Orlando figes the crimean war a history (v5 0)

For Seren Table of Contents Title Page Introduction - Religious Wars - Eastern Questions - The Russian Menace - The End of Peace in Europe - Phoney War - First Blood to the Turks - Alma - Sevastopol in the Autumn - Generals January and February 10 - Cannon Fodder 11 - The Fall of Sevastopol 12 - Paris and the New Order Epilogue: The Crimean War in Myth and Memory Acknowledgements Note on Dates and Proper Names ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES Notes Select Bibliography Index About the Author Notes Copyright Page Introduction In the parish church of Witchampton in Dorset there is a memorial to commemorate five soldiers from this peaceful little village who fought and died in the Crimean War The inscription reads: DIED IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY THEIR BODIES ARE IN THE CRIMEA MAY THEIR SOULS REST IN PEACE MDCCCLIV In the communal cemetery of Héricourt in south-eastern France, there is a gravestone with the names of the nine men from the area who died in the Crimea: ILS SONT MORTS POUR LA PATRIE AMIS, NOUS NOUS REVERRONS UN JOUR At the base of the memorial somebody has placed two cannonballs, one with the name of the ‘Malakoff’ (Malakhov) Bastion, captured by the French during the siege of Sevastopol, the Russian naval base in the Crimea, the other with the name ‘Sebastopol’ Thousands of French and British soldiers lie in unmarked and long-neglected graves in the Crimea In Sevastopol itself there are hundreds of memorials, many of them in the military cemetery (bratskoe kladbishche), one of three huge burial grounds established by the Russians during the siege, where a staggering 127,583 men killed in the defence of the town lie buried The officers have individual graves with their names and regiments but the ordinary soldiers are buried in mass graves of fifty or a hundred men Among the Russians there are soldiers who had come from Serbia, Bulgaria or Greece, their co-religionists in the Eastern Church, in response to the Tsar’s call for the Orthodox to defend their faith One small plaque, barely visible in the long grass where fifteen sailors lie underground, commemorates their ‘heroic sacrifice during the defence of Sevastopol in 1854-5’: THEY DIED FOR THEIR FATHERLAND, FOR TSAR AND FOR GOD The Héricourt Memorial Elsewhere in Sevastopol there are ‘eternal flames’ and monuments to the unknown and uncounted soldiers who died fighting for the town It is estimated that a quarter of a million Russian soldiers, sailors and civilians are buried in mass graves in Sevastopol’s three military cemeteries.1 Two world wars have obscured the huge scale and enormous human cost of the Crimean War Today it seems to us a relatively minor war; it is almost forgotten, like the plaques and gravestones in those churchyards Even in the countries that took part in it (Russia, Britain, France, PiedmontSardinia in Italy and the Ottoman Empire, including those territories that would later make up Romania and Bulgaria) there are not many people today who could say what the Crimean War was all about But for our ancestors before the First World War the Crimea was the major conflict of the nineteenth century, the most important war of their lifetimes, just as the world wars of the twentieth century are the dominant historical landmarks of our lives The losses were immense – at least three-quarters of a million soldiers killed in battle or lost through illness and disease, two-thirds of them Russian The French lost around 100,000 men, the British a small fraction of that number, about 20,000, because they sent far fewer troops (98,000 British soldiers and sailors were involved in the Crimea compared to 310,000 French) But even so, for a small agricultural community such as Witchampton the loss of five able-bodied men was felt as a heavy blow In the parishes of Whitegate, Aghada and Farsid in County Cork in Ireland, where the British army recruited heavily, almost one-third of the male population died in the Crimean War.2 Nobody has counted the civilian casualties: victims of the shelling; people starved to death in besieged towns; populations devastated by disease spread by the armies; entire communities wiped out in the massacres and organized campaigns of ethnic cleansing that accompanied the fighting in the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Crimea This was the first ‘total war’, a nineteenth-century version of the wars of our own age, involving civilians and humanitarian crises It was also the earliest example of a truly modern war – fought with new industrial technologies, modern rifles, steamships and railways, novel forms of logistics and communication like the telegraph, important innovations in military medicine, and war reporters and photographers directly on the scene Yet at the same time it was the last war to be conducted by the old codes of chivalry, with ‘parliamentaries’ and truces in the fighting to clear the dead and wounded from the killing fields The early battles in the Crimea, on the River Alma and at Balaklava, where the famous Charge of the Light Brigade took place, were not so very different from the sort of fighting that went on during the Napoleonic Wars Yet the siege of Sevastopol, the longest and most crucial phase of the Crimean War, was a precursor of the industrialized trench warfare of 1914–18 During the eleven and a half months of the siege, 120 kilometres of trenches were dug by the Russians, the British and the French; 150 million gunshots and million bombs and shells of various calibre were exchanged between the two sides.3 The name of the Crimean War does not reflect its global scale and huge significance for Europe, Russia and that area of the world – stretching from the Balkans to Jerusalem, from Constantinople to the Caucasus – that came to be defined by the Eastern Question, the