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Contemporary writers have gone to great lengths to depict the recent and rapid growth of the Soviet naval and merchant fleets and their operations in the Mediterranean and on the high seas as the culmination of several centuries of Russian naval history and tradition. Such an interpretation, however, is not supported by any analysis of Russian history that looks beyond the obvious pattern of limited naval warfare, flurries of ship construction, and intermittent efforts to achieve some technological breakthrough. Recent surveys, basically superficial and uncritical, have cast the rise of Soviet naval power in a false perspective. Journalistic writers, usually quoting one another, have created a naval tradition where, relatively speaking, none existed. They have apparently felt compelled to do this in order to demonstrate the "logic” of Soviet naval development. Thus, they have failed to make the most crucial point of all, that the rise of Soviet naval power since World War II defies the "logic” of Russian history. The first step toward an accurate and proper assessment of Soviet intentions must begin with that recognition. Soviet naval development since the mid-1950s is remarkable and ominous precisely because of Russia’s feeble naval heritage. Current developments demand serious attention because they depart significantly from the historical pattern of Russian naval strategy and policy and leave us, therefore, without clear points of reference.
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The possibility that Tsarist and Soviet regimes could follow similar policies in pursuit of common national objectives has engaged historians and analysts for half a century. Their interest recognizes that the Bolsheviki fell heir to most of the potentials and limitations of the old regime. This problem of continuity and change bears particular relevance to naval affairs because of the relative immutability of the geo-strategic factors underlying national policy. The relative permanence of the foundations of naval strategy makes it all the more remarkable, therefore, that the questionable theory of Russia’s "urge to the sea” has never been tested against Tsarist naval policies. Indeed, Russian naval policy itself has received scant attention. Although any survey of pre-revolutionary strategy and policy can contribute only peripherally to the analysis of Soviet affairs, it can free current analysis from the fetters of mythology and direct attention to the real world.
The growth of the Russian empire was attended by a refusal to annex non-contiguous territory that would depend on seapower for colonization, sustenance, and defense. Russia’s emergence out of the depths of the Eurasian plain clearly fostered the Russians’ historically negative attitude toward the sea. This negativism in turn accounted for the mediocre capabilities of the Russian Navy throughout most of the country’s his-
tory. The rationale behind the acquisition and develop ment of naval bases underscores the essentially passim role of the Russian Navy.
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The Russian conquest of northern Eurasia consisted of a series of aggressions, each required or suggested by its predecessor. A variety of rationalizations and "necessities”—a kind of manifest destiny—justified this expansion. An urge to the sea was never, with on® exception, one of them. The need for a warm-wate® port was suggested only occasionally and then as a® afterthought.
Blue water ports, remote from concentrations of population and power, were the results—not the goals—of Russian expansion. The logic of Russia® imperialism dictated that they would become terminals marking the perimeters of an exclusively continental empire, not bases for further expansion. Having reached the water’s edge, the Russians were compelled to pro- vide maritime defenses. The naval arm that they developed always served, until recently, to meet these essentially local, defensive requirements.
The traditional strategic deficiency of the Russia® Navy reflected a national policy that never sought to exercise control over the sea lanes leading to Russia The Muscovite princes, who maintained a monopol) in international commerce, were content to allow foreign merchants to come in foreign ships to Russia Their only positive effort to facilitate foreign seaborne commerce was the drive to the Baltic, initiated by Iva® IV (1533-84) and completed by Peter the Great i® 1721. The weak mercantile class that emerged in Russia in the 19th century created some pressure for maritim® development, but the response was limited. The Tsari[1]1 government persisted throughout the 19th century i® its passive attitude toward oceanic commerce and i® its accustomed reluctance to expose Russia to the superior naval power of European rivals.
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Although Russia emerged from the European victor)' over Napoleon as the dominant military power on th® continent, England still ruled the seas. Alexander 1 (1801-25) tried nevertheless to develop naval force* capable of supporting Russia’s growing interest in the Far East. Russian ships ranged the Pacific from Bering * Strait to Antarctica. By mid-century, Russian mariner* had completed 36 circumnavigations, and Russia® traders had scattered outposts along the western coa*1 of North America. European and domestic problems- compounded by growing friction with the British and Americans in the Pacific, cut short these enterprise* In 1818, Alexander vetoed an offer to annex the Hawaiian Islands. Their possession, he declared, would serve no useful purpose but could create difficulties fo( Russia with Great Britain and the United States.
