The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

But the more the West expressed its opposition to Russia’s occupation of the principalities, the more he was inclined to gamble everything on a grand alliance of the Orthodox, even threatening to support Slav revolts against the Austrians, if they should join the West against Russia. Religious conviction made the old Tsar rash and reckless, risking all the gains Russia had made in the Near East over many decades of diplomacy and fighting on a gamble with the Slavs.

The Russians were despised by the Moldavians and Wallachians, the British consul reported, ‘and everybody laughs at them when it can be done with safety’. There were dozens of uprisings in the countryside against the requisitioning, some of them repressed by the Cossacks with ruthless violence, killing peasants and burning villages. Omer Pasha’s Turkish forces also carried out a war of terror against dozens of Bulgarian settlements – destroying churches, beheading priests, mutilating murder victims and raping girls – to deter others from rising up against them or sending volunteers to the Russians.16

The leaders of the Serb army were resigned to and even colluding in a Russian takeover, according to the British consul in Belgrade. In January 1854 the commander-in-chief of the Serbian army told him that it was ‘pointless to resist a power as invincible as Russia, which would conquer the Balkans and turn Constantinople into the capital of Orthodox Slavdom’.18

If Serbia was lost, there was a real danger that the entire Balkans would rebel against the Ottomans. From Serbia it was not far to Thessaly and Epirus, where 40,000 Greeks were already organized in armed rebellion against the Turks and were supported by the government in Athens, which took the opportunity provided by the Russian occupation of the principalities to start a war with Turkey for the rebellious territories.

Afraid of losing all their Balkan territories, the Turks decided to hold a defensive line on the Danube and attack the Russians in the Caucasus, where they could draw on the support of the Muslim tribes, to force them to withdraw some of their troops from the Danubian front.

This was the opportunity the Turks now decided to exploit. A successful war against the Russians in the Caucasus would encourage the Persians and Muslims throughout the Black Sea area, perhaps even leading to the downfall of the Russian Empire in the region. It was also bound to attract the support of the British, who for several years had secretly been running guns and money to the rebels in Circassia and Georgia, and had long been planning to link up with Shamil.

According to Slade, the Russian attack killed 2,700 Turkish sailors, out of a total of 4,200 at Sinope. In the town there was chaos and destruction everywhere.

taken off in ships to Constantinople.24 A few days later Slade related the details of the battle to the Porte. He found the ministers strangely unaffected by the news – reinforcing the suspicion that the Turks had provoked the attack by the Russians to bring the Western powers into the war: Their cheerful cushioned apartment and sleek fur-robed persons deepened in imagination, by the force of contrast, the gloom of the dingy cafés of Sinope with their writhing occupants.

News of Sinope reached London on 11 December. The destruction of the Turkish fleet was a justified action by the Russians, who were after all at war with Turkey, but the British press immediately declared it a ‘violent outrage’ and a ‘massacre’, and made wildly exaggerated claims of 4,000 civilians killed by the Russians.

Russia.27 The position of the British government – a fragile coalition of Liberals and free-trade Conservatives weakly held together by Lord Aberdeen – was dramatically altered by the public reaction to Sinope. At first the government reacted calmly to the news. Most of the cabinet took the view of the Prime Minister that more time should be given to the peace initiatives promoted by the Austrians. It was agreed that the British and French fleets would have to make their presence felt in the Black Sea, but that this show of naval strength should be used to force the Russians to accept peace talks rather than provoke a war. There was a general feeling that Britain should not be dragged into a war by the Turks, who had brought the disaster on themselves.

At this stage the Queen agreed with Aberdeen that the invasion of the principalities should not be taken as a cause of war against Russia. Like him, she was still inclined to trust the Tsar, whom she had met and come to like ten years before, and thought that his aggressive actions might be curbed. Her private views were anti-Turk, which also had a bearing on her attitude to the Russian invasion. Before Sinope, Victoria had written in her journal that it ‘would be in the interest of peace, and a great advantage generally, were the Turks to be well beaten’. Afterwards she took a different view of the invasion, hoping that a Russian beating of the Turks would make both sides more amenable to European peace initiatives.

