The First Cold War — when Russia and Britain were at odds

In 1839, the grand duke and future Russian tsar Alexander II visited Britain, where the young Queen Victoria threw a ball for him at Buckingham Palace and Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, took him to the races at Newmarket. In Alexander’s honour, a new horse race was established — the Cesarewitch, a mangled transliteration of tsarevich, the title of the heir to Russia’s imperial throne. To this day, the Cesarewitch is an annual Newmarket event.

Barbara Emerson tells this story as a way of illustrating how, for the most part, Britain and Russia managed to prevent their often tense relations from lurching into outright military hostilities during the 19th century.

It was an era when, as indicated by her book’s title, The First Cold War, the two empires were at odds in ways suggestive of the US-Soviet rivalry of the second half of the 20th century. There were multiple areas of contention — Poland, the Balkans, the Black Sea, Persia, central Asia and the Far East — but, with the notable exception of the 1853-56 Crimean war, the British and Russians just about kept their disagreements under control.

It was never easy. After the 1830-31 Polish uprising against tsarist rule, “expansionist and savage came to be the widely held views of Russia in the British parliament, the press and informed opinion”, writes Emerson, vice-chair of the Great Britain-Russia Society and a former faculty associate at Harvard University.

Naturally, the Russian perspective was different. In 1882, the newspaper Novoye Vremya denounced British criticisms of anti-Jewish pogroms in the tsarist empire: “The concern of England, which has beggared the population of India and Egypt, which has poisoned the people of China with opium, which destroyed, like indigenous insects, the natives of Australia, and which, under the pretext of abolishing the slave trade, is now exterminating in a most wholesale fashion the numerous races of Africa — the concern of a people who do these things is certainly astonishing.”

Emerson covers her ground with exemplary thoroughness, mining a variety of British and Russian archival materials and paying particular attention to the geopolitical competition in central Asia for which Arthur Conolly, an East India Company officer and explorer, is generally credited with inventing the term “the Great Game”.

Perhaps she devotes too much space to the political opinions and matchmaking schemes of Victoria and other royals whose influence over British foreign policy was in truth rather small. On the other hand, she is excellent on how Russian spies broke British diplomatic codes, passing the sensitive correspondence to Alexander III (1881-94) and inspiring him to write “numerous and usually acerbic annotations in Russian on the telegrams”.

Emerson has a sharp eye for the unusual or entertaining detail, as in her account of Lord Curzon’s career before he became viceroy of India and later foreign secretary. In the late 1880s, Curzon toured Russia’s recently acquired central Asian possessions “with a quantity of luggage incredible today — it included bedding, a rubber bath, tinned meat, chocolate and flea powder”.

In 1892, Curzon published Persia and the Persian Question, a book that warned of Russia: “She regards the future partition of Persia as a prospect scarcely less certain of fulfilment than the achieved partition of Poland.” In the end, Persia was not partitioned but divided in the early 20th century into British and Russian spheres of influence. One strength of Emerson’s book is that she reminds us how such actions — in Afghanistan as well as Persia — left abiding memories in these countries of the high-handedness of foreign imperialism.

Britain and Russia eventually settled their differences in a 1907 convention that came about partly because of Russia’s weakness after its defeat at Japan’s hands in a 1904-05 war, but more especially because of the two countries’ shared fear of the rise of Germany. Some hardliners and liberals in London, and some hawks in St Petersburg, were suspicious of the deal, Emerson writes. But Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany grasped the true meaning of the Anglo-Russian pact: “When taken all around, it is aimed at us.”

The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century, by Barbara Emerson, Hurst £35/$54.99, 544 pages

Tony Barber is the FT’s European comment editor

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