Historian Mikhail Pokrovsky explained in 1915 that the two centuries of Russia's struggle with Turkey had an economic reason - the Russian grain landowners needed a sales market, and the closed Straits hindered this. But by 1829 the Turks had opened the Bosphorus for Russian export ships, the task was completed. After that, the struggle of Russia against Turkey had no economic sense, and its reasons had to be invented - allegedly for the sake of "the cross over St. Sophia."
The war between Russia, on the one hand, Germany and Austria, on the other, is waged over the Turkish legacy.
But it is high time to understand the “historical tasks of Russia on the Black Sea”. The general public, without distinction of shades, accepts "tasks" en bloc: how can you not have the keys to your own house! The straits are necessary for Russia - without this the development of Russian capitalism is impossible. But how to keep the Straits without owning Constantinople? And under Constantinople, some Hinterland is also needed, speaking in the language of the enemies of freedom and civilization. The matter is clear: the Dardanelles, Bosphorus, Constantinople, Asia Minor, all or in part, must be Russian.
At first glance, it may seem that the most archaic of all possible motives for the conquest of Constantinople is religious: the planting of a cross on St. Sophia. This, it would seem, is the oldest of the "tasks" bequeathed to modern Russia by Moscow Russia. In fact, if we take the Russian-Turkish relations of the Moscow era, as they really happened, we will find almost no traces of this "task." Despite the constant push in this direction from the West (from the Pope and the German Emperor - then the head of the Holy Roman Empire), the project of the conquest of Constantinople was seriously put forward only once during this entire era: when a "heretic and rastriga ", a disciple of the Arians and Jesuits, Demetrius. True Orthodox Moscow sovereigns were deaf in this ear.
The reasons do not have to look long. This - from our, modern, point of view, Constantinople fell on May 30, 1453: in the eyes of pious Muscovites, it fell 14 years earlier, when the Church of Constantinople recognized the primacy of the pope (Union of Florence in 1439). The material destruction of the Byzantine Empire was only a logical consequence of its moral downfall. Since 1439, the "Third Rome" - Moscow became the center of universal Orthodoxy. From the “third” Rome to return back to the “second” would be approximately the same as looking for last year's snow.
True, the Orthodox patriarch continued to live in Constantinople, the spiritual center of Orthodoxy, Athos with its monasteries, was left within the Turkish Empire, but the Greek hierarchy got along well with the Turkish "yoke" (Athos monasteries recognized the supremacy of the Sultan even before the fall of Constantinople). Coming to Moscow for alms, the patriarch and the Athonite elders could see in practice the Moscow regime, and this hardly inspired them with a special desire to become direct subjects of their northern patron. In words, they were not averse to longing for the Orthodox sovereign, in fact, until the 19th century, they remained loyal loyal subjects of the padishah.
The further the Russian sovereigns moved away from Orthodoxy, the greater the place in their politics was occupied by Constantinople. The son of Patriarch Filaret, the pious Mikhail Fedorovich, the Don Cossacks could not drag him into the war with the Turks, no matter how hard they tried. His grandson, Peter I, who made a "masquerade performance" out of the Orthodox liturgy and dressed his chief jester as an Orthodox patriarch, had already fought a number of wars with Turkey, not always successful, but sometimes very decisive (the Prut campaign of 1711). And under Catherine II, who corresponded with Voltaire and subsidized the encyclopedists, the question of erecting a cross on St. Sophia became quite acute: an extensive plan for the restoration of the Byzantine empire emerged with the sovereign from the house of Romanovs (or Saltykovs - at least from the offspring of Catherine II) at the head.
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The underlay of this strange progression - diminishing Orthodoxy and growing interest in St. Sophia - does not have to be sought: it has long been groped by historical literature even before the Marxist period. Since the reign of Peter, Russian foreign policy has been going under the banner of commercial capitalism. The struggle for trade routes becomes at its center. Peter himself had mainly to fight for the northern route - the Baltic Sea, but even with him, the restoration of the old Genoese route, through the Black Sea, was outlined quite clearly. So far, however, it was a more distant and roundabout way, with it one could wait.
