When Prince Philip, a grandson and grandnephew of Romanov Grand Duchesses, was asked if he would care to visit the Soviet Union in 1967, he sneered, “I would like to go to Russia very much—although the bastards murdered half my family.” Anglo-Russian relations have rarely been easy, despite their royal connections, which are explored in “Russia, Royalty & the Romanovs,” an exhibition of art and artifacts owned by the Royal Collection Trust, now on display at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace.
The eminent British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder summarized the Anglo-Russian antagonism succinctly at the turn of the twentieth century, calling Russia the quintessential “heartland” power—a frosty, isolated fortress whose remote geography impelled it to seek hegemony by lashing out to dominate its warmer and wetter peripheries. This brought it into natural conflict with Britain, the classic “coastland” power, an outward-looking engine of mercantile prowess whose hegemonic aspirations demanded secure trade routes and stable commercial entrepôts to master access to the vast Eurasian interior.
Divided by their conflicting interests, Russia and Britain spent more than two centuries trying to outmaneuver each other almost everywhere between the Balkans and Japan, but only once did the two enter into open conflict, when they battled for influence over the decaying Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War. A not-so-subtle reminder of that exhausting contest, which ushered in much of what we now think of as “modern” warfare, emerges in “Roger Fenton’s Photographs of the Crimea, 1855,” a concurrent exhibition