Rolf Petri – The ‘Russian Threat’ against European Unity: Variants of an Old Tale

At least since the time of the Great Northern War (1700–21), the allegation of Russian ambitions to conquer Europe has been spun and disseminated by Western diplomatic and political circles, mostly on the basis of projections and forged ‘evidence’.

Rolf Petri, Ph.D., is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

With permission from Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved: “European Unity and the ‘Enemies of Humankind’: The French Revolution, Napoleon and the Case of Russia, 1791–1814”. In: Waging War and Making Peace: European Ways of Inciting and Containing Armed Conflict, 1710-1960, eds. M. D’Auria, R. Petri, J. Vermeiren, Berlin, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025, pp. 109-133.

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Introduction

“What happens if, in fact, you have Putin continue to go into NATO? We have an Article Five agreement, attack on one is attack on all. You want to start the nuclear war he keeps talking about, go ahead, let Putin go in and control Ukraine and then move on to Poland and other places.” When uttering these words in the Atlanta presidential debate on June 27, 2024, then U.S. President Joseph Biden resorted to an ages-old trope. According to a deeply engrained belief, since Peter the Great ‘Russian imperialism’ has been pursuing the goal of conquering Europe. Why? It does so out of a “perennial hunger for land”, the German magazine Geschichte recently claimed. And to prepare for the big grab, evil Russia disrupts European unity. In 2019, euronews reported a senior policy fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations as saying that “Russia meddles in European domestic affairs to try and destabilise the European Union.”

Why do similar claims widely resonate with the Western public, while officially declared goals of Russian foreign policy do not? Why can allegations regarding the Russian threat against Europe make a new phase of rearmament and ‘readiness for war’ acceptable in the eyes of large parts of the population despite their negative social and economic consequences?

We believe it is because similar claims fall on a fertile ground prepared for centuries by ‘recited truths’, to use Michel de Certeau’s expression. The allegation that Russia wants to dominate and ultimately conquer Europe, and is therefore interfering in the internal affairs of European states and trying to undermine European unity could already be read in a ‘secret document’ from 1797. When decades later this document turned out to be forged, its content had already become a truism due to an endless chain of references and repetitions. At this point, even the exposure of the forgery could no longer impair, let alone refute, it’s ‘recited truth’. In the broad consciousness of the European public, although the document was forged, its content remained true, whatever a Russian or Soviet government might put forth in the opposite sense.

Peter I and Russian expansion in the eighteenth century

In the Great Northern War of 1700–21, a coalition of Russia, Denmark, Saxony and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which would unite with the Cossack Hetmanates and other allies, managed to curb the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in Northern and Central-Eastern Europe. The conflict began in the Baltic area and escalated after a Swedish intervention on the side of the Warsaw Confederation formed by oppositional Polish magnates inside the Commonwealth. The anti-Russian coalition was joined in due course by the sides-switching Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa, while the hostility of the Ottoman Empire was held back by a freshly signed peace treaty. In the most important battle of the war, which took place at Poltova in 1709, Russian troops led by Peter I defeated the Swedish army decisively. Apparently, the circulation of supposed ‘revelations’ regarding Peter’s expansionist intentions go back to that period. It was a matter of war propaganda that could leverage an already consolidated Russophobe stereotype circulating in Western Europe since the previous century, according to which Russia was populated by barbarians and ruled by despots

Two diplomatic memorials, produced around 1706 for the Ottoman Grand Vizir Ali Pasha by the Hungarian envoys János Pápai and Ferenc Horváth, alleged Peter’s intention to expand his rule over foreign territories. A couple of years later, another Hungarian diplomat, Máte Talaba, delivered a ‘secret document’ in which the tsar elaborated his plans of action against the Ottoman Empire. The text was sent through Charles XII, King of Sweden, to the Tartar Khan and the Ottoman Sultan to convince them to act against Russia. But the original document ‘went missing’ and only a purported summary of it survived, which had been drawn by Pylyp Orlyk, a Polish Orthodox who had married into the Cossack aristocracy making a political career in the Zaporozhian Host under Hetman Mazepa, who defected to Charles XII in 1708. Orlyk’s summary of the dreadful threats that Peter I’s plans of expansion represented to Europe anticipated the argumentation patterns of later circulating, supposedly secret, but never directly documented plans of Peter the Great for domination.

