Yearning for the Bosphorus

In May 1821, Tsar Alexander had a decision to make.

Seven years had passed since a coalition led by the Russian tsar had defeated Napoleon and Russian troops had triumphantly entered Paris, and Alexander was still one of the most influential and admired monarchs in Europe. Together with Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich, Alexander had also been behind the idea of creating an international body to prevent further revolutions, coups, and political turmoil; resolve disagreements among European heads of state; and preserve legitimate monarchies across Europe.

The power of these monarchs was legitimate, in Alexander’s eyes, because it was derived from God, rather than their subjects, which is why the body he and Metternich established was named the Holy Alliance. It was decided that the sovereigns or their representatives would meet regularly to make collective decisions and, when needed, help one another suppress revolution.

They were all terrified of revolution: memories of the storming of the Bastille, the Jacobins, and the execution of Louis XVI were still fresh. No one wanted to find himself in Louis’ shoes. So, at the first signs of unrest, the monarchs would convene a congress of the Holy Alliance and decide what steps were needed.

The previous year had seen the Congress of Troppau (see Russian Life Nov/Dec 2020), and from January to May 1821 the alliance convened in the Austrian town of Laibach (today’s Lubljana, in Slovenia), where the monarchs nervously debated how they could suppress revolution in Naples. Ferdinand (of Naples) had already been compelled to sign a constitution, which his fellow monarchs believed would inevitably open the floodgates to revolutionary chaos. They resolved that Ferdinand should revoke his authorization of the constitution. Meanwhile, Austrian troops would help him defeat the revolutionaries. If Austrian troops were insufficient, the Russians would also lend military support. Problem solved. Ferdinand did indeed go back on his promise of a constitution and the Austrians helped him suppress the revolution, without Russian help.

But there was another problem, and this one confronted the Russian tsar with a quandary. He was faced with a situation that put his support for autocratic power in conflict with one of his nation’s most cherished geopolitical (and religious, and cultural) dreams. Unrest was breaking out in another part of Europe, and in this case, it was the rebels who were hoping Russia would come to their aid.

Specifically, it was the Greeks who were rising up, against the Ottoman sultan, and they were hoping for support from the Russians, their fellow Orthodox Christians.

For the past half century, at least, Russia had been flirting with the Greeks and other Orthodox peoples subsumed by the Ottoman Empire. Catherine II, Alexander’s grandmother, had twice gone to war with the Turks, gaining bits of the Black Sea coast and Crimea. She and Potemkin dreamed of capturing Constantinople (Alexander’s brother had been named Constantine for a reason – the plan was for him to rule over a Christian kingdom on the Bosphorus). Russia would gain control over the straits and the Balkan peninsula. As part of this plan, Potemkin was founding new cities in southern Russia and building a powerful naval base in Sevastopol. When Catherine visited Crimea, her route was lined with triumphal arcs in the classical style. She was even greeted by companies of amazons, fighting forces of ethnically Greek Crimean women. Russian ships were also docking at Greek islands in the Mediterranean.

Catherine’s Greek project never came to fruition, and Constantinople remained beyond Russia’s grasp. The empress passed her Mediterranean ambitions down to her grandson. And now, it seemed, Alexander was being handed an opportunity to fulfill his grandmother’s dream. He could support the Greeks, send them Russian troops, achieve the creation of an independent Greece and, perhaps, take control of the Bosphorus.

It was tempting, but there was a problem. The Greeks were rebelling against someone the Holy Alliance considered to be a legitimate sovereign. They were committing the very sin the Alliance had been designed to oppose. On the other hand, there was a difference between the Turkish sultan and the king of Naples. Most notably, he was not Christian, which is why the Ottoman Empire was not a member of the Holy Alliance. Perhaps this was an instance where Alexander could bend his own rule and support the Greeks, even if the sultan was, in the Alliance’s eyes, a pillar of the existing world order?

Alexander wavered. He knew that the rebelling Greeks had been led from the start by Alexandros Ypsilantis, who had served as a general in the Russian Army during the Napoleonic Wars. However, Ypsilantis’ attempts to rouse the sultan’s Orthodox subjects to rebellion had not yielded fruit. And then, after he and his men withdrew to territory belonging to Austria, he had been taken prisoner – by the very same Austrians with whom Alexander had forged the Holy Alliance and whose Minister Metternich was supposedly his bosom buddy. The Austrians, however, had designs of their own concerning the Balkans, and they were not at all pleased to see Russia encroaching on “their turf.”

Alexander faced a choice. Should he play the “Orthodox brotherhood” card and go after the Bosphorus or remain faithful to the idea that the current order was divinely ordained?

In Laibach, Metternich convinced Alexander that the power of a sovereign – even a Muslim one – had to be respected. Was Metternich’s devotion to the idea that sovereign power is sacred a matter of principle or, in this case, strategic – in other words, inspired by his desire to prevent Russia from extending its power to the Mediterranean? Whatever the case may have been, Alexander did not lend his support to the Greek cause, at least not openly. It is noteworthy that, when the Greeks did, several years later, achieve independence, the first leader of their new state was another Greek who had served the Russian state (as foreign minister, 1816-22), Ioannis Kapodistrias.

But the draw of the Balkans and the Bosphorus was too strong to abandon dreams of these geopolitical gems. The problem was that Russia was not alone in harboring these dreams. As the century progressed, the struggle for influence in the region became increasingly contentious.

All of Alexander’s successors were torn between a reluctance to antagonize the other European powers and the dream of restoring a cross above the sixth-century Hagia Sophia church-turned-mosque (not to mention gaining control of the Bosphorus). They all opted to vie for the Bosphorus. Alexander’s brother Nicholas I spent his thirty-year reign working to strengthen Russia’s influence in the Balkans, an effort that ended with humiliating defeat by England and France in the Crimean War. His successor, Alexander II, was so successful in his battle against the Turks that his avant-garde came within sight of the domes of Hagia Sophia. They never reached it, however, because the other Great Powers objected and a retreat was negotiated.

After the February 1917 revolution, under very different circumstances, the Provisional Government wanted to continue Russia’s involvement in World War I, and a major motivation for this was the hope of winning the Bosphorus and Dardanelles as part of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. Arguably, had the government not hungered for the straits, had not fought on at a time when revolutionary agitation was eating away at the Russian Army, it might not have been so seriously damaged in the people’s eyes as to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.

Over time, the dream of controlling the Bosphorus and restoring a cross above Hagia Sophia has done Russia more harm than good. Alexander I was probably wise, back in 1821, when he decided that his country was better off without Balkan entanglements. Then again, maybe pressure from Metternich had more to do with it than wisdom.