Look to the West (Thande's first proper timeline, and it's about time!)
- Thread starter Thande
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Hmmm, interesting to note that Ridiculously Similar Flag Syndrome develops in LTTW too (Siam and Oman - I know they're different shades of red, but at first glance they are exactly the same).
And... Royal Imperial Natal Company? Does this mean we're going to have an Empire of South Africa as well?
And... Royal Imperial Natal Company? Does this mean we're going to have an Empire of South Africa as well?
That would be awsome.
It looks like there will be *dominions everywhere at this rate...
Thande
Donor
The Danish Asiatic Company runs Frederiksnagore and their other minor Indian possessions. Much like OTL.Wait, the Danes are returning to Asia...
That would be awsome.
It looks like there will be *dominions everywhere at this rate...
No dominions. No British Empire. Why do I have to keep saying this?
No dominions. No British Empire. Why do I have to keep saying this?
Bah, what do you know? You are just the guy writing the timeline.
Besides, we already know than it is the Empire of America, not the British Empire. Don't think than you can trick us to look towards the wrong side of the ocean while you fill the flace with loyal Imperial Dominions
Constantinople
Banned
No dominions. No British Empire. Why do I have to keep saying this?
Yes you do.
So what exactly is the set up then? Direct rule forever? The Empire of North America sounds awful like a backdoor secret dominion by a different name.
Vince
Monthly Donor
If I had to take a guess it's got something to do with that North American country 'Superia'.
Thande
Donor
Part #85: Natisk na Vostok
Wer wagt, gewinnt
Russia, historically, is not so much an Empire as an Argument.
*
From – “The Great Eastern Adventure” by Pavel Nikolaiyevich Khlebnikov (1972):
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” wrote William Shakespeare in the late sixteenth century, speaking of a king from the early fifteenth. Words which truly know no nation, no era. Indeed they transcend even systems of government, for they may be applied to many an individual instead to don the Phrygian cap. It would, of course, be vulgar (and in violation of Haraldsson’s celebrated maxim) to bring up L’Inhumain at this point, and so I shall not.
No – instead we look to the head of Emperor Paul the First in the year of 1805. Certainly the Tsar had every right to be concerned. He had won back his throne from the Potemkinite rebels at the cost of numerous compromises with potential enemies. While the Klimentov rebellion had been successfully crushed two years before, and proletarian anger diverted into the Great Pogrom against the Jews soon afterwards, both were symptomatic of continuing pressure beneath the surface, slowly building. Russia, as ever, found herselves at the crossroads of West and East. Ever since Peter the Great, the Tsars and Tsaritsas had tried to bring Russia closer to the European, Western, civilised world. There were reasons for this beyond the simple chauvinism of the fact that most of the royals were themselves German in descent. Europe represented literacy, knowledge, rationalism, Enlightenment, while Russia was regarded by many as still being primarily an oriental, Asiatic power, doomed to superstition and credulousness. The tsars, and much of the upper classes (separated from their subjects by language, as the court speech was French) had sincerely believed that such a course would be of benefit to all the people of Russia, from the Emperor down to the lowest krestyanin.
Yet even with the broad acceptance of the autarkic, arbitrary power of the Imperial authority by the people, there had remained a stubbornness and resentment directed towards the attempts to bring European civilisation to Russia. The Germanophile Peter III had encouraged the settlement of Germans in the Empire, picking up many fleeing religious persecution in the Germanies. But while such settlers, often more skilled than their Russian counterparts, might serve a national agenda well, they only provoked resentment among the Russian people. It had been programmes such as this which had allowed Alexander Potemkin, a man with a hopelessly flimsy claim to the throne, nonetheless to paint Peter and his son Paul as “foreigners”, un-Russian, un-Slavic, seeking to remake the country in their own German image. Some have suggested that the upsurge in Slavic racialism in Russia in the late 1790s was both a mirroring of and a reaction to the French Revolution and the rise of Linnaean Racism therein. This is, however, an oversimplification; Russia had long since had its own Linnaean school of thought, probably even before France – Sweden, after all, was one of the few “European” countries with which Russia had close cultural contact.
While Alexander Potemkin had been defeated, Paul had been forced to respond to this angry popular feeling by making concessions to the idea of a Slavic identity. He had officially banned French as the court language (though of course this took several years to implement) and had scholars focusing on codifying a sufficiently ‘refined’ Russian grammar for official business. At the same time, though, he partially owed his victory (and later the quelling of the Klimentov rebellion) to Heinz Kautzman and others among the German settlers in Russia. Excessive anti-French propaganda and fanning the flames of anti-Semitic pogroms could only go so far to hide this contradiction. Beneath it all, the cultural war was still raging, if turned down to a low flame.
Paul’s own opinion was that the strategy of his fathers had been wrong: yes, Russia must become more enlightened and developed if she was to survive and prosper, but it had been wrong to hold up the notion of a European identity to society and declare “this is how you must be”. There were historical precedents, after all. The Old Believers had refused to follow Orthodox Church reforms more than a century before and there were still thousands of them around. No; rather than bringing Russia to Europe, Paul knew that Europe must be brought to Russia. The “European” identity must be redefined to include Russia while allowing for only minor alterations to the Russian character and culture. Once that was accomplished, osmosis would handle the rest. And the French Revolution provided an excellent opportunity, with a nation that was once the heart and wellspring of European enlightenment and culture replaced by what Edmund Burke termed “the new barbarism”. If one such dramatic change could be made to the definition of European, why not another in the opposite direction?
