VOLUME XIII, No. 4 - History

Russian Arms for Franz Joseph
in 1849

December 22, 2022

‘Warsaw is lying at Your Majesty’s feet’, declared Field Marshal Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich to Tsar Nicholas I on 8 September 1831, after the Polish capital had opened its gates to him early at dawn the same day. Paskevich did not fail to call the Tsar’s attention to the fact that the Siege of Warsaw was crowned with the triumph of Russian arms on the anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, fought on the approaches to Moscow, where the Russians had prevailed over Napoleon on 7 September 1812. Nor was it a coincidence that, when choosing the harbinger to bring the news to the Emperor, Paskevich settled on co-captain and aide-de-camp to the Tsar Alexander Arkadyevich Suvorov, the grandson of the revered strategist Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov, who in 1794 had occupied Warsaw and crushed the Kościuszko uprising. ¹The war of independence to restore Poland’s sovereignty, which had broken out in November 1830, essentially came to a close with the fall of Warsaw. Saint Petersburg was boisterous with celebration, and Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin hailed Paskevich with a poem dedicated to him.

‘Hungary is lying at Your Majesty’s feet’, Field Marshal Paskevich relayed the news of Görgei’s surrender to Nicholas I from Debrecen on 13 August 1849, ² this time in the capacity of commander-in-chief of the Russian Army that had pushed into the Habsburg Empire at the urgent behest of the Austrian government. Delivery of the intelligence which, for all intents and purposes, signalled the demise of Hungary’s War of Independence of 1848–1849, was entrusted to Paskevich’s own son, Fyodor Ivanovich Paskevich, aide-de-camp to the Tsar, who had been waiting impatiently in Warsaw for the urgent news of the victory which he confidently expected. Destiny thus provided Paskevich with the opportunity to utter the same laconic, but all the more impressive, sentence twice in less than two decades. All he had to change was the name of the geographic location. Nowadays, one would say that he employed his propaganda tools expertly and successfully by hinting at historical analogies and electing the right person as the messenger—all in order to highlight his own personal achievements. Incidentally, Paskevich’s resounding statement did not entirely accord with reality. In the fall of 1831, by putting down the Polish War of Independence, Nicholas I was in the position to decide the fate of his subjects and of the Kingdom of Poland, now engulfed by his empire. In 1849, by contrast, he had extended military support to another, neighbouring power in its own territory. In other words, Hungary was not ‘lying at the feet of’ Nicholas I, but at those of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph and his vengeful government. Yet the Tsar and his court enjoyed another round of revelry and celebration, holding parades, handing down decorations in Warsaw, and brandishing the banners of the Hungarian defence forces as a token of victory all around Saint Petersburg and Moscow.

What Russia aimed to secure in the summer of 1849 was not simply the internal order of the Habsburg Empire, but the network of international relations among continental states that had been formed in 1815 but was undermined in 1848. The European powers fully concurred with this goal, and deemed it unconditionally essential, at least for the time being, to preserve the Habsburg Empire for the sake of maintaining the balance of power on the continent. Taken aback by the unexpected Hungarian military victories, they began to fear that power relations in Europe might be reshuffled. Be that as it may, Nicholas had done a thorough job paving the way for his military offensives through diplomatic channels. The pragmatism of the autocratic ruler is attested by his recognition of the new government of France in 1849, in spite of his deep-seated hatred of revolutions and republican movements.

Nor should we forget that Lord Palmerston, the Whig foreign minister of a country regarded for a century as the hotbed of democracy, entrusted to the despotic Tsar the fate of a constitutional Hungary that had followed the British ideal by conferring citizenship rights upon its disenfranchised serfs. When the Russian ambassador to London, Filipp Ivanovich Brunnov, tried to feel out impending British reactions to the armed response by Russia, Palmerston simply answered, ‘Get it done as soon as you can’. His words, recorded by the ambassador in a report to Chancellor Karl Vasilyevich Nesselrode on 11 May 1849, are so well known that they routinely appear in textbooks. Yet Brunnov also underlines circumstances that made a speedy and massive Russian intervention desirable for British politics. As the report suggests, there was reason to surmise that pro-constitution British public opinion, driven by its preference for a ‘fair fight’, would instinctively side with the underdog as soon as the imbalance of power became obvious. Moreover, the British people ‘had long been enthusiastic about Hungary’s supposedly ancient freedom. This half-barbaric, half-chivalrous country holds a sort of fascination for the English mind, linked with confused ideas about civilization as well as commercial and political ambitions of expansion along the Danube.’

