The Crimean War (94 page)

Authors: Orlando Figes

Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856

BOOK: The Crimean War

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Soimonov relied on a naval map, without any markings on the land. A member of his staff showed him the way by drawing on the map with his finger (A. Andriianov,
Inkermanskii boi i oborona Sevastopolia (nabroski uchastnika)
(St Petersburg, 1903), p. 15).

Woods was mistaken: the Russian Guards were nowhere near the Crimea.

A reasonable mistake to make amid the heavy fog and brushwood on the heights, where non-wounded soldiers lay down on the ground to ambush the enemy.

Tolstoy is citing the official figures passed for publication by the military censors. The true Russian losses were double that amount.

So incompetent was the commissariat that it took shipments of green, unroasted coffee beans, instead of tea, the usual drink of the troops in an Empire based on the tea trade. The process of roasting, grinding and preparing the coffee was too laborious for most of the British soldiers, who threw the beans away.

Born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg, she was received into the Russian Orthodox Church and given the name Elena Pavlovna before her marriage to the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich in 1824.

The telegraphs were meant for military use; journalists were not allowed to clog them up with long reports, so there was a time lag between the headline story in a newspaper, which arrived by cable, and the full report, which came later by steamship. There were often false reports because of this – the most famous in
The Times
, on 2 October 1854, which announced the fall of Sevastopol on the basis of telegraph communications of the victory at the Alma and Russell’s first dispatch from the Crimea, covering the landing of the allied troops. It was not until 10 October that Russell’s full report on the Alma got to London, by which time the true situation had been clarified by further telegraphs.

The vicar Joseph Blakesley, who styled himself ‘A Hertfordshire Incumbent’, wrote so many lengthy letters to
The Times
, offering his learning on anything associated with the war, from the climate in the Crimea to the character of Russia, that he earned a reputation as a popular historian and was later even appointed to the Regius Professorship of History at Cambridge University, despite his lack of academic credentials.

There was some basis to the rumours about America. US public opinion was generally pro-Russian during the Crimean War. The Northern abolitionists were sympathetic towards the Western powers but the slave-owning South was firmly on the side of Russia, a serf economy. There was a general sympathy for the Russians as an underdog fighting against England, the old imperial enemy, as well as a fear that if Britain won the war against Russia it would be more inclined to meddle once again in the affairs of the United States. Relations between the USA and Britain had been troubled during recent years because of concerns in London about America’s territorial claims over Canada and its plans to invade Cuba (Clarendon had told the British cabinet that if Cuba was invaded Britain would be forced to declare war against America). Isolated in Europe, the Russians developed relations with the USA during the Crimean War. They were brought together by their common enemy – the English – although there were lingering suspicions on the Russian side of the republican Americans and, on the American side, about the despotic tsarist monarchy. Commercial contracts were signed between the Russians and Americans. A US military delegation (including George B. McClellan, the future commander of the Northern army in the early stages of the Civil War) went to Russia to advise the army. American citizens sent arms and munitions to Russia (the arms manufacturer Samuel Colt even offering to send pistols and rifles). American volunteers went to the Crimea to fight or serve as engineers on the Russian side. Forty US doctors were attached to the medical department of the Russian army. It was at this time that the USA first proposed the purchase of Russian-America, as Alaska was known, a sale that went ahead in 1867.

‘As for Constantinople, we will have it, rest assured.’

In 1857 he married Parthenope Nightingale, the elder sister of Florence Nightingale, and remained close to Florence all his life.

Not to be confused with Mikhail Gorchakov, his commander-in-chief.

Herbert’s resignation from the cabinet (as Secretary to the Colonies) came after weeks of harsh and xenophobic criticism in the British press, which had focused on his family connections to Russia. It was said, for example, in the
Belfast News-Letter
(29 Dec. 1854) that his mother Lady Herbert was the sister of a prince with a ‘splendid palace in Odessa’ that had been deliberately spared by the British during the bombardment of that town (in fact Vorontsov’s palace had been badly damaged during the bombardment of Odessa). In the
Exeter Flying Post
(31 Jan. 1855), Herbert was accused of attempting to ‘obstruct the way [of the government] and favour the designs of the Czar’.

There were many Poles who ran away from the Russian army and joined the Sultan’s forces, some of them quite senior officers who adopted Turkish names, partly to disguise themselves from the Russians: Iskander Bey (later Iskander Pasha), Sadyk Pasha (Micha Czaykowski) and ‘Hidaiot’ (Hedayat) with Omer Pasha’s army in the Danube area; Colonel Kuczynski, chief of staff of the Egyptian army at Evpatoria; and Major Kleczynski and Major Jerzmanowski of the Turkish army in the Crimea.

