On the other major issues the powers largely came to terms before the Paris congress met, guided by the Four Points agreed by the allies in 1854. The British had attempted to add a fifth point that would take away from Russia all its lands in the southern Caucasus (Circassia, Georgia, Erivan and Nakhichevan) but the Russians insisted that they held these territories by the Treaty of Adrianople and the Turks backed up their claims. However, the Russians were forced to surrender Kars. They also lost out in their efforts to avoid the full effect of the Third Point – the demilitarization of the Black Sea – by negotiating an exclusion for Nikolaev (20 kilometres inland from the coastline on the Bug river) and for the Sea of Azov.
On the question of the two Danubian principalities (the main subject of the First Point), there was a lively exchange of ideas. The British were broadly in favour of restoring Ottoman control. The French gave their backing to the Romanian liberals and nationalists who wanted to unite the principalities as an independent state. The Austrians were flatly opposed to the establishment of a nation state on their south-eastern border, as they had significant Slav minorities with national aspirations of their own. The Austrians rightly suspected that the French were backing the Romanians as a way of putting pressure on the Austrians to give up their interests in northern Italy. The three powers all agreed to end the Russian protectorate over the Danubian principalities and to guarantee the free commercial navigation of the Danube (the Second Point). But they could not agree on what to replace it with – other than the collective guarantee of the great powers under the nominal sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire with vague plans for elections at some point in the future to determine the views of the population in Moldavia and Wallachia.
As for the question of protecting the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire (the Fourth Point), representatives of the allied powers met with the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha and the Tanzimat reformer Fuad Pasha (the Sultan’s delegates to the Paris congress) in Constantinople in early January to impress on them the need for the Porte to show that it was serious about granting full religious and civil equality to the Empire’s non-Muslims (including Jews). Reporting on the conference to Clarendon on 9 January, Stratford Canning was sceptical about the Turkish ministers’ expressions of commitment to reform. He thought they were resentful of the foreign imposition of reform, that they saw it as undermining Ottoman sovereignty, and concluded that it would be difficult to get any protection for the Christians implemented properly. The Turks had always lived in the belief that the Christians were inferior, and no law passed by the Sultan could overcome that prejudice in the short period of time expected by the West. ‘We may expect procrastination on the ground of respect of religious antipathies, popular prejudices, and unassociating habits,’ wrote the veteran diplomat, who further warned that forcing through reforms might lead to a revolt by the Muslims against the Sultan’s Westernizing policies. In response to a 21-point draft programme presented by the allies’ representatives, the Sultan issued the Hatt-i Hümayun on 18 February. The decree promised to his non-Muslim subjects full religious and legal equality, rights of property, and open entry on merit to the Ottoman military and civil service. The Turks hoped that the reform would prevent any further European intervention into Ottoman affairs. They wanted the Hatt-i Hümayun excluded from the Paris talks, on the grounds of Turkish sovereignty. But the Russians – who had been named in the Fourth Point as one of the five great powers that would guarantee the security of the Sultan’s Christian subjects – insisted that the issue was brought up. They were satisfied with the compromise solution – an international declaration joined by the Porte on the importance of Christian rights in the Ottoman Empire – and in their domestic propaganda the Russians even used it as a symbol of their ‘moral victory’ in the Crimean War. In one sense they were right, in so far as the Paris congress restored the status quo in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, as Russia had demanded on behalf of the Greeks against the Latin claims, a point made by the Tsar many times. In a manifesto published on the day the peace was signed, Alexander invoked Providence for bringing to pass ‘the original and principal aim of the war … Russians! Your efforts and sacrifices have not been in vain!’5
Finally, there was the unspoken question of Poland. The idea of restoring Polish independence from Russia had first been advanced among the wartime allied diplomats by Walewski, the son of Napoleon I by the Polish Countess Marie Walewska. After the capture of Sevastopol, the French Emperor wanted to do something for Poland: an independent Polish kingdom fitted the Napoleonic ideal of a new Europe based on nation states to overthrow the 1815 settlement. At first Napoleon III supported Czartoryski’s programme for the restoration of Congress Poland, the autonomous kingdom established by the Vienna treaty, whose freedoms had been undermined by the Russians. Later on, as the pre-congress talks got under way and it became apparent that none of the other powers would come out in favour of the Poles, Napoleon gave his backing to Czartoryski’s pared-down list of conditions for Polish language rights and the defence of Poland against Russification. But Orlov would have none of this, insisting that Russia’s rights in Poland were based, not on the 1815 treaty, but on the Russian conquest of Poland during the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1830–31. In the interests of improving his relations with Russia, whose support would be needed against the Austrians in Italy, Napoleon decided to give up on the Poles. Nothing more was said about the Polish question at the Paris congress. Even Palmerston, who rarely missed a chance to confront Russia, advised Clarendon not to make an issue of the Poles. ‘It would not be expedient,’ he explained, ‘to require Russia to restore the Kingdom of Poland.’
