal history
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II. THE EAST: THE GOD-CHOSEN RACE (1861-1900)
Unlike the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East did not represent areas of vital geopolitical importance to Russia; and so Russian conquests there must be evaluated in a different way.
In 1859, following the victory of Britain over China in the Second Opium War, and as a British and French force was approaching Peking to enforce the terms that had been agreed, Count Nicholas Ignatiev managed to secure the weakened Emperor's formal ceding of Manchuria to Russia. Then, when the foreign troops had left Peking after securing the agreement they wanted, Ignatiev signed the Treaty of Peking with the Chinese. Peter Hopkirk writes: "It had been a Machiavellian performance of the highest order by the young Ignatiev, then still in his late twenties, and a remarkable diplomatic triumph for the Russians. First, they had formally added a vast tract of territory, the size of France and Germany together, to their already huge northern Asiatic empire. Second, they had got the Chinese to agree to their opening consulates at Kashgar, in Eastern Turkestan, and at Urga, the capital of Mongolia, then both under Peking's rule. They had thereby stolen a march on their rivals, the British, who had obtained no such facility, for the establishment of consulates meant that Russian merchants and goods would have exclusive access to these important new markets. It was with considerable satisfaction, therefore, that Ignatiev left Peking on November 22 and rode hard for St. Petersburg. 'Not since 1815,' one British historian has written, 'had Russia concluded such an advantageous treaty, and probably never before had such a feat been carried off by so young a Russian diplomat. The successes of 1860 went far to obliterate the bitter memories of the Crimean defeat, the more especially as they had been achieved in good measure by hoodwinking the English.’”202
Machiavellianism? Hoodwinking? From the Russian Tsars? Such an idea would have been considered outrageously unjust in relation to Alexander I or Nicolas I, both of whom conducted their foreign policy on the basis of high principle: Alexander (from 1815, at any rate) - on the basis of the Sacred Union of Christian powers against the revolution, and Nicholas on the basis of the interests of the Orthodox Christian commonwealth as a whole. But in the new reign a group of senior army officers and diplomats, determined to take revenge for their country's defeat in the Crimean War, took advantage of the inexperience of the young tsar to push through a foreign policy that was often Machiavellian, sometimes outrightly deceitful and imperialist in the western sense - that is, designed, not for any higher spiritual purpose, such as the spreading of the Orthodox Christian Faith among the pagans, but simply in order to increase the political and economic power of Russia and steal a march on the scheming British.
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This was particularly clear in Central Asia, where from 1864 the Russians gradually acquired huge territories by a series of sudden coups and advances, each time declaring that they had no intention of acquiring more territory.
The first such disavowal came in December, 1864, when just after the Russians had seized the oasis towns of Chimkent and Turkestan from the Khan of Khokand, the Russian Foreign Minister Prince Gorchakov issued a memorandum to the European Powers: "'The position of Russia in Central Asia,' declared this celebrated document, 'is that of all civilised States which are brought into contact with half-savage nomad populations possessing no fixed social organisation. In such cases it always happens that the more civilised State is forced, in the interests of the security of its frontiers and its commercial relations, to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whose turbulent and unsettled character make them undesirable neighbours.' In their turn these newly pacified regions had to be protected from the depredations of the lawless tribes beyond them, and so on. The Russian government therefore had to choose between bringing civilisation to those suffering under barbarian rule and abandoning its frontiers to anarchy and bloodshed. 'Such has been the fate,' Gorchakov wrote, 'of every country which has found itself in a similar position.' Britain and the other colonial powers had been 'irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward march'. The greatest difficulty, he concluded, lay in deciding where to stop. Nonetheless, having consolidated its frontier with Khokand, Russia was intending to advance no further.
"'We find ourselves,' he assured the other powers, 'in the presence of a more solid, less unsettled and better organised State, fixing for us with geographical precision that point at which we must halt.' Whether he himself really believed this, or whether he was merely playing for time on behalf of a government already bent on subjugating the khanates, is a question which still exercises scholars. Certainly N.A. Khalfin, the Soviet historian of this era, believes that it was a deliberate smokescreen aimed at deceiving the British. Needless to say, the Russian advance did not stop there as Gorchakov had promised. Within a few months they were driving south once more. The great Russian push into Central Asia was about to begin."203
Essentially the Russians were playing the same “great game” of colonial conquest as the British had been playing. For that reason, the British could not protest with too much conviction, and preferred the policy of “masterful inactivity”. And so by 1881, the Russians had consolidated their border along the northern frontier of Afghanistan, while that country stood as the neutral buffer State between Russian Central Asia and British India.