It is of course rather charitable to attribute such notions to Paul himself – while the Emperor knew the end result he wanted, and was a competent enough ruler, he was no great thinker. He did, however, employ ministers who were – foremost among them being Prince Arkady Evgenevich Voloshin, Minister for the Interior, who masterminded this scheme. It helped that Russia had favourable relationships with other nations considered already to lie within the European identity, such as Denmark or (to a lesser extent) Lithuania and Courland. Voloshin had printers disseminating propaganda that contrasted the ravages of the French Jacobins with the ‘slow yet steady progress’ of Russian society, highlighting the gradual emancipation of the serfs (and ignoring the fact that this had provoked the Klimentov rebellion and much muttering since then). The message was targeted primarily at the Germanies; Voloshin’s general strategy to stabilise his Emperor’s rule was to have Russian troops one day march through the German lands as part of a multi-national force and be accepted as liberators from French tyranny. Then, once Germans and Russians were united in mutual acceptance of the other’s culture and civilisation, that should break down the tensions which the relationships with Kautzman and other German-Russians caused among the former Potemkinite supporters.
Of course this scheme did not come off quite as its creators had planned. The first thing to go wrong was the death of Mehmet Ali Pasha, the Turkish Grand Vizier, in February 1806. Given the nature of Ottoman politics, it seems quite likely that he was poisoned, although this is not entirely certain. Mehmet Ali had secured a strong position for himself after the victories of the Austro-Turkish War, unassailable by conventional political means, and perhaps had been unwise enough to let his guard down.
Mehmet Ali’s former dominance of the court politics of the Sublime Porte meant that no opposition faction was strong enough to gain power without a period of bloody chaos and infighting, perhaps limited to a wave of assassinations and street fights in Constantinople, perhaps degenerating into civil war. To forestall such a crisis, Sultan Murad V quickly appointed Dalmat Melek Pasha, the heroic general of the Bosnian front, to the position of Grand Vizier. A Bosniak himself, Dalmat Melek was far from the first non-Turkish Ottoman to hold the position, yet his “rustic” ways alienated parts of the court. This was perhaps balanced by the support he gained from the Janissaries. Nonetheless, he soon proved as vigorous and ruthless in the political arena as on the battlefield.
Predictably, the former general’s own stance on foreign policy turned towards war. The relative powers of the grand vizier and the sultan had varied considerably from the reign of one sultan to the next, and under Murad V their influence was roughly equal. Dalmat Melek had been furious when the Ottoman government had agreed to withdraw their influence from the Georgian states in 1801 in exchange for buying Russian neutrality during the Austro-Turkish War. While he recognised the daunting prospect of fighting two enemies, at the time he had argued that Russia had only just emerged from her civil war, could not the face of even a cursory conflict with the Porte, and would have backed down if pressed. Whether that is true or not is questionable, but Dalmat Melek nonetheless advocated a confrontational policy with Russia, seeking both to regain influence over the Caucasus and also the Khanate of the Crimea. In the latter case, the Khanate had gone from being an Ottoman vassal to a Russian puppet after the Russo-Turkish War of 1771-1776, then shifted back in Constantinople’s direction during the Russian Civil War as the Ottomans extended their influence. However, Khan Devlet V had tried with limited success to play the two sides off each other in order to retain as much independence as his country, small and surrounded by two great powers, could. He desperately wanted to avoid another war; the new Jewish population of Crimea, having fled there after the Great Pogrom, concurred. Both knew that, despite the Black Sea being an Ottoman lake, it was likely that the Caucasus would be the primary front of the war and the Ottomans would be unable or unwilling to hold against a Russian invasion of the Khanate from Ruthenia. After all, they could always get the war-torn ruins of Crimea restored at the bargaining table after victory elsewhere – better, in fact, for the Porte, for that would mean they could install a far more pliable Khan than Devlet and fill the country with Ottoman settlers…
The Russians reacted to the new Ottoman aggression by massing troops in Ruthenia and the northern Caucasus. As before when quelling the Klimentov rebellion, Kautzman and his Germans were careful not to be at the spearhead, along with the Lithuanian contingent sent by Grand Duke Peter, Paul’s son. It was imperative for Voloshin’s cultural programme that the Russians be seen to get all the glory. And now war seemed inevitable. That was not so much a bad thing from Emperor Paul’s perspective. The country had sufficiently recovered from the damage it had suffered during the Civil War, a good war against the undeniably loathsome Turk now would help reunite the Empire’s fractured society, and the Russians had a decent shot at victory, rolling back the control that the Ottomans had gained during the Civil War. Neutral, knowledgeable commentators such as the Prussian observer and diarist Johannes Bachstein generally thought the two sides were about evenly matched: both had learned a lot in recent wars, though the Russians had taken more from those lessons (the Ottoman victory in the Austro-Turkish War had tended to wipe away any awkward questions about the circumstances leading up to it), the Russians were in a better strategic position for the initial attacks, but the Donanmasi, the Ottoman Navy, controlled the Black Sea. It is questionable which would have triumphed, though most modern scholars consider an Ottoman victory somewhat more likely, after an exhaustive slugging match which would have wrecked the Crimea and perhaps the Caucasus as well. As it is, we shall never know.
Even as newly conscripted Russian regiments assembled in Kiev and Rostov,[1] though, the crisis imploded, superseded by another. In April 1806, Shah-Advocate Ali Zand Shah of Persia died after succumbing to an infected insect bite. This came at the worst possible time for any attempt to reconcile to a peaceful solution in the ongoing Turco-Persian rancour over the matter of the Pirate Coast.[2] The Ottomans enjoyed at least nominal authority over the coastal emirates, and thus the Persians held Constantinople responsible for the increasing pirate attacks on Persian ships sailing from Bandar Abbas[3] to trade, primarily with Indian states, Oman and the Zanj lands in East Africa.[4] (In practice, it is possible that these attacks were sponsored by Oman rather than the Ottomans, fearful of the Persians usurping their African colonies).
In particular several influential Persian leaders expressed outrage at the attack of July 5th 1804, in which Arab pirates sailing from Abu Dhabi took, amid much bloodshed, a Persian ship carrying not trade cargo but peaceful hajjis on their way to Mecca. Among them was the third son of the Grand Vizier, Mirza Reza Khan Sadeghi. Mirza Reza demanded blood, but Ali Zand Shah attempted to resolve things. This was not merely due to his celebrated pacifism (at least by 18th century standards) but because he was concerned about the East Durrani Empire, which was once more eyeing the lands west of Herat that it had once possessed and then lost to the Zands. War on two fronts was the last thing Persia needed, particularly considering the simmering rebellions among the Turkmen in the north.[5]
However, Ali Zand Shah’s death meant his more hot-blooded son Zaki Mohammed Shah succeeded him as Shah-Advocate, and Zaki Mohammed concurred with Mirza Reza. Thus in October of that year, war was joined. The Persians attacked Mesopotamia and battled the Donanmasi in the Persian Gulf. Historically the Persians had never possessed much naval strength, and while this had slowly increased under the Zands, the Donanmasi and its Arab irregular allies far outmatched what Persia could field. Oman remained studiously neutral but privately took a pro-Ottoman stance, further closing the seas to Persia. However, with assistance from their Portuguese allies trickling in (sometimes taking the form of Portguese East India Company ships fighting under Persian flag) the Persians at least managed to prevent the Ottomans from sweeping them from the seas to the extent of being able to launch an amphibious descent.
In truth this was not needed. The Persian army was in the process of reorganisation, and things remained chaotic, for the army establishment was still divided over the merits of the European training methods and new breakthroughs in firearms that the Portuguese provided. Furthermore, for all its benefits, the period of peace that Ali Zand Shah had presided over also meant the Persians were less experienced than the Ottomans, their only real conflicts in recent history being with the Durranis and Turkmen rebels. Neither of those more irregular sets of warriors prepared them for facing disciplined, organised Ottoman troops.
Therefore the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09 ended in an Ottoman victory, helped along by Ali Zand Shah’s predictions coming true: the Durranis indeed sallied from Herat in an attempt to (re)take Nishapur and Mashhad. However, matters worsened when the Khan of Kalat also entered the war and besieged the key port of Jask, eventually taking it. Zaki Mohammed Shah submitted to a punishing peace, which involved ceding Azerbaijan,[6] Khuzestan and Ilam to the Ottomans. This put the Turks within spitting distance of a Caspian Sea coast, alarming the Russians. St Petersburg repeatedly considered intervening in the war. Although relations with Persia were correct at best, backing Shiraz[7] against Constantinople seemed the lesser of two evils, and would give the Russians a better chance of victory in the originally planned war. However, problems arose, primarily with spinning things: Voloshin had been ready to present a war for the defence of the motherland in the face of the heathen, a heady mix to make the people forget their former differences and unite in opposition. An opportunistic war of revenge amidst a diplomatic kerfuffle between Mohammedans was quite another kettle of fish, and ran the risk of spiralling out of control.
A more important reason why the Russians did not move was the course of events further west. Voloshin and Paul had indeed planned to intervene in the Jacobin Wars at some point, preferably after the French and their opponents had exhausted each other and the Russians could take all the glory. However, it seemed events had overtaken them. By late 1806 it seemed that the war was winding down to a stalemate: French reverses in Germany, Italy and Spain, yet the Republic clearly far from collapse. Alarmists in the Russian ministries advocated that intervention had to be made now, before it was too late and the ideological war petered out into an anticlimactic peace. Of course, this was before the “Le Grand Crabe” invasions of Flanders and Britain by France a few months later, which expanded the war once more and ultimately brought about the doom of the Republic, but as of yet even the plans for these remained unknown to St Petersburg. Thus Russia hesitated between two wars, only in the end to get involved in a third.
