The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  With no shortage of volunteers, and all the resources of their empire to draw from, the Russians had an ideal opportunity in these winter months to attack and destroy the weakened allied armies on the frozen heights above Sevastopol. But there was no initiative. The Russian high command had lost authority and self-confidence since the defeat at Inkerman. Without faith in his commanders, the Tsar had become increasingly gloomy and despondent, believing that the war could not be won and perhaps regretting that he had caused it in the first place. Courtiers described him as a broken man, physically ill, exhausted and depressed, who had aged ten years since the beginning of the war.

  Perhaps the Tsar was still counting on his trusted ‘Generals January and February’ to defeat the British and the French. As long as they were losing men from cold, disease and hunger on the open heights, he was happy for his commanders to limit their attacks to small nightly sorties against the allies’ forward positions. These sorties caused little damage but added to their exhaustion. ‘Our Tsar won’t let them eat or sleep,’ wrote a Cossack to his family from Sevastopol on 12 January. ‘It’s only a shame they don’t all die so we don’t have to fight them.’44

  The Russians had supply problems that prevented them developing a more ambitious strategy. With the allied fleets in control of the sea, the Russians had to bring in all their supplies by horse or oxen-driven peasant carts on snow-bound and muddy roads from south Russia. There were no railways. By the time of the hurricane, the whole of the Crimea was suffering from shortages of hay; the draft animals began to die at an alarming rate. Pirogov saw ‘the swollen bodies of dead oxen at every step along the road’ from Perekop to Sevastopol in the first week of December. By January the Russian army in the Crimea had just 2,000 carts to bring in supplies, one-third the number it had deployed at the start of November. In Sevastopol, rations were drastically reduced. The only meat available was rotten salted beef from the dead oxen. Transferred to Esky-Ord near Simferopol in December, Tolstoy found the soldiers there had no winter coats but plentiful supplies of vodka which they had been given to keep warm. In Sevastopol, the defenders of the bastions were just as cold and hungry as the British and the French in the trenches. Every day through these winter months at least a dozen Russians ran away.45

  But the main reason why the Tsar would not commit to a major new offensive in the Crimea was his growing fear of an Austrian invasion of Russia. The cautious Paskevich, the only one of his senior commanders in whom he really trusted after Inkerman, had long been warning of the Austrian threat to Russian Poland, which he thought was far more serious than the danger to the Crimea. In a letter to the Tsar on 20 December, Paskevich persuaded him to keep a large corps of infantry in the Dubno, Kamenets and Galicia border regions in case of an attack by the Austrians rather than send them to the Crimea. The Austrian threat had been underlined two weeks before, when the Austrians had entered a military alliance with France and Britain promising to defend the Danubian principalities against the Russians in exchange for the allies’ pledge to defend them against the Russians and guarantee their possessions in Italy for the duration of the war. In reality, the Austrians were far more concerned to use their new alliance to force the Western powers to negotiate a peace with the Russians under their own influence at Vienna than they were to go to war against Russia. But the Tsar still felt the betrayal of the Austrians, who had mobilized their troops to force the Russians out of the Danubian principalities only the previous summer, and he was afraid of them. Between 7 January and 12 February the Tsar wrote long notes in his own hand in which he planned the measures he would take if Russia faced a war against the Austrians, the Prussians and the other German states. In each memorandum he became more convinced that such a war was imminent. It was perhaps a symptom of the growing desperation that took hold of the Tsar in his final days. He was haunted by the possibility that the whole Russian Empire would collapse – that all the territorial gains of his ancestors would be lost in this foolish ‘holy war’ – with Britain and the Swedes attacking Russia through the Baltic, Austria and Prussia attacking through Poland and the Ukraine, and the Western powers attacking in the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Realizing that it was impossible to defend all sectors simultaneously, he agonized over where to place his defences, and concluded that in the last resort it would be better to lose the Ukraine to the Austrians than to weaken the defences of the centre and ‘the heart of Russia’.46

