The Crimean War by Orlando Figes

of time in the company of liberal noblemen and intellectuals (several of them converts to the Roman Church) who were deeply disenchanted with the reactionary policies of Nicholas I. The suppression of the Polish uprising, which came just six years after the crushing of the Decembrist revolt in Russia, had made these men despair of their country ever following the Western constitutional path. Their pessimism no doubt left its mark on Custine’s dark impressions of contemporary Russia. Everything about it filled the Frenchman with contempt and dread: the despotism of the Tsar; the servility of the aristocracy, who were themselves no more than slaves; their pretentious European manners, a thin veneer of civilization to hide their Asiatic barbarism from the West; the lack of individual liberty and dignity; the pretence and contempt for truth that seemed to pervade society. Like many travellers to Russia before him, the Marquis was struck by the huge scale of everything the government had built. St Petersburg itself was a ‘monument created to announce the arrival of Russia in the world’. He saw this grandiosity as a sign of Russia’s ambition to overtake and dominate the West. Russia envied and resented Europe, ‘as the slave resented his master’, Custine argued, and therein lay the threat of its aggression:

    An ambition inordinate and immense, one of those ambitions which could only possibly spring in the bosoms of the oppressed, and could find nourishment only in the miseries of an entire nation, ferments in the heart of the Russian people. That nation, essentially aggressive, greedy under the influence of privation, expiates beforehand, by a debasing submission, the design of exercising a tyranny over other nations: the glory, the riches, which are the objects of its hopes, console it for the disgrace to which it submits. To purify himself from the foul and impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the slave, sunk to his knees, dreams of world domination.
     

    Russia had been put on earth by Providence to ‘chastise the corrupt civilization of Europe by the agency of a new invasion’, Custine argued. It served as a warning and a lesson to the West, and Europe would succumb to its barbarism ‘if our extravagances and iniquities render us worthy of the punishment’. As Custine concluded in the famous last passage of his book:

    To have a feeling for the liberty enjoyed in the other European countries one must have sojourned in that solitude without repose, in that prison without leisure, that is called Russia. If ever your sons should be discontented with France, try my recipe: tell them to go to Russia. It is a journey useful to every foreigner; whoever has well examined that country will be content to live anywhere else. 29
     

    Within a few years of its publication, La Russie en 1839 went through at least six editions in France; it was pirated and republished in several other editions in Brussels; translated into German, Danish and English; and abridged in pamphlet form in various other European languages. Overall it must have sold several hundred thousand copies, making it by far the most popular and influential work by a foreigner on Russia on the eve of the Crimean War. The key to its success was its articulation of the fears and prejudices about Russia widely held in Europe at that time.
    Throughout the Continent there were deep anxieties about the rapid growth and military power of Russia. The Russian invasion of Poland and the Danubian principalities, combined with Russia’s growing influence in the Balkans, gave rise to fears of a Slavic threat to Western civilization that La Russie had expressed. In the German lands, in particular, where Custine’s book was very well received, it was widely argued in the pamphlet press that Nicholas was plotting to become the emperor of the Slavs throughout Europe, and that German unity could not be gained without a war to push back Russian influence. Such