Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [321]
Of course, it is unfair to judge the efforts of statesmen using retrospective knowledge. Some of the difficulties caused by annexing the Duchy of Warsaw could have been – and indeed were – anticipated. But from the Russian perspective there were actually no easy answers to the Polish problem, to an even greater extent than was true of the British in Ireland. Nor could anyone predict that the weak Prussia of 1814 would be transformed by the Industrial Revolution and German unification into a menace to itself and Europe. Nevertheless a knowledge of subsequent European history does give emphasis to the question of whether the enormous sacrifices of the Russian people in 1812–14 had been worthwhile.
This is not just a matter of how much the Russian population suffered during the war. As is always true, victory legitimized and consolidated the existing regime, which in Russia was rooted in autocracy and serfdom. The sense that Russia was victorious and secure removed an incentive for radical domestic reform. The conservative regime of Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 until 1855, was partly rooted in an assumption of Russian power and security. This assumption was only undermined by defeat in the Crimean War of 1854–6, which unleashed a swath of modernizing reforms under Nicholas’s son, the Emperor Alexander II. In 1815, however, Russia did not have the means – which meant above all the educated cadres – to carry out radical reforms of the type undertaken two generations later. It is naive to believe that defeat by Napoleon would have unleashed a programme of successful liberalization in Russia. Even less well founded is the belief that Nicholas’s conservatism was the basic cause of Russia’s growing backwardness in 1815–60 vis-à-vis north-western Europe. The Industrial Revolution had dynamics well beyond the control of the Russian government of that era. It required levels of education and population density which Russia lacked, and the bringing together of coal and iron deposits, which in Russia’s case was only possible with the introduction of the railway.
In any case, the question whether the sacrifices made in 1812–14 were worthwhile implies that the Russians had a choice. Then as always, ordinary Russians of course had little choice. The whole logic of the political system was designed to deny this. In 1807–14, however, the Russian government in reality also had few options. By the second half of 1810 the brilliantly run Russian intelligence operations in Paris gave Alexander every reason to expect attack. The very extensive military intelligence provided in 1811 confirmed this. No doubt if Alexander had caved in to all Napoleon’s demands war might have been avoided for a time. By 1810, however, it was clear that the price of adhering to Napoleon’s Continental System would be the undermining of the financial base of Russia’s position as a great power. Russia’s growing weakness would make it easy for Napoleon to restore a greater Poland, which was within both his power and his interests. Returning part of its Adriatic coastline to Austria could easily reconcile the Habsburgs to this new European order. Compensating the King of Saxony by destroying Prussia would have satisfied two French interests simultaneously. If full-scale French empire in Europe was impossible, French hegemony was not – at least for a time. No Russian government would have allowed this to happen without fighting. In the barely credible event that a Russian monarch had tried to do this, he would have been overthrown. Perhaps subsequent European history would have been happier had French hegemony lasted. But no one can expect Alexander’s government to have foreseen or accepted this.
As some of Alexander’s advisers had predicted, one result of Napoleon’s destruction