The Crimean war: new approaches to assessing its outcome

Keywords: Crimea; Crimean War; propaganda; Russian Empire; international politics; history.

Crimea's return to Russia in 2014 drew a hostile response from the so-called international community and set off a new round of information warfare against Russia. For the moment, the confrontation has remained confined to the information sphere, but the rise in tension has been without precedent in the post-Soviet period. It is worth remembering, then, that Crimea has been a point of contention between Russia and the Western powers before.

The nineteenth-century dispute grew into a full-scale war, and the question of who would control the peninsula was ultimately settled on the battlefield. Yet information was used as a weapon then, just as it is now, and many of the stock themes of present-day Western propaganda are little more than recycled versions of earlier ones. The parallel is especially clear in the conduct of pro-Western figures within the Russian Empire. The political outlook of today's liberal opposition has much in common with that of its nineteenth-century ideological forerunners.

For those reasons, the Crimean War still matters today. “The Crimean war demonstrated the rottenness and impotence of feudal Russia” [1]. Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, wrote those words. That verdict became the label under which the war entered Soviet historiography. Lenin is long dead, and so is the state he founded, yet public understanding of the events of 1853–1856 still largely follows the judgement of the leader of the world proletariat. Public memory of the Crimean War is rather like an iceberg. Most people remember only the visible tip from their school days: the defence of Sevastopol, Nakhimov's death, and the scuttling of the Russian fleet.

The war is usually discussed through clichés instilled by decades of anti-Russian propaganda: the “technological backwardness” of tsarist Russia, the “disgraceful defeat of tsarism”, and the “humiliating peace treaty”. Its true scale and significance, however, remain little known. Many people imagine a peripheral, almost colonial conflict fought far from Russia's main centres.

The simplified version is straightforward: enemy troops landed in Crimea, defeated the Russian army, achieved their aims, and then withdrew in triumph. Is that really what happened? Let us look more closely.

To begin with, who decided that Russia's defeat was disgraceful, and on what grounds? Losing a war is not in itself a disgrace. Germany, after all, lost its capital in the Second World War, was fully occupied, and signed an unconditional surrender. Yet who describes that as a disgraceful defeat?

Consider the Crimean War from the same angle. Russia was opposed by three empires—the British, French, and Ottoman—and one kingdom, Sardinia-Piedmont. What did Britain represent at the time? An enormous country, the world's leading industrial power, and the strongest navy on earth. France was the world's third-largest economy, possessed its second-largest navy, and fielded a large, well-trained land army. The alliance between those two powers gave the coalition extraordinary military strength. And there was still the Ottoman Empire to consider.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire's golden age was over, and it had acquired the nickname “the sick man of Europe”. But that judgement was made relative to the most advanced countries in the world. The Ottoman navy had steamships. Its army was large and partly armed with rifles. Officers were sent to train in Western countries, while foreign instructors worked in the empire itself.

During the First World War, the same “sick man of Europe”, by then deprived of almost all its European possessions, defeated Britain and France in the Gallipoli campaign. If the Ottoman Empire could still do that near the end of its existence, it was presumably an even more formidable opponent during the Crimean War.

Sardinia's role is usually ignored altogether, although this small kingdom sent a well-equipped force of 20,000 men against Russia. Russia therefore faced an immensely powerful coalition. That fact matters.

Now consider what the coalition intended to achieve. Its plans called for Russia to be stripped of the Åland Islands, Finland, the Baltic provinces, Crimea, and the Caucasus. At one stage, St Petersburg itself was offered to Sweden. The Kingdom of Poland was to be restored, and an independent Circassian state, a Turkish vassal, created in the Caucasus. Nor was that all. The Danubian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, were under Russian protection; they were now to pass to Austria. Austrian troops would thus have reached Russia's south-western frontier.

The spoils were to be divided as follows: the Baltic provinces would go to Prussia, the Åland Islands and Finland to Sweden, and Crimea and the Caucasus to Turkey. Circassia was to go to Shamil, leader of the mountain peoples [2]; his forces, incidentally, also fought Russia during the Crimean War.

This plan is usually attributed to Palmerston, the influential British cabinet minister, while Napoleon III is said to have taken a different view. But let the French emperor speak for himself. He told a Russian diplomat:

“I intend ... to do everything in my power to halt the spread of your influence and force you back into Asia, where you came from. Russia is not a European country; it should not be one and will not be one unless France forgets the role she is meant to play in European history. ... Once your ties with Europe are weakened, you will turn east of your own accord and become an Asian country again. It would be no difficult matter to deprive you of Finland, the Baltic lands, Poland, and Crimea” [3].

