Empires Apart (34 page)

Russian and American
troops marched west at the same time. Just after Winfield Scott captured Mexico City the Russians entered Hungary: Nicholas I had dutifully inherited the role of ‘gendarme of Europe' from Alexander I, and used his army to suppress revolutionary elements beyond the borders of his empire. Both halves of the Austro-Hungarian empire were in turmoil. In the Hungarian half (which was far larger than Hungary today and extended down into the Balkans) the parliament pushed for more autonomy and demanded major reforms. Hungary was to be a constitutional monarchy, with a powerful parliament including an elected lower house, and its own army. Serfdom was to be abolished and civil rights guaranteed. The parliament made Hungarian the official language of administration, justice and education in all the areas it controlled. Depending upon your point of view this was the proud foundation stone of Hungarian independence, reflecting the throwing off of Germanic cultural, economic and military imperialism, or the descendants of Attila the Hun intent on doing to their own minorities (Croats, Serbs, Germans, Gypsies, Vlachs, Ruthenians and Slovaks) just what they accused the Austrians of doing to them. Many of these minority groups were Slavs, and a Pan-Slav congress in Prague condemned the Hungarians as oppressors, describing them in terms remarkably similar to those used to describe the British at a different congress in Philadelphia seventy-four years earlier. (Pan-Slavism was the Russian equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine, but justified in the name of ethnic solidarity rather than the racial superiority that America increasingly used to justify its interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.)

Nicholas wanted no revolutionary changes on his borders, and in the guise of Pan-Slavism felt able to justify intervention. Russian troops marched west and occupied Slovakia and Ruthenia. The putative Hungarian revolution was crushed. Lajos Kossuth, who had declared himself leader of an independent Hungary, was forced to flee to Turkey where he was imprisoned. The Turks did not want him in their country; his presence was just the sort of excuse that could be used to justify further Russian aggression (just as the presence of the native leader Tecumseh had been used to justify the American invasion of Canada). On the other hand they were not keen to hand him over to their Russian enemy – but by then there was another imperial power on the horizon. Following American intervention Kossuth was freed and travelled to America, where he received an enthusiastic reception. Abraham Lincoln tabled a Senate resolution, lamenting that the United States had not actively intervened to support the Hungarian revolution. Kossuth joined a group of Hungarian political refugees who had established the community of New Buda in Iowa. Like the Polish hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko he became another of the ‘democratic' victims of Russian autocracy to be feted in the United States; and like Kosciuszko he eventually tired of the American way of life and returned to Europe.

Like America Russia was keen to expand – annexing territory to the south and eventually starting a full-scale war with Turkey. The Turkish fleet was totally destroyed at Sinope Bay in 1853, and it looked as though the victory of Nicholas I would be as complete as Zachary Taylor's in Mexico, but there was a fundamental difference in the geopolitics of the two nations: America was the only imperial power on its continent. Russia's invasion of the Turkish-controlled provinces of Walachia (modern Romania) and Moldavia propelled Britain and France into the war on Turkey's side.

The west's fear of the barbarian east flared into outright war in the Crimea. It was a fear that went back to Châlons and would continue into the future. During the cold war the spectre of Red Army troops parachuting into the English countryside or Soviet missiles raining down on New York seemed quite real. With hindsight the threat was plainly hollow and Russia's empire was rotten at the core, but that is not how
it seemed at the time. Exactly the same happened in the nineteenth century. Alexander I's military machine overcame Napoleon and rolled on. By the middle of the century the west was shuddering each time the Russian Bear moved. Nowhere was safe. An emplacement built during the Crimean War for a battery of five 8-inch muzzle-loading guns still looks out over Sydney Harbour from Kirribilli Point. It is difficult now to believe that anyone seriously thought that Russia was about to invade Australia, but the alarms of the cold war proved just as far fetched.

