History repeats itself in Ukraine, but we shouldn’t reenact it blindly.
History repeats itself in Ukraine, but we shouldn’t reenact it blindly.
T he fitful efforts to find an exit ramp from Russia’s war in Ukraine present a real challenge in statesmanship and diplomacy. We can learn some lessons from history in this area. Contrary to what you might get from some commentators, there are other historical analogies besides the 1938 Munich Agreement, or even besides the Vietnam War (although the fate of South Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accords should be powerfully instructive).
Another war, fought between Russia and the West largely within modern Ukraine, holds lessons of its own: the Crimean War of 1853–56.
The Gendarme and the Sick Man
Like the Ukraine War, the Crimean War was the first direct challenge to the postwar order in decades. At the time, that meant the order established by the Great Powers of Europe (Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and the recently defeated France) at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The Concert of Europe system established in 1815 aimed to resolve or limit conflicts through mediation and collective security. For 38 years, none of those powers went to war against one another.
The standard story of the Crimean War is that it was fought over the Holy Places dispute between Russia and France, an obscure squabble among Orthodox and Catholic Christians regarding access and control over churches and other shrines in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Both sites were within the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire, which put the Turks in the cross fire of this quarrel. While the Ottomans didn’t care who controlled the Holy Places, the vacillation of the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman regime was known) in trying to please both the Russians and the French allowed the dispute to fester and escalate.
But the Holy Places controversy, as important as it was in triggering what followed, wasn’t the reason why anyone went to war. The French, after making a show for the domestic benefit of Napoléon III, recalled the militant Catholic ambassador who pressed for a confrontation in favor of a more conciliatory figure. Prince Alexander Menshikov, the Russian envoy sent to Constantinople (now Istanbul), was reported to have told the Turkish finance minister that the Holy Places issue was a “secondary question” that “could easily be abandoned.” The British ambassador, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, was (like Boris Johnson) blamed by contemporary politicians and later historians for talking the Turks into standing up to Russia, but in April 1853, five months before the war was declared, he was able to get both Menshikov and the new French ambassador on board with a settlement of the dispute.
The real issue was Russia’s drive to undermine the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, ostensibly on behalf of its Orthodox Christian population, of which the tsar styled himself the protector. Critical to the coming of the war were both the outlook of the Russian state in general and the personality of Tsar Nicholas I in particular.
Nicholas I personified the 19th-century military autocrat. Like Putin, he viewed Russian foreign policy as an extension of how he ruled at home. He oversaw such pervasive censorship that the tsar himself would burn the midnight oil poring over manuscripts and sleeping in his office. He restricted passports so that few Russians could study or travel outside his realm, to avoid the contagions of even embryonic European liberalism. He felt keenly his obligation as protector of the Orthodox Church, and he was apt to fall back on the notion that if he did his duty, God would provide for Russia. Two pieces of advice he gave to his son and heir are revealing. “Remember this: Die on the steps to the throne, but do not give up power,” he told the future Alexander II; and, “In Europe the ruler must have the art of being sometimes fox, sometimes lion,” but “in Russia, he must be only the lion.”
He embraced his nickname as the “gendarme of Europe” for his dedication to monarchy and the old aristocratic and clerical order. In 1849, that extended to sending his army into the Austrian Empire at the invitation of Franz Joseph to help the Austrians put down the Hungarian revolution before it could (as both emperors feared) encourage the Poles to follow suit. But when it came to Christians living under Muslim rule, the gendarme of Europe sounded more like the Jacobin of the Balkans. Count Karl Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister, warned the Sublime Porte in January 1851: “The day that the Emperor sees the [Orthodox] cult or the Church persecuted or humiliated . . . His Majesty will not recoil before any consideration or any sacrifice to take up with pride the defence of his co-religionists.”
By 1853, Nicholas I was 56 years old and had been Tsar of All the Russias for 28 years, far longer than any other ruler in Europe. The 1848 revolutions across Europe and Russia’s role in suppressing them had confirmed everything he believed about the justice of his views and the effectiveness of his methods. As observers of Putin can attest, overconfidence and paranoia are a toxic combination.