The colonization of the southern Russian steppes gave the issue a pungent sensation. Already at the very beginning of this process, in 1760, we hear complaints from the southern Russian landowners that they have nowhere to put their wheat, since Russia does not have a single port on the Black Sea. In fact, it was possible to export wheat even then, but on very unfavorable terms. The Turks now appear to us as a people, economically unusually inert and passive. It was not so a hundred and fifty years ago. Then Turkey stubbornly held on to the monopoly of sailing in the Black Sea; only the Ottoman flat could fly on it - and no other. The Turkish ship owners did not refuse, of course, to carry Russian goods - they mainly lived by their transportation - but the Russian commercial capital had to share the profits with the Turkish: intermediation was so expensive that trade was, in the end, "unprofitable".
To force the Turks to abandon their monopoly, a series of wars had to be fought. Already the first one, ending with the Kuchuk-Kainardzhiyskiy peace (1774), made a major breach in the Turkish monopoly: on the Black Sea, the Russian flag received equal rights with the Turkish one. But the question remained about freedom of navigation in the straits, about access to the now Russian harbors of the northern coast of the Black Sea for foreign ships. The Turks defended every step, interpreting every vague phrase in the treatises in their favor. Only the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) finally resolved all this confusion in the Russian favor. By the seventh article of the Adrianople treatise, the voyage from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and back was declared completely free for the merchant ships of all powers at peace with Turkey. The port once and for all pledged never to close the straits for trade,with liability for damages in case of violation of this obligation.
The "historical task" was already quite satisfactorily solved in 1829. Reading the Adrianople treatise, you do not understand what else people need? The only objection would be the violation by the Turks of this treatise. But such violations - with the exception of the cases of the Russian-Turkish wars, which began in the 19th century always at the initiative of Russia and never Turkey - were very rare, this is first of all; and secondly, this evil was by no means incurable. At the end of the last century, a well-known specialist in international law, Moscow professor Komarovsky (Octobrist) and his student Zhikharev came up with a project to neutralize the straits - from the point of view of international law, likening them to the Suez Canal. They were not supposed to be the object of a blockade, neither in them, nor near them, at a certain distance, should there be no military action, and so on.
It would be all the easier to achieve this because not only Russia is interested in the freedom of navigation on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and not even most of all. Of the tons of ships that entered the harbor of Constantinople in 1909-10, 41.7% wore the English flag, 17.7% - Greek, 9.2% - Austrian and only 7% - Russian. Russian diplomacy, however, clearly neglected this line of least resistance. From the very beginning, when the Turks did not even have time to think about violating the Treaty of Adrianople (they barely had time to dry their ink), they raised a completely different, new question: about the freedom of passage of Russian warships through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
In the early 1830s, his vassal, the Egyptian Pasha (the famous Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian “Peter the Great”), rebelled against the Sultan. The troops of the latter defeated the Sultan's army in Syria and moved through Asia Minor to Constantinople. Suddenly, the Black Sea fleet appears on the Bosphorus: the "Tsar-Knight", Nikolai Pavlovich, came to rescue his "friend", Sultan Mahmud. With them was a corps of Russian troops, which immediately landed on the Asia Minor coast of the strait and occupied the most important strategic points. The Turks, who had not yet come to their senses from the Adrianople defeat, did not dare to object. They bowed, thanked and only timidly dared to hint that they were not worth all these favors and worries, that the sultan himself would somehow cope with the Egyptian rebel.
Nikolai decided to do good to the people who did not understand their benefits to the end. The Russian army began to concentrate on the Danube, which was supposed to go by dry route to protect Constantinople - along the way, taking appropriate protective measures in relation to Shumla, Varna and other Turkish fortresses. In the last degree of panic, the Sultan hastened to yield to the Egyptian Pasha what he did not even demand, just to eliminate any pretext for Russian intervention.
It ended, however, only with the decisive action of England and France. Realizing that because of the straits he would have to fight the British and French, Nikolai conceded. Russian troops withdrew from the Bosphorus, but before leaving the authorized Nicholas (Count Orlov) forced the Sultan to sign the so-called. Unkiar-Iskelesky treaty (1833). In the explicit part of this document, the contracting parties guaranteed each other the inviolability of their territories (on occasion, and Nikolai knew how to be a humorist). The real meaning was the secret article, which the Sultan undertook, at the request of Russia, to close the Dardanelles to foreign warships (read French and English).
