The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

many of the Tatars who had fled from the Crimea were resettled on the lands abandoned by the Christians in Bessarabia.

On the other side of the Black Sea, tens of thousands of Christian Armenians left their homes in Anatolia and emigrated to Russian-controlled Transcaucasia in the wake of the Crimean War. They were fearful that the Turks would see them as allies of the Russians and carry out reprisals against them. The European commission appointed by the Paris Treaty to fix the Russian-Ottoman border found Armenian villages ‘half inhabited’ and churches in a state of ‘advanced decay’.

Impetus for the genocide?

By 1864 the Muslim population of Circassia had been entirely cleared. The British consul C. H. Dickson claimed that one could walk a whole day in formerly Circassian territories and not meet a living soul.

Overall, counting both Circassians and Abkhazians, around 1.2 million Muslims were expelled from the Caucasus in the decade following the Crimean War, most of them resettling in the Ottoman Empire, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Muslims of these two regions were outnumbered by new Christian settlers by more than ten to one.

In almost every sphere of life, the Crimean War marked a watershed in the opening up and Westernization of Turkish society. The mass influx of refugees from the Russian Empire was only one of many ways in which the Ottoman Empire became more exposed to external influence. The Crimean War brought new ideas and technologies into the Ottoman world, accelerated Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and greatly increased contacts between Turks and foreigners. More Europeans came to Constantinople during and immediately after the Crimean War than at any other time in its previous history; the many diplomats, financiers, military advisers and soldiers, engineers, tourists, merchants, missionaries and priests left a deep impression on Turkish society.

The New Ottomans’ belief in adopting Western institutions within a framework of Muslim tradition made them in many ways the ‘spiritual fathers’ of the Young Turks, the creators of the modern Turkish state.

new political principles to Ottoman governance stipulated by the British: strict annual budgets by the government; the establishment of banks; the codification of criminal and civil law; the reform of Turkish prisons; and mixed courts to oversee a majority of cases involving Muslims and non-Muslims.

Angered by the Hatt-i Hümayun, a group of Muslim theologians and students plotted a conspiracy against the Sultan and his ministers, but they were arrested in 1859. Under interrogation their leaders claimed that the Hatt-i Hümayun was a contravention of shariah law because it had granted Christians equal rights to Muslims. Sheikh Ahmet, one of the main conspirators, claimed that the Christians had obtained these rights only through the help of foreign powers, and that the concessions would mean the end of the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire.

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.

Further impetus?

The defeat of Russia was seen as a ‘Muslim victory’ by the local Palestinians, whose religious pride was offended by the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun.

In the rural areas of Palestine, according to Finn, the Hatt-i Hümayun remained unobserved for many years. Local governors were corrupt, ill-disciplined and closely linked to the Muslim notables, clerics and officials, who kept the Christians in their place, while the Porte was too remote and weak to curb their excesses, let alone to force them to uphold the new laws of equality.

But it was in the Balkans that the failure of the Porte to carry out reforms would have the most lasting consequences for the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Balkan region, Christian peasants would rise up against their Muslim landlords and officials, beginning in Bosnia in 1858. The continuation of the millet system would give rise to nationalist movements that would involve the Ottomans and the European powers in a long series of Balkan wars, culminating in the conflicts that would bring about the First World War.

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);

But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany.

Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War, despite having barely taken part in it. Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (in the war against the Prussians in 1866) and in the Balkans (where it steadily retreated from the 1870s until 1914).

The French Emperor knew that the Grand Duke was trying to assert himself as a force in Russian foreign policy, and that he had pan-Slav views at odds with those of Gorchakov, so he played to his political ambitions.

Napoleon referred specifically to the possibility of an Italian uprising against the Austrians and the eventual unification of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership, and talked about the likelihood of Christian uprisings in the Ottoman Empire, a subject of great interest to Constantine, suggesting that in both cases it would suit their interests to encourage the formation of smaller nation states.

Under the command of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel, the Franco-Piedmontese army won a series of rapid victories, destroying the Austrian forces under the command of Emperor Franz Joseph at the battle of Solferino on 24 June, the last major battle in history in which all the armies were under the personal command of their monarchs.

The Polish uprising of 1863 was the final breaking point for Russia’s policy of friendship towards France. Inspired by Garibaldi, Polish students began demonstrations in 1861, prompting General Lambert, the Tsar’s viceroy, to impose martial law. The Polish leaders gathered secretly, some supporting the idea of a popular democratic revolution uniting peasants and workers, others, led by Czartoryski, more conservative, seeking to establish a national movement led by nobles and intellectuals.

A clandestine revolutionary government was established in Warsaw. It declared ‘all sons of Poland free and equal citizens’, gave the peasants ownership of land, and appealed for help to the nations of Europe.

In the end, the competing French invasion of Mexico prevented troops from being sent.

The Russian army burned whole towns and villages. Tens of thousands of Polish men and women were exiled to Siberia, and hundreds of insurgents were publicly hanged.

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.

In the first six years of Alexander’s reign there were 500 peasant uprisings and strikes against the gentry on the land.

a revision of the Military Criminal Statute to reduce the maximum number of lashes permissible as corporal punishment from 6,000 to 1,500 (a figure still quite adequate to kill any soldier);

The Tsar was concerned by the growing presence of the British in Persia following their victory in the Anglo-Persian War of 1856–7. By the Paris Treaty of March 1857, the Persians withdrew from Herat, the north-western Afghan city they had occupied with Russian backing in 1852 and 1856. From his correspondence with Bariatinsky, it is clear that Alexander was afraid that the British would use their influence in Tehran to install themselves on the southern shores of the Caspian. He shared Bariatinsky’s gloomy prediction that ‘the appearance of the British flag on the Caspian would be a fatal blow not only to our influence in the East, not only to our foreign trade, but also to the political independence of the [Russian] Empire’.

