The Crimean War
Page 59
Pride in the heroes of Sevastopol, the ‘city of Russian glory’, remains an important source of national identity, although today it is situated in a foreign land – a result of the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 and the declaration of Ukrainian independence on the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the words of one Russian nationalist poet:
On the ruins of our superpower There is a major paradox of history: Sevastopol – the city of Russian glory – Is … outside Russian territory.31
The loss of the Crimea has been a severe blow to the Russians, already suffering a loss of national pride after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Nationalists have actively campaigned for the Crimea to return to Russia, not least nationalists in Sevastopol itself, which remains an ethnic Russian town.
Memories of the Crimean War continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment of the West. In 2006 a conference on the Crimean War was organized by the Centre of National Glory of Russia with the support of Vladimir Putin’s Presidential Administration and the ministries of Education and Defence. The conclusion of the conference, issued by its organizers in a press release, was that the war should be seen not as a defeat for Russia, but as a moral and religious victory, a national act of sacrifice in a just war; Russians should honour the authoritarian example of Nicholas I, a tsar unfairly derided by the liberal intelligentsia, for standing up against the West in the defence of his country’s interests.32 The reputation of Nicholas I, the man who led the Russians into the Crimean War against the world, has been restored in Putin’s Russia. Today, on Putin’s orders, Nicholas’s portrait hangs in the antechamber of the presidential office in the Kremlin.
At the end of the Crimean War a quarter of a million Russians had been buried in mass graves in various locations around Sevastopol. All around the battle sites of Inkerman and Alma, the Chernaia valley, Balaklava and Sevastopol there are unknown soldiers buried underground. In August 2006 the remains of fourteen Russian infantrymen from the Vladimir and Kazan regiments were discovered not far from the spot where they were killed during the battle at the Alma. Alongside their skeletons were their knapsacks, water-bottles, crucifixes and grenades. The bones were reburied with military honours in a ceremony attended by Ukrainian and Russian officials at the Museum of the Alma near Bakhchiserai, and there are plans in Russia to build a chapel on the site.
The Eastern Question’s conflict zone
The Danube conflict zone
The Allied advance towards Sevastopol
The battle of the Alma
The Caucasus
The battle of Balaklava
The battle of Inkerman
The siege of Sevastopol
Acknowledgements
The research for this book took place over many years and thanks are due to a large number of people.
In the early stages of research Helen Rappaport helped me to compile a working bibliography from the potentially endless list of books, published memoirs, diaries and letters by participants in the Crimean War. She also gave invaluable advice on the social history of the war, sharing information from her own research for No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War.
At the National Army Museum in London I am grateful to Alastair Massie, whose own works, The National Army Museum Book of the Crimean War: The Untold Stories and A Most Desperate Undertaking: The British Army in the Crimea, 1854–56, were an inspiration to my own. I gratefully acknowledge the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to make use of the materials from the Royal Archives, and am thankful to Sophie Gordon for her advice on the photographs of the Royal Collection at Windsor. In the Basbanlik Osmanlik Archive in Istanbul, I was helped by Murat Siviloglu and Melek Maksudoglu, and in the Russian State Military History Archive in Moscow by Luisa Khabibulina.
Various people commented on all or sections of the draft – Norman Stone, Sean Brady, Douglas Austin, Tony Margrave, Mike Hinton, Miles Taylor, Dominic Lieven and Mark Mazower – and I am grateful to them all. Douglas Austin and Tony Margrave, in particular, were a mine of information on various military aspects. Thanks are also due to Mara Kozelsky for allowing me to read the typescript of her then unfinished book on the Crimea, to Metin Kunt and Onur Önul for help on Turkish matters, to Edmund Herzig on Armenian affairs, to Lucy Riall for advice on Italy, to Joanna Bourke for her thoughts on military psychology, to Antony Beevor for his help on the hussars, to Ross Belson for background information on the resignation of Sidney Herbert, to Keith Smith for his generous donation of the extraordinary photograph ‘Old Scutari and Modern Üsküdar’ by James Robertson, and to Hugh Small, whose book The Crimean War: Queen Victoria’s War with the Russian Tsars made me change my mind on many things.