But even without a spectacular finale, the political meaning of the Unkiar-Iskeles adventure is completely clear. This was the first (and for a long time the only) attempt by Russia to act as a great Mediterranean power. Faced with real great sea powers on her way, she was embarrassed and retreated. On the dry road, neither England, nor even France were afraid of Nicholas, but he still did not have a fleet capable of suppressing the Anglo-French. On the other hand, the Anglo-French opposition was caused precisely by the maritime nature of the Russian adventure: the Russian fleet in the Archipelago, based on Sevastopol and Nikolaev, inaccessible to the enemy, since the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus were in Russian hands, would have been the master of the eastern half of the Mediterranean.
This idea was firmly imprinted in the memory of the statesmen of England and France, and they calmed down not before the very possible base of the Mediterranean Russian fleet was destroyed, not before Sevastopol was taken (1855). Even the formal cancellation of the Unkiar-Iskeles treaty (in 1837) did not calm England.
The economic meaning of the adventure is no less clear. The reign of Nicholas I was the first spring of Russian manufacturing capitalism. Constrained in the domestic market, thanks to serfdom, which was slowly developing, he looked for foreign markets and, it seemed, found them in the uncultured regions of Western Asia. “There is no doubt that with the real improvement of factories and manufactories, our products can begin to compete with foreign ones, prepared for the Asian bargaining itself,” reasoned the state council of Nicholas I in 1836. A European, of course, will not buy Russian goods, but an Asian, perhaps, can be seduced, especially if you put guns on the Bosphorus in a good place.
In Russia, the economic base of the pyramid was the serf man: why, in a pendant to him, not to have a serf buyer abroad of "improved" Russian calico and calico? Serfdom would then be perfectly compatible with the successes of Russian industrial capital.
Striking, to the smallest detail, the similarity of the situations of the 1830s, the day after the defeat of the Decembrists, and the 1910s, the day after the defeat of the Russian revolution. Then the dilemma stood like this: either the abolition of serfdom, or the conquest of new markets; now - either the completion of the bourgeois revolution, the triumph of bourgeois relations in the Russian countryside, or "Great Russia", beaten inside, but beating outside. Then, after Sevastopol, the first half of the dilemma triumphed, now it will be just the opposite.
And to understand the new "historical challenge" dating from 1833, we have data. Political gains are lasting only when they consolidate the economic dominance achieved or definitely emerged in times of peace. What does the Russian capital have in cash moving to Turkey? Until now, Russia imported there, in large quantities, sugar (Count Bobrinsky) and kerosene. But neither Russian sugar, which is sold abroad for a penny due to the monopoly inside the country, nor Russian kerosene, which in Turkey will always be cheaper than American and better than Romanian, have no rivals before them, it is not for them to conquer the market. But what about those goods which, in the opinion of the Russian State Council, were sufficiently "improved" already in 1836?
There is an American study on the sale of cotton products in Turkey. In the statistical tables available there for the import of cotton goods into Turkey, you will find different countries, from England, which imports 21 million annually. dollars, to Holland, the import of which does not exceed 321 thousand dollars (second place after England is Italy - 3.146 tons, third Austria - 2.645 thousand dollars). You will not find Russia: it is hiding in a heap of "all other" countries, together importing less than 1 million. And only in a special table for the import of yarn you will find Russia, with a modest figure - 3 thousand dollars.
The numbers refer to 1906. Since then, Russian imports have grown, but it would take quite a long time to wait until it naturally overtakes England or at least overtakes Italy. But if a stupid Asian does not see the advantages of Russian chintz over English or Italian, he can be forced to buy Russian chintz by driving it into the Russian customs line with a bayonet. But how will the British and Italians react to this? This is the first thing. And secondly, why talk about the keys to your own house when it is clearly a matter of breaking into someone else's chest?
(No. 95 and 96 "Voice." Paris, January 4, 1915. From the book "M. Pokrovsky. Imperialist war. Collection of articles 1915-1930, 1931)