great international problem posed by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire Perhaps it would be better to adopt the Russian name for the Crimean War, the ‘Eastern War’ ( Vostochnaia voina), which at least has the merit of connecting it to the Eastern Question, or even the ‘Turco-Russian War’, the name for it in many Turkish sources, which places it in the longer-term historical context of centuries of warfare between the Russians and the Ottomans, although this omits the crucial factor of Western intervention in the war The war began in 1853 between Ottoman and Russian forces in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, the territory of today’s Romania, and spread to the Caucasus, where the Turks and the British encouraged and supported the struggle of the Muslim tribes against Russia, and from there to other areas of the Black Sea By 1854, with the intervention of the British and the French on Turkey’s side and the Austrians threatening to join this anti-Russian alliance, the Tsar withdrew his forces from the principalities, and the fighting shifted to the Crimea But there were several other theatres of the war in 1854–5: in the Baltic Sea, where the Royal Navy planned to attack St Petersburg, the Russian capital; on the White Sea, where it bombarded the Solovetsky Monastery in July 1854; and even on the Pacific coastline of Siberia The global scale of the fighting was matched by the diversity of people it involved Readers will find here a broad canvas populated less than they might have hoped (or feared) by military types and more by kings and queens, princes, courtiers, diplomats, religious leaders, Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries, doctors, nurses, journalists, artists and photographers, pamphleteers and writers, none more central to the story from the Russian perspective than Leo Tolstoy, who served as an officer on three different fronts of the Crimean War (the Caucasus, the Danube and the Crimea) Above all, through their own words in letters and memoirs, the reader will find here the viewpoint of the serving officers and ordinary troops, from the British ‘Tommy’ to the French-Algerian Zouaves and the Russian serf soldiers There are many books in English on the Crimean War But this is the first in any language to draw extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman as well as British sources to illuminate the geopolitical, cultural and religious factors that shaped the involvement of each major power in the conflict Because of this concentration on the historical context of the war, readers eager for the fighting to begin will need to be patient in the early chapters (or even skip over them) What I hope emerges from these pages is a new appreciation of the war’s importance as a major turning point in the history of Europe, Russia and the Middle East, the consequences of which are still felt today There is no room here for the widespread British view that it was a ‘senseless’ and ‘unnecessary’ war – an idea going back to the public’s disappointment with the poorly managed military campaign and its limited achievements at the time – which has since had such a detrimental impact on the historical literature Long neglected and often ridiculed as a serious subject by scholars, the Crimean War has been left mainly in the hands of British military historians, many of them amateur enthusiasts, who have constantly retold the same stories (the Charge of the Light Brigade, the bungling of the English commanders, Florence Nightingale) with little real discussion of the war’s religious origins, the complex politics of the Eastern Question, Christian-Muslim relations in the Black Sea region, or the influence of European Russophobia, without which it is difficult to grasp the conflict’s true significance The Crimean War was a crucial watershed It broke the old conservative alliance between Russia and the Austrians that had upheld the existing order on the European continent, allowing the emergence of new nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany It left the Russians with a deep sense of resentment of the West, a feeling of betrayal that the other Christian states had sided with the Turks, and with frustrated ambitions in the Balkans that would continue to destabilize relations between the powers in the 1870s and the crises leading to the outbreak of the First World War It was the first major European conflict to involve the Turks, if we discount their brief participation in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars It opened up the Muslim world of the Ottoman Empire to Western armies and technologies, accelerated its integration into the global capitalist economy, and sparked an Islamic reaction against the West which continues to this day Each power entered the Crimean War with its own motives Nationalism and imperial rivalries combined with religious interests For the Turks, it was a question of fighting for their crumbling empire in Europe, of defending their imperial sovereignty against Russia’s claims to represent the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, and of averting the threat of an Islamic and nationalist revolution in the Turkish capital The British claimed they went to war to defend the Turks against Russia’s bullying, but in fact they were more concerned to strike a blow against the Russian Empire, which they feared as a rival in Asia, and to use the war to advance their own free-trade and religious interests in the Ottoman Empire For the Emperor of the French, Napoleon III, the war was an opportunity to restore France to a position of respect and influence abroad, if not to the glory of his uncle’s reign, and perhaps to redraw the map of Europe as a family of liberal nation states along the lines envisaged by Napoleon I – though the influence of the Catholics on his weak regime