As always, I am indebted to my family, to my wife, Stephanie, and our daughters, Lydia and Alice, who could never quite believe that I was writing a war book but indulged my interests nonetheless; to my wonderfully supportive agent, Deborah Rogers, and her superb team at Rogers, Coleridge and White, especially Ruth McIntosh, who talks me through my VAT returns, and to Melanie Jackson in New York; to Cecilia Mackay for her thoughtful work on the illustrations; to Elizabeth Stratford for the copy-editing; to Alan Gilliland for the excellent maps; and above all to my two great editors, Simon Winder at Penguin and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan.
Note on Dates and Proper Names
DATES
From 1700 until 1918 Russia adhered to the Julian calendar, which ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar in use in Western Europe. To avoid confusion, all dates in this book are given according to the Gregorian calendar.
PROPER NAMES
Russian names are spelled in this book according to the standard (Library of Congress) system of transliteration, but common English spellings of well-known Russian names (Tsar Alexander, for example) are retained.
ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES
Peasant Russia, Civil War:
The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917 – 1921
A People’s Tragedy:
The Russian Revolution, 1891 – 1924
Interpreting the Russian Revolution:
The Language and Symbols of 1917
(with Boris Kolonitskii)
Natasha’s Dance:
A Cultural History of Russia
The Whisperers:
Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AN Archives nationales, ParisBLMD British Library Manuscripts Division, LondonBLO Bodleian Library Special Collections, OxfordBOA Basbakanlik Osmanlik Archive, IstanbulFO National Archive, London, Foreign OfficeGARF State Archive of the Russian Federation, MoscowIRL Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, St PetersburgNAM National Army Museum, LondonRA Royal Archives, WindsorRGADA Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, MoscowRGAVMF Russian State Archive of the Military Naval Fleet, St PetersburgRGB Russian State Library, Manuscripts Division, St PetersburgRGIA Russian State Historical Archive, St PetersburgRGVIA Russian State Military History Archive, MoscowSHD Service historique de la Défense, VincennesWO National Archive, London, War Office
INTRODUCTION
1
L. Liashuk, Ofitsery chernomorskogo flota pogubshie pri zashchite Sevastopolia v 1854–1855 gg. (Simferopol, 2005); G. Arnold, Historical Dictionary of the Crimean War (London, 2002), pp. 38–9.
2
Losses of Life in Modern Wars: Austria-Hungary; France (Oxford, 1916), p. 142; Histoire militaire de la France, 4 vols. (Paris, 1992), vol. 2, p. 514; D. Murphy, Ireland and the Crimean War (Dublin, 2002), p. 104. The best recent survey of allied effectives and casualties is T. Margrave, ‘Numbers & Losses in the Crimea: An Introduction’, War Correspondent, 21/1 (2003), pp. 30–32; 21/2 (2003), pp. 32–6; 21/3 (2003), pp. 18–22.
3
J. Herbé, Français et russes en Crimée: Lettres d’un officier français à sa famille pendant la campagne d’Orient (Paris, 1892), p. 337; A. Khrushchev, Istorii
a oborony Sevastopolia (St Petersburg, 1889), pp. 157–8.
CHAPTER 1. RELIGIOUS WARS
1
FO 78/446, Finn to Aberdeen, 27 May 1846; 78/705 Finn to Palmerston, 5 Apr. 1847; H. Martineau, Eastern Life: Present and Past, 3 vols. (London, 1848), vol. 3, pp. 162–5.
2
Ibid., pp. 120–21.
3
FO 78/368, Young to Palmerston, 14 Mar. 1839.
4
Quoted in D. Hopwood, The Russian Presence in Palestine and Syria, 1843–1914: Church and Politics in the Near East (Oxford, 1969), p. 9.
5
A. Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea: Its Origin and an Account of Its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan, 8 vols. (London, 1863), vol. 1, pp. 42–3; N. Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders: The Western Rediscovery of Palestine (London, 1987), p. 23; Martineau, Eastern Life, vol. 3, p. 124; R. Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (London, 1849), p. 209.