Taganrog had insufficient military forces to defend itself, just one battalion of infantry and a Cossack regiment, along with a unit of 200 armed civilians, in all some 2,000 troops, but no artillery. In a desperate effort to save the town from bombardment, the governor sent a delegation to meet the commanders of the allied fleet with an offer to decide the fate of Taganrog by combat in the field. He even offered to make the sides unequal to reflect the allied advantage at sea. It was an extraordinary act of chivalry that could have come directly from the pages of medieval history. The allied commanders were unimpressed, and returned to their ships to begin the bombardment of Taganrog. The entire port, the dome of the cathedral and many other buildings were destroyed. Among the many inhabitants who fled the besieged city was Evgenia Chekhova, the mother of the future playwright Anton Chekhov, who was born in Taganrog five years afterwards (L. Guerrin,
Histoire de la dernière guerre de Russie (1853 – 1856)
, 2 vols. (Paris, 1858), vol. 2; N. Dubrovin,
Istoriia krymskoi voiny i oborony Sevastopolia
, 3 vols. (St Petersburg, 1900), vol. 3, p. 191).

Peto & Grissell, the company he ran with his cousin Thomas Grissell, built many well-known London buildings, including the Reform Club, the Oxford & Cambridge Club, the Lyceum and Nelson’s Column.

This incident is the origin of the famous phrase, originally coined by Totleben: ‘The French army is an army of lions led by donkeys.’ The phrase was later used to describe the British army in the First World War.

A barrier about 2 metres high and a metre or so wide, made up of felled trees, timber and brushwood.

In an attempt to stop them from deserting, the Russian officers had told their men that if they gave themselves up to the enemy their ears would be cut off and given to the Turks (whose military custom was to cut off ears to receive a reward); but even this had not prevented Russian troops from running off in large numbers.

Lyde’s accusers claimed that he had fired wilfully at the beggar but the only witnesses of the shooting were three women. The testimony of women was inadmissible in a Turkish court.

It was from this time that Nice became a favourite resort of the Russian aristocracy, a ‘Russian Brighton’, according to the British press, which was alarmed by the appearance of Russian merchant ships in the Mediterranean, a sea dominated by the Royal Navy. There were dire warnings of an intrigue between Russia and the Catholic powers. When rumours later circulated that the Russians were intending to set up coaling stations in other parts of the Mediterranean, in 1858, Palmerston (by this stage out of office) called for a show of naval strength against the Sardinians. But the Conservative government of Lord Derby was less concerned, seeing Russia’s deal with the Sardinians as no more than a commercial agreement. The Villafranca contract lasted until 1917.

In 1857 the army song was published by the socialist exile Alexander Herzen in his periodical the
Polar Star
. The ballad was well known in the student revolutionary circles of the 1860s and was later even cited by Lenin. In fact, Tolstoy was not wholly responsible for the song, which expressed a discontent that was widely felt in the army. It originated with a group of artillery officers, including Tolstoy, who gathered round the piano in the rooms of their commander on an almost daily basis to drink and sing and make up songs. As he was already known for his writing, Tolstoy, who no doubt played a leading role in the composition of the verses, took most of the blame for them.

Under the terms of the emancipation, the peasants were obliged to pay redemption dues on the land transferred to them. These repayments, calculated by the gentry’s own land commissions, were to be repaid over a forty-nine-year period to the state, which recompensed the gentry in 1861. Thus, in effect, the serfs bought their freedom by paying off their masters’ debts. The redemption payments became increasingly difficult to collect, not least because the peasantry regarded them as unjust from the start. They were finally cancelled in 1905.

Overall, perhaps half the farming land in European Russia was transferred from the gentry’s ownership to the communal tenure of the peasantry, although the precise proportion depended largely on the landowner’s will.

Shamil was sent to St Petersburg for a meeting with the Tsar. There he was treated as a celebrity by the Russian public, which for years had lived on tales of his courage and daring. Exiled to Kaluga, Shamil suffered from the cold. In 1868 he was moved to the warmer climate of Kiev, where he was given a mansion and a pension, and placed under only loose surveillance by the authorities. In 1869 he was allowed to leave for a pilgrimage to Mecca on condition that he left his oldest sons in Russia as hostages. After completing his pilgrimage to Mecca, he died in Medina in 1871. Two of his sons became officers in the Russian army, but two others fought for the Turks against the Russians in 1877 – 8.

Ermak Timofeevich, the sixteenth-century Cossack leader and folk hero who began the exploration and military conquest of Siberia.

Including the character of Vronsky at the end of Tolstoy’s novel
Anna Karenina
.

It has since been shown that the metal in fact came from antique Chinese guns (J. Glanfield,
Bravest of the Brave: The Story of the Victoria Cross
(London, 2005)).

The Rumiantsev Library and Museum, opened in Moscow in 1862, was not a public collection in this sense. It was donated to the public by a single nobleman.