also pushed him towards war against the Russians on religious grounds For the British and the French, this was a crusade for the defence of liberty and European civilization against the barbaric and despotic menace of Russia, whose aggressive expansionism represented a real threat, not just to the West but to the whole of Christendom As for the Tsar, Nicholas I, the man more than anyone responsible for the Crimean War, he was partly driven by inflated pride and arrogance, a result of having been tsar for twenty-seven years, partly by his sense of how a great power such as Russia should behave towards its weaker neighbours, and partly by a gross miscalculation about how the other powers would respond to his actions; but above all he believed that he was fighting a religious war, a crusade, to fulfil Russia’s mission to defend the Christians of the Ottoman Empire The Tsar vowed to take on the whole world in accordance with what he believed was his holy mission to extend his empire of the Orthodox as far as Constantinople and Jerusalem Historians have tended to dismiss the religious motives of the war Few devote more than a paragraph or two to the dispute in the Holy Land – the rivalry between the Catholics or Latins (backed by France) and the Greeks (supported by Russia) over who should have control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem – even though it was the starting point (and for the Tsar a sufficient cause) of the Crimean War Until the religious wars of our own age, it seemed implausible that a petty quarrel over some churchwarden’s keys should entangle the great powers in a major war In some histories the Holy Lands dispute is used to illustrate the absurd nature of this ‘silly’ and ‘unnecessary war’ In others, it appears as no more than a trigger for the real cause of the war: the struggle of the European powers for influence in the Ottoman Empire Wars are caused by imperial rivalries, it is argued in these histories, by competition over markets, or by the influence of nationalist opinions at home While all this is true, it underestimates the importance of religion in the nineteenth century (if the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the rise of militant Islam have taught us anything, it is surely that religion plays a vital role in fuelling wars) All the powers used religion as a means of leverage in the Eastern Question, politics and faith were closely intertwined in this imperial rivalry, and every nation, none more so than Russia, went to war in the belief that God was on its side Religious Wars For weeks the pilgrims had been coming to Jerusalem for the Easter festival They came from every corner of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, from Egypt, Syria, Armenia, Anatolia, the Greek peninsula, but most of all from Russia, travelling by sea to the port of Jaffa where they hired camels or donkeys By Good Friday, on 10 April 1846, there were 20,000 pilgrims in Jerusalem They rented any dwelling they could find or slept in family groups beneath the stars To pay for their long journey nearly all of them had brought some merchandise, a handmade crucifix or ornament, strings of beads or pieces of embroidery, which they sold to European tourists at the holy shrines The square before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the focus of their pilgrimage, was a busy marketplace, with colourful displays of fruit and vegetables competing for space with pilgrims’ wares and the smelly hides of goats and oxen left out in the sun by the tanneries behind the church Beggars, too, collected here They frightened strangers into giving alms by threatening to touch them with their leprous hands Wealthy tourists had to be protected by their Turkish guides, who hit the beggars with heavy sticks to clear a path to the church doors In 1846 Easter fell on the same date in the Latin and Greek Orthodox calendars, so the holy shrines were much more crowded than usual, and the mood was very tense The two religious communities had long been arguing about who should have first right to carry out their Good Friday rituals on the altar of Calvary inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot where the cross of Jesus was supposed to have been inserted in the rock During recent years the rivalry between the Latins and the Greeks had reached such fever pitch that Mehmet Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, had been forced to position soldiers inside and outside the church to preserve order But even this had not prevented fights from breaking out On this Good Friday the Latin priests arrived with their white linen altar-cloth to find that the Greeks had got there first with their silk embroidered cloth The Catholics demanded to see the Greeks’ firman, their decree from the Sultan in Constantinople, empowering them to place their silk cloth on the altar first The Greeks demanded to see the Latins’ firman allowing them to remove it A fight broke out between the priests, who were quickly joined by monks and pilgrims on either side Soon the whole church was a battlefield The rival groups of worshippers fought not only with their fists, but with crucifixes, candlesticks, chalices, lamps and incense-burners, and even bits of wood which they tore from the sacred shrines The fighting continued with knives and pistols smuggled into the Holy Sepulchre by worshippers of either side By the time the church was cleared by Mehmet Pasha’s guards, more than forty people lay dead on the floor.1 ‘See here what is done in the name of religion!’ wrote the English social commentator Harriet Martineau, who travelled to the Holy Lands of Palestine and Syria in 1846 This Jerusalem is the most sacred place in the world, except Mekkeh, to the Mohammedan: and to the Christian and the Jew, it is the most sacred place in the world What are they doing in this sanctuary of their common Father, as they all declare it to be? Here are the Mohammedans eager to kill any Jew or Christian who may enter the Mosque of Omar Uvarov, Sergei Uvazhnov-Aleksandrov, Colonel, shortlived command of Soimonov’s Division Vaillant, Marshal (French Minister of War) council of war with allied leaders (1855) Vanson, Lt, ‘souvenirs’ of Sevastopol Vantini, Giuseppe see Yusuf, General Varna: British and French troops cholera outbreak drunkenness among troops fire caused by arsonists Turkish army Verney, Sir Harry, Our Quarrel with Russia Viazmitinov, Anatoly, in the Zherve battery Vicars, Capt Hedley (Ninety-Seventh Regiment) Victor Emmanuel: King of Piedmont-Sardinia war with Austria (1859) King of Italy Crimean War paintings Victoria, Queen of Great Britain: Tsar Nicholas and description of Napoleon III political judgement of attitude to Russian invasion of Turkey comment on Clarendon abdication threat religious sympathies with Greeks sees necessity of war declaration of War on Russia (1854) knitting for soldiers calls Palmerston to form a government (1855) comments on the death of Tsar Nicholas does not trust Russian diplomatic moves not ready to end war and the FrancoAustrian peace ultimatum Napoleon III writes on alternative plans for war Serpent Island incident (1856) unhappy with the Crimean peace first Victoria Cross investiture collector of photographic memorabilia buys The Roll Call Victoria Cross, institution of Viel-Castel, Horace de, on France as a great power Vienna Conference (1853), peace terms offered to Russia Vienna Conference (1855) Vienna, Congress of (1815) Villafranca, secret deal (France/Austria) Ville de France (French ship) Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Karl Friedrich, Count (Saxon Minister to London) Vixen (British schooner), gun-running to Circassia Vladimir, Saint, Grand Prince of Kiev desecration of church of Vladimirescu, Tudor Vladivostok Voennyi sbornik (military journal) Volkonsky, Sergei Voltaire, Catherine the Great and Vorntsov, Count Semyon Vorontsov, Prince Mikhail and Franco-Austrian peace proposals as governor-general in the Crimea palace hit by naval shells Vyazemsky, Prince Pyotr, criticisms of the war Walewski, Alexandre Joseph, Count (French Foreign Minister); council of war with allied leaders (1855) and Napoleon’s threat of revolutionary war Paris Peace Congress (1856) Polish independence possible peace talks with Russia Serpent Island incident (1856) Wallachia autonomy granted (1829) cereal exports to Britain debated at Paris Peace Congress (1856) hospodar ordered to reject Turkish rule preliminaries to Crimean War (1853) repressive occupation by Russians Russian occupation of (1829 – 34) Russian response to 1848 revolution see also Romania Wallachian volunteers, desert from Russian army war graves, Sevastopol war memorials: in Britain in France in Sevastopol war tourism see also Duberly, Fanny; spectators Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of White, Charles, Turcophile pamphlets White Sea, theatre of war White Works redoubts (Sevastopol) Wightman, Trooper (17th Lancers) Williams, General William, in command in Kars Wilson, Capt (Coldstream Gds), at Inkerman Wilson, Sir Robert, Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia in the Year 1817 winter (1854 – 5); in prospect in actuality the hurricane Wodehouse, John (British ambassador in St Petersburg) women: attempts to Westernize Turkish womens dress by the Sultan British army wives cantinières Dasha Sevastopolskaia (the heroine of Sevastopol) leaving Sevastopol in Sevastopol spectators at Alma spectators at Balaklava see also nurses and nursing Wood, Midshipman Evelyn, letters home Woods, Nicholas (war correspondent), report on Inkerman dead Wrangel, Lt-Gen Baron (cavalry commander), at Evpatoria Yalta Conference (1945) Yenikale see Kerch, allied raid (1855) Ye ilköy see San Stefano York, Prince Frederick, Duke of, memorial column Young, William (British consul) Young Turks Ypsilantis, Alexander Yusuf, General, of Spahis d’Orient Zamoyski, Wladislav: Czartoryski’s agent in London the ‘Sultan’s Cossacks’ Zherve Battery, fight for possession Zhukovsky, Vasily, tutor to Alexander II About the Author ORLANDO FIGES is the author of The Whisperers, Natasha’s Dance, and A People’s Tragedy, which have been translated into over twenty languages The recipient of the Wolfson History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, among others, Figes is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London Notes a According to medieval Russian chronicles, the lands of Japheth were settled by the Rus′ and other tribes after the Flood in the Book of Genesis b The Russians were steadily extending their system of fortresses along the Terek river (the ‘Caucasus Line’) and using their newly won protectorate over the Orthodox Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kacheti to build up a base of operations against the Ottomans, occupying Tbilisi and laying the foundations for the Georgian Military Highway to link Russia to the southern Caucasus c Not to be confused with Mehmet Ali, the Egyptian ruler d The name reverted to the Gold Cup after the outbreak of the Crimean War e There is an obvious comparison with the Western view of Russia during the Cold War The Russophobia of the Cold War era was partly shaped by nineteenth-century attitudes f It also influenced British public opinion on the eve of the Crimean War In May 1854, ‘The True Story of the Nuns of Minsk’ was published in Charles Dickens’s journal Household Words The author of the article, Florence Nightingale, had met Makrena in Rome in 1848 and had written an account of her ordeal which she then put in a drawer After the battle of Sinope, when the Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet in the Black Sea, Nightingale brought out the article, which she thought might help