The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

The most influential of these pamphlets was On the Designs of Russia, previously discussed, by the future Crimean War commander George de Lacy Evans, which first laid out the danger posed by Russia’s activities in Asia Minor. But this pamphlet was notable for another reason as well: it was here that de Lacy Evans advanced the earliest detailed plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire, a programme that would be taken up again by the cabinet during the Crimean War. He advocated a preventive war against Russia to block its aggressive intentions. He proposed attacking Russia in Poland, Finland, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, where it was most vulnerable. His eight-point plan reads almost like a blueprint of the larger British aims against Russia during the Crimean War: 1. Cut off trade to Russia so that the nobles would lose their profits and turn against the tsarist government. 2. Destroy the naval depots at Kronstadt, Sevastopol, etc. 3. Launch a series of ‘predatory and properly supported incursions along her maritime frontiers, especially in the Black Sea, within the shores of which, and even in the rear of her line of military posts, she has a host of unsubdued, armed, indomitable mountaineer enemies …’. 4. Help the Persians to reclaim the Caucasus. 5. Send a large corps of troops and a fleet to the Gulf of Finland ‘to menace the flanks and reserve of the Russian armies of Poland and Finland’. 6. Finance revolutionaries to ‘create insurrections and a serf war’. 7...