6
FO 78/413, Young to Palmerston, 29 Jan. and 28 Apr. 1840; 78/368, Young to Palmerston, 14 Mar. and 21 Oct. 1839.
7
R. Marlin, L’Opinion franc-comtoise devant la guerre de Crimée, Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Besançon, vol. 17 (Paris, 1957), p. 23.
8
E. Finn (ed.), Stirring Times, or, Records from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles of 1853 to 1856, 2 vols. (London, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 57–8, 76.
9
FO 78/705, Finn to Palmerston, 2 Dec. 1847.
10
On the various interpretations of the treaty, see R. H. Davison, Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774–1923: The Impact of the West (Austin, Tex., 1990), pp. 29–37.
11
Mémoires du duc De Persigny (Paris, 1896), p. 225; L. Thouvenal, Nicolas Ier et Napoléon III: Les préliminaires de la guerre de Crimée 1852–1854 (Paris, 1891), pp. 7–8, 14–16, 59.
12
A. Gouttman, La Guerre de Crimée 1853–1856 (Paris, 1995), p. 69; D. Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (London, 1995), pp. 76, 82–3; Correspondence Respecting the Rights and Privileges of the Latin and Greek Churches in Turkey, 2 vols. (London, 1854–6), vol. 1, pp. 17–18.
13
A. Ubicini, Letters on Turkey, trans. Lady Easthope, 2 vols. (London, 1856), vol. 1, pp. 18–22.
14
S. Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London, 2000), pp. 244–5.
15
W. Reddaway, Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge, 1931), p. 147; Correspondence artistique de Grimm avec Cathérine II, Archives de l’art français, nouvelle période, 17 (Paris, 1932), pp. 61–2; The Life of Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 3 vols. (London, 1798), vol. 3, p. 211; The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (New York, 1955), p. 378.
16
Davison, Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, p. 37; H. Ragsdale, ‘Russian Projects of Conquest in the Eighteenth Century’, in id. (ed.), Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 83–5; V. Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (London, 2007), pp. 160–61.
17
Montefiore, Prince of Princes, pp. 274–5.
18
Ibid., pp. 246–8.
19
G. Jewsbury, The Russian Annexation of Bessarabia: 1774–1828. A Study of Imperial Expansion (New York, 1976), pp. 66–72, 88.
20
M. Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnya and Dagestan (London, 1994), p. 44; J. McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821–1922 (Princeton, 1995), pp. 30–32.
21
M. Kozelsky, ‘Introduction’, unpublished MS.
22
K. O’Neill, ‘Between Subversion and Submission: The Integration of the Crimean Khanate into the Russian Empire, 1783–1853’, Ph.D. diss., Harvard, 2006, pp. 39, 52–60, 181; A. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772–1783 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 144–6; M. Kozelsky, ‘Forced Migration or Voluntary Exodus? Evolution of State Policy toward Crimean Tatars during the Crimean War’, unpublished paper; B. Williams, ‘Hijra and Forced Migration from Nineteenth-Century Russia to the Ottoman Empire’, Cahiers du monde russe, 41/1 (2000), pp. 79–108; M. Pinson, ‘Russian Policy and the Emigration of the Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire, 1854–1862’, Güney-Dogu Avrupa Arastirmalari Dergisi, 1 (1972), pp. 38–41.
23
A. Schönle, ‘Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea’, Slavic Review, 60/1 (Spring 2001), pp. 1–23; K. O’Neill, ‘Constructing Russian Identity in the Imperial Borderland: Architecture, Islam, and the Transformation of the Crimean Landscape’, Ab Imperio, 2 (2006), pp. 163–91.
24
M. Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (De Kalb, Ill., 2010), chap. 3; id., ‘Ruins into Relics: The Monument to Saint Vladimir on the Excavations of Chersonesos, 1827–57’, Russian Review, 63/4 (Oct. 2004), pp. 655–72.
