Crimea

by Orlando Figes

The Tsar left England with the firm conviction that the conversations he had held with Peel and Aberdeen were statements of policy, and that he could now look forward to a partnership with Britain the aim of which was to devise a coordinated plan for the partition of the Ottoman Empire whenever that should become necessary to safeguard the interests of the two powers. It was not an unreasonable assumption to make, given that he had a secret memorandum to show for his efforts in London. But in fact it was a fatal error for Nicholas to think that he had a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with the British government on the Eastern Question. The British saw the conversations as no more than an exchange of opinions on matters of concern to both powers and not as something binding in any formal sense. Convinced that all that mattered was the viewpoint of the Queen and her senior ministers, Nicholas failed to appreciate the influence of Parliament, opposition parties, public opinion and the press on the foreign policy of the British government. This misunderstanding was to play a crucial role in the diplomatic blunders made by Nicholas on the eve of the Crimean War.

France. In this sense, through his exertions in London and Paris, Czartoryski was to play a signficant part in bringing about the Anglo-French alliance that would go to war with Russia in 1854. Czartoryski and the Polish exiles of the Hôtel Lambert group also played a significant role in the rise of French Russophobia, which gained strength in the two decades before the Crimean War. Until 1830, French views of Russia were relatively moderate.

But the Tsar’s opposition to the July 1830 Revolution had made him hated by the liberals and the Left, while Russia’s traditional allies, the legitimist supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, had strong Catholic opinions, which alienated them from the Russians on the question of Poland.

Even at this stage there were hopes for a diplomatic settlement. The Turkish declaration was a means of buying time for one to work by calming the war fever of the religious crowds in Constantinople and placing pressure on the Western governments to intervene. Unprepared for a real war against Russia, the Ottomans began a phoney one to avert the threat of an Islamic revolution in the Turkish capital and to force the West to send their fleets to make the Russians back down.

Warned by the British not to intervene in Thessaly and Epirus, King Otto chose to ignore them. Gambling on a Russian victory, or at least a prolonged war on the Danube, Otto hoped to win support for his monarchical dictatorship by establishing a greater Greece. Nationalist feelings were running high in Greece in 1853, the 400th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and many Greeks were looking towards Russia to restore a new Greek empire on the ruins of Byzantium.

Like so many wars, the allied expedition to the East began with no one really knowing what it was about. The reasons for the war would take months for the Western powers to work out through long-drawnout negotiations between themselves and the Austrians during 1854. Even after they had landed in the Crimea, in September, the allies were a long way from agreement about the objectives of the war.

It was generally assumed that the fall of Sevastopol would bring Russia to its knees, allowing the Western powers to claim victory and impose their conditions on the Russians. But this did not make much sense. Compared to Kronstadt and the other Baltic fortresses defending the Russian capital, Sevastopol was a relatively distant outpost in the Tsar’s Empire, and there was no logical reason to suppose that its capture by the allies would force him to submit. The consequence of this unquestioned assumption was that during 1855, when the fall of Sevastopol did not happen quickly, the allies went on battering the town in what was at that time the longest and most costly siege in military history to date rather than develop other strategies to weaken Russia’s land armies, which rather than her Black Sea Fleet were after all the real key to her power over Turkey.46 The Crimean campaign was not only wrongly conceived but also badly planned and prepared. The decision to invade the Crimea was taken without any real intelligence. The allied commanders had no maps of the region.

led them to believe that the Crimean winters were extremely mild, even though there were more recent books that pointed out the cold, such as The Russian Shores of the Black Sea in the Autumn of 1852 by Laurence Oliphant, which was published in 1853. The result was that no winter clothing or accommodation was prepared, partly on the hopeful assumption that it would be a brief campaign and that victory would be achieved before any frost set in.

If the allies had pushed on directly from the Alma, they would have taken Sevastopol by surprise. In all probability, they would have captured it in a few days, at relatively little cost in human lives compared to the many tens of thousands who were to die during the 349-day siege that followed from their errors and delays.

The real blunder of the British at Balaklava was not so much the Charge of the Light Brigade as their failure to pursue the Russian cavalry once the Heavy Brigade had routed them and the Light Brigade had got them on the run and then finish off the rest of Liprandi’s army.

The French recovered from the storm in a few days, but the British took much longer, and many of the problems they encountered in the winter months – the shortages of food and shelter and medical supplies – were a direct outcome of the hurricane as well as the failures of the supply system. The arrival of the winter had turned the war into a test of administrative efficiency – a test barely passed by the French and miserably failed by the British.

