Empires Apart (27 page)

The westward expansion of the slave states mirrored the experience of territorial expansion in early Russia. There, colonisation had been driven by a desire for new agricultural land, although not as a means of generating wealth; the Rus and their Russian successors needed to find new land, however poor, simply to provide food for their population. Often Russian colonisation had been to replace land that had already been worked to exhaustion, just as was happening in early nineteenth-century America. Russian colonisation was also driven by the slave trade. Slaves were the principal export commodity for early Russia; but with the fall of Byzantium this export market suddenly disappeared and a use had to be found for slaves at home. The answer was colonising new land. Similarly in America the success of slave breeders, the decline in death rates among slaves as malaria and other diseases were brought under control and the continuing (if lessening) inflow of new slaves from Africa, the Caribbean and Florida prompted the search for new territory suitable for slave labour. Colonisation of this territory brought further wealth to an already dominant planter aristocracy.

The economic imperatives of the slave trade were absent further north but here too those who were already wealthy, or who had access to wealth to fund their speculative investments, were the ones to benefit from westward expansion. In colonial times many of the revolutionary leaders including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had speculated in land, particularly in the Ohio Valley – territory claimed by France and
occupied by natives. George Washington started buying land as a teenager and amassed a fortune as land prices soared. After Independence Congress provided that land in the Northwest Territory would be sold in plots no smaller than a square mile (640 acres), and in practice most of the land was taken by speculators like the Ohio Company of General Knox, which acquired 1.5m acres at $1 an acre. In 1796 the Land Act doubled the price of public lands to $2 an acre, making speculators even more likely to be the prime beneficiaries.

Typical of the period was the Yazoo Land Fraud. In 1795 a corrupt Georgia legislature sold 35m acres of land along the Yazoo river to speculators for 1½ cents per acre. The next year a new legislature rescinded the sale but the speculators pursued their claim for compensation through the courts, and eventually in 1810 the US Supreme Court ruled that however corrupt the motives of the legislators the original deal had been valid. In 1814 Congress provided $4.2m to compensate the disgruntled speculators. The case yet again demonstrated the precedence of legality over justice.

In the same year as the sale of the land on the Yazoo and a year after the battle of Fallen Timbers, Spain conceded the US navigation rights on the full length of the Mississippi: the gateway to future expansion was open. In Russia colonisation continued along the Volga, albeit more slowly than in contemporary North America. The rigid social structures in Russia meant that there was little room for individual initiative when it came to colonisation. The social pressures that kept the American frontier expanding westward were almost entirely missing. Nor was there a pool of ‘sturdy vagabonds' of the type England had dispatched across the Atlantic in the previous century. The economic imperative to colonise new land and thereby maintain or increase agricultural production remained and Catherine resorted to immigration to settle the new lands. Both America and Russia benefited from the desire of land-hungry German farmers to escape their warring princes. The ethnic German communities along the lower Volga that two centuries later excited the paranoia of Joseph Stalin had their roots in the incentives Catherine had offered their forebears.

Controlling the Volga gave Russia access to the Caspian Sea, but what Catherine wanted, like Peter the Great before her, was access via the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Unlike Peter she got it, pushing the Ottoman Turks aside in a series of battles that saw Russian armies storming through what today are the states of Moldova and Romania. A British naval captain, John Elphinston, was made an admiral in the imperial navy; sailing from Kronstadt in the Baltic around Europe to the Aegean, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at Chesme Bay, forcing Turkey into granting independence to the Crimea. That independence lasted less than a decade before Russia formally annexed the whole of Crimea, gaining a Black Sea coastline stretching from Odessa in the west to the Sea of Azov and beyond in the east. In 1783 a treaty with Georgia extended the Russian zone of influence even further.