Fifty years later the Russians sold what they could
Russia’s Fictitious Naval Tradition 67
not hope to hold. Having already retreated from California, Russia disposed of Alaska because of the excessive cost of its administration and the impossibility of defending it against hostile British seapower.
The Russians owed their brief success in the northern Pacific to the absence of competition. The rapid development of the Pacific basin and the intrusion of new political forces raised the ante higher than they were
Russia’s future in the Pacific. The committee concluded that Russia had no role to play in that part of the world and advised against the acquisition. In 1884, Germany annexed the territory.
Although Russia’s restraint was less evident in the Near East, the same principles operated there. Repeated crises in the European and Asiatic provinces of the moribund Ottoman empire presaged the collapse of
willing to go. Rejecting the alternative of an active naval policy, they withdrew to the Asian mainland where thqir military superiority remained unchallenged for a time.
A major decision during the reign of Alexander II (1855-81) reconfirmed this policy. In 1876, the Russian geographer N. N. Mikluko-Maklay proposed that Russia annex territory along the northern coast of New Guinea. Among his arguments for annexation was the possibility of developing there a naval bastion halfway between Europe and the empire’s Pacific provinces. The Tsar appointed a select committee to consider this proposal within the context of the larger question of
Turkish authority, foreign intervention, and partition. Each crisis renewed European fears of an imminent Russian occupation of Constantinople and the Dardanelles and seemed to portend the eruption of Russia into the Mediterranean.
The Dardanelles and the Bosporus straits, of course, were the crux of Russia’s strategic interest in the Near East, but Russian motives and ambitions there were widely misunderstood and exaggerated. Defeat in the Crimean War forged Tsardom’s final attitude toward the Straits. That conflict had seen Anglo-French forces humiliate Russia on its Black Sea coast. The defeat underscored for Russia the treachery of the sea and the penalties of naval indifference. In the next decades, therefore, the Russians directed much attention toward a satisfactory solution of the Eastern Question. Alexander III (1881-94) emphasized the importance of this area in 1885:
"In my opinion we ought to have one principal aim, the occupation of Constantinople, so that we may maintain ourselves once and for all at the Straits and know that they will remain in our hands. This is in the interest of Russia and ought to be our aspiration.”
The aggressive pursuit of this objective contributed to the lingering misunderstanding of the motive behind it.
Haunted by the Crimean defeat, the Russians perceived only that the Straits were Europe’s entrance to the Black Sea and the vulnerable southern flank of the Russian empire. Europeans, of course, saw the Straits as Russia’s access to the Mediterranean. Europeans, therefore, understandably regarded every Russian effort to secure the Black Sea coast as the prelude to a unilateral solution of the Eastern Question and a thrust into the Mediterranean. The Russians were undeniably capable of contemplating this. Their policy, however, was less ambitious. Even though they saw absolute possession of the Straits as the solution to their strategic problem, the balance of power dictated caution, and caution led to a prudent compromise that closed the Straits to all warships.
The intensity of the Anglo-Russian rivalry prevented the British from interpreting Russia’s demonstrable interest in the Straits as anything less than an effort to disrupt or sever England’s vital sea route to India. Indeed, the British perceived every Russian advance in Asia as part of a master plan to overthrow British rule in India. The specter of the Russian bear thrashing about in the waters of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and even the Pacific was enough to distract any English gentleman. England’s
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The much-heralded "threat to India” opened numtf ous opportunities to Russian diplomacy. The Russian* assumed that pressure anywhere along a line from the Balkans to the Pamirs might induce Westminster to adopt a more tractable attitude toward Russian interests in the Near East. The British, for example, lived if constant dread of a Russian thrust into Afghanistan' By 1881, however, the Russians had concluded that this would be unnecessary. Archives of the Russian General Staff contain a reference to "a menacing position” o'1 the Afghan frontier which would, when the opportu- nity presented itself, "enable us to exert the pressutf that could settle the Eastern Question in Europe.”
The Russian government, therefore, had little reason to allay the fears of England or Europe. The propensit)' of foreigners to magnify Russian power and intentions served as a substitute for real power, at least until tht Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905. Tht Western powers also construed Russian naval activity in grander terms than policies or objectives actually warranted.
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By 1897, Russia, with half the naval forces of Eng' land, ranked third among the world’s naval powers The modern renaissance of the Tsarist navy began in the aftermath of the Crimean War. The construction program that gave Russia the appearance of a naval power was erratically sustained during the rest of the century. Remilitarization of the Black Sea and tht maritime defense of the Pacific empire inspired these efforts. The Franco-Russian alliance, concluded in 189^ secured Russia’s western frontiers and allowed it to pursue a more active policy in the East.
