A Short History of Russia

by Mary Platt Parmele

The liberal Russians might have sympathized with the first moderate demand, but when by the last there was an attempt made upon the integrity of Russia, there was but one voice in the empire. So cruel and so vindictive was the punishment of the Poles, by Liberals and Conservatives alike, that Europe at last in 1863 protested. The Polish language and even alphabet were prohibited. Every noble in the land had been involved in this last conspiracy. They were ordered to sell their lands, and all Poles were forbidden to be its purchasers. Nothing of Poland was left which could ever rise again.

CHAPTER XXIV

TURCO-RUSSIAN WAR—TREATY OF BERLIN

Liberalism had received a check. In this outburst of severity, used to repress the free instincts of a once great nation, the temper of the Russian people had undergone a change. The warmth and ardor were chilled. The Emperor's grasp tightened. Some even thought that Finland ought to be Russianized precisely as Poland had been; but convinced of its loyalty, the Grand Principality was spared, and the privileges so graciously bestowed by Alexander the First were confirmed.

While the political reforms had been checked by the Polish insurrection, there was an enormous advance in everything making for material prosperity. Railways and telegraph-wires, and an improved postal service, connected all the great cities in the empire, so that there was rapid and regular communication with each other and all the world. Factories were springing up, mines were working, and trade and production and arts and literature were all throbbing with a new life.

In 1871, at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, the Emperor Alexander saw his uncle William the First crowned Emperor of a United Germany at Paris. The approval and the friendship of Russia at this crisis were essential to the new German Empire as well as to France. Gortchakof, the Russian Chancellor, saw his opportunity. He intimated to the Powers the intention of Russia to resume its privileges in the Black Sea, and after a brief diplomatic correspondence the Powers formally abrogated the neutralization of those waters; and Russia commenced to rebuild her ruined forts and to re-establish her naval power in the South.

There had commenced to exist those close ties between the Russian and other reigning families which have made European diplomacy seem almost like a family affair—although in reality exercising very little influence upon it. Alexander himself was the son of one of these alliances, and had married a German Princess of the house of Hesse. In 1866 his son Alexander married Princess Dagmar, daughter of Christian IX., King of Denmark, and in 1874 he gave his daughter Marie in marriage to Queen Victoria's second son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. It was in the following year (1875) that Lord Beaconsfield took advantage of a financial crisis in Turkey, and a financial stringency in Egypt, to purchase of the Khedive his half-interest in the Suez Canal for the sum of $20,000,000, which gave to England the ownership of nearly nine-tenths of that important link in the waterway leading direct to her empire in India.

During all the years since 1856, there was one subject which had been constantly upper-most in the mind of England; and that one subject was the one above all others which her Prime Minister tried to make people forget. It was perfectly well known when one after another of the Balkan states revolted against the Turk—first Herzegovina, then Montenegro, then Bosnia—that they were suffering the cruelest oppression, and that not one of the Sultan's promises made to the Powers in 1856 had been kept. But in 1876 no one could any longer feign ignorance. An insignificant outbreak in Bulgaria took place. In answer to a telegram sent to Constantinople a body of improvised militia, called Bashi-Bazuks, was sent to manage the affair after its own fashion. The burning of seventy villages; the massacre of fifteen thousand—some say forty thousand—people, chiefly women and children, with attendant details too revolting to narrate; the subsequent exposure of Bulgarian maidens for sale at Philippopolis—all this at last secured attention. Pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, gave voice to the horror of the English people. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, Gladstone, John Bright, Carlyle, Freeman, made powerful arraignments of the government which was the supporter and made England the accomplice of Turkey in this crime.

However much we may suspect the sincerity of Russia's solicitude regarding her co-religionists in the East, it must be admitted that the preservation of her Faith has always been treated—long before the existence of the Eastern Question—as the most vital in her policy. In every alliance, every negotiation, every treaty, it was the one thing that never was compromised; and Greek Christianity certainly holds a closer and more mystic relation to the government of Russia than the Catholic or Protestant faiths do to those of other lands.