The Crimean War

assume a mythic status in the democratic imagination.

Sevastopol itself was elevated to a quasi-sacred site in the collective memory. The veneration of the fallen heroes of the siege began as soon as the war ended, not on the initiative of the government and official circles, but through popular efforts, by families and groups of veterans erecting monuments or founding churches, cemeteries and benevolent funds with money raised from public donations. The focal point of this democratic cult was the commemoration of admirals Nakhimov, Kornilov and Istomin, the popular heroes of Sevastopol. They were idolized as ‘men of the people’, devoted to the welfare of their troops, who had all died as martyrs in the defence of the town. In 1856 a national fund was organized to pay for the erection of a monument to the admirals in Sevastopol, and there were similar initiatives in many other towns. Kornilov was the central figure of numerous histories of the war. Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and virtually a saint in the folklore of the siege, appeared in tales and prints as a brave and selfless soldier, a martyr of the people’s holy cause, who was ready for his death when he was struck down while inspecting the Fourth Bastion. It was entirely through private funding that the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet was established in Sevastopol in 1869. On display to the crowds who came on the opening day were various weapons, artefacts and personal items, manuscripts and maps, drawings and engravings collected from veterans. It was the first historical museum of this public nature in Russia.^bl

The Death of Admiral Nakhimov by Vasily Timm (1856)

The Russian state became involved in the commemoration of Sevastopol only in the later 1870s, around the time of the Russo-Turkish war, mainly as a result of the growing influence of the pan-Slavs in government circles, but government initiatives focused on court favourites, such as General Gorchakov, and virtually neglected the people’s hero Nakhimov. By this time the admiral had become an icon of a popular nationalist movement that the regime attempted to subordinate to its own Official Nationality by building monuments to the Crimean War. In 1905, a year of revolution and war against Japan, a splendid panorama of The Defence of Sevastopol was opened to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the siege, in a purpose-built museum on a site where the Fourth Bastion had once stood. Government officials insisted on replacing the portrait of Nakhimov with one of Gorchakov in Franz Roubaud’s life-size painting-model re-creating the events of 18 June, when the defenders of Sevastopol had repelled the assault by the British and the French.²⁹ Nakhimov did not appear in the museum, which was built upon the very ground where he had been mortally wounded.

The Soviet commemoration of the war returned the emphasis to the popular heroes. Nakhimov came to stand for the patriotic sacrifice and heroism of the Russian people in the defence of their motherland – a propaganda message that took on a new force during the war of 1941–5. From 1944, Soviet naval officers and sailors were decorated with the Nakhimov Medal, and trained in special cadet schools established in his name. In books and films he became a symbol of the Great Leader rallying the people against an aggressive foreign foe.

Production of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s patriotic film Admiral Nakhimov (1947) began in 1943, when Britain was an ally of the Soviet Union. Planned as a Soviet counterpart to Alexander Korda’s wartime epic about Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton (1941), its first cut made light of Britain’s role as an enemy of Russia during the Crimean War, focusing instead on Nakhimov’s private life and on his relations with the population of Sevastopol. But as it went through editing, the film got caught up in the opening skirmishes of the Cold War – a conflict that arose in the Turkish Straits and the Caucasus, the starting points of the Crimean War. From the autumn of 1945, the Soviets pushed for a revision of the 1936 Montreux Convention on the neutrality of the Straits. Stalin demanded joint Soviet – Turkish control of the Dardanelles and the cession to the Soviet Union of Kars and Ardahan, territories conquered by tsarist Russia but ceded to the Turks in 1922. Mindful of the build-up of Soviet troops in the Caucasus, the United States sent warships to the eastern Mediterranean in August 1946. It was precisely at this moment that Stalin demanded changes to Pudovkin’s film: the focus shifted from Nakhimov as a man to Nakhimov as a military leader against the foreign foe; and Britain was depicted as the enemy of Russia who had used the Turks to pursue its aggressive imperialist aims in the Black Sea, just as Stalin claimed the Americans were doing in the early stages of the Cold War.³⁰

A similar patriotic line was taken by the great historian of the Stalin era, Evgeny Tarle, in his two-volume history of The Crimean War (1941–3), his biography Nakhimov (1948), and in his later book, The City of Russian Glory: Sevastopol in 1854–55 (1955), published to commemorate the centenary. Tarle was very critical of the tsarist leadership, but he glorified the patriotic courage and resilience of the Russian people, led and inspired by the example of such heroic leaders as Nakhimov and Kornilov, who laid down their lives for the defence of Russia against the ‘imperialist aggression’ of the Western powers. The fact that Russia’s enemies in the Crimean War – Britain, France and Turkey – were now all NATO members and adversaries of the newly founded Warsaw Pact in 1955 added greater tension to the Soviet celebration of the war’s centenary.

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