The Duke of Wellington, the venerated, conservative field marshal who had triumphed at Waterloo, is reported with satisfaction by the Russian ambassador to have held similar views to those of the liberal Palmerston: ‘Bring in massive force, enough men, to stifle the anarchy’, he said. ‘You must wage a great war, commissioning great assets. These are at your disposal.’ Brunnov voiced his hope that joint action by Russia and Austria, ‘if delivering suitably swift results, will stem anarchy in Hungary before the rebels succeed in establishing a seemingly legitimate government of their own’. Should the war drag on, however, the British government might yield to the pressure of public opinion and re-evaluate its position. With France joining in, this could give a headache to the Russians. For the time being, however, there was not the faintest sign of protest in Britain against the intervention, as the ambassador hastened to reassure Saint Petersburg. ³

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy, if coupled with an end to Germany’s territorial fragmentation, would certainly have redrawn the political map of Europe. A newly unified Germany would have undermined the power position of the Russian Empire on the continent. It makes sense, then, that Russia, faced with the revolutions of 1848, followed with keen attention not only the growing popular movements in the Habsburg Empire and the success of the Hungarian armed resistance, but also the burgeoning plans for German unity—the proceedings of the liberal pan-German Parliament in Frankfurt, as well as the similar ambitions of the neighbouring Kingdom of Prussia. Another issue on the agenda was the case of the Polish state, dismembered by its neighbours in 1795. Tsarist Russia then aimed to consolidate a definitive hold on the acquired territories once the Polish War of Independence of 1830–1831 was crushed.

Western Europe resigned itself without objection to the military actions which the Russian Empire carried out in the region during this period, acknowledging the suppression of Polish national ambitions in 1831 as a matter of Russian internal affairs and, in 1849, condoning Russian intervention in another state’s internal affairs (albeit at the request of that state) to put its house in order by the use of massive military force. This acquiescence was granted despite the fact that this latter state was not a semi-sovereign small country at the mercy of a greater power, but the mighty Habsburg Empire, a major European power in its own right.

The Russian military assistance provided to Vienna surpassed the expectations of the Austrian government in its scale, perhaps excessively so. Following the Russian occupation of Habsburg territories in Galicia and Bukovina, some 192,000 Russian troops marched into Hungary and Transylvania between 15 and 20 June 1849, followed by smaller contingents over the next few weeks. The sheer number of Russian soldiers mobilized at one time was unheard of in Europe. This massive force outnumbered both the young Hungarian Army that had waged a successful campaign in the spring—liberating practically the entire country including Transylvania and the capital—and the armies dispatched to this particular theatre by the Austrian government that had solicited Russian intervention in the first place, combined. In short, the original parties to the war were simply dwarfed by the ancillary forces (as they were called in official Austrian documents) invited to intervene.

Initial Russian plans, drafted with a view to supporting the government of Franz Joseph, reckoned with no more than about a third of the force that would later march in, headed by cavalry general Fyodor Vasilyevich, Graf von Rüdiger, in command of the 3rd Infantry Corps. The energetic, seasoned Rüdiger, who had distinguished himself in the Polish theatre of operations in 1831, had been recommended to the monarch by none other than Paskevich himself.

As chief advisor to the Tsar in European and military affairs, Paskevich was in effect the man in charge of preparing the armed intervention in Hungary. With a number of victories and conquests to his name and celebrated as the hero of campaigns that had consolidated the sometimes enfeebled power of the Russian Empire in some of its reluctant provinces, the marshal enjoyed great reputation and power, and was awarded the titles of Count of Yerevan and Serene Prince of Warsaw, among other distinctions. From 1831 to his death in 1855, he was Namiestik (Deputy Monarch) of the Kingdom of Poland, as well as commander of the First Russian Army (in Russian, действующая армия), which comprised four infantry corps assigned to protect the western borders of the Empire. His personal acquaintance with Grand Duke Nicholas, the future monarch, dated back to the mid-1810s, when nobody had suspected that the third son of the assassinated Paul I would become Tsar one day. It is hardly a coincidence, therefore, that Paskevich enjoyed the unconditional trust of Nicholas I. Nor is it surprising that the Tsar solicited his opinion on every issue which arose during the negotiations with Austria, or that the Austrian premier Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg corresponded with him directly while maintaining communications simultaneously with Saint Petersburg and Warsaw.

