Thought for the Day: Russian imperialism

"We don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do, 

We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too. 

We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true, 

The Russians shall not have Constantinople!"

    (English music-hall song, from the Balkans crisis of 1878. For a modern version, replace "Constantinople" with "Kyiv") 

 British alarm at Russian expansionism goes back a long way. This cartoon from the late 18th century shows the Devil offering the Russian Empress Catherine the Great the cities of Warsaw and Constantinople. 

 It was Catherine who seized the Crimea, Odessa and neighbouring territories for Russia, which almost led to war with Britain. In this cartoon, Catherine strides from Russia towards Constantinople over the crowned heads of Europe, among whom is George III in red with his blue Garter ribbon.

As it happened, Catherine did grab Warsaw, when the kingdom of Poland was partitioned between the neighbouring powers. She never managed to take Constantinople, but the fact that she had two of her grandsons christened Constantine and Alexander gives a strong hint of her imperial ambitions..

 The war referred to in the song above was the Crimean War, fifty years later, when British and French forces, alamed at the apparent Russian threat to Turkey, captured and burnt the port of Sebastopol. The young Leo Tolstoy was there as a junior officer, and described the war in one of his earliest published writings. 

The odd thing about Catherine the Great was that she didn't have a single drop of Russian blood in her veins. She was a princess from a minor German state who was chosen as a suitable bride for Peter, the heir to the Russian throne. But when Peter eventually became Tsar in 1762 he proved so useless that after just a few months he was deposed and soon afterwards perished, presumably with official assistance. Catherine then ruled in his place for the next thirty years! 

 The great historian A. J. P. Taylor always maintained that ideologies played little or no part in actual political behaviour. During the height of the Cold War he argued that Soviet expansionism into the Baltic, the Black Sea and central Europe had nothing to do with any Communist beliefs, but was merely following in the tradition of Russian ambitions going back to Peter the Great and to Catherine. The behaviour of Vladimir Putin in rcent years would appear that Taylor could have been right!