The advantage to the Poles would be very doubtful; if they could be made independent of Russia, that indeed would be a great advantage both for the Poles and for Europe, but the difference either for the Poles or for Europe between the present condition of the Kingdom of Poland and that which was established by the Treaty of Vienna would be hardly worth all the difficulties which we should have to encounter in endeavouring to carry such a change into effect. The Russian Govt would say as it said in former years that Poland had rebelled and was conquered, and that consequently it is held now by right of conquest and not by the Treaty of Vienna, and that therefore Russia is freed from the obligation of that Treaty. The Russians would moreover say that to make such a demand is to interfere in the internal affairs of Russia.
‘Poor Poland!’ remarked Stratford Canning to Lord Harrowby, one of Czartoryski’s supporters. ‘Her revival is a regular flying Dutchman. Never is – always to be.’6
With all the major issues resolved beforehand, the Paris congress proceeded smoothly without any major arguments. Just three sessions were required to draft the settlement. There was plenty of spare time for a full range of social engagements – banquets, dinners, concerts, balls and receptions, and a special celebration to mark the birth of the Prince Imperial, Louis-Napoleon, the only child of Napeolon III and the Empress Eugénie – before the diplomats finally assembled for the formal signing of the peace treaty at one o’clock on Sunday, 30 March.
Announcements of the peace were made throughout Paris. Telegraphs worked overtime to spread the news across the world. At two o’clock, the ending of the war was signalled by a thunderous cannonade fired by the guns at Les Invalides. Cheering crowds assembled in the streets, restaurants and cafés did a roaring trade, and in the evening the Paris sky was lit by fireworks. The next day, there was a parade on the Champ de Mars. French troops passed by the Emperor and Prince Napoleon, senior French commanders and foreign dignitaries, watched by tens of thousands of Parisians. ‘There was an electrical tremor of excitement in the crowd,’ claimed the official history of the congress, published the next year, ‘and from the people there was a deafening cheer of national pride and enthusiasm that filled the Champ de Mars better than a thousand cannon could.’7 Here was the glory and popular acclaim Napoleon had wanted when he w
ent to war.
News of the peace arrived in the Crimea the next day – as long as it took for the telegram to be relayed from Paris to Varna and communicated by the underwater cable to Balaklava. On 2 April the allied guns in the Crimea were fired for the final time – in salute to mark the end of the war.
Six months were given to the allies to evacuate their armed forces. The British used the port of Sevastopol, where they oversaw the destruction of the magnificent docks by a series of explosions, while the French destroyed Fort Nicholas. There were enormous quantities of war matériel to be counted, loaded onto ships and taken home: captured guns and cannon, munitions, scrap metal and food supplies, including vast amounts of booty from the Russians. It was a complicated logistical operation to allocate it all to the various departments of the ministries of war, and many things were left behind, sold off to the Russians, or, like the English wooden huts and barracks, donated to them on condition that they were used ‘for the inhabitants of the Crimea who had been made homeless by the war’ (the Russians accepted the English offer but kept the huts and barracks for the army). ‘It is an enormous endeavour to carry off, in just a few months, everything that was brought here over a period of two years,’ wrote Captain Herbé to his family on 28 April. ‘A large number of the horses and mules will have to be abandoned or sold off cheaply to the population of the Crimea, and I don’t count on ever seeing mine again.’ The animals were not the only means of transport to be sold off privately. The Balaklava railway was purchased by a company established by Sir Culling Eardly and Moses Montefiore, who wanted to use the equipment to build a new railroad between Jaffa and Jerusalem, a communication that would ‘civilize and develop the resources of a district now wild and disorderly’, according to Palmerston, who authorized the sale. It would serve the growing traffic of religious pilgrims to the Holy Lands. The Jaffa railway was never built and in the end the Balaklava line was sold to the Turks as scrap.8
Considering how long it took to ship all these supplies to the Crimea, the evacuation was completed speedily. By 12 July Codrington was ready to hand over possession of Balaklava to the Russians before departing with the final British troops on HMS Algiers. A stickler for military etiquette, the commander-in-chief was offended by the low rank and appearance of the Russian delegation sent to meet him and receive control of Balaklava:
There were about 30 Cossacks of the Don mounted and about 50 infantry. But such a lot! I could not have conceived the Russians would have sent such a dirty specimen of their troops. Never were [there] such figures in grey coats – so badly armed too – disreputable looking – we were all surprised and amused. I hope they intended to insult us by such specimens: if so, it must have rather turned the tables if they heard the remarks. The Guard marched on board – the Russians posted their sentries – and the evacuation was completed.9
Left behind in the Crimea were the remains of many thousands of soldiers. During the last weeks before their departure, the allied troops laboured hard to build graveyards and erect memorials to those comrades they would leave behind. In one of his last reports from the Crimea, William Russell described the military cemeteries:
The Chersonese is covered with isolated graves, with longer burial grounds, and detached cemeteries from Balaklava to the verge of the roadstead of Sevastopol. Ravine and plain – hill and hollow – the road-side and secluded valley – for miles around, from the sea to the Chernaia, present those stark-white stones, singly or in groups, stuck upright in the arid soil, or just peering over the rank vegetation which springs from beneath them. The French have taken but little pains with their graves. One large cemetery has been formed with great care and good taste near the old Inkerman camp, but in general our allies have not enclosed their burial places … . The burial ground of the noncommissioned officers and men of the Brigade of Guards is enclosed by a substantial wall. It is entered by a handsome double gate, ingeniously constructed of wood, and iron hoops hammered out straight, and painted, which is hinged on two massive pillars of cut stone, with ornamental capitals, each surmounted by a cannon ball. There are six rows of graves, each row containing thirty or more bodies. Over each of these is either a tomb-stone or a mound, fenced in by rows of white stones, with the initials or sometimes the name of him who lies below, marked on the mound by means of pebbles. Facing the gate, and close to it stands a large stone cross … . There are but few monumental stones in this cemetery; one is a stone cross, with the inscription, ‘Sacred to the memory of Lieutenant A. Hill, 22nd Regiment, who died June 22, 1855. This stone was erected by his friends in the Crimea.’ Another is ‘In memory of Sergeant-Major Rennie, 93rd Highlanders. Erected by a friend.’ … [Another] is to ‘Quarter-master J. McDonald, 72nd Regiment, who died, on the 16th of September, from a wound received in the trenches before Sevastopol on the 8th of December, aged thirty-five years.’10
The British cemetery at Cathcart’s Hill, 1855
After the allied armies left, the Russians, who had withdrawn towards Perekop during their evacuation, moved back to the southern towns and plains of the Crimea. The battlefields of the Crimean War returned to farms and grazing lands. Cattle roamed across the graveyards of the allied troops. Gradually, the Crimea recovered from the economic damage of the war. Sevastopol was rebuilt. Roads and bridges were repaired. But in other ways the peninsula was permanently changed.
Most dramatically, the Tatar population had largely disappeared. Small groups had begun to leave their farms at the start of the conflict, but their numbers grew towards the end of the war, in line with their fear of reprisals by the Russians after the departure of the allied troops. There had already been reprisals for the atrocities at Kerch, with mass arrests, confiscations of property, and summary executions of ‘suspicious’ Tatars by the Russian military. The inhabitants of the Baidar valley petitioned Codrington to help them leave the Crimea, fearing what would happen to them if their villages should fall into the hands of the Russians, ‘as our past experience of them gives us little ground to hope for good treatment’. Written and translated into English by a local Tatar scribe, their supplication continued:
In return for the kindness shown us by the English we should as soon cease to remember God as to forget Her Majesty Queen Victoria and General Codrington, for whom we will pray the five times a day that the Mahometan religion enjoins us to say our prayers, and our prayers to preserve them and the whole English nation shall be handed down to our children’s children.
Signed in the names of the priests, nobles and inhabitants of the following twelve villages: Baidar, Sagtik, Kalendi, Skelia, Savatka, Baga, Urkusta, Uzunyu, Buyuk Luskomiya, Kiatu, Kutchuk Luskomiga, Varnutka.11
Codrington did nothing to help the Tatars, even though they had provided the allies with foodstuffs, spies and transport services throughout the Crimean War. The idea of protecting the Tatars against Russian reprisals never crossed the minds of the allied diplomats, who might have included a stronger clause about their treatment in the peace treaty. Article V of the Paris Treaty obliged all warring nations to ‘give full pardon to those of their subjects who appeared guilty of actively participating in the military affairs of the enemy’ – a clause that appeared to protect not only the Crimean Tatars but the Bulgarians and Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, who had sided with the Russians during the Danubian campaigns. But Count Stroganov, the governor-general of New Russia, found a way around this clause by claiming that the Tatars had lost their treaty rights, if they had broken Russian law by departing from their place of residence without prior approval from the military authorities – as tens of thousands of them had been forced to do during the Crimean War. In other words, any Tatar who had left his home without a stamp in his passport was deemed to be a traitor by the Russian government, and was subject to penal exile in Siberia.12
As the allied armies began their evacuation of the Crimea, the first large groups of Tatars also left. On 22 April, 4,500 Tatars set sail from Balaklava for Constantinople in the belief that the Tu
rkish government had invited them to relocate in the Ottoman Empire. Alarmed by the mass exodus, which was a threat to the Crimean agricultural economy, Russian local officials looked for guidance from St Petersburg as to whether they should stop the departure of the Tatars. Having been informed that the Tatars had collaborated en masse with the enemy, the Tsar responded that nothing should be done to prevent their exodus, adding that in fact it ‘would be advantageous to rid the peninsula of this harmful population’ (a concept re-enacted by Stalin during the Second World War). Communicating Alexander’s statement to his officials, Stroganov interpreted it as a direct order for the expulsion of the Muslim population from the Crimea by claiming that the Tsar had said that it was ‘necessary’ (and not just ‘advantageous’) to make the Tatars leave. Various pressures were applied to encourage their departure: there were rumours of a planned mass deportation to the north, of Cossack raids on Tatar villages, of campaigns to force the Tatars to learn Russian in Crimean schools, or to convert to Christianity. Taxes were increased on Tatar farms, and Tatar villages were deprived of access to water, forcing them to sell their land to Russian landowners.
The Crimean War Page 50