The decision to appoint Paskevich to the general command of the Russian forces deployed to crush the Hungarian uprising had not been made until early May 1849, and even then it was not primarily motivated by the Austrian government’s official confirmation, on 21 April, of the request for Russian engagement (seconded by a letter written personally by Franz Joseph to the Tsar on 1 May), but by the fact that increasingly alarming news from Hungary had been coming in since the end of April.

The successfully attacking Hungarian troops freed the Fortress of Komárom from the imperial blockade on 26 April 1849, and no doubt would have vanquished the forces of Lieutenant General Balthasar Simunich, had it not been for the 2nd and 3rd Imperial Corps that had retreated from Pest-Buda on the order of Field Marshal and Commander-in-Chief Ludwig von Welden, which arrived in the area. These troops, having left behind a garrison in Buda Castle, had no choice but to evacuate from the Hungarian capital and to move swiftly back west toward the city of Győr and then on to Pozsony [today Bratislava in Slovakia]. The Austrian government was concerned that, should the Hungarian Army choose to pursue the exhausted, dejected imperial troops, the theatre of operations might inch closer to Vienna. If that had happened, the Austrian forces might have found it difficult to fend off an all-out Hungarian offensive.

In light of Hungary’s military advances, Paskevich described to the Tsar the worrisome developments in the neighbouring Empire and the ensuing Austrian requests urging the deployment of Russian troops at the earliest opportunity, and offered to lead the invading army himself. ‘In view of the importance of this campaign and given the absence of any other war on the horizon, I take the liberty to propose to Your Majesty to entrust this matter to my humble person, so that I may lead our troops to combat until we achieve decisive victory. Your Majesty will have the leisure to make this decision by the time You arrive in Warsaw’, ⁴ he wrote to Nicholas on 1 May 1849. In a few days, on 6 May, he resolved, under renewed pressure from Vienna, to compose an infantry division from Russian troops that had already marched into Kraków, and dispatch it by rail as an aid of expedience to help defend Vienna. (Incidentally, the division, under the command of Lieutenant General Fedor Sergeyevich Panyutin, only made it to Ungarisch Hradisch, ⁵ to be ultimately subsumed by the core Austrian Army under Field Marshal Julius von Haynau. ⁶ )

Briefed by Paskevich and concerned that ‘Vienna might fall to the insurgents’, the Tsar opined that ‘a massive force far greater than originally planned’ would be called for. ‘Under the circumstances, I think we must provide genuine help, not by means of scattered troops but of all the force we can muster, in order to leave no doubt about our expected final victory. I want you in person to lead my army toward new victories in a generous, altruistic campaign. May God support us in this endeavour, and may you be His instrument.’ It was with these words that the Tsar entrusted to Paskevich (instead of General Rüdiger, the previous hopeful applicant for the post) the command of the Russian Army that would penetrate the territory of the Austrian Empire. ‘This, then, is the time for us to take action. Needless to say, it is not my business to outline the specific strategy. I only ask you not to bow to Austrian influence, but to weigh all the preconditions of triumph together and, when you have done that, to vanquish our enemies in one fell swoop, God willing. Do not have mercy on the mob. Should Vienna fall, you shall remedy that loss by squashing the hotbed of the insurrection.’ ⁷

Graf Karl Ferdinand Buol-Schauenstein, the Austrian ambassador to Saint Petersburg, reported to Schwarzenberg on 7 May that the intervention forces, comprising the 3rd and 4th Infantry Corps, supported by two cavalry divisions and 320 guns, would be commanded by Paskevich. Obviously, Russian plans at the time still reckoned with more modest manpower than was ultimately dispatched to the Habsburg Empire. ⁸

