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A moment propitious for the enterprise soon offered itself. In the same year Circassian chiefs warned the Russian command that they would make trouble if the Russians proceeded with their plan to build a new fortified line across their territory. The warning was disregarded, and in the following year more Russian troops were landed, more Circassian villages were laid waste. The building went ahead.

By this point a forty-year-old bushy-bearded imam called Shamyl had assumed the leadership of the Muridist movement. He was based in Dagestan, but he succeeded in uniting the opposition in the western as well as the eastern Caucasus. Chechens, Circassians and Dagestanis all joined forces. Shamyl’s name soon reached the ears of the Tsar, who was on a tour of the Caucasus. He immediately invited Shamyl to meet him, but after some hesitation the invitation was refused and the imam’s followers were soon offering more resistance to the Russians than ever before.

In 1842 a Russian task force of 10,000 men with 24 guns, closely supervised by the War Minister himself, was forced to retreat with a loss of nearly a fifth of its strength. An entire army corps had to be ordered down to the Caucasus to restore the position. Yet two years later a force of 20,000 men under M. S. Vorontsov, the new commander-in chief, Caucasus, was trapped in the mountains and lost 4,000 men and his war chest before he could be extricated.

These were significant losses for the military establishment of the northern Caucasus, which numbered about 80,000 men. And combat was not the only scourge. In the winter of 1841—2 fever took a toll of one man in six. But the unrecorded losses of the enemy were serious too. Several Caucasian communities which Shamyl had hoped would join him responded to his call without enthusiasm or not at all. Even the ardour of some of the Chechens had cooled. Again the demographic factor seems to have governed events. An ecological balance between the population and resources of the northern Caucasus had evidently been regained. Even so, it was only after the Crimean War that the Chechens were subdued. Shamyl was to be captured in 1859, and his movement was broken. ³⁷

Success had been bought at a high financial cost, however. ‘Never was the state so oppressed with debt as it is at this day,’ wrote a French engineer who spent five years in southern Russia. ‘The war in the Caucasus, the grand military parades, and the payment of a countless host of diplomatic agents, avowed and secret, all absorb immense sums.’ In 1841, the Finance Minister, Kankrin, had annoyed the Tsar by telling him the proposed military expenditures were unaffordable. Stamp duties were quadrupled and countless public works were halted in consequence. ³⁸ The crisis was hardly to be wondered at given the size of the military establishment, and the costs were not to diminish. In 1848, when it was put on a war footing, the army could field no fewer than 368 infantry battalions, 460 cavalry squadrons and 996 guns in European Russia alone.

In this same area the Empire’s population had risen from 36 million in 1800 to 60 million by 1850. This implied a huge increase of both taxpayers and young men liable for military service. This strong demographic growth helped to make the huge army more affordable. So did the immensity of the Empire’s natural assets. By 1843 Siberia was producing twice as much gold as all other gold mines in the world, and the state was collecting over 20 tons of it a year for its own purposes. But, though the Empire survived the immediate financial alarms, the seemingly insatiable demands for military and naval expenditures was soon to lead to an effective devaluation of the ruble, which Kankrin had gone to great pains to stabilize. ³⁹This, however, was not the only cost.

The immensity of Russia’s armaments now thoroughly alarmed other powers — Britain in particular. It could be argued that Russia needed these arms to defend at least half a dozen vulnerable points along its far-flung frontiers as well as the long Polish border. On the other hand they seemed a looming threat to Britain’s vital interests in the Middle East, India and the Pacific. A growing imperial power makes enemies, and the enemies were already combining to halt Russia’s progress.