For years, Nicholas I had been telling anyone in Europe who would listen that “Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive, but we shall not succeed. He will, he must, die. . . . It will be a great misfortune if he slips through our hands . . . before the necessary arrangements are made.” (This was the origin of the description of the Ottoman Empire as “the Sick Man of Europe.”) In 1849, he and Franz Joseph provoked a confrontation with Turkey in demanding that it turn over Hungarian and Polish refugees, including Lajos Kossuth, who had become a Zelensky-like popular hero of Western liberals. The tsar told a British envoy, “If the Ottoman Empire still exists, this is due to me. If I pull back the hand that protects it and sustains it, it will collapse in an instant.” But he backed down from an immediate confrontation after Britain and France dispatched their fleets. By 1853, Nicholas I was more prepared to try again in earnest.
He was encouraged by what he thought was a more accommodationist British government when the dovish Lord Aberdeen came to power at the beginning of 1853, sidelining the Russia hawk Lord Palmerston, who was put in charge of the Home Office. Aberdeen’s distaste for both the Turks and Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy was well-known, and, based on meetings with Aberdeen (then the foreign minister) in 1844, Nicholas I believed that he still had a gentlemen’s agreement to cooperate with Britain on a post-Ottoman future. Like Joe Biden, Aberdeen’s reputation preceded him into office and encouraged foreign adventurism.
Spring in Constantinople
The tsar’s first big mistake was getting isolated. At the start of 1853, the Sublime Porte was caught in a pincer movement between Russia and Austria. An Austrian envoy arrived in Constantinople in January demanding concessions in a tense, armed dispute over Montenegro, and the Russian chargé leaned on the Porte to compromise with the Austrians. Unfortunately for Russia, Menshikov had been too ill for months to travel and did not arrive until late February to start his own negotiations. By then, the Austrians had reached a settlement with the Turks, who were able to withdraw their forces from the Montenegrin frontier. This left the Russians in the lurch without reciprocal Austrian support.
A united Russo-Austrian front was difficult for the Porte to resist, and it would have given the British and French pause in allowing the sultan to think he could go to war with Western support. Once Austrian weight was removed from the Russian side of the scale, Nicholas I had to adjust his position to reflect his reduced leverage. He did nothing of the sort.
Another delay in Menshikov’s mission came after he discovered, upon arriving in Constantinople, that his staff had left behind the maps that were needed to negotiate disputed borders. This sounds like an extremely 1850s problem: Today, everyone with a smartphone has instant access to more detailed maps than kings or generals had in 1853, when detailed maps were still held as state secrets in some countries. But it, too, was echoed in the 2022 peace talks when a proposed Russian treaty demanded that Ukraine restore the supply of water to Crimea. Russian negotiators ended up opposing their own demand when they realized that holding Ukraine responsible for Crimea’s water supply would require Russia to give back the canal that controls it.
Early on in Menshikov’s mission, while Stratford was absent because of the change of governments in London, the British chargé (Colonel Hugh Rose) tried to call up the Royal Navy for a show of force. The French were ready to follow him, but the admiral of the Mediterranean squadron appealed to the Cabinet, which vetoed the deployment. Aberdeen still believed that the negotiations were mainly about the Holy Places controversy, which he blamed the French for starting. And so passed perhaps the last chance to deter Russian aggression before things escalated to a critical stage.
What made it impossible for the Ottoman Sublime Porte to reach agreement with Menshikov was the tsar’s demand (much like those issued by Putin to Ukraine) for an irrevocable guarantee of Orthodox rights within the Ottoman Empire. This was a climbdown from the initial Russian demand to appoint life-tenured Orthodox patriarchs — a significant request in the Ottoman millet system, where religious leaders exercised significant civil authority over their own faithful. But if the guarantee that was ultimately demanded was formally less than an explicit Russian protectorate of Orthodox subjects of the Porte, it nonetheless amounted to a binding commitment to Russia that limited the Ottoman Empire’s sovereignty over 10 million of its own subjects — a third of them in the Anatolian heartland — and further bound the hands of the Porte in making agreements with other nations. The Turks were willing to provide assurances of everything Nicholas I asked. But for a multinational empire, formally subordinating its control over its own internal affairs to a foreign power was tantamount to signing the death warrant of its own sovereignty. The empire could not afford to declare itself a sick man.
Stratford, writing to Lord Clarendon (the British foreign minister) just after Menshikov’s departure, sounded the same note that Polish president Andrzej Duda sounded in 2022 in describing Russia’s demands of Ukraine:
What Russia requires of the Porte would bear a strange appearance if the principle involved in it were applied to other countries less anomalously situated. What would be thought in Europe if France or Austria were to demand a guarantee from Great Britain for the protection and good treatment of the Roman Catholic priesthood in Ireland? What if Her Majesty’s Government were to interfere in a similar way on behalf of the Protestants in France? . . . In Turkey the dignitaries of the Greek or Ottoman church exercise in some degree the power of civil magistrates. Russia, overstepping the spiritual limit declared by herself, includes these powers in the spirit of privilege, for the ultimate maintenance of which she seeks a treaty right.
Summer in Vienna
The next mistake by Nicholas I finds further echoes in Putin’s overreach. In order to put pressure on the Turks, Nicholas I sent his army to occupy the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (modern Romania), which remained part of the Ottoman Empire. He considered this a less drastic step than his original idea of a coup de main aimed at capturing Constantinople. Moreover, Russia had occupied the Principalities during the 1848 revolutions without serious incident. But in entering the Balkans, he ignored the shrewd advice of Menshikov that an invasion of the Principalities would be much more provocative both to Austria and to the Western Powers than an attack on eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. Russo-Turkish wars in the east had happened many times before. A Russian army on the Danube, raising the banner of Slavic nationalism against a multinational empire, however, was predictably interpreted in Vienna as an existential threat to Habsburg rule, shattering Russia’s alliance with Austria.
Putin made a similar miscalculation. Invading Georgia in 2008 and seizing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 produced protests from the West, but no serious response. Even in early 2022, Biden was saying that a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine might not produce a strong American reaction. But with a full-scale invasion that featured an armored drive on the Ukrainian capital, Putin’s longstanding pose of ambiguity was abandoned, finally provoking a serious reaction.
The occupation didn’t go as planned. Half of the Russian force would be dead within a year, most from disease. The local response was not as ecstatic as Russia had expected, and a significant Austrian army had been stationed on the border.
Palmerston was duly appalled that Britain hadn’t taken a harder line with the great autocrat: “It is the nature of men whose . . . Power over others [is] founded on intimidation, and kept up by arrogant assumptions and pretensions, to mistake forbearance for intimidation, and to look upon inaction and hesitation as symptoms of fear, and forerunners of Submission.”
The Austrian foreign minister, Count Karl Ferdinand von Buol, convened the three other Great Powers — Britain, France, and Prussia — to hammer out a deal to avert a war, as had been done so many times before under the Concert of Europe. The idea was to present a united front to the tsar. Now, it was Buol’s turn to make a mistake. Like Trump today in opening one-on-one channels with Moscow without Ukrainian involvement in talks over the fate of their own country, Buol cut the Turks out of the process — even to the point of refusing to forward to Russia the most recent Turkish response, which was deemed inflammatory. This was a deliberate choice, suggested by the French, who assumed that Nicholas I would reject the Great Powers’ proposal. Instead, the tsar accepted what became known as the Vienna Note. Aberdeen took a public victory lap at the success of diplomacy in averting war.
Nicholas I was eager to get his army out of the pestilential swamps of Romania. More important, as was the case in 2022, the Russians felt that the language of the Vienna Note buried in its details a trap for the Turks. When Nesselrode’s view of the Note leaked to the British press, Clarendon referred to it as Russia’s “violent interpretation” of the Note, effectively forcing the tsar’s desired guarantees on the Porte in more diplomatic language. Thus, the tsar insisted that the Turks must accept the Note “purely and simply,” without a word of alteration.