French support was crucial to Palmerston and the war party in the British cabinet. Napoleon was determined to use Sinope as a pretext to take strong action against Russia, partly from the calculation that it was an opportunity to cement an alliance with Britain, and partly from the belief that an emperor of France should not tolerate the humiliation of his fleet, should the Russian action go unpunished. On 19 December Napoleon proposed that the French and British fleets should enter the Black Sea and force all Russian warships to return to Sevastopol. He even threatened that the French would act alone, if Britain refused. This was enough to make Aberdeen reluctantly capitulate: fear of a resurgent France, if not fear of Russia, had forced his hand.

But the origins of the Crimean War cannot be understood by studying only the motives of statesmen and diplomats. This was a war – the first war in history – to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion.

emergence of a national press in the 1840s and 1850s, public opinion became a potent force in British politics, arguably overshadowing the influence of Parliament and the cabinet itself. The

The issue that allowed him to achieve this was the war against Russia. His foreign policy captured the imagination of the British public as the embodiment of their own national character and popular ideals: it was Protestant and freedom-loving, energetic and adventurous, confident and bold, belligerent in its defence of the little man, proudly British, and contemptuous of foreigners, particularly those of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox religion, whom Palmerston associated with the worst vices and excesses of the Continent. The public loved his verbal commitment to liberal interventionism abroad: it reinforced their John Bull view that Britain was the greatest country in the world and that the task of government should be to export its way of life to those less fortunate who lived beyond its shores.

Palmerston became so popular, and his foreign policy became so closely linked to the defence of ‘British values’ in the public mind, that anyone who tried to halt the drift to war was likely to be vilified by the patriotic press.

Evacuating the city, the Russians issued a dark warning to the ‘treacherous Wallachians’ in a manifesto from the Tsar: His Majesty the Tsar does not believe that those who profess the same religion as the Orthodox Emperor can submit to a government that is not Christian. If the Wallachians cannot understand that, because they are too much influenced by Europe, and given over to false beliefs, the Tsar nonetheless cannot renounce the mission that God has given him as the leader of the Orthodox, to remove for ever from the sovereignty of the Ottomans those who profess the true Christian faith, that is to say the Greek.

News of the withdrawal was a huge shock to the Slavophiles in Moscow and St Petersburg who had seen the Russian advance into the Balkans as a war of liberation for the Slavs. They now became despondent at what they saw as the abandonment of their ideals. Konstantin Aksakov had dreamed of a Slavic federation under Russian leadership. He thought the war would end with the planting of a cross on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. But the retreat from the Danube filled him ‘with feelings of disgust and shame’, as he wrote to his brother Ivan to explain:

They rejoiced in the fact that Russia would be fighting on its own against Europe, believing that a holy war for the Slavs’ liberation from Western influence would be the fulfilment of Russia’s messianic role.33

The Turkish commander was supported by the British and the French.

of the Tsar. To the British and the French, it seemed obvious that the Austrians had come to the rescue of the Danubian principalities, not as gendarmes of the European Concert, nor as champions of Turkish sovereignty, but with political motives of their own.34

Bashi Bazouks under French command. By 22 July he had assembled at Varna a cavalry brigade of 4,000 Bashi Bazouks given to the French by the Ottomans, along with various other detachments of irregulars, including a Kurdish band of horsemen commanded by Fatima Khanum. Known as the Virgin of Kurdistan, the 70-year-old Khanum led her tribal followers, armed with swords and knives and pistols, under the green banner of a Muslim war.

Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy

Sevastopol was a military town. Its entire population of 40,000 people was connected in some way to the life of the naval base,

The defeat of the Russian forces at the Alma created panic among the civilian population of Sevastopol. People were expecting the allies to invade from the north at any time; they were confused when they saw their fleets on the southern side, supposing wrongly that they had been surrounded.