News reached St Petersburg in November of two important events on the heels of each other: Moritz Benyovsky’s triumphs against the Japanese and his successful inviegling of Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company trade into the ensuing civil war; and the death of Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin at the hands of the Chinese army amid that great Empire also succumbing to a war of succession. Although Paul had been a great supporter of the Lebedev-Benyovsky venture when he had sat the throne of Lithuania, this alarmed him. It was one thing to poke a stick into as distant and irrelevant a place as Japan, but China was another matter. Sino-Russian relations were vitally important to St Petersburg and wars had been fought before. On the other hand, it had been the Chinese who moved this time. In the past, Paul’s father Peter III and his predecessor Empress Elizabeth had reacted to Chinese sweeps of the Amur valley with ignored diplomatic protests at best, before waiting a few months and then quietly sending in more settlers beneath the languid gaze of the only intermittently interested Qing dynasty. But this was different, both in numbers and in reaction: the planned execution of Lebedev, and the fight to the death with the Chinese army outside Beijing, could not be ignored. Furthermore, Benyovsky’s successes in Japan, along with those of Boris Dmitrevich Leskov in Russian America,[8] convinced Paul that the potential trade wealth about to be unlocked in the East was sufficient to be worth fighting for. Even worth risking relations with China over – and besides, that horse had already bolted.
Therefore, in February 1807 – before the news of Le Grand Crabe reached St Petersburg – the Great Eastern Adventure was launched. This was one of the greatest projects in Russian history, and essentially represents the answer to the problem “how does one move 75,000 soldiers from A to B, where A is European Russia and B is the back of beyond near Yakutsk?” It was organised scientifically, placed under the command of the forward-thinking general Evgeny Serafimovich Kuleshov and backed up by a large number of theoreticians and experienced war organisers – most of them German or Italian exiles fleeing the conflicts raging across their homelands. Fortunately for them, the route between Moscow and Yakutsk had already been codified and expanded over the past two decades thanks to the activities of the Pacific Company and its predecessors, and now there was usually at least a beaten track every step of the way from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan to Perm to Yekaterinburg to Omsk to Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk and finally on to Yakutsk. Yet the movement of the odd caravan and escort company was far from what that route was now playing host to.
The largest problem was logistics, keeping such a large number of men fed and protecting them from the cold (the expedition set off in winter, despite the conditions, as that meant the more swampy regions along the way would be frozen and safe to move over). Despite the traditional Russian lackadaisical approach to such matters, believing the best solution to soldiers’ problems was to give them a damn good thrashing, under Kuleshov a more rational approach was taken, based in many ways on the works of Coulomb (not that the Russians would admit that for ideological reasons, of course). Everything was planned in advance, with caches of food and water being concealed by advance scouts to eke the men through the more barren parts of the vast route. It was a journey that few armies since that of the Mongol Khans had made, and they had not been encumbered with field artillery.
The fact that the Russians lost only six thousand men to the cold, starvation, disease and other problems on this epic trek is often cited as a triumph of strategic organisation. Though as one contemporary commentator waggishly put it, the Russian success could also be attributed to them examining the conduct of French (and other to a lesser extent) generals in the Jacobin Wars, especially the Spanish front, and labelling this “How Not To Do It”.
The Russian land army was supplemented by a Lithuanian force that went by sea, sailing around almost the entirety of the Old World to reach the Pacific Company’s area of operations. This, too, built upon the many voyages along this long, awkward route that had been made under the Company’s auspices; the Lithuanians had long since graduated from the experienced foreign navigators that Paul had hired when he was Grand Duke, and possessed a cadre of their own. Their fleet had also expanded, being part of a strategy by the Russians both to contest the Baltic with Denmark in the event the alliance ended (as historical inevitability suggested it must) and also to move into the Mediterranean or even the Indian Ocean to hit the Ottomans from several sides in the event of a war, particularly given that the Russians had no chance of challenging the Ottomans on the Black Sea, lacking the possession of any ports there. Now, though, it came in useful for what was swiftly – and, at first, pejoratively – dubbed the Great Eastern Adventure.
Thus it was that by 1808, when Russia finally did intervene in the Jacobin Wars, only a small force remained to be sent along with the Danes’ to France. It was only good fortune that saw the Russians and their allies play such a decisive role in the Battle of Paris that they obtained correspondingly great influence at the Congress of Copenhagen, indeed virtually gaining an Atlantic port in the form of Bayonne in the Kingdom of Navarre. All of which served the Tsar’s interests and ultimate goals, yet it seemed to Paul that even now any control he had ever had over Benyovsky’s venture, at the eastern end of his allegedly autocratic realm, had long since slipped away…
[1] That is, Rostov-na-Donu (Rostov-on-Don); the latter addendum was only added in 1806 in OTL, and never makes it in TTL.
[2] The modern United Arab Emirates.
[3] In OTL Bandar Abbas was under the control of Muscat from 1740 until the 19th century. In TTL Muscat is never separated from Oman.
[4] Zanj, “black” in Farsi, is a term used in Persia and the Arab world denoting East Africans and their land (as in “Zanzibar”, for example).
[5] Among them the Qajars who had by this point become the ruling dynasty in OTL.
[6] Recall the Persians took control over all Azerbaijan during the Russian Civil War – therefore they’re ceding all of it to the Ottomans now.
[7] Shiraz is the Persian capital under the Zands (and was in OTL).
[8] More on this later…
Wer wagt, gewinnt
– short form title of the memoirs of Ulrich Münchhausen, published posthumously in 1836
Russia, historically, is not so much an Empire as an Argument.
– Dr Tarlach Óinseach, 1926
*
From – “The Great Eastern Adventure” by Pavel Nikolaiyevich Khlebnikov (1972):
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” wrote William Shakespeare in the late sixteenth century, speaking of a king from the early fifteenth. Words which truly know no nation, no era. Indeed they transcend even systems of government, for they may be applied to many an individual instead to don the Phrygian cap. It would, of course, be vulgar (and in violation of Haraldsson’s celebrated maxim) to bring up L’Inhumain at this point, and so I shall not.
No – instead we look to the head of Emperor Paul the First in the year of 1805. Certainly the Tsar had every right to be concerned. He had won back his throne from the Potemkinite rebels at the cost of numerous compromises with potential enemies. While the Klimentov rebellion had been successfully crushed two years before, and proletarian anger diverted into the Great Pogrom against the Jews soon afterwards, both were symptomatic of continuing pressure beneath the surface, slowly building. Russia, as ever, found herselves at the crossroads of West and East. Ever since Peter the Great, the Tsars and Tsaritsas had tried to bring Russia closer to the European, Western, civilised world. There were reasons for this beyond the simple chauvinism of the fact that most of the royals were themselves German in descent. Europe represented literacy, knowledge, rationalism, Enlightenment, while Russia was regarded by many as still being primarily an oriental, Asiatic power, doomed to superstition and credulousness. The tsars, and much of the upper classes (separated from their subjects by language, as the court speech was French) had sincerely believed that such a course would be of benefit to all the people of Russia, from the Emperor down to the lowest krestyanin.
Yet even with the broad acceptance of the autarkic, arbitrary power of the Imperial authority by the people, there had remained a stubbornness and resentment directed towards the attempts to bring European civilisation to Russia. The Germanophile Peter III had encouraged the settlement of Germans in the Empire, picking up many fleeing religious persecution in the Germanies. But while such settlers, often more skilled than their Russian counterparts, might serve a national agenda well, they only provoked resentment among the Russian people. It had been programmes such as this which had allowed Alexander Potemkin, a man with a hopelessly flimsy claim to the throne, nonetheless to paint Peter and his son Paul as “foreigners”, un-Russian, un-Slavic, seeking to remake the country in their own German image. Some have suggested that the upsurge in Slavic racialism in Russia in the late 1790s was both a mirroring of and a reaction to the French Revolution and the rise of Linnaean Racism therein. This is, however, an oversimplification; Russia had long since had its own Linnaean school of thought, probably even before France – Sweden, after all, was one of the few “European” countries with which Russia had close cultural contact.
While Alexander Potemkin had been defeated, Paul had been forced to respond to this angry popular feeling by making concessions to the idea of a Slavic identity. He had officially banned French as the court language (though of course this took several years to implement) and had scholars focusing on codifying a sufficiently ‘refined’ Russian grammar for official business. At the same time, though, he partially owed his victory (and later the quelling of the Klimentov rebellion) to Heinz Kautzman and others among the German settlers in Russia. Excessive anti-French propaganda and fanning the flames of anti-Semitic pogroms could only go so far to hide this contradiction. Beneath it all, the cultural war was still raging, if turned down to a low flame.
Paul’s own opinion was that the strategy of his fathers had been wrong: yes, Russia must become more enlightened and developed if she was to survive and prosper, but it had been wrong to hold up the notion of a European identity to society and declare “this is how you must be”. There were historical precedents, after all. The Old Believers had refused to follow Orthodox Church reforms more than a century before and there were still thousands of them around. No; rather than bringing Russia to Europe, Paul knew that Europe must be brought to Russia. The “European” identity must be redefined to include Russia while allowing for only minor alterations to the Russian character and culture. Once that was accomplished, osmosis would handle the rest. And the French Revolution provided an excellent opportunity, with a nation that was once the heart and wellspring of European enlightenment and culture replaced by what Edmund Burke termed “the new barbarism”. If one such dramatic change could be made to the definition of European, why not another in the opposite direction?
It is of course rather charitable to attribute such notions to Paul himself – while the Emperor knew the end result he wanted, and was a competent enough ruler, he was no great thinker. He did, however, employ ministers who were – foremost among them being Prince Arkady Evgenevich Voloshin, Minister for the Interior, who masterminded this scheme. It helped that Russia had favourable relationships with other nations considered already to lie within the European identity, such as Denmark or (to a lesser extent) Lithuania and Courland. Voloshin had printers disseminating propaganda that contrasted the ravages of the French Jacobins with the ‘slow yet steady progress’ of Russian society, highlighting the gradual emancipation of the serfs (and ignoring the fact that this had provoked the Klimentov rebellion and much muttering since then). The message was targeted primarily at the Germanies; Voloshin’s general strategy to stabilise his Emperor’s rule was to have Russian troops one day march through the German lands as part of a multi-national force and be accepted as liberators from French tyranny. Then, once Germans and Russians were united in mutual acceptance of the other’s culture and civilisation, that should break down the tensions which the relationships with Kautzman and other German-Russians caused among the former Potemkinite supporters.
Of course this scheme did not come off quite as its creators had planned. The first thing to go wrong was the death of Mehmet Ali Pasha, the Turkish Grand Vizier, in February 1806. Given the nature of Ottoman politics, it seems quite likely that he was poisoned, although this is not entirely certain. Mehmet Ali had secured a strong position for himself after the victories of the Austro-Turkish War, unassailable by conventional political means, and perhaps had been unwise enough to let his guard down.
Mehmet Ali’s former dominance of the court politics of the Sublime Porte meant that no opposition faction was strong enough to gain power without a period of bloody chaos and infighting, perhaps limited to a wave of assassinations and street fights in Constantinople, perhaps degenerating into civil war. To forestall such a crisis, Sultan Murad V quickly appointed Dalmat Melek Pasha, the heroic general of the Bosnian front, to the position of Grand Vizier. A Bosniak himself, Dalmat Melek was far from the first non-Turkish Ottoman to hold the position, yet his “rustic” ways alienated parts of the court. This was perhaps balanced by the support he gained from the Janissaries. Nonetheless, he soon proved as vigorous and ruthless in the political arena as on the battlefield.
Predictably, the former general’s own stance on foreign policy turned towards war. The relative powers of the grand vizier and the sultan had varied considerably from the reign of one sultan to the next, and under Murad V their influence was roughly equal. Dalmat Melek had been furious when the Ottoman government had agreed to withdraw their influence from the Georgian states in 1801 in exchange for buying Russian neutrality during the Austro-Turkish War. While he recognised the daunting prospect of fighting two enemies, at the time he had argued that Russia had only just emerged from her civil war, could not the face of even a cursory conflict with the Porte, and would have backed down if pressed. Whether that is true or not is questionable, but Dalmat Melek nonetheless advocated a confrontational policy with Russia, seeking both to regain influence over the Caucasus and also the Khanate of the Crimea. In the latter case, the Khanate had gone from being an Ottoman vassal to a Russian puppet after the Russo-Turkish War of 1771-1776, then shifted back in Constantinople’s direction during the Russian Civil War as the Ottomans extended their influence. However, Khan Devlet V had tried with limited success to play the two sides off each other in order to retain as much independence as his country, small and surrounded by two great powers, could. He desperately wanted to avoid another war; the new Jewish population of Crimea, having fled there after the Great Pogrom, concurred. Both knew that, despite the Black Sea being an Ottoman lake, it was likely that the Caucasus would be the primary front of the war and the Ottomans would be unable or unwilling to hold against a Russian invasion of the Khanate from Ruthenia. After all, they could always get the war-torn ruins of Crimea restored at the bargaining table after victory elsewhere – better, in fact, for the Porte, for that would mean they could install a far more pliable Khan than Devlet and fill the country with Ottoman settlers…
The Russians reacted to the new Ottoman aggression by massing troops in Ruthenia and the northern Caucasus. As before when quelling the Klimentov rebellion, Kautzman and his Germans were careful not to be at the spearhead, along with the Lithuanian contingent sent by Grand Duke Peter, Paul’s son. It was imperative for Voloshin’s cultural programme that the Russians be seen to get all the glory. And now war seemed inevitable. That was not so much a bad thing from Emperor Paul’s perspective. The country had sufficiently recovered from the damage it had suffered during the Civil War, a good war against the undeniably loathsome Turk now would help reunite the Empire’s fractured society, and the Russians had a decent shot at victory, rolling back the control that the Ottomans had gained during the Civil War. Neutral, knowledgeable commentators such as the Prussian observer and diarist Johannes Bachstein generally thought the two sides were about evenly matched: both had learned a lot in recent wars, though the Russians had taken more from those lessons (the Ottoman victory in the Austro-Turkish War had tended to wipe away any awkward questions about the circumstances leading up to it), the Russians were in a better strategic position for the initial attacks, but the Donanmasi, the Ottoman Navy, controlled the Black Sea. It is questionable which would have triumphed, though most modern scholars consider an Ottoman victory somewhat more likely, after an exhaustive slugging match which would have wrecked the Crimea and perhaps the Caucasus as well. As it is, we shall never know.
Even as newly conscripted Russian regiments assembled in Kiev and Rostov,[1] though, the crisis imploded, superseded by another. In April 1806, Shah-Advocate Ali Zand Shah of Persia died after succumbing to an infected insect bite. This came at the worst possible time for any attempt to reconcile to a peaceful solution in the ongoing Turco-Persian rancour over the matter of the Pirate Coast.[2] The Ottomans enjoyed at least nominal authority over the coastal emirates, and thus the Persians held Constantinople responsible for the increasing pirate attacks on Persian ships sailing from Bandar Abbas[3] to trade, primarily with Indian states, Oman and the Zanj lands in East Africa.[4] (In practice, it is possible that these attacks were sponsored by Oman rather than the Ottomans, fearful of the Persians usurping their African colonies).
In particular several influential Persian leaders expressed outrage at the attack of July 5th 1804, in which Arab pirates sailing from Abu Dhabi took, amid much bloodshed, a Persian ship carrying not trade cargo but peaceful hajjis on their way to Mecca. Among them was the third son of the Grand Vizier, Mirza Reza Khan Sadeghi. Mirza Reza demanded blood, but Ali Zand Shah attempted to resolve things. This was not merely due to his celebrated pacifism (at least by 18th century standards) but because he was concerned about the East Durrani Empire, which was once more eyeing the lands west of Herat that it had once possessed and then lost to the Zands. War on two fronts was the last thing Persia needed, particularly considering the simmering rebellions among the Turkmen in the north.[5]
However, Ali Zand Shah’s death meant his more hot-blooded son Zaki Mohammed Shah succeeded him as Shah-Advocate, and Zaki Mohammed concurred with Mirza Reza. Thus in October of that year, war was joined. The Persians attacked Mesopotamia and battled the Donanmasi in the Persian Gulf. Historically the Persians had never possessed much naval strength, and while this had slowly increased under the Zands, the Donanmasi and its Arab irregular allies far outmatched what Persia could field. Oman remained studiously neutral but privately took a pro-Ottoman stance, further closing the seas to Persia. However, with assistance from their Portuguese allies trickling in (sometimes taking the form of Portguese East India Company ships fighting under Persian flag) the Persians at least managed to prevent the Ottomans from sweeping them from the seas to the extent of being able to launch an amphibious descent.
In truth this was not needed. The Persian army was in the process of reorganisation, and things remained chaotic, for the army establishment was still divided over the merits of the European training methods and new breakthroughs in firearms that the Portuguese provided. Furthermore, for all its benefits, the period of peace that Ali Zand Shah had presided over also meant the Persians were less experienced than the Ottomans, their only real conflicts in recent history being with the Durranis and Turkmen rebels. Neither of those more irregular sets of warriors prepared them for facing disciplined, organised Ottoman troops.
Therefore the Turco-Persian War of 1806-09 ended in an Ottoman victory, helped along by Ali Zand Shah’s predictions coming true: the Durranis indeed sallied from Herat in an attempt to (re)take Nishapur and Mashhad. However, matters worsened when the Khan of Kalat also entered the war and besieged the key port of Jask, eventually taking it. Zaki Mohammed Shah submitted to a punishing peace, which involved ceding Azerbaijan,[6] Khuzestan and Ilam to the Ottomans. This put the Turks within spitting distance of a Caspian Sea coast, alarming the Russians. St Petersburg repeatedly considered intervening in the war. Although relations with Persia were correct at best, backing Shiraz[7] against Constantinople seemed the lesser of two evils, and would give the Russians a better chance of victory in the originally planned war. However, problems arose, primarily with spinning things: Voloshin had been ready to present a war for the defence of the motherland in the face of the heathen, a heady mix to make the people forget their former differences and unite in opposition. An opportunistic war of revenge amidst a diplomatic kerfuffle between Mohammedans was quite another kettle of fish, and ran the risk of spiralling out of control.
A more important reason why the Russians did not move was the course of events further west. Voloshin and Paul had indeed planned to intervene in the Jacobin Wars at some point, preferably after the French and their opponents had exhausted each other and the Russians could take all the glory. However, it seemed events had overtaken them. By late 1806 it seemed that the war was winding down to a stalemate: French reverses in Germany, Italy and Spain, yet the Republic clearly far from collapse. Alarmists in the Russian ministries advocated that intervention had to be made now, before it was too late and the ideological war petered out into an anticlimactic peace. Of course, this was before the “Le Grand Crabe” invasions of Flanders and Britain by France a few months later, which expanded the war once more and ultimately brought about the doom of the Republic, but as of yet even the plans for these remained unknown to St Petersburg. Thus Russia hesitated between two wars, only in the end to get involved in a third.
News reached St Petersburg in November of two important events on the heels of each other: Moritz Benyovsky’s triumphs against the Japanese and his successful inviegling of Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company trade into the ensuing civil war; and the death of Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin at the hands of the Chinese army amid that great Empire also succumbing to a war of succession. Although Paul had been a great supporter of the Lebedev-Benyovsky venture when he had sat the throne of Lithuania, this alarmed him. It was one thing to poke a stick into as distant and irrelevant a place as Japan, but China was another matter. Sino-Russian relations were vitally important to St Petersburg and wars had been fought before. On the other hand, it had been the Chinese who moved this time. In the past, Paul’s father Peter III and his predecessor Empress Elizabeth had reacted to Chinese sweeps of the Amur valley with ignored diplomatic protests at best, before waiting a few months and then quietly sending in more settlers beneath the languid gaze of the only intermittently interested Qing dynasty. But this was different, both in numbers and in reaction: the planned execution of Lebedev, and the fight to the death with the Chinese army outside Beijing, could not be ignored. Furthermore, Benyovsky’s successes in Japan, along with those of Boris Dmitrevich Leskov in Russian America,[8] convinced Paul that the potential trade wealth about to be unlocked in the East was sufficient to be worth fighting for. Even worth risking relations with China over – and besides, that horse had already bolted.
Therefore, in February 1807 – before the news of Le Grand Crabe reached St Petersburg – the Great Eastern Adventure was launched. This was one of the greatest projects in Russian history, and essentially represents the answer to the problem “how does one move 75,000 soldiers from A to B, where A is European Russia and B is the back of beyond near Yakutsk?” It was organised scientifically, placed under the command of the forward-thinking general Evgeny Serafimovich Kuleshov and backed up by a large number of theoreticians and experienced war organisers – most of them German or Italian exiles fleeing the conflicts raging across their homelands. Fortunately for them, the route between Moscow and Yakutsk had already been codified and expanded over the past two decades thanks to the activities of the Pacific Company and its predecessors, and now there was usually at least a beaten track every step of the way from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan to Perm to Yekaterinburg to Omsk to Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk and finally on to Yakutsk. Yet the movement of the odd caravan and escort company was far from what that route was now playing host to.