Fall in Constantinople
The result was predictable: National and religious feeling in Constantinople rebelled, led by cadres of Muslim religious students, and the Ottomans declared war rather than submit. Stratford, who had made known in Constantinople his skepticism of the terms of the Vienna Note, came in for blame from the Cabinet and later historians for a decision the Turks would probably have made anyway.
The Ottomans knew that they couldn’t beat Russia alone. In their effort to cut off resupply of the Russian army in the Principalities by the Black Sea, they succeeded in provoking the Russian navy into the Battle of Sinope in late November 1853. The battle destroyed the entire Ottoman navy almost to the last man, so badly unbalancing the naval forces in the Black Sea that the British and French felt compelled to enter the war, which they did by March 1854.
Clarendon, in a debate in the House of Lords, famously described Britain’s position in terms that would resonate with later generations:
The question has been asked whether we are at peace or war. It is one that is very difficult to answer distinctly. We are not at war, because war is not declared; we are not strictly at peace with Russia. Consider that we are in the intermediate state; that our desire for peace is just as sincere as ever; but then I must say that our hopes of maintaining it are gradually dwindling away, and that we are drifting toward war.
After months of dithering, the British public, whipped into a war frenzy against Russia, turned to hunting for scapegoats suspected of selling out to the Russians. Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was one of the skeptics of confronting Russia, having proposed to Aberdeen at one point an Orthodox empire in the Balkans as a buffer state between Russia, Austria, and Turkey (Palmerston acidly quipped that if this was the British position, they may as well switch sides). As war approached, a crowd even gathered at the Tower of London in hopes of seeing Albert frog-marched into the tower on charges of treasonous collusion with the tsar. (Palmerston himself had defended a Parliamentary inquiry in 1848 into charges of being a Russian agent.) Russia, Russia, Russia: Some things never change.
Quagmire
Once Britain and France entered the war — joined, later, by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the forerunner to a unified Italy — it swiftly descended into a quagmire from which none of the combatants could escape. Nicholas I ended up withdrawing from the Principalities and accepting an Austrian peacekeeping force, which in time led to the creation of an independent Romanian state. Unable to march across neutral Austrian or Prussian territory or break through with naval warfare in the Baltics or on the Pacific coast of Russia, the French and British settled on an amphibious landing on the Crimean Peninsula, which after a few celebrated battles settled into a grinding nine-month siege of Sevastopol. In early 1855, Nicholas I died and Aberdeen’s government fell over dissatisfaction with the war, making Palmerston the prime minister. Once Sevastopol fell, a negotiated settlement was inevitable, if on terms that nobody especially loved.
Historian A.J.P. Taylor was unsparing on the conduct of Napoléon III and his ministers in negotiating the final peace:
Napoléon’s ‘“swell mob” (Clarendon’s phrase), introduced into international affairs the methods of lying and dishonesty which had made the coup d’etat [that brought him to power in 1851]; they knew no other methods. . . . To have a great state ruled and run by liars was a unique problem which the statesmen of Europe were unfitted to deal.
Taylor noted that, “contrary to the common view,” diplomacy had previously been the art of omissions and misleading feints, but not outright whoppers.
The final peace imposed a harsh demilitarization of the Black Sea on Russia, which it renounced without consequence in 1871 when France had fallen to civil disorder in its war with Germany. In the long run, while it was a victory for British interests until then, the conflict went well for nobody. Russia faced profound social consequences for the military defeat by the West, which withdrew it from European affairs for decades and prompted the end of serfdom and colossal reforms of the legal system and the army. Austria lost the support of Russia, which made it vulnerable to Prussian predation in the centuries-long struggle to control Germany, leading to German unification in 1870–71. The largely Muslim Crimean Tatars, the longstanding population of the peninsula, were ethnically cleansed and replaced with Russians and Ukrainians. The war pushed the Ottoman Empire into debts that made it a captive of Western financiers, and the final peace treaty was barely more respectful of Ottoman sovereignty than what Nicholas I had demanded. Russia went to war with Turkey again in 1877–78, only to have its victories stripped away again at the peace table by the Powers of Europe.
There are no happy endings in such stories. But the lessons we learn from history should help us avoid repeating the worst mistakes of the past without knowing that they are mistakes.