The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church sent more pilgrims to Jerusalem than any other branch of the Christian faith.

It is hardly surprising that a Unitarian such as Martineau or an Anglican like Curzon should have been so hostile to such rituals: demonstrations of religious emotion had long been effaced from the Protestant Church. Like many tourists in the Holy Land, they sensed that they had less in common with the Orthodox pilgrims, whose wild behaviour seemed barely Christian at all, than with the relatively secular Muslims, whose strict reserve and dignity were more in sympathy with their own private forms of quiet prayer.

Under Turkish law, whoever owned the roof of a house was the owner of that house. So the right to carry out the repairs was fiercely disputed by the Latins and the Greeks on the grounds that it would establish them in the eyes of the Turks as the legitimate protectors of the Holy Sepulchre.

That misgovernment was rooted in the empire’s failure to adapt to the modern world. The domination of the Muslim clergy (the mufti and the ulema) acted as a powerful brake on reform.

Western ideas and technologies were slow to penetrate the Islamic parts of the empire: trades and commerce were dominated by the non-Muslims (the Christians and Jews); there was no Turkish printing press until the 1720s; and as late as 1853 there were five times as many boys studying traditional Islamic law and theology in Constantinople as there were in the city’s modern schools with a secular curriculum.

The purchasing of offices for the lucrative business of tax-farming was almost universal in the provinces. Powerful pashas and military governors ruled whole regions as their personal fiefdoms, squeezing from them as many taxes as they could. As long as they passed on a share of their revenues to the Porte, and paid off their own financial backers, no one questioned or cared much about the arbitrary violence they employed.

But the key to the decline of the Ottoman Empire was its military backwardness. Turkey had a large army in the early nineteenth century, and it accounted for as much as 70 per cent of treasury expenditure, but it was technically inferior to the modern conscript armies of Europe. It lacked their centralized administration, command structures and military schools, was poorly trained and was still dependent on the recruitment of mercenaries, irregulars and tribal forces from the periphery of the empire.

But to build a modern conscript army was impossible without a fundamental transformation of the empire to centralize control of the provinces and overcome the vested interests of the 40,000 janizaries, the sultan’s salaried household infantry, who represented the outmoded traditions of the military establishment and resisted all reforms.11

By the middle of the nineteenth century as many as one million inhabitants of the Sultan’s empire were using the protective powers of the European legations to escape the jurisdiction and taxes of the Turkish authorities.

The Greek revolution really began in Russia. In its early stages it was led by Greek-born Russian politicians who had never even been to mainland Greece (a ‘geographical expression’ if ever there was one) but who dreamed of uniting all the Greeks through a series of uprisings against the Turks, which they planned to begin in the Danubian principalities.

There was a powerful Greek lobby in the ruling circles of St Petersburg. The Foreign Ministry contained a number of Greek-born diplomats and activists of the Greek cause.

In 1822 Ottoman troops brutally crushed a Greek uprising on the island of Chios, hanging 20,000 islanders and deporting into slavery almost all the surviving population of 70,000 Greeks.

Half the Russian soldiers died from illness and diseases during 1828–9. Reinforcements soon got sick as well. Between May 1828 and February 1829 a staggering 210,000 soldiers received treatment in military hospitals – twice the troop strength of the whole campaign.19 Such huge losses were not unusual in the tsarist army, where there was little care for the welfare of the serf soldiers.

To enforce the Treaty of Adrianople, the Russians occupied Moldavia and Wallachia. During the five years of the occupation, from 1829 to 1834, they introduced a constitution (Règlement organique) and reformed the administration of the principalities on relatively liberal principles (far more so than anything allowed in Russia at that time) to undermine the remaining vestiges of Ottoman control.

Until the 1840s, the Russians had a near-monopoly of trade in manufactured goods in this part of Asia. Russian textiles, rope and linen products dominated the bazaars of Bayburt, Baghdad and Basra. But steamships and railways made it possible to open up a shorter route to India – either through the Mediterranean to Cairo and then from Suez to the Red Sea, or via the Black Sea to Trebizond and the Euphrates river to the Persian Gulf

The danger Russia posed to India was the bête noire of British Russophobes. For some, this would become the underlying aim of the Crimean War: to stop a power bent not just on the conquest of Turkey but on the domination of the whole of Asia Minor right up to Afghanistan and India.

In truth, there was never any serious danger of the Russians reaching India in the years before the Crimean War. It was much too far and difficult to march an army all that way – though the Russian Emperor Paul I had once entertained a madcap scheme to send a combined French and Russian force there.

But while few in official British circles thought that Russia was a serious threat to India, this did not prevent the Russophobic British press from whipping up that fear, emphasizing the potential danger posed by Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus and its ‘underhand activities’ in Persia and Afghanistan.

With French support, the Egyptians were not only a major threat to Turkish rule. As head of a powerful Islamic revival movement against the intervention of the Christian nations in the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet Ali was also an inspiration to the Muslim rebels against tsarist rule in the Caucasus.

Despite the fact that the threat of Russia to British interests was minimal, and trade and diplomatic relations between the two countries were not bad at all in the years leading up to the Crimean War, Russophobia (even more than Francophobia) was arguably the most important element in Britain’s outlook on the world abroad.

the Polish uprising – and its brutal suppression – did more than any other issue to involve the British in the affairs of the Continent and exacerbate the tensions that led to the Crimean War.

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.