to drum up popular support against Russia, and sent it to Dickens, who shortened it into the version that appeared in Household Words g In 1850 the British public applauded the decision by Palmerston to send the Royal Navy to block the port of Athens in support of Don Pacifico, a British subject who had appealed to the Greek government for compensation after his home was burned down in an anti-Semitic riot in Athens Don Pacifico was serving as the Portuguese consul in Athens at the time of the attack (he was a Portuguese Jew by descent) but he had been born in Gibraltar and was thus a British subject On this basis (‘Civis Britannicus Sum’), Palmerston defended his decision to dispatch the fleet h The Austrians and Prussians had agreed to follow Russia’s example, but then backed down, fearing it would cause a break with France They found a compromise, addressing Napoleon as ‘Monsieur mon frère.’ i The Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen; Lord John Russell, leader of the House of Commons; Foreign Secretary Lord George Clarendon; Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty; and Palmerston, at that time Home Secretary j Nesselrode was supported by Baron Meyendorff, the Russian ambassador in Vienna, who reported to the Tsar on 29 November that the ‘little Christian peoples’ would not fight on Russia’s side They had never received any help from Russia in the past and had been left in ‘a state of military destitution’, unable to resist the Turks (Peter von Meyendorff: Ein russischer Diplomat an den Höfen von Berlin und Wien Politischer und privater Briefwechsel 1826 – 1863, ed O Hoetzsch, vols (Berlin and Leipzig, 1923), vol 3) k A reference to the expeditionary force of General Oudinot in 1849 – 50 which attacked the anti-papal Roman Republic and brought back Pius IX to Rome The French troops remained in Rome to protect the Pope until 1870 l In the Opium Wars of 1839 – 42 m A reference to the Don Pacifico affair n In the battle of Poltava (1709) Peter the Great defeated Sweden and established Russia as a Baltic power o It is one of the ironies of the Crimean War that Sidney Herbert, the British Secretary at War in 1852 – 5, was the nephew of this senior Russian general and Anglophile Mikhail was the son of Count Semyon Vorontsov, who lived for forty-seven years in London, most of them after his retirement as Russia’s ambassador Semyon’s daughter Catherine married George Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke A general in the war against Napoleon, Mikhail was appointed governor-general of New Russia in 1823 He did a great deal to establish Odessa, where he built a magnificent palace, promoted the development of steamships on the Black Sea and fought in the war against the Turks in 1828 – Following the Anglophile traditions of his family, Vorontsov built a fabulous Anglo-Moorish palace at Alupka on the Crimea’s southern coast, where the British delegation to the Yalta Conference stayed in 1945 p There was no Russian Bible – only a Psalter and a Book of Hours – until the 1870s q One of them now stands in front of the City Duma building on the Primorsky Boulevard r Their determination was given more religious force when Musa Pasha was later killed by a shell that landed directly on him while he was conducting evening prayers for divine intervention to save Silistria s After it was amputated (without anaesthetic) Raglan had asked to have the arm so that he could retrieve a ring given to him by his wife The incident had sealed his reputation for personal bravery t The first Zouave battalions were recruited from a Berber mountain tribe called the Zouaoua Later Zouave battalions of Frenchmen adopted their Moorish costumes and green turbans u A tall shako, named after Prince Albert, who supposedly designed it v Events would prove them right On August Napier launched an allied attack against the Russian fortress at Bomarsund in the Aaland Islands, between Sweden and Finland, mainly with the aim of involving Sweden in the war The support of Swedish troops was necessary for any move on the Russian capital After a heavy bombardment that reduced the fortress to rubble, the Russian commander and his 2,000 men surrendered to the allies But Bomarsund was a minor victory – it was not Kronstadt or St Petersburg – and the Swedes were not impressed, despite strong approaches from the British Until the allies committed more serious resources to the campaign in the Baltic, there was no real prospect of involving Sweden in the war, let alone threatening St Petersburg But the allies were divided on the significance of the Baltic The French were far less keen on it than the British – Palmerston in particular, who dreamed of taking Finland as part of his broader plans to dismantle the Russian Empire – and they were reluctant to commit more troops to a war aim which they saw as serving mainly British interests For Napoleon, the campaign in the Baltic could be no more than a minor diversion to prevent the Tsar from deploying an even bigger army in the Crimea, the main focus of their war campaign w The British army had allowed four wives per company to go with their men to Gallipoli Provided for by the army (‘on the strength’) the women performed cooking and laundry services x The first British casualty of the fighting was Sergeant Priestley of the 13th Light Dragoons, who lost a leg Evacuated to England, he was later presented with a cork leg by the Queen (A Mitchell, Recollections of One of the Light Brigade (London, 1885), p 50) y Having given the order to advance, Raglan had taken the incredible decision to ride up ahead and get a better view of the attack With his staff, Raglan crossed the Alma and occupied a position on an exposed spur of Telegraph Hill, well ahead of the British troops and practically adjacent to the Russian skirmishers ‘It seems marvellous how one escaped,’ wrote