In all, that winter, in the four months following the hurricane, 4,000 soldiers died in the hospitals of Scutari, the vast majority of them unwounded. The British public was appalled by the loss of life. The readers of The Times demanded explanations, and in early March a government-appointed sanitary commission arrived in Scutari to investigate. It found that the main Barrack Hospital was built on top of a cesspool, that the sewers were leaking, with sewage spilling into the drinking water. Nightingale was unaware of the danger, for she believed that infection came from contaminated vapours, but the sanitation in the hospital was clearly inadequate. The soldiers in her care would have had a better chance of survival in any Turkish village than in her hospitals in Scutari.

Through daily reports in the newspapers, photographs and drawings in periodicals, people had immediate access to the latest news about the war, and a clearer grasp of its realities, than during any previous conflict. Their reactions to the news became a major factor in the calculations of the military authorities, which were exposed to a degree of public criticism never seen before

and that the concessions would mean the end of the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire.22 Their views were shared by many power-holders and beneficiaries of the old Muslim hierarchy – local pashas, governors, landowners and notables, clerics and officials, tax-farmers and moneylenders – who were all afraid that the better-educated and more active Christian minorities would soon come to dominate the political and social order, if they were granted civil and religious equality. For centuries the Muslims of the empire had been told that the Christians were inferior. Faced with the loss of their privileged position, the Muslims became increasingly rebellious. There were riots and attacks by Muslims against Christians in Bessarabia, in Nablus and in Gaza in 1856, in Jaffa during 1857, in the Hijaz during 1858, and in Lebanon and Syria, where 20,000 Maronite Christians were massacred by Druzes and Muslims during 1860. In each case religious and economic divisions reinforced each other: the livelihood of Muslims engaged in agriculture and small trades was directly threatened by the import of European goods by Christian middlemen. Rioters attacked Christian shops and houses, foreign churches and missionary schools, even embassies, after they had been stirred up by Muslim clerics opposed to the Hatt-i Hümayun.

But otherwise the treaty’s articles were statements of principle: the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were confirmed and guaranteed by the great powers (the first time a Muslim state was recognized by international law, the Congress of Vienna having specifically excluded Turkey from the European powers regulated by its international laws); the protection of the non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan was guaranteed by the signatory powers, thereby annulling Russia’s claims to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire; Russia’s protectorate over the Danubian principalities was negated by an article confirming the autonomy of these two states under Ottoman sovereignty; and, most humiliating of all for the Russians, Article XI declared the Black Sea to be a neutral zone, open to commercial shipping but closed to all warships in peacetime, thus depriving Russia of its naval ports and arsenals on this crucial southern coastal frontier.

was on this basis that the French and Piedmontese began their war against Austria in April 1859, in the knowledge that the Russians would advance 300,000 troops towards the Austrian frontier while they attacked in Italy. Only a few years before, Russia would have given military support to Austria against any French attempts to revise the Vienna treaty. The Crimean War had changed everything.

The Russians gave considerable backing to Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Prime Minister, whose conservatism had been noted by the Tsar during his period as ambassador in St Petersburg between 1859 and 1862. Bismarck himself placed a high priority on his good relations with Russia, which consistently supported Prussia in its wars against Denmark (in 1864), Austria (in 1866) and France (in 1870). With the defeat of France and the support of a grateful Germany, united by Bismarck, in 1871 Russia finally succeeded in getting the removal of Article XI of the Paris Treaty, allowing it to recommission its Black Sea Fleet.

Russia did not lose a lot in terms of territory but it was humbled by the Paris Treaty. Apart from the loss of its Black Sea Fleet and Bessarabia, it lost prestige in the Balkans and forfeited the gains that it had made in the Eastern Question since the eighteenth century. Russia did not recover the dominant position it had held in Europe until after 1945.

Bold statement, although I guess it did not decide on world's event on its own between 1856 and 1945. And that was probably the case between 1815-1853 and 1945-1991

The demilitarization of the Black Sea was a major strategic blow to Russia, which was no longer able to protect its vulnerable southern coastal frontier against the British or any other fleet, should the Sultan call on them in the event of war. The destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and other naval docks was a humiliation. No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a great power previously. Not even France had been disarmed after the Napoleonic Wars. The way Russia had been treated was unprecedented for the Concert of Europe, which was supposed to honour the principle that no great power should be humbled by others. But the allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power in Russia. They regarded Russia as a semi-Asiatic state. During the negotiations at the Paris congress, Walewski had asked the British delegates whether it would not be too humiliating for the Russians if the Western powers installed consuls in their Black Sea ports to police the demobilization. Cowley insisted that it would not, pointing out that a similar condition had been imposed on China by the Treaty of Nanking after the First Opium War.34