Despite two decades of reform, the Russian military remained far behind the armies of the other European states. The officer corps was poorly educated and almost all the troops illiterate: official figures of the 1850s showed that in a group of six divisions, numbering approximately 120,000 men, only 264 (0.2 per cent) were able to read or write.

The importance attached to keeping troops in tight columns was partly to maintain their discipline and prevent chaos when there were large formations on the move, as in other armies of the time. But it was also necessitated by the inefficiency of the Russian musket and the consequent reliance on the bayonet (justified by patriotic myths about the ‘bravery of the Russian soldier’, who was at his best with the bayonet).

It was only during the Crimean War – when the musket was shown to be useless against the Minié rifle of the British and the French – that the Russians ordered rifles for their own army.

The tsarist army lost men at a far higher rate than any of the other European armies.

The vast majority of Russian soldiers were not killed in battle but died from wounds and diseases that might not have been fatal had there been a proper medical service.

Even in peacetime the average rate of sickness in the Russian army was 65 per cent.26 The appalling treatment of the serf soldier lay behind this high rate of illness. Floggings were a daily aspect of the disciplinary system; beatings so common that entire regiments could be made up of men who carried wounds inflicted by their own officers. The supply system was riddled with corruption because officers were very badly paid – the whole army was chronically underfunded by the cashstrapped tsarist government – and by the time they had taken their profit from the sums they were allowed to buy provisions with, there was little money left for the rations of the troops. Without an effective system of supply, soldiers were expected to fend largely for themselves. Each regiment was responsible for the manufacturing of its uniforms and boots with materials provided by the state.

In terms of pay and conditions there was a huge gulf between the officers and the soldiers, a divide even wider than in the Russian army, with many senior commanders living like pashas and their troops left unpaid for several months, sometimes even years, during a war.

In his calculation, the annual cost of the Turkish infantry soldier (salary, rations and clothing) was 18 silver roubles; the equivalent costs for the Russian soldier were 32 roubles; for the Austrian, 53 roubles; for the Prussian, 60 roubles; for the French, 85 roubles; and for the British foot soldier, 134 roubles.

If anything, the French were hostile to the idea of a war in which they would be allied with the English, their traditional enemy. It was widely felt that France was being dragged into a war that would be fought for British imperial interests – a theme constantly invoked by the opposition to Napoleon – and that France would pay the price for it. The business world was especially opposed to the idea of war, fearing higher taxes and a drain on the economy.

At the moment of decision, Napoleon had hesitated over war. But in the end he needed the alliance with the British, and feared losing out in the share-out of the spoils if he did not join them in a war for the defence of Western interests in the Near East.

The French had also learned how to supply an army on the march efficiently – an area of expertise where their superiority over the British became apparent from the moment the two armies landed at Gallipoli.

The outbreak of the Crimean War had caught the British army by surprise. The military budget had been in decline for many years, and it was only in the early weeks of 1852, following Napoleon’s coup d’état and the eruption of the French war scare in Britain, that the Russell government was able to obtain parliamentary approval for a modest increase in expenditure. Of the 153,000 enlisted men, two-thirds were serving overseas in various distant quarters of the Empire in the spring of 1854, so troops for the Black Sea expedition had to be recruited in a rush. Without the conscription system of the French, the British army relied entirely on the recruitment of volunteers with the inducement of a bounty.

The main recruiting grounds for the British army were pubs and fairs and races, where the poor got drunk and fell into debt.

Colonial prejudice limited the use the Western powers were prepared to make of the Turkish troops. Napoleon III thought the Turks were lazy and corrupt while Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, advised Raglan that ‘no Turk was to be trusted’ with any military responsibility essential to national security.

So why did the allies not pursue a peace once the Russians had left the principalities? Why did they decide to invade Russia when the war against the Russians had been won? Why was there a Crimean War at all? The allied commanders were frustrated by the retreat of the Russians. Having brought their armies all this way, they felt they had been ‘robbed of victory’, as Saint-Arnaud put it, and wanted to achieve a military goal to justify the efforts they had made.

Back in London, the British cabinet also felt that forcing Russia out of the Danube area was not enough to justify the sacrifices made so far. Palmerston and his ‘war party’ were not prepared to negotiate a peace when the Russian armed forces remained intact. They wanted to inflict serious damage on Russia, to destroy her military capacity in the Black Sea, not just to secure Turkey but to end the Russian threat to British interests in the Near East.

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.

The decision to invade the Crimea was taken without any real intelligence. The allied commanders had no maps of the region. They took their information from outdated travelogues, such as Lord de Ros’s diary of his Crimean travels and Major-General Alexander Macintosh’s Journal of the Crimea, both dating back to 1835, which led them to believe that the Crimean winters were extremely mild, even though there were more recent books that pointed out the cold,

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.

The key thing on the battlefield was military discipline – the ability of officers to hold their men together and stop them fleeing out of fear – because it was when they turned their backs to the enemy that soldiers were most likely to be killed.

Of the 661 men who set off on the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded, and 45 were taken prisoner; 362 horses were lost or killed. The casualties were not much higher than those suffered on the Russian side (180 killed and wounded – nearly all of them in the first two defensive lines) and far lower than the numbers reported in the British press.

But contrary to the myth of a ‘glorious disaster’, the charge was in some ways a success, despite the heavy casualties. The objective of a cavalry charge was to scatter the enemy’s lines and frighten him off the battlefield, and in this respect, as the Russians acknowledged, the Light Brigade had achieved its aim. 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 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.

The comfortable conditions which senior British officers were allowed to enjoy contrasted starkly with the circumstances of French officers, who lived much more closely to their men.