The ‘unmentionable infamy’, as he called the Kangaroo affair, reinforced the Tsar’s belief that Russia would not be secure against the British threat as long as the Caucasus remained unconquered and the Central Asian steppe beyond her political control.

Officially, the mission had been sent by the Foreign Ministry, but unofficially it was also working for the War Ministry, collecting topographical, statistical and ‘general military information’ on various routes into Central Asia. From the start of the Russian initiative there was a more forward policy, favoured by the followers of Bariatinsky in the War Ministry, to set up protectorates and military bases in the khanates for the conquest of Turkestan and the Central Asian steppe right up to the borders of Afghanistan.44

After angry diplomatic protests by the British, who were afraid that the Russian troops might continue their advance from Tashkent to India, the Russian government disowned responsibility for the invasion carried out by Cherniaev. The general was forced into retirement in 1866. But unofficially he was received as a hero in Russia. The nationalist press proclaimed him the ‘Ermak of the nineteenth century’.

Ignat′ev’s growing influence in foreign affairs was based largely on his highly successful negotiation of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, in November 1860, which gave Russia possession of the Amur and Ussuri regions as well as Vladivostok in the Far East.

After a Turkish bombardment of Belgrade in 1862, the Russians called a special conference of the signatories of the Paris Treaty at Kanlidze near Constantinople and eventually succeeded in getting the removal of the final Turkish garrisons from Serbia in 1867.

By the Treaty of San Stefano, the Porte agreed to recognize the full independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as the autonomy of a large Bulgarian state (to include Macedonia and part of Thrace).

With the restoration of her Black Sea status completed seven years before, Russia had succeeded in reversing all the losses she had suffered after the Crimean War.

What a waste

In many ways the congress sowed the seeds of the future Balkan wars and the First World War by leaving so many border disputes unresolved. Above all, the fundamental problem of the Eastern Question, the ‘sick man of Europe’, Turkey, remained without a cure.

Twelve days later, on 26 April, the old religious rivalries began once again. Fights broke out between the Greeks and the Armenians during the ceremony of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Of the 98,000 British soldiers and sailors sent to the Crimea, more than one in five did not return: 20,813 men died in the campaign, 80 per cent of them from sickness or disease.

The Crimean War brought about a sea change in Britain’s attitudes towards its fighting men. It laid the basis of the modern national myth built on the idea of the soldier defending the nation’s honour, right and liberty.

As the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his English Notebooks, the year of 1854 had ‘done the work of fifty ordinary ones’ in undermining aristocracy.

there was a series of comic scenes ridiculing the incompetence of the British authorities, followed by a scene in which ‘Miss Bird’ (Nightingale) appears and sorts out all the problems left behind. The scene ends with a moral lesson: ‘In that young lady we behold true heroism – the heart that beats in her bosom is capable of any heroic deed.’

Here was the origin of the cult of ‘muscular Christianity’ – the notion of ‘Christian soldiers’ fighting righteous wars that came to define the Victorian imperial mission. This was a time when Britons began to sing in church: Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe; Forward into battle see His banners go! (1864)

In France, too, the names of the Crimea are found everywhere, reminders of a war in which 310,000 Frenchmen were involved. One in three did not return home.

In Italy and Turkey, as in France, the Crimean War was eclipsed by later wars and quickly dropped out of the nationalist myths and narratives that came to dominate the way these countries reconstructed their nineteenth-century history.

In Turkey the Crimean War has been not so much forgotten as obliterated from the nation’s historical memory, even though it was there that the war began and Turkish casualties were as many as 120,000 soldiers, almost half the troops involved, according to official statistics.

History textbooks in most Turkish schools charge the decline of Islamic traditions to the growing intervention of the West in Turkey as a result of the Crimean War.21 So do the official Turkish military histories,

This was the context in which Tolstoy wrote his own ‘national epic’, War and Peace. Tolstoy’s conception of the war against Napoleon as Russia’s national awakening – the rediscovery of ‘Russian principles’ by the Europeanized nobility and the recognition of the patriotic spirit of the serf soldiers as the basis of a democratic nationhood – was a reflection of his reaction to the heroic deeds of the Russian people during the Crimean War. Written between 1862 and 1865, in the years immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, when Russian liberal society was inspired by ideals of national reform and reconciliation between the landed classes and the peasantry, War and Peace was originally conceived as a Decembrist novel set in the aftermath of the Crimean War. In the novel’s early form (‘The Decembrist’), the hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for reform are in the air. But the more Tolstoy researched the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812, and so set his novel then. The memory of 1812 was bitterly contested after the Crimean War, which had opened up a new perspective on the national character. Democrats like Tolstoy, inspired by the recent sacrifices of the Russian peasant soldiers, saw 1812 as a people’s war, a victory attaine...

estimates of the Russians killed during the Crimean War vary between 400,000 and 600,000 men for all theatres of the war. The Medical Department of the Ministry of War later published a figure of 450,015 deaths in the army for the four years between 1853 and 1856. This is probably the most accurate estimate.

No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War.