The reaction at home was mixed. "In 1874," writes Figes, "the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg hosted an extraordinary exhibition by the artist Vasily Vereshchagin, whose enormous battle scenes of the Turkestan campaign had recently returned with high acclaim from a European tour. Huge crowds came to see the exhibition (30,000 copies of the catalogue were sold in the first week) and the building of the Ministry became so cramped that several fights broke out as people jostled for a better view. Vereshchagin's pictures were the public's first real view of the Imperial war which the Russians had been fighting for the past ten years against the Muslim tribes as the Tsar's troops conquered Turkestan. The Russian public took great pride in the army's capture of the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, followed by its conquest of Tashkent and the arid steppe of Central Asia right up to the borders with Afghanistan and British India. After its defeat in the Crimean War, the campaign showed the world that Russia was a power to be reckoned with. But Vereshchagin's almost photographic battle images revealed a savagery which had not been seen by civilians before. It was not clear who was more 'savage' in his pictures of the war: the Russian troops or their Asiatic opponents. There was 'something fascinating, something truly horrifying, in the wild energy of these canvases', concluded one reviewer in the press. 'We see a violence that could not be French or even from the Balkans: it is half-barbarian and semi-Asiatic - it is a Russian violence.'
"It had not originally been the painter's aim to draw this parallel. Vereshchagin started out as an official war artist, and it was not part of his remit to criticize the conduct of the Russian military... But his experience of the war in Turkestan had given rise to doubts about the 'civilizing mission' of the Russian Empire in the East. On one occasion, after the Russian troops had massacred the people of a Turkmen village, Vereshchagin dug their graves himself. None of his compatriots would touch the dead. Vereshchagin came to see the war as a senseless massacre... The message of Vereshchagin's epic canvases was clearly understood. He portrayed the Asian tribesmen, not as savages, but as simply human beings who were driven to defend their native land. 'What the public saw,' Stasov later wrote, 'was both sides of the war - the military conquest and the human suffering. His paintings were the first to sound a loud protest against the barbarians of the Imperial war.'
"There was a huge storm of controversy. Liberals praised the artists for his stance against all war. Conservatives denounced him as a 'traitor to Russia', and mounted a campaign to strip him of his Order of St. George. General Kaufman became so enraged when he saw the artist's pictures that he began to shout and swear at Vereshchagin and physically attacked him in the presence of his fellow officers. The General Staff condemned his paintings as a 'slander against the Imperial army', and called for them to be destroyed; but the Tsar, ironically, was on the liberals' side...
"In Russia's educated circles the military conquest of the Central Asian steppe produced two opposing reactions. The first was the sort of imperialist attitude which Vereshchagin's paintings had done so much to offend. It was based on a sense of racial superiority to the Asiatic tribes, and at the same time a fear of those same tribes, a fear of being swamped by the 'yellow peril' which reached fever pitch in the war against Japan. The second reaction was no less imperialist but it justified the empire's eastern mission on the questionable grounds that Russia's cultural homeland was on the Eurasian steppe. By marching into Asia, the Russians were returning to their ancient home. This rationale was first advanced in 1840 by the orientalist Grigoriev. 'Who is closer to Asia than we are?' Grigoriev had asked. 'Which of the European races retained more of the Asian element than the Slavic races did, the last of the great European peoples to leave their ancient homeland in Asia?' It was 'Providence that had called upon the Russians to reclaim the Asian steppe'; and because of 'our close relations with the Asiatic world', this was to be a peaceful process of 'reunion with our primeval brothers', rather than the subjugation of a foreign race. During the campaign in Central Asia the same thesis was advanced. The Slavs were returning to their 'prehistoric home', argued Colonel Veniukov, a geographer in Kaufman's army, for 'our ancestors had lived by the Indus and the Oxus before they were displaced by the Mongol hordes'. Veniukov maintained that Central Asia should be settled by the Russians. The Russian settlers should be encouraged to intermarry with the Muslim tribes to regenerate the 'Turanian' race that had once lived on the Eurasian steppe. In this way the empire would expand on the 'Russian principle' of 'peaceful evolution and assimilation' rather than by conquest and by racial segregation, as in the empires of the European states.
