The Crimean War (75 page)

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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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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
 
 
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.
 
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.

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