At this point the weaknesses in the mighty military machine that Alexander I had thrust into the centre of European political life became evident. Without having to worry about public opinion, or even the opinion of the nobility, the Russian autocracy was able to treat its population as cannon fodder – but it still needed to manufacture the cannon. Russia lacked the economic and organisational resources to turn brute force into lasting success. The death of 300,000 Russians in Nicholas's adventures on the Turkish front and military defeat, along with Austrian pressure, forced his successor, Alexander II, to withdraw.

The Crimean War in Britain is remembered for the blinding incompetence of the British general, Lord Raglan, at the Charge of the Light Brigade, but the Russian general, Prince Menshikov, surpassed him in aristocratic stupidity. Russia's defeat showed plainly to the world that the days when Russia had been the continent's superpower were long gone. Moldavia and Walachia returned to Turkish control, and as so often Russia's attention swung back to the west. In 1863 another Polish revolt was brutally suppressed. Not only were rebels executed or exiled to Siberia as before but Alexander II introduced a deliberate policy of cultural cleansing aimed at expunging Polish culture, language and Catholicism. As in the earlier partitions of Poland, and as Stalin and Hitler would do seventy-five years later, the Russian and German leaders co-operated in destroying any chance of an independent Poland; the Prussian leader Bismarck forcibly repatriated Polish rebels who tried to flee west.

Under Alexander II one particular long-running colonial conflict on the southern frontier was finally ‘settled': the Chechens were pacified. Some of the native tribes encountered by the Russians as they expanded their empire were less easily quelled than others, and nowhere was the resistance fiercer than in the Caucasus. Since the time of Ivan the Terrible Russians had been pushing into the region, and in the eighteenth century serious attempts were made to control the Muslim mountain tribes. In the latter half of the century the Chechen Sheikh Mansur declared holy war on the advancing Russians, uniting clans and mobilising resistance until his capture in 1791. In 1817 the leadership of the resistance forces passed to a twenty-year-old Dagestani mullah, Imam Shamil, who fought a bitter guerrilla war for more than forty years. Russia eventually deployed an enormous number of troops, one source says half a million, until Shamil was captured in 1859. His captors wary of the dangers of creating martyrs, he was jailed and later allowed to go into exile in Mecca. Following age-old Russian practice his two sons became officers in the Russian army.

Today the name of Imam Shamil is venerated by Dagestanis and Chechens as much as Kossuth by Hungarians or Kosciuszko by Poles. If in the west the histories of Hungary and Poland are largely ignored, the history of the Caucasus wars is entirely forgotten. Only after the breakup of the Soviet empire did the west suddenly take note of the bitterness still bubbling in the region; bitterness that exploded in the atrocities of the Chechen War. That bitterness has existed since at least the time of Alexander II. Leo Tolstoy, in his novella
Hadji Murat
, set in 1852, wrote, ‘The feeling experienced by all the Chechens from the youngest to the oldest was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures that the desire to exterminate them – like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders or wolves – was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.'

Alexander II was known as the Tsar Liberator for his role in emancipating the serfs. To the Chechens and other conquered people it must have seemed a particularly inappropriate title.

Although the conquest of Chechnya took so many years and so much blood it was not a particularly momentous event in Russian history. The expansion of empire was a given, one of those inexorable tides in the affairs of man that almost all Russians expected to continue more or less without end. Similarly Americans considered their nation-empire was virtually limitless. Having dealt with the Mexicans to the south, attention once more turned north and west.

The British had long settled in what was then called Oregon (the modern US states of Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and the Canadian province of British Columbia). Their main settlement was the great Hudson's Bay Company trading post of Fort Vancouver on the Columbia river, opposite the site of modern Portland, Oregon. Over time the beaver on which the trading post depended were hunted to the brink of extinction and the fertile terrain of the Oregon region started to attract pioneers more committed to farming than to hunting. Most of these pioneers came overland in covered wagons, and for most of them the starting point was Independence, Missouri. The result was that by the 1840s Canadian settlers in Oregon were greatly outnumbered by American. In 1845 the Hudson's Bay Company abandoned Fort Vancouver and retreated north to Vancouver Island.

