The events of 1830–1 inaugurated a long period of Russophobia in Britain. The House of Commons passed a unanimous vote of censure on the tsar. In Germany popular songs condemning the enslavement of Poland were in vogue for a time. The Russian poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) responded with a diatribe against ‘the slanderers of Russia’, accusing critics abroad of feelings of envy because they had done less than the Russians to overthrow Napoleon. It was, he declared, a quarrel between Slavs. That was not the way it was seen in the rest of Europe, where anything up to 7,000 Poles
...more