This was the future Britain and France had in mind for Russia. The themes are familiar, are they not? Our generation has had the “good fortune” to see such a plan carried out. Now imagine Palmerston's and Napoleon III's ideas put into effect not in 1991 but in the middle of the nineteenth century. Imagine Russia entering the First World War with the Baltic already in German hands, Austria-Hungary holding a bridgehead in Moldavia and Wallachia, and Turkish garrisons stationed in Crimea. Under those conditions, the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 would have been a disaster before it began.

But “backward, powerless, and rotten” Russia brought every one of these projects to nothing. Not one was realised. There was no disgrace, and certainly no humiliating defeat.

The second major charge concerns the “technological backwardness of serf-owning Russia”. Whenever the subject comes up, rifles and steamships are invoked. Britain and France, we are told, armed their soldiers with rifles, while Russian troops carried obsolete smoothbore muskets. Yet that is not true. Russian forces used rifled weapons during the Crimean War and before it, both in the Caucasus and in the Hungarian campaign. A Russophobe may grudgingly concede that “rifled weapons were not entirely absent”, only to add at once that “there were still very few of them”.

In 1858, Voennyi sbornik published a debate among military specialists, some of whom had fought in the Crimean War. One contributor wrote:

“If we take account of the total number of rifled arms then held by the whole of our army, we shall find that it was scarcely much below the number held by the French. The difference was that the French, waging an offensive war and secure at home, could concentrate their best troops and best weapons at the point of action, whereas we were obliged to disperse both” [4, p. 7].

That, in essence, settles the point. The myth of Russian backwardness in this area does not survive scrutiny. Where, then, was the rest of the army? The following figures show:

a) the Baltic seaboard—Finland, St Petersburg Province, and the Baltic provinces: 179 battalions, 144 cavalry squadrons and Cossack sotnias, and 384 guns; b) the Kingdom of Poland and the western provinces: 146 battalions, 100 cavalry squadrons and Cossack sotnias, and 308 guns; c) the area along the Danube and the Black Sea as far as the River Bug: 182 battalions, 285 cavalry squadrons and Cossack sotnias, and 612 guns; d) Crimea and the Black Sea coast from the Bug to Perekop: 27 battalions, 19 cavalry squadrons and Cossack sotnias, and 48 guns; e) the shores of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea region: 31½ battalions, 140 cavalry squadrons and Cossack sotnias, and 54 guns; f) the Caucasus and Transcaucasia: 152 battalions, 281 cavalry squadrons and Cossack sotnias, and 289 guns. One-third of these troops were stationed on the Turkish frontier; the rest were deployed within the region against hostile highland forces [5].

It is obvious that the bulk of the army was nowhere near Crimea. Why this seemingly odd deployment? The answer has already emerged, but it is worth stating plainly. As Prussia, Austria, and Sweden edged towards the anti-Russian camp, Russia had to keep its main forces away from Crimea, spread along an arc from the northern frontier through the west to the south-west.

Next comes another stock accusation: “Advanced Britain and France had long since adopted steam power, while Russian ships still relied on sail.”

This too is far from the truth. Russian steamships took part in the Battle of Sinope. There were few of them, and the British and French fleets did possess many more steam-powered vessels. But those were the world's two leading maritime powers, countries that had ruled the seas for centuries. No one therefore dismisses the rest of the world as “rotten”.

Still, let us consider Russia's military “backwardness” as a whole. There is no need to work through every weapon type and compare the technical specifications of individual models. The casualty figures are enough. Had Russia truly lagged far behind its enemies in armaments, its losses should have been vastly greater.

Estimates of total losses vary widely, but the figures for those killed are broadly consistent. Across the war as a whole, 10,240 French soldiers, 2,755 British soldiers, 10,000 Ottoman soldiers, and 24,577 Russian soldiers were killed. Some estimates add about 5,000 Russian missing presumed dead, putting the total at around 30,000 [6]. That is no catastrophic imbalance, especially given that Russia fought for six months longer than Britain and France.

The answer, of course, will be that most casualties were incurred during the defence of Sevastopol, where the coalition had to storm fortifications and therefore suffered heavily. On that view, the defenders' strong position partly compensated for Russia's technological backwardness.