Paskevich received his letter of appointment on 10 May. ‘Your Majesty’s appointment of my person stands as another sign of Your trust in me in this turbulent, extraordinary situation. I pray to God to help me so that I may become worthy of that trust’, Paskevich acknowledged the assignment with satisfaction. He proceeded by identifying the provisions of supply of the invading army as his first priority. There had been reports of Austrian supply chains collapsing, and although officials in Vienna promised everything ‘in their beleaguered situation’, they could not be counted on to actually deliver. When ‘the war begins, we will have to push forward relentlessly’, Paskevich declared, ‘and if it is God’s will that we prevail over the enemy, we shall not cease from pursuing it till the end’. This meant that supplies for the Russian troops had to be sourced from Russian inventories, collecting enough food for 31 days, readying 4,000 carts for delivery over a distance of 300 versts (about 320 kilometres). ⁹

The appointment of Paskevich to the helm not only entailed the overwhelming military superiority discussed above, but also the presence at the head of the Russian Army of a man superior to the commander-in-chief of the allied Austrian forces in rank and authority, who thus quickly overruled initial Austrian hopes of wielding discretionary power over the Russian troops.

Vienna failed to produce an imperial commander-in-chief on a par with Paskevich, unless it was to be the aged Field Marshal Josef Radetzky, but this would have engendered conflicts of a different kind. As it happened, Radetzky was serving in Italy, quite successfully. At the time when Paskevich assumed charge, the commander-in-chief of the Austrian Imperial Army was Field Marshal Ludwig von Welden, a man of the same age, who became the military and civilian governor of Vienna when the revolution of October 1848 had been crushed. On 12 April 1849, he followed Field Marshal Alfred zu Windisch-Grätz who had suffered defeat in Hungary. Initially, von Welden adamantly opposed his government’s plans to seek Russian military intervention, but a series of fiascos brought him around and he became a vocal supporter of Russian intervention. Von Welden, who had fallen ill in part due to his failures, was replaced on 30 May 1849 by Haynau, though the ink on his letter of promotion to field marshal had barely dried. Apart from other circumstances, including the difficult personalities of the two military leaders, this situation gave rise to much tension later on, which was only exacerbated by Paskevich’s sometimes unfounded, sometimes justified resentment of Haynau.

It would be difficult to argue that Hungarian historiography—especially in the second half of the twentieth century, when the norm was to follow the Soviet example and Marxist ideology—explored the entire issue of Russian military intervention with the seriousness warranted by the subject. This did not really happen, even though relations between Hungarian and Soviet academic institutions began to improve in 1945 and then flourish after 1948, when the lack of command of the Russian language no longer presented an obstacle. Yet the new, hitherto officially banned research opportunities proved to exist only on paper. Researchers from Hungary had no more access to Russian state archives than professionals from other countries did. In my personal experience, attempts to obtain Russian sources (documents) even from books and periodicals published in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century ran into impenetrable red tape well into the 1980s. There were, however, some privileged historians. Among the reliable Hungarian historians, Erzsébet Andics, a far-left scholar holding both Hungarian and Russian citizenship, moved to the Soviet Union in November 1956, where she also did archival research later, and ultimately went on to publish diplomatic documents on the background of the Russian intervention from the archives of the Foreign Ministry there. ¹⁰ Another reliable historian under the old regime, Zsigmond Pál Pach, completed a study trip to Moscow in 1954, and also published documents from the Foreign Ministry archives pertaining to 1849, including an account of the summer campaign by Artúr Görgei, written on the orders of Paskevich while Görgei was being held as prisoner of war in Nagyvárad (today Oradea in Romania). ¹¹ Pach himself did not specialize in the period; the papers were probably given to him by the archives’ staff. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pach published these papers in 1957, when Soviet troops had stifled the Hungarian ‘counterrevolution’, as it was then called, and when the ‘revolutionary alliance of workers and peasants’ was about to settle scores with the latter-day ‘traitors’. By making the papers available in print, Pach intended to validate the portrait of Görgei as a traitor, except that the documents themselves failed to support the charges levelled against the general, despite the argument proposed in an introductory study. ¹²