The incorporation of Georgia is a classic example of Russian imperial expansion. Threatened by the Islamic forces of Turkey and Persia the Georgian king Irakli agreed to Russian suzerainty over eastern Georgia. Once established there Russia annexed the remainder of his kingdom eighteen years later. Annexation in this case was very different from the American annexations of Spanish possessions like Florida, Texas and New Mexico that started in the very same year, 1801. Florida was annexed to gain territory to be settled by Americans and their imported slaves; the existing natives and their leaders were an impediment to be removed. Russia on the other hand was as keen to gain population as land. The Georgian leaders were courted and recruited into Russian service, and the nobility were given Russian imperial titles of higher rank. The vast mass of Georgians continued life as before; only in the last days of the Romanovs in the 1890s was there any attempt to Russify the annexed people by making Russian the language of instruction in schools.

Catherine's southern conquests provided Russia with outlets to the Black Sea and, vitally, a granary. The Russian heartland had poor soil and often atrocious weather but the newly conquered territories provided rich agricultural land, which, along with the subtropical produce of
Georgia, sustained a 300 per cent growth in the Russian population in the nineteenth century.

That Russia and America had much in common was demonstrated by the life of one of the most unusual characters in late eighteenth-century history. Elphinston was not the only mercenary Catherine recruited to the Russian navy. A far more famous figure was a Scottish slave trader, freemason and pirate with an assumed Welsh name who, after leaving Catherine's service, died in Paris where he was buried in an unmarked grave, only to be exhumed more than a century later and carried across the Atlantic in what may well have been the most impressive naval cortege in history. His story is a bizarre example of the increasingly intertwined histories of America and Russia.

John Paul was born in Kirkcudbright in 1747 and went to sea at the age of thirteen. Four years later he went into the slave trade, but reputedly left in disgust. Known for his fiery temper, Paul was arrested in Tobago for ‘excessively' flogging his ship's carpenter and sent home to Kirkcudbright, where the charges were dismissed. He returned to the Caribbean but had to move on again after killing a sailor in a dispute over wages. He fled to Virginia, where his brother had settled, and changed his name, first to John Jones and later to John Paul Jones.

When war broke out between the colonists and Britain, John Paul Jones joined the rebels and depending on who is telling the story either became the most heroic figure in the infant US navy, famed especially for his defeat of HMS
Serapis
off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, or became the leader of a gang of American and French pirates who preyed on British merchantmen, raided the town of Whitehaven in Cumbria and returned to Kirkcudbright to steal the Countess of Selkirk's family silver. Posters distributed throughout the rebel colonies and signed by John Hancock on behalf of the infant Congress suggest that both versions of history are true. They encouraged sailors to join John Paul Jones Esq. ‘for the Glorious Cause of their country' and, perhaps more importantly, to ‘make their fortune'.

Jones became a hero not just in America but in France, and it was here after the war that Thomas Jefferson, the new American ambassador to France, arranged for him to become Admiral Pavel Dzhones in the Russian navy. According to legend, at the battle of Liman he carried out a night-time reconnaissance of the Turkish fleet in a rowing boat before destroying fifteen of their ships, killing 3,000 of their men and taking 1,600 prisoners at a cost of one ship lost and just eighteen Russians killed. On settling in St Petersburg he was charged with molesting the ten-year-old daughter of a German immigrant and, although the charge was dropped, returned to Paris, where he died at the age of forty-five. He was buried in an unmarked grave.

Like Columbus, his body was not to remain at peace. The story of John Paul Jones had assumed mythic proportions in America and, despite the objections of his family in Scotland, plans were made to transport his remains across the Atlantic, providing they could be found. In 1905 his grave was at last identified. The American government sent four cruisers, escorted on the final leg by seven battleships, to bring the ‘Father of the American Navy' back ‘home'. In 1913 his body was finally laid to rest in a marble sarcophagus, modelled on the tomb of Napoleon, at the Annapolis Naval Academy. It is another of the ironies of history that the father of the US navy achieved a higher rank in the Russian navy than he ever did in the American.

