attached to an artillery brigade in the Cossack village of Starogladskaya in the northern Caucasus. He took part in raids against Shamil’s Muslim army, narrowly escaping capture by the rebels on more than one occasion, but after the outbreak of the war against Turkey, he requested a transfer to the Danubian front. As he explained in a letter to his brother Sergei in November 1853, he wanted to take part in a real war: ‘For almost a year now I’ve been thinking only of how I might sheathe my sword, and I can’t do it. But since I’m compelled to fight somewhere or other, I would find it more agreeable to fight in Turkey than here.’1
In January Tolstoy passed the officer’s examination for the rank of ensign, the lowest-ranking commissioned officer in the tsarist army, and departed for Wallachia, where he was attached to the 12th Artillery Brigade. He travelled sixteen days by sledge through the snows of southern Russia to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, arriving there on 2 February, and set off again on 3 March, travelling again by sledge, and then, when the snows turned to mud, by horse and cart through the Ukraine to Kishinev, reaching Bucharest on 12 March. Two days later, Tolstoy was received by Prince Gorchakov himself, who treated the young Count as one of the family. ‘He embraced me, made me promise to dine with him every day, and wants to put me on his staff,’ Tolstoy wrote to his aunt Toinette on 17 March.
Leo Tolstoy in 1854
Aristocratic connections went a long way in the Russian army staff. Tolstoy was quickly caught up in the social whirl of Bucharest, attending dinners at the Prince’s house, games of cards and musical soirees in drawing rooms, evenings at the Italian opera and French theatre – a world apart from the bloody battlefields of the Danubian front just a few miles away. ‘While you are imagining me exposed to all the dangers of war, I have not yet smelt Turkish powder, but am very quietly at Bucharest, strolling about, making music, and eating ice-creams,’ he wrote to his aunt at the start of May. 2
Tolstoy arrived in Bucharest in time for the start of the spring offensive on the Danube. The Tsar was determined to push south to Varna and the Black Sea coast as soon as possible, before the Western powers had time to land their troops and stop the Russian advance towards Constantinople. The key to this offensive was the capture of the Turkish fortress at Silistria. It would give the Russians a dominant stronghold in the Danube area, allowing them to convert the river into a supply line from the Black Sea into the interior of the Balkans, and giving them a base from which to recruit the Bulgarians to fight against the Turks. This was the plan that Paskevich had persuaded the Tsar to adopt in order not to alienate the Austrians, who might intervene against a Russian offensive through the Serb-dominated areas of the Danube further to the west, where Serbian uprisings in favour of the Russians might spread into Habsburg lands. ‘The English and the French cannot land their troops for at least another fortnight,’ Nicholas wrote to Gorchakov on 26 March, ‘and I suppose that they will land at Varna to rush towards Silistria … . We must take the fortress before they arrive … With Silistria in our hands, there will be time for volunteers to raise more troops from the Bulgarians, but we must not touch the Serbs, in case we alarm the Austrians.’3
The Tsar was hopeful of mobilizing troops from the Bulgarians and other Slavs. Although he was wary of inflaming Serb passions against the Austrians, he hoped that his offensive would trigger Christian uprisings, leading to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when a victorious Russia would impose a new religious settlement on the Balkans. ‘All the Christian parts of Turkey’, he wrote in the spring of 1854, ‘must necessarily become independent, they must become again what they previously were, principalities, Christian states, and as such rejoin the family of the Christian states of Europe.’ Such was his commitment to this religious cause that he was prepared to exploit revolutions against even Austria, should this be necessitated by the opposition of the Austrians to a Russian settlement of the Eastern Question. ‘It is highly likely that our victories will lead to Slav revolts in Hungary,’ he wrote to the Russian ambassador in Vienna. ‘We shall use them to threaten the heart of the Austrian Empire and force her government to accept our conditions.’ Indeed the Tsar was ready by now to abandon virtually all his legitimist principles in the interests of his holy war. Angered by the anti-Russian stance of the European powers, he talked of stirring up the revolutionary disturbances in Spain to divert French troops from the east, and even thought of forming an alliance with Mazzini’s liberation movement in Lombardy and Venice to undermine the Austrians. But in both cases the Tsar was dissuaded from supporting revolutionary democrats.4
The start of the spring offensive was hailed by Slavophiles as the dawning of a new religious era in the history of the world, the first step towards the resurrection of the Eastern Christian empire with its capital in Tsargrad, the name they gave to Constantinople. In ‘To Russia’ (1854), the poet Khomiakov greeted the beginning of the offensive with ‘A call to holy war’:
Arise my motherland!
