ROBERT E. JONES

THE NOBILITY AND RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY

1560-1811

In June 1772 the Empress Catherine II chose her lover and favorite Gregorii Orlov to represent Russia at the peace conference with the Ottoman Empire at Focsani. The purpose of the conference was to negotiate an end to the Russo-Turkish War that had begun in 1769, but since Orlov was an outspoken proponent of an aggressive, expansive policy toward the Ottomans, his appointment meant that Russia would take a hard line in the negotiations and the war was likely to continue.

Important segments of the Russian nobility opposed Orlov's policy toward the Ottomans and condemned his appointment. A few weeks after Catherine's announcement that Orlov would represent Russia at the peace conference, her agents discovered a conspiracy in the Preobrazhenskii Guards Regiment that was aimed at replacing the empress with her son, Paul, an opponent of the Turkish War. Among the grievances cited by the conspirators in their confessions was that "Of Count Orlov, that he will be the prince of Moldavia or emperor, for which he has gone to the army under the pretense of going to a congress."1 A number of Russian statesmen and their literary clients also reacted to Orlov's appointment with outrage. In their view, favorites like Orlov were dishonorable and unprincipled men who willfully promoted costly and ruinous wars for personal motives unrelated to and often opposed to the national interest, whereas statesmen from established families, those whom Nikita Panin dubbed "the true sons of the Fatherland," were opposed to needless, aggressive wars.2

Panin cited the reigns of Elisabeth Petrovna and Peter III to illustrate his thesis that "accidental people," as he termed powerful governmental officials who were not members of the established elite, led the monarch to "sacrifice the state's domestic prosperity for the sake of foreign affairs" and resulted in harmful wars.3 But his thesis has a broader and more general application to Russian history. In this paper I will argue that Panin's notion that the aristocratic elite opposed costly, aggressive wars provides a useful basis for reexamining the history of political conflict between

Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, XXXIV (1-2), janvier-juin 1993, pp. 159-170.