The largest problem was logistics, keeping such a large number of men fed and protecting them from the cold (the expedition set off in winter, despite the conditions, as that meant the more swampy regions along the way would be frozen and safe to move over). Despite the traditional Russian lackadaisical approach to such matters, believing the best solution to soldiers’ problems was to give them a damn good thrashing, under Kuleshov a more rational approach was taken, based in many ways on the works of Coulomb (not that the Russians would admit that for ideological reasons, of course). Everything was planned in advance, with caches of food and water being concealed by advance scouts to eke the men through the more barren parts of the vast route. It was a journey that few armies since that of the Mongol Khans had made, and they had not been encumbered with field artillery.
The fact that the Russians lost only six thousand men to the cold, starvation, disease and other problems on this epic trek is often cited as a triumph of strategic organisation. Though as one contemporary commentator waggishly put it, the Russian success could also be attributed to them examining the conduct of French (and other to a lesser extent) generals in the Jacobin Wars, especially the Spanish front, and labelling this “How Not To Do It”.
The Russian land army was supplemented by a Lithuanian force that went by sea, sailing around almost the entirety of the Old World to reach the Pacific Company’s area of operations. This, too, built upon the many voyages along this long, awkward route that had been made under the Company’s auspices; the Lithuanians had long since graduated from the experienced foreign navigators that Paul had hired when he was Grand Duke, and possessed a cadre of their own. Their fleet had also expanded, being part of a strategy by the Russians both to contest the Baltic with Denmark in the event the alliance ended (as historical inevitability suggested it must) and also to move into the Mediterranean or even the Indian Ocean to hit the Ottomans from several sides in the event of a war, particularly given that the Russians had no chance of challenging the Ottomans on the Black Sea, lacking the possession of any ports there. Now, though, it came in useful for what was swiftly – and, at first, pejoratively – dubbed the Great Eastern Adventure.
Thus it was that by 1808, when Russia finally did intervene in the Jacobin Wars, only a small force remained to be sent along with the Danes’ to France. It was only good fortune that saw the Russians and their allies play such a decisive role in the Battle of Paris that they obtained correspondingly great influence at the Congress of Copenhagen, indeed virtually gaining an Atlantic port in the form of Bayonne in the Kingdom of Navarre. All of which served the Tsar’s interests and ultimate goals, yet it seemed to Paul that even now any control he had ever had over Benyovsky’s venture, at the eastern end of his allegedly autocratic realm, had long since slipped away…
[1] That is, Rostov-na-Donu (Rostov-on-Don); the latter addendum was only added in 1806 in OTL, and never makes it in TTL.
[2] The modern United Arab Emirates.
[3] In OTL Bandar Abbas was under the control of Muscat from 1740 until the 19th century. In TTL Muscat is never separated from Oman.
[4] Zanj, “black” in Farsi, is a term used in Persia and the Arab world denoting East Africans and their land (as in “Zanzibar”, for example).
[5] Among them the Qajars who had by this point become the ruling dynasty in OTL.
[6] Recall the Persians took control over all Azerbaijan during the Russian Civil War – therefore they’re ceding all of it to the Ottomans now.
[7] Shiraz is the Persian capital under the Zands (and was in OTL).
[8] More on this later…
You're spoiling us with these updates, Thande!
I'd forgotten about Persia (though let's be honest, they're not one of the most interesting areas of LTTW), but all the happenings with Russia and the Ottomans are very welcome. I'll admit, though, when you were building up to the March to Yakutsk, I thought you were about to unveil a Trevithickian wonder (is Trevithick in Russia yet, or have you abandoned that idea?).
I'd forgotten about Persia (though let's be honest, they're not one of the most interesting areas of LTTW), but all the happenings with Russia and the Ottomans are very welcome. I'll admit, though, when you were building up to the March to Yakutsk, I thought you were about to unveil a Trevithickian wonder (is Trevithick in Russia yet, or have you abandoned that idea?).
MrP
Banned
That just conjured the mental giggle-inducer that ITTL the Great Eastern is not a Brunellian steamship but a grand railway built to link Russia's disparate halves.
Giggle-inducing only because the difference amuses me, not because it's actually a silly name for a railway, mind.Good update on Russia there ! Really like the way they're expanding eastward, and I'm not a kind that will normally like seeing Japan getting colonized....
Wonder if China will eventually end up southward-focusing ITTL....
Really like the way they're expanding eastward, and I'm not a kind that will normally like seeing Japan getting colonized....Wonder if China will eventually end up southward-focusing ITTL....
Yay! The best country in LTTW receives an update! Long live the Rodina! This certainly looks promising for Mother Russia. Perhaps LTTW's Russia will eclipse even that of DOD in size? (I get the feeling you're merely doing this to upstage Jared, Thande...)
Also, the How Not To Do It part made me giggle.
Also, the How Not To Do It part made me giggle.
That just conjured the mental giggle-inducer that ITTL the Great Eastern is not a Brunellian steamship but a grand railway built to link Russia's disparate halves.
"St Petersburg to Moscow, Mr Trevithick? We may as well extend it another four thousand miles across the Siberian wastes to Vladivostok!"
We still need updates on India, Japan and Iceland (which is becoming like the India of TTL ) to bring them all up to date...
And maybe a new map of ENA?
) to bring them all up to date... And maybe a new map of ENA?
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