If seen from Constantinople, Russian efforts to gain control over the northern shores and obtain freedom of navigation in the Ottoman dominated Black Sea, as well as the Russian sense of religious duty to avenge 1453, needed hardly any revelation of ‘secrets’ to be taken seriously. After Poltova and Charles’ retreat to Moldavia, Sultan Ahmed III barely avoided being drawn into a major conflict with Peter. But later in the century, under the reign of Catherine the Great, Russian-Ottoman tensions around Podolia and the Danuban Principalities led to a land war in 1768–74, while Count Alexsei Orlov’s fleet harassed the Ottomans in the Mediterranean instigating Greek and Mameluke revolts and fighting the Ottoman navy in the Aegean Archipelago and the Levant. After the Ottoman defeat in 1774, Russia obtained coastlands between Bug and Dnieper, freedom of navigation in the Black Sea, the right to cross the straits for Russian commercial vessels and the right to build an Orthodox church in Constantinople. This was only the prelude to the incorporation of the Crimean Khanate into the Russian Empire in 1783, the further extension of the Russian coastline in the western direction and the foundation of Odessa after victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–92.

However, during the eighteenth century, the Tsarist Empire was far from being the only power interested in weakening the Ottomans. Without even mentioning Great Britain and other powers, behind the Ottoman’s back their old friend, the Kingdom of France, began to play double games against them. They were the ones who had pressed Mustafa III to go to war against Russia in 1768. While publicly sustaining the Ottomans, French diplomats secretly made plans regarding the ‘independence’ of parts of the Empire, in particular Egypt, should their Ottoman ‘ally’ lose or be decisively weakened. Previously, a famous French diplomat and spy, Charles d’Éon de Beaumont (or Lia de Beaumont under their female identity), approached the tsarist court at the height of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) to curry favour for a French–Russian alliance. In 1757, d’Éon wrote a memorandum that realistically described the Tsarina’s intentions with regards to Poland predicting her role in the process that would lead to the First Partition of Poland in 1772. But he also added that her manoeuvres were following a scheme already excogitated by Peter the Great to strategically come closer to the territories of the German Empire, with which Russia began practicing policies of dynastic intermarriage. In later decades, d’Éon’s remarks would be taken as another piece of evidence for the long-standing Russian expansionist drive.

A Polish Sympathizer of the French Revolution launches Peter the Great’s “Will”
In 1797 Michał Sokolnicki, a general of the French Republic’s Légion Polonaise, presented to the Directorate a resumé purportedly transcribed in secretive Russian archives. It was supposed to report the secret plans of Peter the Great and detailed instructions given to his heirs. The Résumé du Plan de l’agrandissement de la Russie et de l’asservissement de l’Europe trace par Pierre I was similar to another document presented in 1794 by Nicolas de Tombeur, a French journalist based in Poland. Both documents contained assumptions regarding Russian territorial expansionism toward Central and South Asia with the aim of building a great Oriental empire; the aspirations for gaining hegemony over Orthodox Christianity; the neo-Byzantinist desire of reconquering Constantinople and asserting Greco–Slavic supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean; and, finally, aspirations toward subjugating Sweden and Poland or parts of them.

Most of these goals were eighteenth-century commonplaces corroborated by public declarations of the Tsarist Empire or accomplished facts. If they had ever held some value of secrecy, they certainly did not do so in 1797. But Sokolnicki’s version contained also unprecedented allegations, according to which Peter the Great encouraged his successors to obtain Western specialist knowledge through industrial espionage and intensified Russian–British trade relations. Furthermore, he directed his heirs to “play off France and Austria against each other”; even more importantly, they should relentlessly meddle with European affairs, “especially those of Germany”; and, finally, they should not shy away from militarily attack continental Europe as a whole should resistance against Russian hegemony be impossible to quell with milder methods. “The fact, the new proof, was the formidable plan of Europe’s enslavement under the Russian yoke”, the general’s great-grandson Michał Hubert Sokolnicki, a Polish historian and future diplomat of the Piłsudski government, would write in 1912.