  At last, in early February, fearing that the Western powers were about to land a new invasion force to cut off the Crimea from the Russian mainland at Perekop, the Tsar ordered an offensive to recapture their likely landing base at the port of Evpatoria, which was then held by a Turkish force of around 20,000 troops under the command of Omer Pasha, supported by the guns of part of the allied fleets. The port’s defensive works, which included 34 pieces of heavy artillery, were formidable, so much so that Lieutenant General Baron Wrangel, the commander of the Russian cavalry in the Evpatoria area, thought that its capture was impossible, and would not take responsibility for an offensive. But Nicholas insisted that the attack should go ahead, giving the command to Wrangel’s deputy, Lieutenant General Khrulev, an artilleryman who was once described by Gorchakov as having ‘not much in the head, but very brave and active, who will do exactly what you tell him’. Asked by Menshikov whether it was possible to capture Evpatoria, Khrulev was confident of success. His force of 19,000 men (with 24 squadrons of cavalry and 108 guns) set off at daylight on 17 February, by which time the Tsar was having second thoughts about the wisdom of the expedition, thinking that it might be better to let the allies land their troops and attack them on their flank as they moved to Perekop. But it was too late to stop Khrulev. The offensive lasted three hours. The Russian troops were easily repulsed, with the loss of 1,500 men, and retreated across the open country towards Simferopol. Without shelter, many of them died from exhaustion and the cold, their frozen bodies abandoned on the steppe.

  By the time the news of the defeat reached the Tsar in St Petersburg on 24 February, he was already gravely ill. The Tsar had come down with influenza on 8 February, but he continued with the daily tasks of government. On the 16th, feeling slightly better and ignoring the advice of his doctors, he went out without a winter coat in a frost of 23 degrees below zero to review the troops in St Petersburg. The next day he went out again. From that evening his health began to deteriorate terminally.

  He caught pneumonia. Doctors could hear liquid in his lungs, a sign that finally persuaded his personal physician, Dr Mandt, that there was no hope of a recovery. Badly shaken by the defeat at Evpatoria, on the advice of Mandt, Nicholas handed over government to his son, the Tsarevich Alexander. He asked his son to dismiss Khrulev and replace Menshikov (who was then sick himself) with Gorchakov as the commander-in-chief. But everybody knew that Nicholas had himself to blame for having ordered the attack, and he was filled with shame. According to Mandt, who was with him when he died, the Tsar’s ‘spiritual suffering broke him more than his physical illness’, and news of the reverses at Evpatoria ‘struck the final blow’ to his already failing health.47

  Nicholas died on 2 March. The public had known nothing of the Tsar’s illness (he had forbidden any bulletins on his health to be published) and the announcement of his sudden death immediately gave rise to rumours that he had committed suicide. It was said that the Tsar had been distraught about Evpatoria and had asked Mandt to give him poison. A crowd assembled outside the Winter Palace, where the black flag was raised, and angry voices called for the death of the doctor with the German name. Fearing for his life, Mandt was whisked away in a carriage from the palace, and left Russia shortly afterwards.48

  Various other rumours began to circulate: that Mandt had killed the Tsar (a version advanced by certain figures at the court to counteract the idea that Nicholas had killed himself); that Mandt was rewarded for his loyalty with a portrait of the Tsar in a diamond-studded frame; and that a doctor by the name of Gruber had been imprisoned i
n the Peter and Paul Fortress for showing too much interest in the Tsar’s death. Rumours of the Tsar’s suicide were readily believed by those who were opposed to his authoritarian rule: that he should have taken his own life seemed to them a tacit recognition of his sins. The rumours were given credence by distinguished scholars in the final decades before 1917, including Nikolai Shil’der, the author of a four-volume biography of Nicholas, whose father, Karl Shil’der, had been at his court; and they were widely cited by historians in the Soviet period. They are still believed by some historians today.49

  In her intimate diary of life at court, Anna Tiutcheva presents enough details of the Tsar’s final hours to rule out the serious possibility of suicide. But she also makes it clear that Nicholas was broken morally, that he was so filled with remorse for his mistakes, for the disastrous war that he had brought to Russia through his impulsive foreign policies, that he welcomed death. Perhaps he thought that he no longer had God on his side. Before he died, the Tsar called his son to him and asked him to tell the army and in particular the defenders of Sevastopol that ‘I have always tried to do my best for them, and, where I failed, it was not for lack of good will, but from lack of knowledge and intelligence. I ask them to forgive me.’50