By way of buttressing the then hegemonic view of history, starting in 1948, the pivotal year hallmarked by the name of Mátyás Rákosi, the Stalinist government rekindled the memory of Görgei as a traitor and blackened his character with further calumnies. The foremost military leader of the War of Independence was recast as a model public enemy in the nation’s ranks, someone always seeking compromise with reactionary forces—as an unscrupulous, opportunistic politician scheming to undermine a genuine revolution. As Domokos Kosáry explains in his monograph on the history of the Görgei-controversy, this false myth, tailored to the dictates of the age, served several purposes, including those of contemporary politics. It was used not only to discredit historians insisting on strict professional standards, but to justify a campaign to purge the military elite. ¹³ This meant that the findings of researchers delving into the Austrian archives after the First World War, and unearthing documents capable of rectifying the often romanticized, simplified reconstructions of the preceding era, were simply barred from the circle of admissible interpretations—just as their proponents were barred from scholarly activities.

It is hardly difficult to explain why, in a country occupied by Soviet forces, particularly in the wake of the crushed and cruelly avenged 1956 Revolution that had traced its roots to the national symbols and demands of 1848–1849, the Russian invasion of 1849 was regarded as a risky topic. The authorities clearly feared that the public might draw parallels between the Russian intervention of 1849 and the Soviet troops that suppressed the Revolution of 1956, and did everything in their power to prevent such analogies from emerging. According to the narrative fashioned by the communist state, the Hungarian War of Independence, waged to vindicate the Acquis of March 1848, failed principally because of domestic politics in general, and specifically on the limited vision of the nobility, which may have hammered through bourgeois reform but remained ungenerous with regard to the issues of the destitute peasantry, the national minorities, etc. All of these shortcomings were combined, according to the official narrative, with the anti-revolutionary attitudes of the ‘black-and-yellow’ officer corps of the national army. In this way, the massive Russian military intervention, which had in and of itself put an end to the armed conflict, was relegated to the status of a rather insignificant episode. The lasting influence of this take on 1848–1849 is shown by a claim, voiced as late as the end of the 1990s, that the Russian intervention ‘no longer carried weight in the military sense. By the time the Russian troops reached Hungary from Galicia and from across South Carpathia, the freedom fight had become hopeless and unable to resist the Austrian forces, let alone the superior power of the Austrian–Russian alliance’. ¹⁴

Learning from the experiences of 1956, Kádár identified ‘nationalist inclination’ as the most pernicious ideology, and therefore spared no effort to banish from Hungarian historical consciousness any movement flying the flag of national sovereignty and taking up arms against foreign powers. The aforementioned recasting of the heritage of 1848–1849 was no exception, as it helped Kádár to belittle the significance of Hungarian armed resistance, going back before the time of the Russian intervention. It is no surprise that the impressive, ten-volume History of Hungary, published by Akadémiai Kiadó in 1979, began the chapter on the demise of the War of Independence (in Vol. 6/I) with an account of the triumphant Spring Campaign waged in April 1849. ¹⁵

During the 1980s, research into the military history of Hungary gathered speed, publishing relevant sources and studies that examined the performance of the Hungarian defence forces and the social support behind them, based on wide-ranging archival evidence. Subsequently, after 1990, bans on research in Russian archives were lifted without limitations, at least as far as 1848–1849 was concerned. ¹⁶

Ironically, with the explosive freedom that attended the fall of the Iron Curtain, from time to time in the 1990s, the Hungarian public fell under the spell (often stoked by the media) of the figure of Görgei, once again presented as a traitor, or of the poet Sándor Petőfi as an exile in Siberia. These sensational stories of course lacked any basis in historical fact.

Following the victories of General Józef Bem in Transylvania, in March 1849, and the overall success of the Spring Campaign, the military masterminds of Nicholas I came to regard Hungarian defence forces as a serious opponent. Nicholas himself was not averse to reckoning with the possibility of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse, and tended to overestimate rather than underestimate Hungary’s military potential.