Propagandistic uses of ‘Peter’s Will’

For around ten years France, concerned with other theatres of war in Europe and the Mediterranean, had no political use for Sokolnicki’s ‘revelation’, although already in 1804, the freshly enthroned emperor Napoleon I sustained that since Peter the Great the Russians were working on a plan for global expansion and therefore should be contrasted by war. According to Bonaparte, Poland in particular was befallen by a Russian “swarm of fanatics and barbarians”. After victory in the War of the Fourth Coalition of 1806–07 against Prussia and Russia, Polish loyalty was rewarded with the institution of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, but the full restoration of the Polish Kingdom in the eyes of French and Polish propagandists required a strategic defeat of Russia.

In preparation of the 1812 invasion, which Napoleon would try to legitimise as the “second Polish Campaign”, a scholar in the service of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Charles-Louis Lesur, published a book titled Des progrès de la puissance russe, which included an adapted wording of the document deposited by Sokolnicki, although not the Polish general but the British former consul to Russia, William Eton, was referenced as a testimony that “there exist, in the particular archives of the Russian emperors, secret memoirs personally written by Peter I, which expose the projects that this prince had conceived and recommended to the attention of his successors”. Among the recommendations there was the urge “to get involved at all costs, either by force or by cunning, in the quarrels of Europe”, and this also meant that if there were no such quarrels but unity, Russian ambitions would fail. The Russian conspiracy foresaw that after weakening Britain and Northern Europe as well as winning Habsburg’s neutrality, Russian ships would dump on Western European shores “all these nomadic peoples, fierce and greedy for booty, to flood Italy, Spain and France, some of whose inhabitants will be looted, other enslaved and abducted to repopulate the deserts of Siberia, the remaining will be made unable to throw off the yoke.” After that, Russia could be certain “to overcome and subjugate the rest of Europe”. Vis-à-vis a similarly horrifying threat, preserving Europe’s freedom, order and unity required decisive action. On 24 June 1812, the Grande Armée crossed the Russian border; Napoleon later was reported as saying that he wanted expel Russia “from Europe so that it would not ruin the unity of this system”. However, this was the first decisive step towards the Corsican’s downfall three years later.

Napoleon’s hapless invasion of Russia was also a prelude to the Congress of Vienna, which marked the formal ‘restauration’ not only of European dynastic rulers but also of Russia’s victorious return on the scene of European power politics. On the level of international relations and diplomacy, between the Congress of Vienna and the Crimean War, the Tsarist, Habsburg and British Empires represented the ultimate guarantors of the European order. Since at least the eighteenth century, among Western European rulers and intellectuals Russia had not only detractors, but also important sympathizers, the majority of whom – like the philosopher Joseph de Maistre – during and after the French Revolution could be found on the conservative side of the aisle. During the entire first half of the nineteenth century, in Catholic and Protestant countries Russophobe or Russophile inclinations tended to differ strongly among political factions. After the ‘liberal’ Tsar Alexander I had died and Greek independence been achieved with Russian support, the polarizing European rhetoric regarding Russia was reignited by the harsh repression of the Polish November Uprising in 1830–31. Numerous Polish patriots fled to France, where, in 1836, Frédéric Gaillardet reinserted Peter I’s ‘secret plan’ in his fictional memoirs of Charles d’Éon. The author insisted that d’Éon had been able to transcribe the text from secret archives. It was since Gaillardet’s publication that it would be commonly referred to as ‘The Will of Peter the Great’.

In the following years, ‘Peter’s Will’ was translated into various European languages and accepted as authentic by a number of scholars. It was used in Leonard Chodźko’s La Pologne historique, litteraire, monumentale et pittoresque (1839) and other works. Since neo-absolutist governments in Europe relied on Russia as a bulwark of the Congress order, for many republicans, democrats and liberals who fought for a constitution, Russia’s autocratic monarchy personified restoration at its worst, and the Testament was cited as a proof. During the years that preceded the 1848 Revolution, it became a major proof of the despotic character of the Russian government and the reactionary subversion that tsarism exerted inside Europe, aligning itself with neo-absolutist tyrants to suffocate progress. Later, the ‘Will’ was quoted to explain the support that the tsar had lent to the Habsburgs in 1849 in quelling revolution in Austria and independence in Hungary. In 1853, in the run-up to the Crimean War, Napoleon III put posters of ‘Peter’s Will’ all over the streets of Paris. In 1863, when the Polish January Uprising was repressed and residual forms of Polish autonomy ended, many opinion-makers would see the endeavor for the ultimate Russification of Europe confirmed.