  Dressed in military uniform, Nicholas was buried in the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the burial place of all Russia’s rulers since Peter the Great. Just before the lid of his coffin was closed, the Empress laid upon the heart of Nicholas a silver cross with a depiction of the Church of St Sophia in Constantinople, ‘so that in Heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’.51

  10

  Cannon Fodder

  News of the Tsar’s death arrived in Paris and London later on 2 March. Queen Victoria was among the first to hear. She reflected on his death in her journal:

  Poor Emperor, he has alas! the blood of many thousands on his conscience, but he was once a great man, and he had his great qualities, as well as good ones. What he did was from a mistaken, obstinate notion of what was right and of what he thought he had a right to do and to have. 11 years ago, he was here – all kindness, and certainly wonderfully fascinating and handsome. For some years afterwards, he was full of feelings of friendship for us! What the consequences of his death may be, no one can pretend to foresee.1

  The Tsar’s death was immediately announced in theatres, meeting places and other public spaces throughout the land. In Nottingham, the announcement came when the curtain fell on the first act of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. The audience cheered, the orchestra played the national anthem, and people poured into the streets to celebrate. Everyone assumed that the war was won, because Nicholas had brought about the war through his aggressive policies and, now that he was gone, Russia would at last come to its senses and sue for an early peace. The Times declared the death of Nicholas an act of divine intervention, God’s punishment of the man responsible for the outbreak of the war, and looked forward to a rapid victory for the allies. Shares rose steeply on the Paris Bourse and the London Stock Exchange.

  The news took longer to reach the allied forces in the Crimea, and it came by unexpected means. On the evening of 4 March, several days before the announcement of the Tsar’s death arrived by telegram, a French trooper found a note attached to a stone that had been thrown from the Russian trenches outside the walls of Sevastopol. Written in French, the note claimed to represent the view of many Russian officers:

  The tyrant of the Russians is dead. Peace will soon be concluded, and we will have no more cause to fight the French, whom we esteem; if Sevastopol falls, it will be the despot who desired it.

  A true Russian,

  who loves his country, but hates ambitious autocrats.2

  Alexander II

  However much such Russians may have wanted peace, the new Tsar Alexander II was not about to give up on his father’s policies. He was 36 when he ascended to the throne, had been the heir apparent for thirty years, and remained firmly in the shadow of his father in the first year of his rule. He was more liberally inclined than Nicholas, having been exposed to the influence of the liberal poet Vasily Zhukovsky, his tutor at the court, and having travelled widely in Europe; to the disappointment of his father, he took no interest in military affairs, but he was a Russian nationalist with pronounced sympathies for the pan-Slav cause. On taking over from his father, Alexander quickly ruled out any talk of peace that he deemed humiliating for Russia (the only peace acceptable to the British) and pledged to go on fighting for his country’s ‘sacred cause’ and ‘glory in the world’. Through Nesselrode, however, he also made it clear that he was amenable to negotiations for a settlement in accordance with ‘the integrity and honour of Russia’. Alexander was aware of the growing opposition to the war in France. The main aim of this initiative was to draw the French away from British influence by offering them the prospect of an early end to the hostilities. ‘Between France and Russia the war is without hatred,’ wrote Nesselrode to his son-in-law, Baron von Seebach, the Saxon Minister in Paris, who read his letter to Napoleon: ‘Peace will be made when the Emperor Napoleon wants it.’3

  Yet throughout these early months of 1855, Napoleon was under growing pressure from his British allies to commit to a more ambitious war against Russia. Palmerston, the new Prime Minister, had long been pushing for this – not just to destroy the naval base at Sevastopol but to roll back Russian power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland, Finland and the Baltic by drawing in new allies and supporting liberation movements against tsarist rule. This assault on the Russian Empire went well beyond the Four Points agreed by the British and the French with the Austrians as the basis of the allied war plans against Russia in 1854 – plans that were carefully circumscribed by the coalition government of Aberdeen. Where Aberdeen had wanted a limited campaign to force the Russians to negotiate on these Four Points, Palmerston was determined to develop the campaign in the Crimea into a wide-ranging war against Russia in Europe and the Near East.