The Tsar thus ensured that everything was in place for a risk-free and swift conclusion of the campaign in Hungary with a splendid triumph of Russian arms. This goal was achieved. The War of Independence came to an end with Hungarian troops surrendering to Russian troops, and the victors had suffered only modest losses. According to official records, the combined total of those who died of disease, of their wounds, or in combat amounted to less than 12,000. However, it is known from memoirs and diary entries published in the nineteenth century that some Russian contemporaries, including qualified chiefs of staff who had participated in the campaign, had more than a few words of harsh criticism for Paskevich’s performance as commander-in-chief. The military historian Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Markovich Andrianov (1877–1918) went so far, in his comprehensive study published late in the first decade of the twentieth century, as to claim that ‘in this campaign, Prince Paskevich buried his own military glory’. ¹⁷

What are the reasons behind these critical words from compatriots, dismissing Paskevich’s qualities as a military leader in the Hungarian Campaign, which happened to go hand in hand with the recognition of Hungary’s military valour? Lack of space prevents an in-depth analysis, but it may be worth our while to evoke a few characteristic comments from the Russian side. In the wake of the Battle of Vác (15–17 July 1849) Tsar Nicholas himself made repeated, increasingly impatient inquiries, at a loss to understand why he had not yet received news of the expected Russian victory or the ‘destruction’ of Görgei. ‘I cannot grasp how Görgei, after leaving Komárom, was able to go around first the right and then the left wing of our army, running such a wide circle, to suddenly appear in the south […] and accomplishing all this in defiance of a courageous and well-disciplined army of 120,000 headed by you’, Nicholas wrote on 6 August 1849. Nicholas I to Paskevich, Warsaw, 6 August 1849. ¹⁸ ‘During our campaign in Hungary, not a single major battle was fought, and the fact that he brought the war to a swift and fortuitous conclusion may create the impression that we acted with calm dignity, as if we had deliberately eschewed trivial skirmishes, choosing instead to herd the Hungarian troops to one location where we forced them into surrender. In other words, we might in this way construe the events of the war to make it appear that we intentionally chose the mentioned tactical solution to clinch victory, which we certainly did.’ On the other hand, ‘Görgei’s successful retreat everywhere, in Vác, Miskolc and Debrecen, was seen—even within the ranks of our own army—as a failure on our part, and we as a party to the war had no reason to contest this assessment’. ¹⁹ As the military historian Ivan Ivanovich Oreus put it in his monograph published in 1880, Görgei always managed to slip out of his pursuers’ clinch, ‘in spite of all the strategic ruses and manoeuvres Prince Paskevich could devise’. ²⁰

As we know, Görgei did not surrender to the overwhelming enemy until his hopes of negotiating certain political conditions through the mediation of the Russian military leadership fizzled out and he received news of the heavy defeat and unravelling of the concentrated Hungarian troops in the South Great Plain on 9 August, at the hands of Haynau, who had been leading the imperial troops aggressively forward to reap several major victories over the summer.

This War of Independence, known to the Hungarian historical mind as the ‘struggle for freedom’, aimed to defend the social and public law reforms enshrined in the April Acts of 1848 as a sort of constitution, and then to defend the sovereignty of the country. This struggle was decided by the military intervention of the Russian Empire, which wasted no time in crushing the hopes of a nation that had been fuelled by the victories of the so-called Spring Campaign of 1849. By seeking armed support from the Russian monarch for his resolve to suppress his rebellious subjects, Franz Joseph and his government effectively sealed the fate of Hungary’s War of Independence. Although the programme of bourgeois development and modernization was subsequently implemented more or less successfully despite the military defeat, this came at the price of diminishing not only the political elite that had devised this programme during the Reform Era beginning in the 1820s and formed perhaps the best qualified corps of politicians in Hungarian history, but also the ranks of the military elite that had undertaken armed resistance to defend this programme and the country’s sovereignty. Many of those who escaped direct retribution, including execution, imprisonment, being enlisted in the imperial army, or forced into emigration, were otherwise side-lined or compelled to lie low. This meant that, in one way or another, they were prevented from helping to shape the country’s future, and few of them had the chance to pick up where they had left off by the time it came to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Indeed, it was the leading edge of this politician and military elite that had been decimated, leaving a tangible void in its wake.

