that, I have decided to send my troops into the [Danubian] principalities – to show the world how far I would go to avoid war – and send a final ultimatum to the Turks to satisfy my demands within eight days, and if they don’t, I shall declare war on them. My aim is to occupy the principalities without a war, if the Turks do not meet us on the left bank of the Danube … If the Turks resist, I shall blockade the Bosporus and seize Turkish ships on the Black Sea; and I shall propose to Austria to occupy Herzegovina and Serbia. If that does not take effect, I shall declare the independence of the principalities, Serbia and Herzegovina – and then the Turkish Empire will begin to crumble, for everywhere there will be Christian uprisings and the last hour of the Ottoman Empire will sound. I do not intend to cross the Danube, the [Turkish] Empire will collapse without that, but I shall keep my fleet prepared, and the 13th and 14th Divisions will remain on a war footing in Sevastopol and Odessa. Canning’s actions … do not put me off: I must go by my own path and fulfil my duty according to my faith as befits the honour of Russia. You cannot imagine how much all this saddens me. I have grown old, but I would like to end my life in peace! 20
The Tsar’s plan was the result of a compromise between his own initial inclination to seize Constantinople in a surprise attack (before the Western powers could react) and the more cautious thinking of Paskevich. Paskevich had commanded the punitive campaign against the Hungarians and the Poles and was the Tsar’s most trusted military adviser. He was sceptical about such an offensive and fearful that it would entangle Russia in a European-wide war. The key difference between the two centred on their views of Austria. Nicholas put excessive faith in his personal link to Franz Joseph. He was convinced that the Austrians – whom he had saved from the Hungarians in 1849 – would join him in his threats against the Turks and, if necessary, in the partition of the Ottoman Empire. That is what had made him so aggressive in his foreign policy: the belief that with Austria on his side there could be no European war and the Turks would be forced to capitulate. Paskevich, by contrast, was doubtful about Austrian support. As he correctly understood, the Austrians could hardly be expected to welcome Russian troops in the principalities and the Balkans, where they already feared uprisings against them by the Serbs and other Slavs; they might even join the Western powers against Russia if these revolts materialized, if and when the Tsar’s troops crossed the Danube.
Determined to limit the Tsar’s offensive plans, Paskevich played to his pan-Slav fantasies. He persuaded Nicholas that it would be enough for Russian troops to occupy the principalities in a defensive war for the Balkan Slavs to rise up and force the Turks to give in to the Tsar’s demands. He spoke of occupying the principalities for several years, if necessary, and claimed that Russian propaganda would raise as many as 50,000 Christian soldiers for the Tsar’s army in the Balkans – enough to deter the intervention of the Western powers and at least neutralize the Austrians. In a memorandum to the Tsar in early April, Paskevich outlined his vision of the religious war that would unfold in the Balkans as the Russian troops advanced:
The Christians of Turkey are from warring tribes and, if the Serbs and Bulgarians have remained peaceful, it is only because they have not yet felt Turkish rule in their villages … But their warrior spirit will be roused by the first conflicts between Christians and Muslims, they will not stand for the atrocities that the Turks will carry out against their villages … when our armies begin the war. There is not a village, perhaps not a family, where there won’t be oppressed Christians … willing to join us in our fight against the Turks … .We will have a weapon that can bring the Turkish Empire down.21
Towards the end of June the Tsar ordered his two armies in Bessarabia to cross the River Pruth and occupy Moldavia and Wallachia. Paskevich still hoped that the invasion of the principalities would not lead to a European war, but feared that the Tsar would not pull back from it if that should be the case, as he explained to General Gorchakov, the commander of the Russian forces, on 24 June. The Tsar’s troops advanced to Bucharest, where their command established headquarters. In every town, they posted copies of a manifesto from the Tsar in which it was stated that Russia did not want to make territorial gains and was only occupying the principalities as a ‘guarantee’ for the satisfaction of its religious grievances by the Ottoman government. ‘We are ready to stop our troops if the Porte guarantees the inviolable rights of the Orthodox Church. But if it continues to resist, then, with God on our side, we shall advance and fight for our true faith.’22