Captain Gage, a member of Raglan’s staff, from the Alma the next day ‘Shells burst close to me, round shot passed to the right, left & over me Minié and musket whistled by my ears, horses & riders of Ld R’s staff (where I was) fell dead & wounded by my side, & yet I am quite safe & can hardly realize what I have gone thro” (NAM 1968 – 07-484 – 1, ‘Alma Heights Battle Field, Sept 21st 1854’) z A lone Russian woman, Daria Mikhailova, cared for the wounded with a cart and supplies purchased at her own expense Daria was the 18-year-old daughter of a Sevastopol sailor killed at the battle of Sinope At the time of the invasion, she was working as a laundress in the Sevastopol naval garrison According to popular legend, she sold everything she had inherited from her father, bought a horse and cart from a Jewish trader, cut her hair and dressed up as a sailor, and went with the army to the Alma, where she distributed water, food and wine to the wounded soldiers, even tearing her own clothes to make dressings for their wounds, which she cleaned with vinegar The soldiers saw through Daria’s disguise, but she was allowed to carry on with her heroic work in the dressing station at Kacha and then as a nurse in the hospitals of Sevastopol during the siege Legends spread about the ‘heroine of Sevastopol’ She came to symbolize the patriotic spirit of the common people as well as the Russian female ‘spirit of sacrifice’ that poets such as Alexander Pushkin had romanticized Not knowing her family name, the soldiers in the hospitals of Sevastopol called her Dasha Sevastopolskaia, and that is how she has gone down in history In December 1854 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Zeal by the Tsar, becoming the only Russian woman of non-noble origin ever to receive that honour; the Empress gave her a silver cross with the inscription ‘Sevastopol’ In 1855 Daria married a retired wounded soldier and opened a tavern in Sevastopol, where she lived until her death in 1892 (H Rappaport, No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War (London, 2007), p 77) aa The engineering department of the War Ministry had failed to implement a plan of 1834 to reinforce the city’s defensive works, claiming lack of finance, though at the same time millions were spent on the fortification of Kiev, several hundred kilometres from the border Afraid of an Austrian attack through south-west Russia, Nicholas I had kept a large reserve of troops in the Kiev area, but saw no need to so in Sevastopol since he dismissed the danger of an attack by the Turks or the Western powers in the Black Sea He had overlooked the huge significance of steamships, which made it possible to carry large armies by sea ab According to a Russian source, the Tatar spies were shot on the orders of the British when the truth was discovered (S Gershel’man, Nravstvennyi element pod Sevastopolem (St Petersburg, 1897), p 86) ac A pejorative Turkish term for a Balkan Christian ad After the Russian annexation of the Crimea, the Giray clan had fled to the Ottoman Empire In the early nineteenth century the Girays had served as administrators for the Ottomans in the Balkans and had entered into military service The Ottoman Empire had various military units made up of Crimean émigrés They had fought against the Russians in 1828 – 9, and were part of the Turkish forces on the Danubian front in 1853 – Mussad Giray was stationed in Varna It was there that he persuaded the allied commanders to take him with them to the Crimea to rally Tatar support for their invasion On 20 September the allies sent Mussad Giray back to the Balkans, praising him for his efforts and considering that his job was done After the Crimean War, the French awarded him with a Légion d’honneur medal ae Balaklava (originally Bella Clava: ‘beautiful port’) was named by the Genoese, who built much of the port and saw it thrive until their expulsion by the Turks in the fifteenth century Plundered by the Turks, the town remained a virtual ruin until the nineteenth century, although there was a monastery in the hills above the town and some Greek soldiers stationed there, who were expelled by the allies af A hot drink made with honey and spices ag Defensive tall wicker baskets filled with earth ah A Turkish term for a woman who is dressed improperly In the Ottoman period it was used to describe non-Muslim women and had sexual connotations, implying that the woman ran a brothel or was herself a prostitute It is something of a mystery as to why the Russians, faced by such a tiny defence force, did not make a quicker and more powerful attack against Balaklava Various Russian commanders later claimed that they lacked sufficient troops to capture Balaklava, that the operation had been a reconnaissance, or that it was an attempt to divert the allied forces from Sevastopol rather than capture the port But these were excuses for their failure, which perhaps could be explained by their lack of confidence against the allied armies on an open battlefield after the defeat of the Russian forces at the Alma aj Soimonov relied on a naval map, without any markings on the land A member of his staff showed him the way by drawing on the map with his finger (A Andriianov, Inkermanskii boi i oborona Sevastopolia (nabroski uchastnika) (St Petersburg, 1903), p 15) ak Woods was mistaken: the Russian Guards were nowhere near the Crimea al A reasonable mistake to make amid the heavy fog and brushwood on the heights, where non-wounded soldiers lay down on the ground to ambush the enemy am Tolstoy is citing the official figures passed for publication by the military censors The true Russian losses were double that amount an So incompetent was the commissariat that it took shipments of green, unroasted coffee beans, instead of tea, the usual drink of the troops in an Empire based on the tea trade The process of roasting, grinding