The year 1840 was still more fatal to the arms of Nicholas. Almost all the new forts on the seaboard were taken by the Circassians, who bravely attacked and carried the best fortified posts without artillery. The military road from the Kuban to Guelendchik was intercepted, Fort St. Nicholas, which commanded it, was stormed and the garrison massacred. Never yet had Russia endured such heavy blows. The disasters were such that the official journals themselves, after many months’ silence, were at last obliged to speak of them; but the most serious losses, the destruction of the new road from the Kuban, the taking of Fort St. Nicholas, and that of several other forts, were entirely forgotten in the official statement.
On the eastern side of the mountain the war was fully as disastrous for the invaders. The imperial army lost four hundred petty officers and soldiers, and twenty-nine officers in the battle of Valrik against the Tchetchens. The military colonies of the Terek were attacked and plundered, and when General Golovin retired to his winter quarters at the end of the campaign, he had lost more than three-fourths of his men.
The great Kabarda did not remain an indifferent spectator of the offensive league formed by the tribes of the Caucasus; and when Russia, suspecting with reason the unfriendly disposition of some tribes, made an armed exploration on the banks of the Laba in order to construct redoubts, and thus cut off the subjugated tribes from the others, the general found the country, wherever he advanced, but a desert. All the inhabitants had already retired to the other side of the Laba to join their warlike neighbours.[d]
THE EMPEROR’S CONSERVATIVE PATRIOTISM
However, in spite of all these disastrous campaigns, Nicholas had not lost sight of his most important task—that of consolidating internal order by reforms. His attention had been directed above all to the administration, from the heart of which he had sought especially to exterminate corruption with a severity and courage proportioned to the immensity of the evil. Then he had announced his firm desire to perfect the laws, and had charged Count Speranski to work at them under his personal direction. The digest (svod) promulgated in 1833 was the first fruit of these efforts and was followed by various special codes. Finally, turning his attention to public instruction, he had assigned to it as a basis the national traditions and religion and charged Uvarov, president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, a man of learning and talent, to animate it with this spirit, so hostile to the ideas of the west, but—let us say it at once—better suited to the real needs of the country.
Nicholas, allowing himself to be ruled by this spirit, plunged further and further into a system which, though contrary to that of Peter the Great, we do not pretend absolutely to condemn on that account, and which the marquis de Custine[e] has highly extolled in his celebrated book, La Russie en 1839. “The emperor Nicholas,” he said, “thought that the day of mere seeming was past for Russia, and that the whole structure of civilisation was to remake in that country. He has relaid the foundations of society. Peter, called the Great, would have overturned it a second time in order to rebuild it: Nicholas is more skilful. I am struck with admiration for this man who is secretly struggling, with all the strength of his will, against the work of Peter the Great’s genius. He is restoring individuality to a nation which has strayed for more than a century in the paths of imitation.”
Without ceasing to borrow diligently from Europe her inventions and arts, her progress in industry, in administration, in the conduct of land and sea armies—in a word, all the material improvements which she devises and realises, he endeavoured to close Russia to her ideas on philosophy, politics, and religion. He condemned exotic tendencies as pernicious to his states, and, without depriving himself of the services of the Germans, the principal depositaries of superior enlightenment in that country, as yet only imperfectly moulded to civilisation, he relied by preference on the party of the old Russians, which included the clergy, whom he treated with respect in spite of the inferiority of their position. Nationality, autocracy, orthodoxy—these three words, taken as the national watchword, sum up the ideas to which he subordinated his internal policy. The expression, Holy Russia, which has been the object of such profound astonishment to the Latin world, reflects also this spirit.
He surrounded with great solemnity those acts which he performed in his quality of head of the church in his own country, and posed as the protector of all his co-religionists in Moldavia, Wallachia, Servia, Montenegro, and other countries. Like his ancestors of preceding dynasties, he adorned himself on solemn occasions with a gold cross which he wore diagonally on his breast. This bias was summed up in the new word cæsaropapism. He regarded with special enthusiasm that one act on account of which, the accusation of religious intolerance was fixed upon him—an accusation justified by many of his deeds. In consequence of the decisions of the council of Florence, and up till 1839, there were in Russia 1,500,000 United Greeks, subjected to the papal obedience. At their head was the archbishop, sometimes the metropolitan, of White Russia, and the bishop, or archbishop, of Lithuania. In 1839 these two prelates, having met in conjunction with a third, at Polotsk, the seat of the first of these eparchies, had signed a document in which they expressed the wish to unite, they and their church, with the national and primitive church, and prayed the emperor to sanction this union. Nicholas referred the matter to the holy synod, and, the latter having with great eagerness signified its approval of the act, he sanctioned it in his turn, adding these words beneath his signature: “I thank God and I authorize it.” It is well known to what complaints on the part of the pope this suppression of the uniate Greek church soon afterward gave rise.[c]