Despite Lipkin’s confidence, the Russian commanders were seriously considering abandoning Sevastopol after the battle at the Alma.

With Menshikov nowhere to be seen, the main responsibility for the defence of Sevastopol passed into the hands of three commanders: Admiral Kornilov, chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet; Totleben, the engineer; and Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and commander of the port, who was popular among the sailors and seen as ‘one of them’.

The defensive preparations were frenzied and improvised. When the work began, it was discovered that there were no shovels in Sevastopol, so men were sent to procure as many as they could from Odessa. Three weeks later, they returned with 400 spades. Meanwhile, the people of the city worked in the main with wooden shovels they had made from torn-up planks of wood.

John Burgoyne would pay me a visit you can

Burgoyne, formerly an advocate of a quick assault, now disagreed. Concerned with loss of lives, the army’s chief engineer insisted on the need to subdue the enemy’s fire with siege guns before an assault by troops was launched. The French agreed with him. So the allies settled down to the slow process of landing siege artillery and hauling it up to the heights.

While the British were hauling up their guns, the French took the lead in digging trenches, moving slowly forward in a zigzag formation towards the defences of Sevastopol, as the Russians fired at them with artillery. The opening of the first trench was the most dangerous because there was little protection from the Russian guns. Armed with shovels and pickaxes, the first shift of 800 men crept forward under cover of the night, using rocks for shelter, until they reached a point within a kilometre of Sevastopol’s Flagstaff Bastion, and on lines marked out by their commanders began digging themselves into the ground, piling up the soil in gabions in front of them to protect themselves from the Russians.

On that night, 9/10 October, the sky was clear and the moon was out, but a north-west wind took the sound of digging away from the town, and by dawn, when the sleepy Russians at last discovered them, the French had dug a protected trench 1,000 metres long.

On 16 October it was finally decided to begin the bombardment of Sevastopol the following morning, even though the British works were not quite completed. There was a mood of optimistic expectation in the allied camp. ‘All artillery officers – French, English and naval – say [that] after a fire of 48 hours, little will be seen of Sevastopol but a heap of ruins,’ wrote Henry Clifford, a staff officer in the Light Division,

‘Inside the No. 4 Bastion,’ recalled Bariatinsky, ‘the scene was frightful and the destruction enormous, whole gun teams having been struck down by shellfire; the wounded and dead were being removed by stretcher-bearers, but they were still lying round in heaps.’

In fact, for all their guns, the French and British ships received better than they gave. The wooden sailing vessels of the allied fleet were unable to get close enough to the stone forts of the coastal bastions to cause them much damage (the blockade had done its job in this respect) but they could be set alight by the Russian guns, which were not so numerous but (because they were based on the land) much more accurate than the allies’ long-range cannonade.

Without steam-powered iron ships, the allied fleet was destined to play only a subsidiary role to the army during the siege of Sevastopol.

On the Russian side, the first day had destroyed the mystique of the allied armies established by their victory at the Alma. Suddenly, the enemy was no longer seen as invincible, and from that the Russians gained new hope and self-confidence.

The British accused the Turkish troops of cowardice, but this was unfair. According to John Blunt, Lord Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, most of the troops were Tunisians without proper training or experience of war. They had only just arrived in the Crimea and were in a famished state: none of them had received any rations they could eat as Muslims since they had left Varna several days before and on their arrival they had disgraced themselves by attacking civilians. Blunt rode after the retreating troops and relayed to an officer Lucan’s command for them to regroup behind the 93rd, but he was accosted by the soldiers ‘who appeared parched with thirst and exhausted’. They asked him why no British troops had come to their support, complained that they had been left in the redoubts for several days without food or water, and declared that the ammunition they were supplied with did not fit the guns in the redoubts. One of the soldiers, his head in a bandage and smoking a long pipe, said to Blunt in Turkish: ‘What can we do sir? It is God’s will.’23

town as those audacious men had done.57 The Russians lost about 12,000 men on the battlefield of Inkerman. The British listed 2,610 casualties, the French 1,726. It was an appalling number killed in just four hours of fighting – a rate of loss almost on a par with the battle of the Somme.