John Paul Jones was not the only veteran of the American Revolution to make his mark on the history of Russian imperialism. The Polish army engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who played a key part in the siege of Charleston, had returned home and was to prove as formidable an opponent to Catherine as he had to the British. Although Catherine's conquests in the south had given Russia what she desperately needed economically, agricultural wealth and access to warm water ports, it was to her campaigns in the west that Catherine devoted most of her energies. Poland blocked the westward expansion of her empire and Catherine
was determined to crush the old enemy once and for all. Standing in her way were two men: Tadeusz Kosciuszko and, before him, an even more remarkable figure, Stanislas Poniatowski.

Most of Catherine's lovers played no role in history and have been long forgotten. Grigory Orlov, who helped kill her husband, is an exception, as is Grigory Potemkin – although the latter's fame owes less to his naval victories than to a later tsar naming a battleship after him and Eisenstein's monumental film of the crew's mutiny. None of her other lovers, however, rose as high, or fell so low, as Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski.

Poniatowski's story reflects the turbulent and confused nature of the region on which Catherine had set her sights. His father was the Palatine of Krakow and had been the close companion of the Swedish king Charles XII in his campaigns against the Russian army of Peter the Great; Stanislas himself became an officer in the Russian imperial army before becoming the Polish plenipotentiary ambassador at the imperial court in St Petersburg. There the British ambassador introduced him to the Grand Duchess Catherine Alexievna and the two became lovers. In 1758 he was suddenly recalled home, when the Polish authorities realised he was conspiring to deprive Catherine's husband of the throne. Catherine quickly replaced him with Grigory Orlov, who then helped her seize power.

Two years later the Polish throne became vacant. Poland was ruled by an elected monarch and this apparently democratic mechanism led to constant power struggles among the nobles who formed the electorate. Catherine sent in her Cossacks to ‘persuade' the voters to elect her former lover as King Stanislas II. His was to be the first of a long series of puppet regimes that Russia imposed on eastern Europe, but this puppet promptly cut his strings. Stanislas instituted a series of dramatic reforms reducing the power of the aristocracy and strengthening the authority of the state. Civil war broke out between Stanislas and reactionary nobles supported by Catherine, and in 1772 she used the resultant instability as an excuse to engineer with Austria and Prussia the First Partition of
Poland, in which Russia grabbed 36,000 square miles and nearly 2 million inhabitants, mainly ‘White Russians'. Just as the Americans were to do in their western conquests, Russia followed a policy of biting off parts of its victims, signing treaties promising to respect the new frontier, regrouping and then invading again.

Russia was still treated as a second-class nation by the western European imperial powers, but this was starting to change.

Britain, France and Spain, who were constantly at war with each other, had no respect for neutrals in general and neutral shipping in particular. The rules of the game were changed on 28 February 1780 when Catherine II signed the Declaration of Armed Neutrality. This asserted that neutral ships should be able to travel freely anywhere, including along the coastlines of nations at war, and that cargo in neutral ships (with the exception of munitions) could not be seized even if it belonged to enemy citizens. What made the declaration more than just a pious aspiration is that Catherine backed it up by force. She dispatched three powerful naval squadrons to the Atlantic, Mediterranean and North Sea. Furthermore she declared that other neutral nations were free to join her for collective security: Denmark, Sweden and Holland were among the first to do so. The Declaration of Armed Neutrality lasted just three years, but Catherine had not only established the reputation of the Russian imperial navy but established significant new principles of international law – principles that were to be followed a quarter of a century later by another, and much newer, imperial power when the US navy intervened decisively in the Mediterranean.

Catherine was determined to humiliate her former lover, Stanislas Poniatowski, and in 1782 compelled him to accompany her and her latest lover, Potemkin, on their triumphal progress through the newly conquered Crimea. Stanislas, however, continued with his reforms, encouraged by the revolutions in America and France, giving new rights to both the peasants and the increasingly important urban population. Catherine and the Polish aristocracy were appalled, and in 1792 the Russian army poured across the border with the support of Prussia
and of reactionary Polish aristocrats. They were met by the hero of the American revolutionary war Tadeusz Kosciuszko.