The forgery is exposed … but the message lives on

Nonetheless, critical voices regarding ‘Peter’s Will’ could also be heard. In 1859, Gustav Berkholz, a German librarian of Riga, concluded on the basis of logical deduction not only that the ‘Will’ could hardly be authentic but also that Lesur, the writer of the book where the ‘document’ was reported, could not be himself the author of the forgery. This was because neither Peter would have called the Orthodox faith “schismatic” nor would a scholar like Lesur make the mistake of attributing to him similar expressions. Such inconsistencies could only have been dictated to Lesur by a higher-placed person, and some stylistic twists pointed to an Italian influence, as one might suspect from a Corsican.

In the 1870s, when Russia helped to drive out the Ottomans from most parts of the Balkans, in the press of continental Europe the usual Russophobe tones partly subsided. Germany, in particular, under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, was open to less hostile views over Russia, engaging in a number of important treaties in the realm of security and economic cooperation. Against the backdrop of a less tense diplomatic atmosphere, the scholarly scepticism regarding ‘Peter’s Will’ gained traction. In 1879, German historian Harry Breßlau, who examined Sokolnicki’s document that in the meantime had emerged from the archives, concluded in an article written for the highly regarded Historische Zeitschrift that the text drafted by “Sokolnicki or his source” was indeed written prior to Lesur’s version as it contained linguistic fallacies that an educated French writer would have avoided. With Breßlau’s refutation, the remaining credibility of the testament disappeared in the academic realm.

However, at the time when the forgery was revealed, the underlying message had already penetrated large parts of European public opinion, so that explicit references to the false ‘Will’ became superfluous. By the detractors of Russia its contents were widely acknowledged to be incontrovertible truths that helped to interpret even newly arising facts and situations. In Germany, after Bismarck resigned in 1890, Russia-friendly voices were increasingly marginalized. Prussian general Friedrich von Bernhardi became one of the leading anti-Russian agitators depicting the Tsarist Empire as Germany’s main adversary in the coming war. On 4 August 1914, during the Reichstag debate on war credits, also the SPD parliamentary group was concerned in particular with the Russian threat. They declared that the “fear of an enemy invasion looms over us. (…) Our people and their future freedom risk a lot, if not everything, in the event of a victory of Russian despotism already stained with the blood of the best of its own people. We must counter this danger and secure the culture and independence of our country”. In the Polish context, historian Micha Hubert Sokolnicki admitted that his great-grandfather had produced a forged document, but emphasized that it nonetheless accurately depicted the long-term objectives of Russian expansionism.

Tsar or Stalin: “It’s Russia, stupid!”

For more than hundred years, tropes referring to Tsarist absolutism in terms of tyranny and despotism had gained traction among liberals, republicans and socialists, while the minority of sympathizers of Russia were typically conservatives. After the October Revolution of 1917 most of these conservatives also turned their back on ‘Russia’ (in common speech, this denomination was often extended to ‘Soviet Russia’ and even the Soviet Union), while the Marxist wing of the labour movement and a number of left-wing intellectuals shifted to a positive view. In 1918–20, a broad Western and Japanese coalition of eleven countries intervened militarily in the Russian Civil War on the side of the White Army to prevent Soviet power from stabilizing. Geographer Halford Mackinder, in his role of British High Commissioner to South Russia, favoured the division of Soviet Russia into a number of smaller nation states. Years later Winston Churchill would publicly regret that the “strangling of Bolshevism at its birth” remained unsuccessful. Nonetheless, some European governments and political forces tried to establish non-hostile diplomatic relations with the USSR, but they experienced harsh opposition. In Germany, industrialist and Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who out of national and economic interest sought reconciliation with ‘Soviet Russia’, was murdered by nationalist forces.

In the following years, in centrist and right-wing political rhetorics anti-Bolshevism became increasingly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism on the one hand and the traditional anti-Russian resentments on the other. Europe’s universal mission of ‘civilization’ continued to be opposed to Russo-Asiatic ‘barbarism’, and the USSR remained the nemesis of Europe that Russia had been since Peter the Great. As Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi summarized this sentiment in his famous pan-European booklet of the early 1920s, the “whole European question culminates in the Russian problem. The main aim of European policy must be to prevent a Russian invasion. There is only one way to prevent this: the unification of Europe”.