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During the 1890s, an apparent Russian interest in acquiring naval bases and coaling stations in southern seas intensified British apprehensions and lent further credibility to the aggressive impulse implicit in the association of Russia and warm water. France encouraged and attempted to facilitate Russian acquisitions along the southern perimeters of Asia. Paris hoped in this way to strengthen the alliance and gain valued Russian support in the colonial competition with Eng' land. Thus the French encouraged the Russians to share or develop their own facilities at Saigon (Cam Ranh Bay), urged them to occupy a base at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, and offered to lease the port of Obok in French Somaliland. Russia’s replies to France were the same as its response to Bismarck who, in 1885 had invited Russia to occupy some of Egypt’s former possessions on the Red Sea. Russia declined all offers. This was hardly the response expected of the world’s third naval power, hardly evidence of a lust for warm water, hardly the reaction of a government confident of its
Russia’s Fictitious Naval Tradition 69
naval prowess. It was, however, a Russian response.
England and France, suffering from a myopia born of their own maritime experiences, failed to understand Russian policy as the policy of a continental power. They naturally assumed that the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, would play a prominent role in linking the European and Asiatic possessions of the Russian empire. As naval powers themselves, they could appreciate the logic of Russia’s interest in a string of coaling stations and bases in the equatorial seas from Suez to Saigon.
But the Russians had reached quite different conclusions. Their strategy and policy logically reflected the view from the Volga rather than the estuaries of the European capitals. In 1891, they began and, in 1903, they completed the great transcontinental railway that was to serve as Russia’s main artery to the east. Not a sea route, but a 6,000-mile railroad was to become the key to Russian military and commercial supremacy in northern Asia. Indeed, the railway was expected to sustain the Pacific fleet.
There remained, nevertheless, the problem of defending three maritime coasts half a world apart. Confronted with the prohibitive cost of a three-ocean navy, the government of Alexander III decided on a Baltic
fleet to maintain parity with Germany and a strategic fleet to rotate between the Black Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Facilities at Vladivostok were to be large enough to accommodate both the Pacific squadrons and the long-range cruisers of the Black Sea fleet. The limited fuel capacity of the ships, however, made it impossible to rotate the fleet without intermittent coaling stations. The government refused nevertheless to consider the annexation of remote territories: overseas bases there would be the hostages of foreign naval power, ultimately indefensible, and therefore useless in time of war. For these reasons, the strategic plan could not be put into effect.
A Soviet destroyer escort refuels from a cruiser in the Philippine Sea in a technique pioneered, not by Americans during World War II, but by the Russian Baltic fleet racing to meet its doom at the hands of the Japanese at Tsushima in 1904. Refueling at sea, then, was not a bold Russian innovation, but a technique conceived in weakness and born out of desperation.
Then, in 1888, the naval ministry came forward with a revolutionary solution, a plan that dispensed with the need for far-flung bases. The ministry proposed to develop a fleet of "large trans-oceanic transports that will serve in wartime as coaling vessels and be dispatched to various points in order to refuel the cruisers [at sea].”
This plan satisfied every Russian requirement. It was adopted and set in motion. One phase involved extensive hydrographic, meteorologic, and coastal surveys in order to determine suitable anchorages for the refueling operations. Throughout the 1890s, Russian naval vessels assigned to this mission systematically surveyed the southern rim of Asia from the Red Sea to the China Sea. The British, totally unaware of the significance of these operations, could only imagine the worst. St. Petersburg did nothing to dispel the rumors or speculation that fed British fears.
The proposed modernization of the fleet proceeded neither as rapidly nor as extensively as planned, how-
ever. The transports, which were the key to the strategy problem, were never built. In other aspects as well, the Russian Navy found itself critically unprepared for the war with Japan that began in 1904. The stunning and decisive destruction of the main body of the Baltic flee’ at Tsushima reduced Russia to sixth place in naval tonnage. But the prelude to Tsushima—the transfer ol the Russian fleet from the Baltic to the Pacific—offered remarkable proof of the feasibility of the concept of strategic mobility. The refueling of the fleet at stt
using German colliers, was unprecedented in nav^ annals, and contemporary naval observers were dub impressed. The great naval powers, including tb United States, were quick to understand the implic* tions of this achievement, and the transition from co»* to oil greatly simplified the problem. While refueM at sea is best remembered in connection with U-- naval operations in the Pacific in World War II, it W** originally a Russian technique conceived in weakne^ and born out of desperation.