and preparing the coffee was too laborious for most of the British soldiers, who threw the beans away ao Born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg, she was received into the Russian Orthodox Church and given the name Elena Pavlovna before her marriage to the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich in 1824 ap The telegraphs were meant for military use; journalists were not allowed to clog them up with long reports, so there was a time lag between the headline story in a newspaper, which arrived by cable, and the full report, which came later by steamship There were often false reports because of this – the most famous in The Times, on October 1854, which announced the fall of Sevastopol on the basis of telegraph communications of the victory at the Alma and Russell’s first dispatch from the Crimea, covering the landing of the allied troops It was not until 10 October that Russell’s full report on the Alma got to London, by which time the true situation had been clarified by further telegraphs aq The vicar Joseph Blakesley, who styled himself ‘A Hertfordshire Incumbent’, wrote so many lengthy letters to The Times, offering his learning on anything associated with the war, from the climate in the Crimea to the character of Russia, that he earned a reputation as a popular historian and was later even appointed to the Regius Professorship of History at Cambridge University, despite his lack of academic credentials ar There was some basis to the rumours about America US public opinion was generally pro-Russian during the Crimean War The Northern abolitionists were sympathetic towards the Western powers but the slave-owning South was firmly on the side of Russia, a serf economy There was a general sympathy for the Russians as an underdog fighting against England, the old imperial enemy, as well as a fear that if Britain won the war against Russia it would be more inclined to meddle once again in the affairs of the United States Relations between the USA and Britain had been troubled during recent years because of concerns in London about America’s territorial claims over Canada and its plans to invade Cuba (Clarendon had told the British cabinet that if Cuba was invaded Britain would be forced to declare war against America) Isolated in Europe, the Russians developed relations with the USA during the Crimean War They were brought together by their common enemy – the English – although there were lingering suspicions on the Russian side of the republican Americans and, on the American side, about the despotic tsarist monarchy Commercial contracts were signed between the Russians and Americans A US military delegation (including George B McClellan, the future commander of the Northern army in the early stages of the Civil War) went to Russia to advise the army American citizens sent arms and munitions to Russia (the arms manufacturer Samuel Colt even offering to send pistols and rifles) American volunteers went to the Crimea to fight or serve as engineers on the Russian side Forty US doctors were attached to the medical department of the Russian army It was at this time that the USA first proposed the purchase of Russian-America, as Alaska was known, a sale that went ahead in 1867 as ‘As for Constantinople, we will have it, rest assured.’ at In 1857 he married Parthenope Nightingale, the elder sister of Florence Nightingale, and remained close to Florence all his life au Not to be confused with Mikhail Gorchakov, his commander-in-chief av Herbert’s resignation from the cabinet (as Secretary to the Colonies) came after weeks of harsh and xenophobic criticism in the British press, which had focused on his family connections to Russia It was said, for example, in the Belfast News-Letter (29 Dec 1854) that his mother Lady Herbert was the sister of a prince with a ‘splendid palace in Odessa’ that had been deliberately spared by the British during the bombardment of that town (in fact Vorontsov’s palace had been badly damaged during the bombardment of Odessa) In the Exeter Flying Post (31 Jan 1855), Herbert was accused of attempting to ‘obstruct the way [of the government] and favour the designs of the Czar’ aw There were many Poles who ran away from the Russian army and joined the Sultan’s forces, some of them quite senior officers who adopted Turkish names, partly to disguise themselves from the Russians: Iskander Bey (later Iskander Pasha), Sadyk Pasha (Micha Czaykowski) and ‘Hidaiot’ (Hedayat) with Omer Pasha’s army in the Danube area; Colonel Kuczynski, chief of staff of the Egyptian army at Evpatoria; and Major Kleczynski and Major Jerzmanowski of the Turkish army in the Crimea ax Taganrog had insufficient military forces to defend itself, just one battalion of infantry and a Cossack regiment, along with a unit of 200 armed civilians, in all some 2,000 troops, but no artillery In a desperate effort to save the town from bombardment, the governor sent a delegation to meet the commanders of the allied fleet with an offer to decide the fate of Taganrog by combat in the field He even offered to make the sides unequal to reflect the allied advantage at sea It was an extraordinary act of chivalry that could have come directly from the pages of medieval history The allied commanders were unimpressed, and returned to their ships to begin the bombardment of Taganrog The entire port, the dome of the cathedral and many other buildings were destroyed Among the many inhabitants who fled the besieged city was Evgenia Chekhova, the mother of the future playwright Anton Chekhov, who was born in Taganrog five years afterwards (L Guerrin, Histoire de la dernière guerre de Russie (1853 – 1856) , vols (Paris, 1858), vol 2; N Dubrovin, Istoriia krymskoi voiny i oborony Sevastopolia, vols (St Petersburg, 1900), vol 3, p 191) ay Peto & Grissell, the company he ran with his cousin Thomas Grissell, built many well-known London buildings, including the Reform Club, the Oxford & Cambridge Club, the Lyceum and Nelson’s Column az This incident is the origin of the famous phrase, originally coined by Totleben: ‘The French army is an army of lions led by donkeys.’ The phrase was later used to describe the British army in the First World War ba A barrier about metres high and a metre or so wide, made up of felled trees, timber and brushwood bb In an attempt to stop them from deserting, the Russian officers had told their men that if they gave themselves up to the enemy their ears would be cut off and given to the Turks (whose military custom was to cut off ears to receive a reward); but even this had not prevented Russian troops from running off in large numbers bc Lyde’s accusers claimed that he had fired wilfully at the beggar but the only witnesses of the shooting were three women The testimony of women was inadmissible in a Turkish court bd It was from this time that Nice became a favourite resort of the Russian aristocracy, a ‘Russian Brighton’, according to the British press, which was alarmed by the appearance of Russian merchant ships in the Mediterranean, a sea dominated by the Royal Navy There were dire warnings of an intrigue between Russia and the Catholic powers When rumours later circulated that the Russians were intending to set up coaling stations in other parts of the Mediterranean, in 1858, Palmerston (by this stage out of office) called for a show of naval strength against the Sardinians But the Conservative government of Lord Derby was less concerned, seeing Russia’s deal with the Sardinians as no more than a commercial agreement The Villafranca contract lasted until 1917 be In 1857 the army song was published by the socialist exile Alexander Herzen in his periodical the Polar Star The ballad was well known in the student revolutionary circles of the 1860s and was later even cited by Lenin In fact, Tolstoy was not wholly responsible for the song, which expressed a discontent that was widely felt in the army It originated with a group of artillery officers, including Tolstoy, who gathered round the piano in the rooms of their commander on an almost daily basis to drink and sing and make up songs As he was already known for his writing, Tolstoy, who no doubt played a leading role in the composition of the verses, took most of the blame for them bf Under the terms of the emancipation, the peasants were obliged to pay redemption dues on the land transferred to them These repayments, calculated by the gentry’s own land commissions, were to be repaid over a forty-nine-year period to the state, which recompensed the gentry in 1861 Thus, in effect, the serfs bought their freedom by paying off their masters’ debts The redemption payments became increasingly difficult to collect, not least because the peasantry regarded them as unjust from the start They were finally cancelled in 1905 bg Overall, perhaps half the farming land in European Russia was transferred from the gentry’s ownership to the communal tenure of the peasantry, although the precise proportion depended largely on the landowner’s will bh Shamil was sent to St Petersburg for a meeting with the Tsar There he was treated as a celebrity by the Russian public, which for years had lived on tales of his courage and daring Exiled to Kaluga, Shamil suffered from the cold In 1868 he was moved to the warmer climate of Kiev, where he was given a mansion and a pension, and placed under only loose surveillance by the authorities In 1869 he was allowed to leave for a pilgrimage to Mecca on condition that he left his oldest sons in Russia as hostages After completing his pilgrimage to Mecca, he died in Medina in 1871 Two of his sons became officers in the Russian army, but two others fought for the Turks against the Russians in 1877 – bi Ermak Timofeevich, the sixteenth-century Cossack leader and folk hero who began the exploration and military conquest of Siberia bj Including the character of Vronsky at the end of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina bk It has since been shown that the metal in fact came from antique Chinese guns (J Glanfield, Bravest of the Brave: The Story of the Victoria Cross (London, 2005)) bl The Rumiantsev Library and Museum, opened in Moscow in 1862, was not a public collection in this sense It was donated to the public by a single nobleman Copyright © 2010 by Orlando Figes All rights reserved Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company, LLC Publishers since 1866 175 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10010 www.henryholt.com Metropolitan Books® and ® are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books, London, as Crimea eISBN 9781429997249 First eBook Edition : April 2011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Figes, Orlando The Crimean War : a history / Orlando Figes.—1st ed p cm “Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books, London”—T.p verso Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-0-8050-7460-4 Crimean War, 1853 – 1856 I Title DK214.F53 2010 947’.0738—dc22 2010023152 ISBN: 978-0-8050-7460-4 Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums For details contact: Director, Special Markets First Edition 2010 ... fortresses, as they were for any Russian army attacking the Ottoman capital, so the allegiance of the peasant population was a vital factor in these wars The Russians appealed to the Orthodox... (encompassing the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia) and the Black Sea northern coast (including the Crimean peninsula) They were to become the two main theatres of the Crimean War With... Hopeful of a Prussian alliance, the pro -war party at the Porte prevailed, and the Ottomans declared war on Russia, which was then supported by its ally Austria with its own declaration of war against