CHAPTER 2. EASTERN QUESTIONS
1
R. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (Chicago, 2004), pp. 29–30.
2
Ibid., p. 30.
3
N. Teriatnikov, Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul: The Fossati Restoration and the Work of the Byzantine Institute (Washington, 1998), p. 3; The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, trans. S. Cross and O. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 111.
4
T. Stavrou, ‘Russian Policy in Constantinople and Mount Athos in the Nineteenth Century’, in L. Clucas (ed.), The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe (New York, 1988), p. 225.
5
Nelson, Hagia Sophia, p. 33.
6
A. Ubicini, Letters on Turkey, trans. Lady Easthope, 2 vols. (London, 1856), vol. 1, pp. 18–22.
7
D. Hopwood, The Russian Presence in Palestine and Syria, 1843–1914: Church and Politics in the Near East (Oxford, 1969), p. 29.
8
S. Pavlowitch, Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Serbia, 1837–39 (Paris, 1961), p. 72; B. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford, 2002), p. 31.
9
F. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, 1826–1853 (London, 1942), pp. 19–22; D. Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600–1914 (Chicago, 1990), pp. 62–3.
10
W. Miller, The Ottoman Empire, 1801–1913 (Cambridge, 1913), p. 18.
11
V. Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (London, 2007), p. 49.
12
D. Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (London, 1995), pp. 41–2.
13
A. Bitis, Russia and the Eastern Question: Army, Government and Society, 1815–1833 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 33–4, 101–4; Aksan, Ottoman Wars, pp. 290–96; T. Prousis, Russian Society and the Greek Revolution (De Kalb, Ill., 1994), pp. 31, 50–51.
14
A. Zaionchkovskii, Vostochnaia voina 1853–1856, 3 vols. (St Petersburg, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 8, 19; L. Vyskochkov, Imperator Nikolai I: Chelovek i gosudar’ (St Petersburg, 2001), p. 141; M. Gershenzon, Epokha Nikolaia I (Moscow, 1911), pp. 21–2.
15
A. Tiutcheva, Pri dvore dvukh imperatov: Vospominaniia, dnevnik, 1853–1882 (Moscow, 1928–9), pp. 96–7.
16
R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy , vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, 1995), p. 382; D. Goldfrank, ‘The Holy Sepulcher and the Origin of the Crimean War’, in E. Lohr and M. Poe (eds.), The Military and Society in Russia: 1450–1917 (Leiden, 2002), pp. 502–3.
17
Bitis, Russia and the Eastern Question, pp. 167–76.
18
Ibid., p. 187.
19
Aksan, Ottoman Wars, pp. 346–52.
20
P. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (O
xford, 1994), pp. 658–60.
21
A. Seaton, The Crimean War: A Russian Chronicle (London, 1977), p. 36.
22
Bitis, Russia and the Eastern Question, pp. 361–2, 366.
23
FO 97/404, Ponsonby to Palmerston, 7 July 1834; R. Florescu, The Struggle against Russia in the Romanian Principalities 1821–1854 (Monachii, 1962), pp. 135–60.
24
F. Lawson, The Social Origins of the Egyptian Expansionism during the Muhammad Ali Period (New York, 1992), chap. 5; Aksan, Ottoman Wars, pp. 363–7; A. Marmont, The Present State of the Turkish Empire, trans. F. Smith (London, 1839), p. 289.
25
Bitis, Russia and the Eastern Question, pp. 468–9.
26
Zaionchkovskii, Vostochnaia voina, vol. 1, p. 235.
27
FO 181/114, Palmerston to Ponsonby, 6 Dec. 1833; P. Mosely, Russian Diplomacy and the Opening of the Eastern Question in 1838 and 1839 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), p. 12; Bailey, British Policy, p. 53.
28
L. Levi, History of British Commerce, 1763–1870 (London, 1870), p. 562; Bailey, British Policy, p. 74; J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 6/1 (1953); FO 78/240, Ponsonby to Palmerston, 25 Nov. 1834; D. Urquhart, England and Russia (London, 1835), p. 110.