The Crimean War

sense of justice forbid me to keep silent in the face of the evil being openly perpetrated before me, causing the deaths of millions and sapping our strength and undermining our country’s honour … . We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowed by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders. This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland – words that have been so much misused! – nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption.

Tolstoy strongly condemned the harsh treatment of the serf soldiers. In an early version of his proposals he even went so far as to maintain that in ‘every beaten soldier’ there was a buried ‘feeling of revenge’ that was ‘too suppressed to appear yet as a real force’ but was waiting to erupt (‘and Oh Lord what horrors lie in wait for our society if that should occur’). He later cut this inflammatory sentence, on the calculation that it would scotch his reform ideas in government circles. Tolstoy called for an end to corporal punishment in the army, blaming Russia’s poor performance in the Crimean War on the brutalization of the troops. He advanced plans for the reform of the artillery, which had been shown to be so ineffective against the Minie rifles. Putting forward his ideas about how to improve the command, he delivered a devastating critique of the officers in the Crimea, denouncing them as cruel and corrupt, concerned mainly with the minutiae of the soldiers’ uniforms and drill, and serving in the army only because they were unfit for anything else. But once again he cut out a fiery passage – in which he had claimed that the senior commanders were courtiers, selected because the Tsar liked them and not for their competence – on the grounds that it would lessen his chances of getting a hearing for his plans. It was already being rumoured that he was the anonymous author of a satirical army song in which the defeats in the Crimea were blamed on the incompetence of the officers with the biggest epaulettes. The ballad circulated widely in the army and society, earning Tolstoy, as its suspected author, a reprimand from the Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, the Tsar’s brother, who accused the verses of destroying the morale of the soldiers.^be Though Tolstoy’s authorship was never established, he was denied promotion beyond second lieutenant, a rank he had obtained before his arrival in Sevastopol.³⁷

Tolstoy’s experience in the Crimean War had led him to question more than just the military system. The poet Afanasy Fet, who first met Tolstoy in Turgenev’s St Petersburg apartment in the winter of 1855, was struck by the young man’s ‘automatic opposition to all generally accepted opinions’. Living side by side with the ordinary soldiers in the Crimea had opened Tolstoy’s eyes to the simple virtues of the peasantry; it had set him on a restless search for a new truth, for a way to live morally as a Russian nobleman and landowner, given the injustices of serfdom. He had touched on these matters before. In A Landowner’s Morning (1852), he wrote about a landowner (for which read: Tolstoy) who seeks a life of happiness and justice in the country and learns that it can only be found in constant labour for the good of others less happy than himself. At around the same time, he had proposed to reduce the dues of the serfs on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, but the serfs were suspicious of his intentions (they were not accustomed to such benevolence) and had turned his offer down. But it was only in the Crimea that Tolstoy began to feel a close attachment to the serfs in uniform – those ‘simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war’. He was disgusted with his former life – the gambling, the whoring, the excessive feasting and drinking, the embarrassment of riches, and the lack of any real work or purpose in his life. And after the war, he threw himself into the task of living with the peasants in ‘a life of truth’ with new determination.³⁸

By the time of Tolstoy’s return, there was a new reformist spirit in the air. Among the more liberal and enlightened noblemen it was generally accepted that the time had come to liberate their serfs. In the words of Sergei Volkonsky, the famous Decembrist and one of Tolstoy’s distant relatives, who was released from his Siberian exile in 1856, the abolition of serfdom was ‘the least the state could do to recognize the sacrifice the peasantry has made in the last two wars: it is time to recognize that the Russian peasant is a citizen as well’. The peasant soldiers who had fought in the Crimea had been led to expect their freedom. In the spring of 1854 thousands of peasants had turned up at the recuiting stations after hearing rumours that freedom had been promised by the Tsar to any serf who volunteered for the army or navy, and there had been clashes with the soldiers and police when they were turned away. Expectations of emancipation mounted after the Crimean War. In the first six years of Alexander’s reign there were 500 peasant uprisings and strikes against the gentry on the land.³⁹

The new Tsar believed that the liberation of the serfs was a necessary measure to prevent a revolution. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it begins to abolish itself from below,’ he told a group of Moscow noblemen in 1856. The defeat in the Crimean War had persuaded Alexander that Russia could not compete with the Western powers until it swept aside its old serf economy and modernized itself. The gentry had very little idea how to make a profit from their estates. Most of them knew next to nothing about agriculture or accounting. Yet they went on spending in the same old lavish way as they had always done, mounting up enormous debts. By 1859 one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and noble banks. The economic argument for emancipation was becoming irrefutable, and many landowners were shifting willy-nilly to the free labour system by contracting other people’s serfs. Since the peasantry’s redemption payments would cancel out the gentry’s debts, the economic rationale was becoming irresistible.^bf

In 1858 the Tsar appointed a special commission to formulate proposals for the emancipation in consultation with provincial gentry committees. Under pressure from diehard squires to limit the reform or to fix the rules for the land transfers in their favour, the commission became bogged down in political wrangling for the best part of two years. In the end, the reactionary gentry were defeated and the moderate reformists got their way, thanks in no small measure to the personal intervention of the Tsar. The Edict of Emancipation was signed by Alexander on 19 February 1861 and read to the peasants by their parish priests. It was not as far-reaching as the peasantry had expected. The Edict allowed the landowners considerable leeway in choosing the bits of land for transfer to the peasantry, and in setting the redemption dues the peasant communes would have to pay for them, whereas the peasants had expected to be given all the land without payment.^bg There were rebellions in many areas, sometimes after rumours circulated that the published law was not the one the Tsar had meant to sign but a forgery by nobles and officials who wanted to prevent the real emancipation, the long-awaited ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land.

Despite the disappointment of the peasantry, the emancipation was a crucial watershed. Freedom of a sort, however limited it may have been in practice, had at last been granted to the mass of the people, and there were grounds to hope for a national rebirth. Writers compared the Edict to the conversion of Russia to Christianity in the tenth century. They spoke about the need for Young Russia to liberate itself from the sins of its past, whose riches had been purchased by the people’s sweat and blood, about the need for the landlord and the peasant to overcome their old divisions and become reconciled by nationality. For, as Fedor Dostoevsky wrote in 1861, ‘every Russian is a Russian first of all’.⁴⁰

Along with the emancipation of the serfs, the defeat in the Crimean War accelerated the Tsar’s plans for a reform of the army. Tolstoy was not the only officer to advance proposals for reform during the Crimean War. In the summer of 1855, Count Fedor Ridiger, commander of the Guards and Grenadiers, endorsed many of Tolstoy’s criticisms of the officers corps in a memorandum to the Tsar. Blaming Russia’s imminent defeat on the gross incompetence of the senior command and the army’s administration, Ridiger advised that officers should be trained in military science rather than in parades and reviews, and that those with talent should be given wider scope to take responsibility on the battlefield. Shortly afterwards, similar ideas were put forward by another high-ranking member of the military establishment, Adjutant General V. A. Glinka, who also criticized the army’s system of supply. Proposals were advanced for the building of railways, the lack of which, it was agreed by everyone, had been a major reason for the supply problems of the military during the Crimean War.⁴¹

The Tsar set up a ‘Commission for the Improvement of the Military Sphere’ under General Ridiger, but then began to waver over implementing its proposed reforms, with which he clearly sympathized, although plans for a network of railways to link Moscow and St Petersburg with the major centres of agriculture and the border areas