In an early example of political spin Polk had been elected in 1844 on a platform of both ‘re-annexing Texas' and ‘re-occupying Oregon', although in neither case was it obvious that ‘re-' had any historical justification. In an attempt to stop Canada extending to the Pacific Ocean he demanded that the northern boundary of Oregon be set at 54° 40', the latitude Tsar Alexander I and President Monroe had agreed would be the frontier between Russia and America. As Canadian explorers had crossed the continent before Lewis and Clark, Britain was never going to agree, and Polk eventually settled for 49°, outraging northern imperialists who wanted a massive new Oregon to balance slave-holding Texas.

A wave of anti-English hysteria again swept America. In New York passions ran particularly high when an English actor, William Macready,
was given a starring role in a play at the Astor Place Opera House. Despite the play itself being English (Shakespeare's
Macbeth
), demonstrators outside the theatre demanded that Macready (quite probably one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of all time), be replaced by an American. In the subsequent riots more than twenty people died and over a hundred were injured.

Stymied in the north-west, potential opportunities beckoned again in the south. American empire building had always involved a mixture of free enterprise and conventional military force. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo sealed the successful outcome of its attack on Mexico, the emphasis moved away from open aggression to the surreptitious activities of the private sector.

American filibusters were still anxious to add more slave states. William Walker and his private army invaded Baja California in 1853, but Mexican troops easily defeated his 300 mercenaries. Escaping back to the United States he was arrested for contravening laws supposedly guaranteeing American neutrality, but was acquitted. He then started a tradition of American intervention in Central America by offering his men to one of the factions competing for power in Nicaragua (just as the US government did repeatedly in the twentieth century). Once in Nicaragua his forces quickly seized power. Walker declared himself president, legalised slavery and started manoeuvring for annexation by the United States. He also started building up the Nicaraguan army in preparation for further conquests, but he was pre-empted by neighbouring Costa Rica (supplied with arms by a British government fearful of America's imperial intentions). Costa Rican troops forced Walker to flee back to the United States, where he attracted enormous crowds wherever he spoke. In 1857 he tried to regain power in Nicaragua but was captured and sent back to the US, where once again he was arrested and then acquitted. In 1860 he made one final attempt to fulfil his dream, this time by attempting a
coup d'état
in Honduras. He was captured by the British, who knew better than to return him to the US; they passed him to the Honduran authorities, who promptly executed him.

Walker and the other filibusters were essentially independent freebooters but they were not acting alone. Just as Yermak and his Cossacks were employed by the Stroganoff family to protect and extend their interests, so Walker had a patron who kept himself well away from the dirty work on the frontier. Cornelius Vanderbilt had become one of the leading plutocrats of his day by exercising a near monopoly over steamships plying on the Hudson river. He also controlled other key routes, one of which was by river and mule across the isthmus of Panama via Lake Nicaragua, and he was anxious that his interest be protected against the twin threats of Latin American nationalism and British imperialism. (Britain had three fledgling colonies in Central America at that time: modern Belize, the Bay Islands off Honduras and Mosquitia with the port of Greytown on the Nicaraguan coast.) The US navy helped Vanderbilt by bombarding Greytown in 1854, safe in the knowledge that the Russian tsar was keeping Britain occupied with war in the Crimea. Vanderbilt then funded Walker's first Nicaraguan
coup d'état
. Later the two men, both with gigantic egos, fell out, and Walker paid the price when Vanderbilt withdrew his support.

The important point about the filibusters is that although they operated outside the law their actions were largely supported by the American public, especially in the south, and their leaders moved effortlessly at the highest levels of American society. A classic example was John Quitman, indicted by the federal government for organising a filibuster expedition to Cuba. Quitman served as governor of Mississippi, as brigadier-general in the Mexican War and as governor of Mexico City during the American occupation. He was governor of Mississippi for the second time when he was indicted, and even after that he continued as a member of the US House of Representatives until his death in 1855. His views were by no means unique. The two US senators from Mississippi (one of whom, Jefferson Davis, went on to become President of the Confederate States in the civil war) openly advocated the conquest of Cuba and the Mexican states of San Luis Potosi, Tamaulipas and Yucatan.