the bishop of Tchernigoff was confined in a monastery, and the archbishop of Tver, after being beaten with rods, tortured, and kept three years in solitary confinement, was stripped of his episcopal dignity and monastic habit, and imprisoned in a fortress, where he languished until the reign of Elizabeth. Prince Vasili Dolgoroucky was executed, with several members of his family. Catharine II. and Alexander I. both gave a temporary shelter and protection to the Jesuits. This last prince, although he dallied for a time with evangelical Protestantism, sent his submission to the pope, asking for a prelate to visit, instruct, and reconcile him to the Holy See, and died a Catholic in faith and intention, although the sudden termination of his mortal career took place before there was time for the arrival of the prelate to whom the Holy Father had confided this mission. The numerous conversions of illustrious Russians to the Catholic Church are well-known facts. That heresy and infidelity are rife among many nominal members of the Russian Church is also equally indisputable and notorious.
The whole history of the empire of Rurik has a close association with Constantinople. While the Russians were still pagans the project of subduing the Greek Empire seems to have been constantly in view. Oleg, Rurik’s immediate successor; Igor, Rurik’s son, who succeeded Oleg, and was the husband of Olga; and their son Sviatoslaf, the father of Vladimir the Great, made invasions into the Greek Empire at the head of armies ranging from eighty to four hundred thousand in number. They were either bought off from conquest by vast ransoms or defeated
by Greek craft and their own disorderly conduct. After the conversion of Vladimir, Constantinople was to Russia what Rome has always been to Occidental Christendom; and when the Greek Empire fell, the Turk became in their eyes what the Moslem was to the Catholic Spaniards. The queen city of the Euxine and Mediterranean Seas, the New Rome of Constantine, with the rich provinces of Turkey in Europe depending upon it, has ever been present to the view of the emperors and the people of Russia as the objective point of perpetual crusades, as a prize to be won by their warlike valor, as the natural and destined capital whose possession is necessary to bring their empire to its acme of power and glory.[180] Always mysteriously baffled and thrown back, the colossal power of the northern empire has been incessantly pressing against this resistance, even since the power of combined Europe has backed the weakening Ottoman Empire. The Emperor Nicholas was more completely possessed by this hereditary idea than any of his predecessors since Peter the Great; he undertook and sacrificed more for it than any one of them, and seems really to have caused Russia to make a great stride towards the ulterior object. By the war of 1828 and ’29 Turkey was extremely humiliated and weakened, and immense advantages were gained by Russia. Her arms were completely and brilliantly successful from beginning to end of the campaign, and surprise has often been expressed that the Russian army did not march directly on Constantinople after Adrianople had been captured.
It may be that the military strength of the empire was exhausted by its costly victories, and that Nicholas was afraid of exciting a league of the great powers against him. Whatever his reasons may have been, he concluded a peace at Adrianople, and postponed further action to a future time.
When the treaty of Adrianople was concluded (1829), the present chancellor of Russia was thirty-one years of age and employed in a subordinate position under the ministry. Prince Alexander Mikhäilovitch Gortchakoff was born in 1798, and claims descent from Rurik. He first gained the favor of the Emperor Nicholas by negotiating the marriage of his daughter, the Princess Olga, with the crown-prince of Würtemberg. He had already passed four years at the little court of Stuttgart as resident minister, and he earned the gratitude of the imperial family by remaining willingly eight years longer, in order to aid the Princess Olga as her guide and counsellor. His residence at Stuttgart fell between the years 1842 and 1854, and he was therefore fifty-six years of age before attaining anything above a minor position in the diplomatic service. After the re-establishment of the Diet at Frankfort, in 1850, he was appointed to represent Russia at its sessions, and henceforth divided his time between Stuttgart and Frankfort, and employed his abundant leisure in studying the politics of Europe. It was at this time that he first met with M. Bismarck, then a lieutenant in the Prussian Landwehr, a novice in diplomacy and his colleague at the Diet. Here also he became intimate with two remarkable and singular characters whose history and ideas illustrate the peculiar national spirit by
which the genuine Russian people, which remains true to its ancient traditions without any foreign mixture, is animated.