As at the Alma, there were claims that the Russians had engaged in atrocities against the British and the French. It was said that they had robbed and killed the wounded on the ground,al sometimes even mutilating their bodies. British and French soldiers put these actions down to the ‘savagery’ of the Russian troops, who they said had been well primed with vodka. ‘They give no quarter,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his father on 8 November, ‘and this should be represented, as it is a scandal to the world that Russia, professing to be a civilized power, should disgrace herself by such acts of barbarity.’ Describing the ‘dastardly conduct’ of the Russian troops in his anonymous memoir, another British soldier wrote:

Aided by night, they emerge from the fog unexpectedly, like demons … Panting with murderous intent (for fair fighting is not their aim), blessed by inhuman Priests, promised plunder to any amount, excited by ardent liquids, encouraged by two of their Grand Dukes … drunk, maddened, every evil passion aroused, they rush wildly upon our soldiers. At Inkerman we saw the Russian soldiery bayoneting, beating out the brains, jumping like fiends upon the lacerated bodies of the wounded Allies, wherever they could find them. The atrocities committed by the Russians have covered their nation with infamy and made them an example of horror and detestation to the whole world.61

But in fact these actions had more to do with a sense of religious outrage.

When Raglan and Canrobert wrote to Menshikov on 7 November to protest against the atrocities, the Russian commander-in-chief replied that the killings had been caused by the destruction of the Church of St Vladimir at Khersonesos – the church built to consecrate the spot where the Grand Prince Vladimir had been baptized, converting Kievan Rus’ to Christianity – which had been pillaged and then used by the French troops as part of their siege works. The ‘deep religious feeling of our troops’ had been wounded by the desecration of St Vladimir, argued Menshikov in a letter approved by the Tsar, adding for good measure that the Russians had themselves been ‘victims’ of a series of ‘bloody retributions’ by the English troops on the battlefield of Inkerman.

But if the Russians had been driven to atrocities by deep religious feelings, it was certainly the case that they had been encouraged by their priests. The night before the battle, at services in churches in Sevastopol, the Russian troops were told that the British and the French were fighting for the Devil, and priests had called on them to kill them without mercy to avenge the destruction of St Vladimir.

The question now was how to make provision for the allied troops to spend the winter on the heights above Sevastopol, for all they had brought with them were lightweight tents suitable only for summer campaigning.

The Duke of Cambridge proposed withdrawing the troops to Balaklava, where they could be more easily supplied and sheltered from the cold than on the heights above Sevastopol. Raglan rejected their proposals, and resolved to keep the army on the heights throughout the winter months, a criminal decision prompting the resignation of Evans and Cambridge, who returned to England, sick and disillusioned, before winter came.

Their departure began a steady homeward trail of British officers. In the two months after Inkerman, 225 of the 1,540 officers in the Crimea departed for warmer climes; only 60 of them would return.64

Among the rank and file, the realization that there would be no quick victory was...

Tolstoy arrived in Sevastopol on 19 November, almost three weeks after setting out from Kishinev. Promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, he was attached to the 3rd Light Battery of the 14th Artillery Brigade and, to his annoyance, was quartered in the town itself, a long way from the city’s defences. Tolstoy stayed only nine days in Sevastopol that autumn, but he saw enough to inspire much of the patriotic pride and hope in the common Russian people that filled the pages of ‘Sevastopol in December’, the first of his Sevastopol Sketches, which was to make his literary name.

Winter came in the second week of November. For three days and nights the freezing wind and rain swept across the heights above Sevastopol, blowing down the tents of the British and French troops, who huddled in the mud, soaked and shivering, with nothing but their blankets and coats to cover them. And then, in the early hours of 14 November, the shores of the Crimea were hit by a hurricane.