Coudenhove-Kalergi was a sympathizer of Fascism but a fervent opponent of Nazism, an apparent contradiction easy to explain in the context of Austrian politics. That other Austrian who became Reichskanzler of Germany in 1933 and its Führer in the following years, shared with Napoleon and Coudenhove the mainstream view on ‘Russia’ as the nemesis of Europe and its unity. At the Nuremberg Reichsparteitag of 1937, Adolf Hitler accused Russia of being “a brutal dictatorship” and “the greatest menace to the culture and civilization of mankind”. He continued that “the Russia of today is fundamentally the Russia of 200–300 years ago”, and exactly like back in Peter’s days, Russia’s goal remained “the destruction of Europe”. He added that “immunity against the threat is all the more necessary as in our Europe the destiny of each people is conditioned by the destiny of all other peoples”.

In June 1941, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop explained the attack on the USSR with the necessity to prevent Russian methods of “causing disintegration among foreign nations” and the Third Reich’s endeavor, which resulted from such conspiracy, “to establish a sound order in Europe”. In early 1942, Berlin historian Wilhelm Schüßler published a scholarly article in Zeitschrift für Politik under the title “Von Peter dem Großen bis Stalin” where he equated the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath with the removal of a thin elitist European patina and the reappearance, below it, of the true Asiatic character of the country, symbolized by the “relocation of the capital from Petersburg to Moscow”. The author of the widely circulating article insisted on the continuity of Russian ambitions to conquer of the West. Therefore, he glossed, the real falsehood of ‘Peter’s Will’ lay in the authorship rather than its contents, as the “Polish author has astutely grasped the real and stated aims of the Russian policy of his time and its methods”.

Conclusion
The claim that the USSR represented an existential danger to Europe seamlessly entered the rhetorical arsenal of the Cold War. In the late 1940s communist government was imposed on both willing and unwilling European countries inside the ‘Soviet sphere of interest’ delineated at Yalta. That this might have been a move to secure the Soviet’s western flank after the USA changed their posture under Harry S. Truman was not even considered. In his message to the Congress on the “Threat to the Freedom of Europe”, on March 17, 1948, U.S. President Truman claimed that the USA must “support those countries of Europe which are threatened with communist control”; but he also noted with satisfaction that fortunately “the free nations of Europe are drawing closer together for their economic well-being and for the common defence of their liberties”. As for Napoleon, Coudenhove-Kalergi and more recently the Axis powers, ‘European unity’ remained the best way to stonewall the purported Eurasian assault.

It is needless to say that in all such discourses the threat that Europe’s own power politics represented to the Russian Other was taken out of the equation. Since the reshaping of Westphalian concepts of public law in the eighteenth century by thinkers such as Emer de Vattel and Montesquieu, who tended to exempt ‘uncivilized’ and ‘despotic’ government from the principle of equality in international relations, the diplomatic realism of putting oneself in the shoes of the Other to integrate also their security concerns into a negotiable compromise, lost traction within the European context. Adversaries were targeted as ‘despotic oppressors’ to exempt them from the protections of international law according to convenience, be that to justify interference in their internal affairs or depict outright wars of aggression as an act of ‘defence’ – a fate that befell the Ottomans and the Tsars but also others, like Belgium, the Rhenish archbishoprics and Bavarian, Austrian and imperial domains and cities who became prey to the French army.

For being expressions of ‘despotic government’, Russian and Soviet concerns regarding the western flank of their immense country, which they considered as both foundational and vulnerable, were depicted as worthless propaganda. So was, and is, the idea that the experience of 1703, 1768, 1812, 1914, 1918 and 1941 might explain their desire to put a cordon sanitaire of neutrality between themselves and the core of western military power. In the West, a realistic consideration of similar concerns, as recently proposed by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has become the exception from the rule. Generally, what Russian representatives say is not worth being reported literally in the media and efforts of understanding are deemed to be treason. The European public is trained to believe that behind any Russian declaration there is a ‘secrete plan’, which only ‘experts’ like Sokolnicki and Lesur can decipher and explain to the wider audience. Which is not that difficult after all, given that according to the ‘truths’ that for centuries have been cited and recited the substance of the plan has remained the same.

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