The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

The image many Russians had built up of their country – the biggest, richest and most powerful in the world – had suddenly been shattered. Russia’s backwardness had been exposed. Calls for reform were heard from every quarter of society. Everything was open to question. The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia – not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and the navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways that accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who had made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state at war against the industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself.