RODERICK BEATON
Lucien J. Frary
RUSSIA AND THE MAKING OF MODERN GREEK IDENTITY, 1821–1844
320pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (US $100).
978 0 19 873377 5
At the beginning of the year 1843, the Greek government found itself without sufficient resources to repay the interest due on its external loan. One of the creditors, the Russian imperial government, came forward with a short-term bridging loan in March. But by May it was already clear that the unpopular austerity measures taken so far would not be enough even to repay the bridging loan, let alone the full amount of interest due on the external debt. And so on July 5, in London, a meeting of the three creditors (Russia, Great Britain and France) rescheduled part of the debt, taking effective control of the Greek economy to ensure that sufficient revenues were set aside to pay the annual charges. Then, on September 15, a coup d'état forced Greece's first king, Otto, to dismiss his government and grant a constitution. The King held on to his throne, but never regained his legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects after this first humiliating loss of sovereignty.
Sounds familiar? Replace the governments of the guarantor powers and the London Conference of 1843 with the Euro Summit in Brussels that dictated even more draconian terms to Greece, for very similar reasons, on July 13, 2015, and the script has hardly changed. At the time of writing, a new general election called for September 20 may once again bring about a change of government, and conceivably pave the way for a drastic change of alignment for Greece, with consequences no less far-reaching than those that followed in 1843–4.
In his new book, Lucien J. Frary helps us understand why. Ever since Greece became a sovereign nation according to the terms of the London Protocol of February 1830, signed into existence by those same great powers that would soon become the country's first creditors, successive Greek governments and elites have chosen to align the young nation state with Western Europe politically, culturally and economically – indeed in all spheres except religion. But when Prime Minister Tsipras and his energy minister (the latter now leader of an anti-European, anti-bail-out party) paid official visits to Moscow and St Petersburg in the spring and early summer of 2015, they were tapping into a deep seam of political memory among Greeks. Greece's westward alignment has never been achieved without cost, or without powerful internal upheavals. Again, Frary helps us understand the back story.
The first government anywhere in the world to enact policies that could loosely be termed "philhellenic" was that of Catherine the Great in the 1780s. When the Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire proclaimed their independence and the Greek Revolution began in 1821, the foreign power most likely to take an interest in their cause was Russia, which shared their Eastern Orthodox religion, along with political and cultural traditions going back to Byzantium. According to the story that has been written ever since, at least in English, the Russians thereafter proved a dire disappointment to the Greeks, while harbouring expansionist ambitions of their own, against which Western European interests had to be constantly vigilant.
Frary has examined for the first time a huge reservoir of unpublished Russian archives, which he situates alongside an impressive armoury of Greek sources to produce a meticulous and generally dispassionate account that challenges this conventional narrative. At times, the sheer wealth of documentation threatens to obscure the bigger picture. When broader conclusions are offered, they often beg others, still broader. It is striking, for instance, to be told that "from a purely military standpoint . . . no power contributed as much as Russia to the establishment of independent Greece"; but then, when Russia went to war with the Ottoman Empire in 1828–9, Greek independence was not one of its war aims and was only appended to the Treaty of Adrianople as something of an afterthought, as Frary himself makes clear.
It is convincingly demonstrated that Tsar Nicholas I had no designs either on Constantinople or on extending the territory of his empire at the expense of the Ottomans. Frary thinks this is enough to explode the "Russophobic" assumptions of Palmerston (and, be it said, of almost all British philhellenes of the period). On the other hand, he provides plenty of evidence that neither the Tsar nor his foreign minister, Count Nesselrode, had the slightest regard for Greek self-determination. Tsarist policy, it emerges clearly, was to see established in Greece a client, absolutist, Orthodox monarchy along Russian lines, to the extent that this could be achieved without breaking the "rules" of the post-1815 international order.
What put an end to these aspirations was the successful coup d'état in 1843 that forced King Otto to grant a constitution. Frary reproduces, in translation, the vicious words of Tsar Nicholas about his abject fellow monarch and, worse, against his own loyal representative in Athens, Gavriil Katakazy, who emerges as the understated hero of the second half of the book. It was too much for the Tsar to stomach that the same political forces in Greece that were the most staunchly pro-Russian had also masterminded the coup against a royal head of government, and almost universally applauded it. None of the leaders of the new Greek state, for all their many faults, and their genuine reverence, in many cases, for the religious traditions upheld by Russian Orthodoxy, had the least appetite for the "Official Nationality" promoted by Tsar Nicholas, based as it was on the very absolutism against which Greeks had fought to the death during the 1820s.
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