Very well. Then consider the first battle fought away from Sevastopol, at the Alma. Menshikov had fewer men and guns than the coalition—hardly surprising when three countries were fighting Russia at once—and the enemy also had naval gunfire support. Yet losses on the two sides were roughly equal. That is hard to square with a major technological disparity.

Russian forces also possessed rockets. Konstantinov's war rockets were substantially superior to Western designs. The Baltic was protected by Russian-made mines designed by Boris Jacobi, likewise among the best weapons of their kind. “Backward Russia”, then, was ahead of the world's most advanced states in some areas. The main claims of anti-Russian propaganda therefore collapse on inspection. The state system proved effective: it had enabled Russia to build up enough strength to withstand a coalition of exceptionally powerful great powers.

The army proved highly combat-effective. Discipline was ironclad, and Russia was preparing to mobilise for a second Patriotic War, with all that this would have meant for the enemy.

Why, then, has the сlichés directed at Nicholas I's Russia proved so durable?

Even while the war was under way, members of the so-called progressive public began producing anti-Russian propaganda and circulating leaflets and proclamations.

“Written in a lively style, and with every effort to make them intelligible to ordinary people and above all to soldiers, these proclamations fell into two groups: some were signed by Herzen, Golovin, Sazonov, and others who had left their homeland; the rest by the Poles Zenkovich, Zabitsky, and Worcell” [7].

After Nicholas I died, the liberal Alexander II succeeded him. Liberals are naturally inclined to criticise conservative institutions, and after the long reign of a stern ruler, the new emperor decided that press controls should be relaxed. Predictably, the press promptly ran riot, mingling fair criticism with outright Russophobia and mud-slinging. Many officers, unfortunately, joined the chorus. Nicholas I had built a team of like-minded men and then proved extremely reluctant to bring the next generation into government. The ambitious young men of his early reign had reached middle age by the 1850s. They wanted senior posts and fame.

They had every incentive to denounce the old guard and argue that a new generation would have done far better. Veterans of the Crimean War also had an interest in excusing their own mistakes. No commander, however great, avoids every error. When a war ends in victory, such mistakes are forgotten and the generals receive decorations and acclaim. The Crimean War, however, ended in a peace settlement that was not entirely on equal terms. A public accustomed to one victory after another was furious. The older commanders began to defend themselves, often blaming one another, the quartermasters, and, inevitably, “bad weapons”.

Finally, Soviet historians writing about the Crimean War worked under strict ideological control. They could hardly say anything other than repeat nonsense about “incompetent generals”, an “autocratic tyrant”, and the all-embracing backwardness of “serf-owning Russia”. For the Bolshevik regime, Nicholas I was the “strangler of freedom” and the “murderer of Russia's finest men—the Decembrists”; anyone who disagreed could expect prison. No one wanted prison, Soviet historians included.

The grip of those old dogmas has still not been broken. The young historians of the 1970s are now established authorities. To disown the work they wrote in the Soviet era would be to admit that their dissertations were propaganda. Those grey-haired professors of the Soviet school have trained many pupils, and a new generation continues to repeat the stock tales of anti-Russian propaganda. Even so, historical work free of the Soviet paradigm is now beginning to appear.

References

1. Lenin, V. I. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Collected Works]. 5th ed., vol. 20. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1973. [In Russian].
2. Istoriia diplomatii [History of Diplomacy]. Vol. 2. Moscow: OGIZ, Gosudarstvennoe sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel'stvo, 1941. [In Russian].
3. Trubetskoy, A. Krymskaia voina [The Crimean War]. Moscow: Lomonosov, 2010. [In Russian].
4. “Vzgliad na sostoianie russkikh voisk v minuvshuiu voinu” [“A View of the State of the Russian Army in the Recent War”]. Voennyi sbornik, no. 1 (1858): 7. [In Russian].
5. “Vostochnaia voina 1853–1856 gg.” [“The Eastern War, 1853–1856”]. In Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' F. A. Brokgauza i I. A. Efrona [Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary]. St Petersburg, 1890–1907. [In Russian].
6. Urlanis, B. Ts. Voiny i narodonaselenie Evropy [Wars and the Population of Europe]. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1960. [In Russian].
7. Dubrovin, N. F. Istoriia Krymskoi voiny i oborony Sevastopolia [History of the Crimean War and the Defence of Sevastopol]. Vol. 1. St Petersburg: Tipografiia Tovarishchestva “Obshchestvennaia pol'za”, 1900. [In Russian].

original https://humanities.fa.ru/jour/article/view/153