For our Brothers! God calls you
To cross the waves of the fiery Danube …
In an earlier poem by the same title, written in 1839, Khomiakov had referred to Russia’s mission to bring the true Orthodox religion to the peoples of the world, but had warned Russia against pride. Now, in his poem of 1854, he called on Russia to engage in ‘bloody battles’ and ‘Smite with the sword – the sword of God’.5
The Russians advanced slowly, fighting against stubborn Turkish resistance at several points on the northern side of the Danube, before coming to a virtual halt. At Ibrail, 20,000 Russian grenadiers, supported by river gunboats and steamers, were unable to defeat the well-defended Turkish fortresses. At Macin there were 60,000 Russian troops encamped in bivouacs outside the fortress town but unable to take it. Held up by the Turks, the Russians spent their time constructing rafts and pontoon bridges from pine masts in preparation for a surprise crossing of the Danube at Galai, which they completed unopposed at the end of March.6
Advancing south towards Silistria, the Russians got bogged down in the marshlands of the Danube delta, the place where so many of them had been struck down by cholera and typhus in 1828–9. These were sparsely populated lands without food supplies for the invading troops, who soon succumbed to the effects of hunger and disease. Of 210,000 Russian troops in the principalities, 90,000 were too sick for action by April. Soldiers were fed on rations of dry bread that were so devoid of nutrition that not even rats and dogs would eat them, according to a French officer, who saw these husks abandoned in the fortress town of Giurgevo after the retreat of the Russian forces in the summer of 1854. A German doctor in the tsarist army thought that ‘the bad quality of food habitually served to the Russian troops’ was one of the main reasons why they ‘dropped like flies’ once they were wounded or exposed to illnesses. ‘The Russian soldier has such a small nervous system that he sinks under the loss of a few ounces of blood and frequently dies of wounds such as would be sure to heal if inflicted on persons better constituted.’7
Soldiers wrote home to their families about the terrible conditions in the ranks, many begging them to send money. Some of these letters were intercepted and sent to Gorchakov by the police, who considered them politically dangerous, and they ended up in the archives. These simple letters give a unique insight into the world of the ordinary Russian troops. Grigory Zubianka, a foot soldier in the 8th Hussars Squadron, wrote to his wife Maria on 24 March:
We are in Wallachia on the banks of the Danube and face our enemy on the other side … . Every day there is shooting across the river, and every hour and every minute we expect to die, but we pray to God that we may be saved, and every day that passes and we are still alive and healthy, we thank the Lord the Maker of all things for that blessing. But we are made to spend all day and night in hunger and the cold, because they give us nothing to eat and we have to live as best we can by fending for ourselves, so help us God.
Nikifor Burak, a soldier in the 2nd Battalion of the Tobol’sk Infantry Regiment, wrote to his parents, wife and children in the village of Sidorovka in Kiev Province:
We are now a very long way from Russia, the land is not like Russia at all, we are almost in Turkey itself, and every hour we expect to die. To tell the truth, nearly all our regiment was destroyed by the Turks, but by the grace of the highest creator I am still alive and well … I hope to return home and see you all again, I will show myself to you and talk with you, but now we are in the gravest danger, and I am afraid to die.8
As the Russian losses mounted, Paskevich became increasingly opposed to the offensive. Though he had previously