  Almost a year earlier, in March 1854, Palmerston had outlined his ‘beau ideal of the result of the war’ in a letter to the British cabinet:

  Aaland (islands in the Baltic) and Finland restored to Sweden. Some of the German provinces of Russia on the Baltic ceded to Prussia. A substantive kingdom of Poland re-established as a barrier between Germany and Russia … The Crimea, Circassia and Georgia wrested from Russia, the Crimea and Georgia given to Turkey, and Circassia either independent or given to the Sultan as Suzerain. Such results, it is true, could be accomplished only by a combination of Sweden, Prussia and Austria, with England, France and Turkey, and such results presuppose great defeats of Russia. But such results are not impossible, and should not be wholly discarded from our thoughts.

  At that time Palmerston’s ambitious plans had been received with a good deal of scepticism in the British cabinet (as mentioned earlier, Aberdeen had objected that they would involve the Continent in a new ‘Thirty Years War’). But, now that Palmerston was the Prime Minister, Russia had been weakened and the hardships of the winter were coming to an end, the prospect of a larger war did not seem impossible at all.4

  Behind the scenes of the British government there were powerful supporters of a broader European war against Russia. Sir Harry Verney, for example, the Liberal MP for Buckingham,at published a pamphlet, Our Quarrel with Russia, which circulated widely among diplomats and military leaders in the spring of 1855. It was sent by Stratford Canning, who was clearly sympathetic to its ideas, to Palmerston and Clarendon as well as to Sir William Codrington, the commander of the Light Division who was shortly to become the commander-in-chief of the eastern army, in whose papers it can still be found. Verney argued that Britain should work harder to involve the Germans in a war against Russia. Germany had a lot to fear from Russian aggression, Berlin being only a few days’ march from the borders of the Tsar’s empire; it was mainly Protestant, so had much in common with Britain; and strategically it was the ideal base for
a war to liberate the Christian West from the ‘barbaric’ menace of Russia. In terms familiar to the standard discourse of European Russophobia, Verney argued that the Russians should be driven ‘eastwards beyond the Dnieper to the Asiatic steppe’.

  Russia is a country which makes no advances in any intellectual or industrial pursuits, and wholly omits to render her influence beneficial to the world. The government from the highest to the lowest is thoroughly corrupt. It lives on the intrigues of agents and on the reports of highly paid spies at home and abroad. It advances into countries more civilized and better governed than its own, and strives to reduce them to its own level of debasement. It opposes the circulation of the Bible and the work of the missionary … . The Greeks in Turkey have so little maintained the Christian character that they have done more to injure Christianity than ever the Turks have been able to effect; they are the allies throughout the Turkish empire on whose aid the Russians rely in furnishing them with intelligence and carrying out their designs. Russia seeks to obtain excellence only in the arts of war – for that there is no sum she will not pay.

  Our contest with her involves the question, whether the world shall make progress, according to the highest interpretation of that word, in civilisation, with all its most precious accompaniments. On its issue depend religious, civil, social and commercial liberty; the empire of equal laws; order consistent with freedom; the circulation of the Word of God; and the promulgation of principles founded on the Scripture.5

  Napoleon was generally sympathetic to Palmerston’s idea of using the war to redraw the map of Europe. But he was less interested in the anti-Russian campaign in the Caucasus, which mainly served British interests. Moreover, his fear of domestic opposition, which had risen to alarming levels after the army’s failure to achieve an early victory, made him wary of committing France to a long and open-ended war. Napoleon was torn. On a practical level, his instinct was to concentrate on the Crimea, to capture Sevastopol as a symbol of the satisfaction of French ‘honour’ and ‘prestige’ which he needed to strengthen his regime, and then bring the war to a quick and ‘glorious’ end. But the vision of a European war of liberation on the model of the great Napoleon was never far away from the Emperor’s thoughts. He flirted with the idea that the French might rediscover their enthusiasm for the war if it offered them that old revolutionary dream of a Europe reconstructed out of democratic nation states.