1
Cf. for example, Генерал-фельдмаршал князь Паскевич: Eго жизнь и деятельность (1831 г.) По неизданным источникам составил Генерального штаба генерал-лейтенант князь Щербатов. Т. 4 (Санкт-Петербург, 1894), 160. For the text of the report: Приложения к главе III. Но. 10. 120.
2
For the official text of the war report of the Russian Army, see: XVIII-е известие из действующей армии. Но 27. Российский государственный военно-исторический aрхив (Russian State Archives of Military History, Moscow, hereiniafter: РГВИА–RGVIA) Ф. 846. Оп. 16. Д. 5335. On microfilm: Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [National Archives of Hungary], X. 10634. Mf 53245. It is likely, however, that the sentence, quoted widely in Hungarian historiography, did not gain currency from the military report in Russian, but rather owing to a report by British Ambassador to Saint Petersburg Andrew Buchanan to Lord Palmerston, of 22 August 1849, entitled Correspondence Relative to the Affairs of Hungary 1847–49, presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 15 August 1850 (London, 1850), 356–357. As was his wont, the ambassador forwarded to London the French translation of the military report originally published in the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg. This is the text that must have been republished by Mihály Horváth in his Magyarország függetlenségi harczának története 1848 és 1849-ben I–III (The History of Hungary’s Fight for Independence in 1848 and 1849) (Geneva, 1865), III, 499–500.
3
From Brunnov to Nesselrode, 29 April/11 May 1849, London. Николай I и европейская реакция 1848–49 гг. (Р. Авербух). Красный Архив 1931. (47/48), 40–43.; Р. А. Авербух: Царская интервенция в борьбе с Венгерской революцией 1848–1849. Москва, 1935. 289–291. For the contents of the correspondence in Hungarian, see the chapter entitled ‘Diplomáciai iratok és parlamenti nyilatkozatok 1848–1849’ (Diplomatic Papers and Declarations of the Parliament, 1848–1849), in Éva Haraszti, Az angol külpolitika a magyar szabadságharc ellen (English Foreign Policy against Hungary’s War of Independence) (Budapest, 1951), 191; also see Domokos Kosáry, Magyarország és a nemzetközi politika 1848–1849-ben (Hungary and International Politics in 1848–1849) (Budapest, 1999), 255.
4
Submission by Paskevich to Nicholas I, 19 April/1 May 1849 (Warsaw), РГВИА–RGVIA Ф. 1. Оп. 1. Д. 18354. 90–94. and the letter (ibid.) of 19 April/1 May (Warsaw, 1849), 87–89.
5
Today Uherské Hradiště in the Czech Republic.
6
For details, cf. Ildikó Rosonczy, Orosz fegyverekkel Ferenc Józsefért. Tanulmányok I. Miklós 1849-es magyarországi beavatkozásáról (Russian Arms for Franz Joseph: Studies on Nicholas I’s 1849 Intervention in Hungary) (Budapest, 2016), 111–294: ‘Orosz gyorssegély Bécsnek’ (Expedited Russian Aid for Vienna).
7
Nicholas I to Paskevich, 23 April/5 May, Saint Petersburg. In Hungarian: Alekszandr Petrovics Scserbatov, Paszkevics Magyarországon (Paskevich in Hungary), translated by Zsigmond Gerencsér, ed. Tamás Katona (Budapest, 1984), 271–273.
8
Buol to Schwarzenberg, 7 May 1849, Saint Petersburg. Cf. Erzsébet Andics, A Habsburgok és Romanovok szövetsége. Az 1849. évi magyarországi cári intervenció diplomáciai előtörténete (The Habsburg–Romanov Alliance: Diplomatic Background to the Tsarist Intervention in Hungary, 1849) (Budapest, 1961), 384.
9
Paskevich to Nicholas I, April 28/May 10, 1849, Warsaw. РГВИА–RGVIA Ф. 1.Оп. 1. Д. 18354. 118–119b.
10
Andics, A Habsburgok és Romanovok szövetsége.
11
Zsigmond Pál Pach, ‘Kiadatlan Görgey-iratok 1849 augusztusából’ (Unpublished Görgei-papers from August 1849), Századok, 1–4 (1957), 198–226.
12
Pach included a revised edited and augmented version of this 1957 essay in his volume of essays published in 1977, without rescinding his accusations of treason against Görgei. Zsigmond Pál Pach, ‘Görgey, Világos után’ (Kiadatlan Görgey-iratok 1849 augusztusából) (Görgey after the Surrender at Világos [unpublished Görgey papers from August 1849]), in Pach, Történetszemlélet és történettudomány (The Concept and Science of History) (Budapest, 1977), 354–391.) For the often reinterpreted Görgei text, see also György Spira, ‘Az emlékíró Görgei első szárnypróbálgatása’ (The First Attempts of Görgei the Memorialist), in Ferenc Glatz, ed., Európa vonzásában. Emlékkönyv Kosáry Domokos 80. születésnapjára (In the Attraction of Europe. Book of Remembrance for the 80th Birthday of Domokos Kosáry) (Budapest, 1993), 177–191, and a revised version of the same study: Spira, ‘Az emlékíró Görgei első szárnypróbálgatása’, in György Spira, Vad tűzzel (With Wild Fire) (Budapest, 2000), 269–289 (text edited to reflect recent research findings). For an assessment at variance with these studies, see Ildikó Rosonczy, ‘Görgei orosz fogságával kapcsolatos dokumentumok (Documents of Görgei’s Russian Captivity), in Ádám Balogh, István Bobay, and Róbert Hermann, eds, Görgei Artúr, „a tiprott hős”. Válogatás a 2016. és 2018. évi Görgei-konferenciák előadásaiból (Artúr Görgei, a ‘Hero Reviled’. A Selection of Lectures Held at the Görgei Conferences of 2016 and 2018) (Budapest, 2020), 223–237.
13
Domokos Kosáry, A Görgey-kérdés története, I–II (The History of the Görgey Question) (Budapest, 1994) II, 235–242.
14
Márta Font, Tamás Krausz, Emil Niederhauser, and Gyula Szvák, Oroszország története (The History of Russia), (Budapest, 1997), 316.
15
For details, see Róbert Hermann, ‘Eredmények és feladatok 1848–1849 hadtörténetének kutatásában’ (Results and Tasks in the Research of the Military History of 1848–1849), Történelmi Szemle, 40/3–4 (1998), 203–214.
16
In the 2010s, I received all the needed research assistance from the archivists of both the Russian State Military Archives in Moscow (Российский государстевенный военно-исторический архив) and the Russian State Historical Archives in St Petersburg (Российский государственный исторический архив).
17
Andrianov’s study of the 1849 campaign was reprinted in a recent representative volume intended for the general public, which surveys the history of the Imperial Russian Army. История русской армии. Иллюстрированное издание. Современная версия. Подготовка текста, комментарии О. Eгоршиной, А. Петрова (Moscow, 2017), 404–412.
18
Scserbatov, Paszkevics Magyarországon, 307. More recently, supplemented by Paskevich’s letters, cf. Ildikó Rosonczy, A biztos győzelem tudatában. Miklós cár és fővezére az 1849-es magyar hadjáratról (Assured of Victory: Tsar Nicholas and His Commander-in-chief on the 1949 Campaign against Hungary) (Budapest, 2021), 232.
19
Mikhail Dormidontovich Lihutin, ‘Feljegyzések az 1849. évi magyarországi hadjáratról’, in A magyarországi hadjárat 1849. Orosz szemtanúk a magyar szabadságharcról (The Hungarian Campaign of 1849: Russian Witnesses on the Hungarian War of Independence), selected by Ildikó Rosonczy, with notes by Tamás Katona and Ildikó Rosonczy, translated by Zsigmond Gelencsér and Ildikó Rosonczy (Budapest, 1988), 802, 804.
20
Ivan Ivanovich Oreus, Oroszország háborúja a magyarok ellen 1849-ben (Russia’s War on Hungary in 1849), translated and edited by Ildikó Rosonczy (Budapest, 2002), 249.

Russian Arms for Franz Joseph
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Ildikó Rosonczy

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Russian Arms for Franz Josephin 1849

Ildikó Rosonczy

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