"The idea that Russia had a cultural and historic claim in Asia became a founding myth of the empire. During the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s, Prince Ukhtomsky, the press baron and adviser to the young Tsar Nicholas II, advocated the expansion of the empire across the whole of the Asian continent, reasoning that Russia was a sort of 'older brother' to the Chinese and the Indians. 'We have always belonged to Asia,' Ukhtomsky told the Tsar. 'We have lived its life and felt its interests. We have nothing to conquer.'
"Inspired by the conquest of Central Asia, Dostoyevsky, too, advanced the notion that Russia's destiny was not in Europe, as had so long been supposed, but rather in the East. In 1881 he told the readers of his Diary of a Writer: 'Russia is not only in Europe but in Asia as well... We must cast aside our servile fear that Europe will call us Asiatic barbarians and say that we are more Asian than European... This mistaken view of ourselves as exclusively Europeans and not Asians (and we have never ceased to be the latter)... has cost us very dearly over these two centuries, and we have paid for it by the loss of our spiritual independence... It is hard for us to turn away from our window on Europe; but it is a matter of our destiny... When we turn to Asia, with our new view of her, something of the same sort may happen to us as happened to Europe when America was discovered. For, in truth, Asia for us is that same America which we still have not discovered. With our push towards Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength... In our Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters. In Europe we were Tatars, while in Asia we can be Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia will encourage our spirit and draw us on; the movement needs only to be started.’”204
Russia certainly did have a civilizing mission in Asia: to bring Orthodoxy to its peoples. Unfortunately, this mission was sometimes forgotten in the ardour of nationalist or commercial passion. But in the wake of Russia's conquering armies, Orthodoxy did make gains - but more among the pagans than among the Muslims, and even more in Russian America beyond Asia - Alaska - than in Asia proper.
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In Siberia, the Russian Church had been evangelizing the native tribes since the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century great progress was made especially in the region of the High Altai. "The High Altai regions in the mid-19th century were still 'pagan' and we may describe their religion as 'Shamanism'. In the past there had been waves of various cultural influences: from the Chinese and hence of Buddhism and Taoism and also from the Turkic peoples to the south spread Islamic ideas and perhaps even Manichaeism and Nestorianism. Nevertheless these influences were weak and the main religion was Shamanism. The Russian Orthodox mission to the area was founded by Fr. Macarios in 1828. He settled in Biisk as permanent priest in residence in 1830. The missionaries, especially those who were sympathetic to the Altai native people (which was mostly the case) made a fundamental contribution to the work of establishing a written Altai language which became a classic of its type. Later, following the model, the grammars of many other Turkic languages were to be defined. Archimandrite Macarios introduced a version of the Bible in the Altai language in the late 1830s. It is amazing to think that this work was begun in 1837 at Easter, not somewhere in highly educated Orthodox centres in the West but far on the frontiers in pagan Altai, in a small place called Ulala.
"Fr. Macarios was certainly an exceptional figure. He was a well-educated theologian who commanded several languages, including Greek and Hebrew. He translated the Bible into modern Russian. In his early years he studied the philosophy of the German philosopher Herder and was also familiar with the botanical work of Linneus and Denandel and the works of the astronomer Herschel and in general took a great interest in the natural science. For some time he was professor at the Theological Academy. From contemporary descriptions he seems to have been a man of great holiness who gave incorruptible service and love to the native peoples. In his approach to missionary work he advocated a definite program: it was not only to baptize the 'natives' and turn them into true children of the Heavenly Kingdom but also to lead them to a settled way of life, to literacy and to encourage them towards a more developed and more profitable form of agricultural practice. His program demanded of the missionaries a thorough knowledge of the Altai language, some basic ideas of science and medicine and an understanding of agrarian economics. He prepared for the mission practically useful objects such as seeds for market gardening and fruit growing, agricultural tools and so on. He produced the first translation into Altai of prayers and texts for church services. For the first time in the history of the missionary movement he took seriously the organization of missionary activities for women. He appointed female assistants. The first among these were the Russia Praskovia Landysheva and the Frenchwoman, Sofia Belmont. Among their duties were the education of the newly converted Altai women in the skills of childcare, sewing, bread making, elementary medical care and the fundamentals of midwifery. He even established an icon-painting studio where some gifted students learned about the fine arts to the extent that in time they established the Altai school of painting which spread over the whole region."205
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