Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [23]
Even more useful to Russia was Austro-Prussian rivalry. The lesson learned by both the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns from the Seven Years War was that their security, let alone future expansion, depended on Russian goodwill. Catherine II conducted a shrewd auction for Russian support. By the 1770s she had come to the correct conclusion that Russia had most to gain by expanding southwards against the Ottomans. For such a policy Austria was more useful than Prussia. The empress therefore graciously allowed Vienna to win the auction for her favour. For this the Austrians paid a high price. In 1788 they found themselves involved in an expensive war against the Ottomans which served Russian not Austrian interests.
Already by the Napoleonic era many of the issues which were to take Austria to war against Russia in 1914 were causing friction between the two empires. Above all there was Austrian fear of ever-growing Russian power. By the 1790s, for example, not merely did the Russian navy dominate the Black Sea, it also had a powerful squadron operating in the Adriatic, in other words in the Habsburgs’ back yard. During Russia’s three wars against the Ottomans between 1768 and 1812 her armies occupied present-day Romania. Russian annexation of this territory was a very real possibility and a major threat to Austrian interests. Russian power and Russia’s victories over their Ottoman overlords won Russia many adherents among the Christian population of the Balkans. In addition, these Christians were Orthodox, as were the Russians. In 1804–12 the Serbs were in rebellion against their Ottoman rulers and looked to Russia for support. In a manner very familiar to historians of Russian foreign policy before 1914 Russian diplomats wavered between wanting the Serbs as loyal clients and fearing that Serbian ambitions would drag Russia into disastrous conflicts with the Habsburgs. Still worse from an Austrian perspective, Russia had a growing number of sympathizers among the Habsburgs’ own Orthodox subjects, thousands of whom emigrated to the steppe lands of southern Russia and Ukraine in the second half of the eighteenth century.29
Initially the French Revolution and French subsequent expansion was of less concern to Russia than to any other European power. Catherine disliked the Revolution and locked up a handful of Russian dissidents. She crushed ‘Jacobinism’ in Poland, using this as a good excuse to destroy the last remnants of Polish statehood. No sensible person could fear a French-style revolution in Russia, however. There was no Russian ‘Third Estate’. To the extent that it existed at all, the professional middle class was mostly of foreign origin and in the state’s employ. Russian merchants and artisans were still with few exceptions deeply traditional, Orthodox and monarchist in their mentalities and loyalties. Enlightened public opinion, still almost the monopoly of nobles, saw the monarchy as the most enlightened force in Russia and looked to it to modernize and Europeanize the empire. In the land of Pugachev any idea of mass revolution was anathema to every educated or property-owning Russian.30
As regards French territorial expansion, Russia could initially also take a relaxed view. France was at the other end of Europe. It would have to expand some distance before Russia’s interests were challenged. By contrast, any advance would quickly carry French troops into the Rhineland and into Belgium, thereby touching on essential Habsburg and British interests. With Britain, France, Austria and perhaps even Prussia embroiled at the other end of Europe, Russia need