Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [286]
In 1814 most of this ‘tilting’ occurred against Russia, partly just because it was the most powerful of the continental allies and partly because Alexander’s aims and manner sometimes appeared unclear and even intimidating to British eyes. To an even greater extent than was true of Metternich, Alexander directed his country’s foreign policy. Whereas Metternich ran Austrian policy because his sovereign and indeed the Austrian elite as a whole shared his outlook and trusted him to defend their interests, Alexander controlled Russian policy because he was sovereign and autocrat. Far from expressing a consensus view of the Russian ruling elite, on some key issues the emperor was very much in a minority.
For many of Alexander’s advisers the key point was that an exhausted Russia was pouring out its wealth and soldiers on issues which appeared far removed from the empire’s own core interests. Aleksandr Chernyshev was not just very loyal but also a consummate courtier. Even he wrote to the emperor in November 1813 that ‘of all the coalition powers, Russia is the one which most needs a speedy peace. Deprived of trade for many years, it needs to restore order to its finances;…the richest Russian provinces have been devastated and require help urgently. Only the end of the war will heal these wounds.’11
Very few of Alexander’s advisers would have disagreed. Admiral Shishkov had opposed crossing the Neman into Germany. The idea of crossing the Rhine into France reduced him to near hysteria. The minister of finance, Dmitrii Gurev, issued warnings that a further year of war threatened the state with bankruptcy. Kutuzov was dead and Rumiantsev marginalized, but Jomini took up their old call, reminding the emperor that a powerful France holding the Rhine frontier and the Belgian coast was essential to Russian interests since only this could check ‘formidable British power’. Of Alexander’s senior generals, the Russian commanders in the Army of Silesia took the same line as Blücher. As a royalist émigré, Alexandre de Langeron had personal reasons for wanting to drive Napoleon off his throne but Fabian von der Osten-Sacken horrified the assembled dignitaries of Nancy, all desperate to sit on the fence, by calling on them to join him in a toast of ‘death and destruction to the tyrant who has so long been the scourge of the French nation and the plague of Europe’. On the other hand, in Alexander’s own headquarters many of his closest advisers were much more cautious and inclined towards a compromise peace.12
Karl Nesselrode dismissed the worries of his father-in-law, the minister of finance, in terms of which the emperor would certainly have approved: ‘The troops are fed and more or less clothed at the expense of the countries in which they are waging war. The conventions with Prussia and Austria are wholly to our advantage, the revenues of the Duchy of Warsaw accrue to us alone. So I don’t understand why the war should be so terribly expensive.’ On the other hand, Alexander’s chief assistant for diplomatic affairs disagreed with the emperor on the two key issues which were of overriding importance not just for the monarch but also for Russia’s relations with its allies. These were the fate of Poland and the question of whether to march on Paris and seek to overthrow Napoleon. Though he knew that his advice would be unwelcome, Nesselrode showed moral courage by continuing to defend what he considered to be the state’s true interests.13
Nesselrode had submitted his key memorandum on Polish affairs to Alexander back in January 1813. In it he argued that appeasing the Poles by establishing an autonomous Polish kingdom would not add substantially to Russia’s strength and would have fatal political consequences. It would both alienate Vienna and infuriate patriotic Russians, who believed that recent Polish behaviour towards