The occupying troops had little understanding of the dispute in the Holy Lands. ‘We did not think of anything, we knew nothing. We let our commanders think for us and did what they told us,’ recalled Teofil Klemm, a veteran of the Danubian campaign. Klemm was just 18, a literate serf who had been chosen for training as an officer in Kremenchug in the Ukraine, when he was called up by the infantry in 1853. Klemm was unimpressed by the pan- Slav pamphlets that circulated widely among the troops and officers of the 5th Army Corps. ‘None of us were interested in such ideas,’ he wrote. But like every soldier in the Russian army, Klemm went off to battle with a cross around his neck and with an understanding of his calling as a fight for God.23
The Russian army was a peasant army – serfs and state peasants were the main groups subject to the military draft – and that was its main problem. It was by far the biggest army in the world, with over a million infantry, a quarter of a million irregulars (mainly Cossack cavalry) and three-quarters of a million reservists in special military settlements. But even this was not enough to defend the enormous borders of Russia, where there were so many vulnerable points, such as the Baltic coast, or Poland, or the Caucasus, and the army could not recruit more without running down the serf economy and sparking peasant uprisings. The weakness of the population base in European Russia – a territory the size of the rest of Europe but with less than a fifth of its population – was compounded by the concentration of the serf population in the central agricultural zone of Russia, a long way from the Empire’s borders where the army would be needed at short notice in the event of war. Without railways it took months for serfs to be recruited and sent by foot or cart to their regiments. Even before the Crimean War, the Russian army was already overstretched. Virtually all the serfs eligible for conscription had been mobilized, and the quality of the recruits had declined significantly, as landowners and villages, desperate to hold on to their last able farmers, sent inferior men to the army. A report of 1848 showed that during recent levies one-third of the conscripts had been rejected because they had failed to meet the necessary height requirement (a mere 160 centimetres); and another half had been rejected because of chronic illness or other physical deficiencies. The only way to solve the army’s shortages of manpower would have been to widen its social base of conscription and move towards a European system of universal military service, but this would have spelled the end of serfdom, the foundation of the social system, to which the aristocracy was firmly committed.24
Despite two decades of reform, the Russian military remained far behind the armies of the other European states. The officer corps was poorly educated and almost all the troops illiterate: official figures of the 1850s showed that in a group of six divisions, numbering approximately 120,000 men, only 264 (0.2 per cent) were able to read or write. The ethos of the army was dominated by the eighteenth-century parade-ground culture of the tsarist court, in which promotion, to quote Karl Marx, was limited to ‘martinets, whose principal merit consists of stolid obedience and ready servility added to accuracy of eyesight in detecting a fault in the buttons and buttonholes of the uniform’. There was more emphasis on the drilling and appearance of the troops than on their battleworthiness. Even during fighting there were elaborate rules for the posture, length of stride, line and movement of the troops, all set out in army manuals, which were quite irrelevant to the actual conditions of the battlefield:
When a battle formation is advancing or retiring it is necessary to observe a general alignment of the battalions in each line and to maintain correctly the intervals between battalions. In this case it is not enough for each battalion separately to keep alignment, it is necessary that the pace be alike in all battalions, so that the guidon sergeants marching before the battalions shall keep alignment among themselves and march parallel to one another along lines perpendicular to the common formation.
The domination of this parade culture was connected to the backwardness of the army’s weaponry. The importance attached to keeping troops in tight columns was partly to maintain their discipline and prevent chaos when there were large formations on the move, as in other armies of the time. But it was also necessitated by the inefficiency of the Russian musket and the consequent reliance on the bayonet (justified by patriotic myths about the ‘bravery of the Russian soldier’, who was at his best with the bayonet). Such was the neglect of small-arms fire in the infantry that ‘very few men even knew how to use their muskets’, according to one officer. ‘With us, success in battle was entirely staked on the art of marching and the correct stretching of the toe.’25
These outdated means of fighting had brought Russia victory in all the major wars of the early nineteenth century – against the Persians and the Turks, and of course in Russia’s most important war, against Napoleon (a