The first of these singular personages was Vassili Joukofski, who had been in early life a poet of considerable renown, not remarkably original, but possessed of a great talent for facile versification and ingenious translation, and sufficiently cultivated as a scholar to have been selected as the private tutor of the Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine, the present emperor and his brother. Although he had voluntarily selected a German lady as his wife and a German town as his permanent abode, he remained, nevertheless, confirmed in his belief of the hopeless corruption of Western Europe, and the destiny reserved for Russia to complete the work of the Crusades, drive “the impure beast” from Byzantium, liberate the Holy Land, and regenerate the world by “a new eruption of Christianity.” The other individual of this remarkable pair was Nicholas Gogol, a man of original and powerful genius, full of a sombre and extravagant religious enthusiasm, who haunted the drawing-rooms of Joukofski, and startled the elegant, cultivated guests of his more worldly friend like a fantastic apparition from the spiritual world. Gogol was a terrible satirist of the vices of Russian society, a prophet of wrath and judgment, in despair of civilization and of his own salvation, wandering the earth in a restless search after some relief for his disturbed soul, and reappearing at intervals among his friends at Frankfort to deliver impassioned exhortations to prayer and penance. The only remedy for modern evils, in his view, was a return to the primitive state of barbarian Muscovy,
and a crusade of despotism joined with the undefiled faith of old Russia against “the heathens of the Occident.” It is an old saying in Russia that “heaven can only be reduced by famine.” Gogol acted on this maxim to such an extent by his long fasts and prayers that he was one day found dead of inanition in an attitude of prayer, prostrate before his holy images.
Prince Gortchakoff is a cultivated sceptic, intent on the aggrandizement of Russia from motives which are earthly and confined within the sphere of that materialistic philosophy which dominates in diplomatic circles. Nevertheless, mystic enthusiasm, the most enlightened and noble aspirations of religion and patriotism, great designs for a lofty end, and the lower qualities of cleverness in worldly wisdom, talent for managing the affairs of administration, and ambition to fulfil a great personal career by serving as an instrument of some grand social or political power, are often found combined together to pursue the same object from different motives. The Emperor Nicholas was undoubtedly thoroughly sincere in his adherence to the religious and political doctrines which he professed, really influenced by the mystical ideas of the “crusaders,” and convinced of the justice of his cause. His chief minister, Nesselrode, certainly did not share these ideas, yet he served his master with all the resources and ability which he possessed. So also did Gortchakoff, although personally he is of the same stamp with his predecessor. The emperor, as the whole world knows, and a great part of it well remembers, reopened the Turkish question and engaged in the memorable, for the time being to Russia unsuccessful, even disastrous,
war of the Crimea. In 1855 Prince Gortchakoff was sent as resident ambassador to Vienna; there he labored strenuously, both before and after the death of Nicholas, first to detach Austria from the cause of the allies and win her cooperation with Russia, and then to gain terms which would permit his government to conclude an honorable peace on the least disadvantageous terms. Russia has been profoundly irritated against Austria ever since the latter power refused to take her part against the protectors of the Ottoman Porte; accusing her of ingratitude for the great service which Nicholas rendered to Francis Joseph in suppressing by military force and gratuitously the Hungarian rebellion. Prince Gortchakoff shared this feeling; it has always affected his diplomatic policy, and it may have yet most important results, if hostilities are renewed on a large scale. At the Congress of Paris, which settled the conditions of peace, Prince Gortchakoff was the Russian plenipotentiary. Immediately afterwards Count Nesselrode retired from the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in April, 1856, the successor upon whom the eyes of the court and the empire had been long turned with favor and hope was elevated to the office, which he has filled for twenty years, and which has become essentially more important in his person than it ever was during preceding administrations. Prince Gortchakoff is the first who has filled at the Russian court the office of Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Western acceptation of the powers and responsibilities of that position. Heretofore the emperor had personally directed the state policy, using his minister as a mere counsellor and chief secretary. Alexander II.