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An unmistakable continuity of policy has seen tbc Soviet Navy maintain ships in the Mediterranean afl“ elsewhere until recently without permanent install* tions. These operations undoubtedly owe much to thc Soviet effort to master the logistic techniques develop^ by the U. S. Navy in World War II. But this mobile also responds to Russian naval experience. Even mo^' it reflects Soviet recognition of the enduring validity- for Russia, of the principles that guided Tsarist strateg! in the 19th century, principles whose validity is U*1'
Russia’s Fictitious Naval Tradition 71
diminished by technological change or the shifting balance of naval power.
America, however, having accepted Britain’s trident, had also absorbed its myths and legends. The United States rose to world prominence during the most intense phase of the Anglo-Russian rivalry. England’s indisputable position as the world’s premier naval power gave to British writings on naval and strategic affairs an authenticity and a bias that were difficult to challenge. Until 1945, moreover, American scholarship, nourished on British historians, made relatively little progress in shaping any independent interpretations of Russian history. Popularization of the pseudo-science of geopolitics assured broad acceptance of tidy concepts like "the urge to the sea.”
Thus we have attributed our positive values toward the sea to the Russians whose corresponding national attitudes have rarely been anything but passive or negative. Seafaring people originally settled this continent, and maritime developments have always played a major role in America’s history. American folklore has typically depicted the sea as the high road to romance and adventure. At any point in our history the sea has been an asset—first as a barrier and then as a thoroughfare for the assertion of national interests.
Russians have never held the positive maritime values credited to them by the Atlantic nations. For Russia, the sea has been at best a strange and uncertain frontier and, at worst, an area of national vulnerability. Russians established their first tenuous links with the sea from deep within the continent. Russian folklore found its legends among long-suffering heroes who braved raging torrents and treacherous forests or who ranged, unshackled as the wind, across feathery steppes.
At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter the Great launched a Russian Navy by forcing his subjects to take to the water in pursuit of national objectives which he alone had conceived and which he alone comprehended. His successors for the most part lacked both his will and his limited appreciation of seapower.
Except for an occasional brief renaissance, the Russian Navy languished and decayed as traditional Russian norms reasserted themselves. The vast depths of Russia remained its proven and trusted first line of defense; its sea coasts remained its most vulnerable frontiers. The lessons of the past guided Russia in the two great wars of this century. Only since World War II has Soviet naval development appeared to mark a radical departure from tradition.
But one disturbing fact remains. Great national efforts in the U.S.S.R. are characteristically accompanied by a tremendous production of popular and scholarly literature designed to emphasize a tradition or even to create one if it does not exist. The Soviet rediscovery of Africa in the mid-1950s, for example, brought forth numerous studies on the historic links between the peoples of Russia and Africa in order to emphasize the continuity of Russian interest in that part of the world. In contrast, Russian naval history has received curiously little attention. The typical study is likely to be an account of some obscure amphibious operation in World War II—occasionally nothing more than a river crossing. The turn of the century offers those most cherished of all topics, the Potemkin mutiny and the revolutionary activity of the Baltic sailors during World War I. Or there are Klado and Makarov, creative naval thinkers to whom, however, no one paid much attention. This is hardly material on which to predicate a naval heritage.
Ironically, a Russian naval tradition is being created and fostered in the West by writers who seem to be completely unaware of the poverty of Russia’s naval and maritime history.
Dr. Rollins completed his Ph.D. in History at Syracuse University in 1966. He held a temporary appointment as assistant professor of history in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 1966-67. Since 1967, he has been an associate professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He has written on various aspects of Russian history and policy for The National Observer, The Russian Review, and the Slavic Review. During the summer of 1971, he taught and studied in the Soviet Union and Finland.
Men, Like Sheep, Shall Not Pass
During a joint maneuver of the Turkish Navy with the Army Commandos, in a district covered with forests, the Navy commander ordered a sergeant to make a reconnaissance of a bridge down in a valley and report its condition.
After saluting briskly, the sergeant disappeared into the forest. A long time passed and he did not return. The commander wondered uneasily what could have happened to him. Finally, the sergeant emerged from the bushes panting and with his uniform torn.
"What happened?” asked the commander.
"I made a reconnaissance of the bridge, sir,” the sergeant replied breathlessly. "Motorized vehicles can pass; guns and tanks can also pass. But the infantry cannot pass.”
The commander was baffled. "And why cannot the infantry pass?”
"There is a huge sheep dog, sir!”
—Contributed by Lt. Cdr. Osman Ondes, Turkish Navy