The Crimean War

In Russia there was very little public information about the war. There was only one Russian newspaper, the Odessa Bulletin (Odesskii Vestnik), for the whole Black Sea area, but it did not have a corrrespondent in the Crimea, and it published only the most basic news about the war, usually two or three weeks late. Strict censorship limited what could be printed in the press. Reports of the battle on the Alma, for example, appeared in the Odessa Bulletin only on 12 October, a full twenty-two days after the event, when the defeat was described as a ‘tactical withdrawal under threat from much larger numbers of the enemy on both flanks and from the sea’. When this laconic and mendacious bulletin failed to satisfy the reading public, which had heard rumours of the fall of Sevastopol and the destruction of the Black Sea Fleet, the newspaper printed a more detailed report on 8 November, forty-nine days after the battle, in which it admitted a defeat but failed to mention the panic flight of the Russian troops or the superiority of the enemy’s riflemen whose firepower had overwhelmed the outdated muskets of the Tsar’s infantry. The public simply could not be told that the Russian army had been poorly led or that it was technically behind the armies of Europe.³⁷

Without official information they could trust, the educated public listened to rumours. An Englishwoman living in St Petersburg noted some ‘ridiculous ideas’ about the war among the upper classes, who were ‘kept entirely in the dark by all the government accounts’. It was rumoured, for example, that Britain was attempting to raise Poland against Russia, that India was about to fall to the Russians, and that the Americans would come to Russia’s aid in the Crimea. Many were convinced that a military treaty had been signed with the United States.^ar ‘They appeared to regard the President of the United States with as much respect as a sailor does his sheet-anchor in a storm,’ wrote the anonymous Englishwoman. Americans in Russia were feted and showered with honours, ‘and seemed rather pleased than otherwise’, she added.

It is odd that citizens of a republican nation such as that of the States should have so great a reverence for titles, orders, stars, and the like trumpery … The very day I left [St Petersburg], one of the attaches of their embassy showed my friends, with the greatest exultation, the Easter eggs with which the Princess so-and-so, the Countess such-an-one, and several officials of high rank about the court, had presented him: he also exhibited the portraits of the whole of the Imperial family, which he intended to hang up, he said, as household treasures, when he returned to New York.

The police struggled to contain the spread of rumours, although their informers were said to be everywhere. The Englishwoman told of two women summoned to the offices of Count Orlov, the head of the Third Section, the secret police, after they had been heard in a coffee shop voicing doubts about what was printed in the Russian press about the war. ‘I was informed that they received a severe reprimand, and were ordered to believe all that was written under the government sanction.’³⁸

The war generated varied responses throughout Russian society. The invasion of the Crimea caused outrage in educated circles, which rallied round the patriotic memory of 1812. Ironically, however, most of the public anger seemed to be focused on the English rather than the French, who, as a result of the Russian victory against Napoleon, were treated ‘as a people too insignificant and helpless to merit any other sentiment but that of the most profound pity and compassion’, according to our unknown Englishwoman in St Petersburg. Anglophobia had a long tradition in Russia. ‘Perfidious Albion’ was blamed for everything in some circles of high society. ‘To hear them talk one would imagine that all the evils existing in the world are to be ascribed to British influence,’ the Englishwoman wrote. In the salons of St Petersburg it was a commonplace that England had been the aggressor responsible for the war, and that English money was at the root of the trouble. Some said the English had made war to gain possession of the Russian gold mines in Siberia; others that they wanted to expand their empire to the Caucasus and the Crimea. They all saw Palmerston as the prime mover of British policy and as the author of their misfortunes. Over much of the European continent, Palmerston was hated as a symbol of the bullying and dishonest British, who preached free trade and liberty as a means of advancing their own economic and imperial interests in the world. But the Russians had a special reason to despise the statesman who had spearheaded Europe’s anti-Russian policy. According to the Englishwoman in St Petersburg, the names of Palmerston and Napier, the admiral in charge of the campaign in the Baltic, ‘inspired the lower classes with so great a terror’ that women would frighten their children off to bed by saying ‘that the English Admiral was coming!’

And among the common men, after exhausting all the opprobious terms they could think of (and the Russian language is singularly rich in that respect), one would turn to the other and say, ‘You are an English dog!’ Then followed a few more civilities, which they would finish by calling each other, ‘Palmerston!’, without having the remotest idea of what the word meant; but at the very climax of hatred and revenge, they would bawl out ‘Napier!’, as if he were fifty times worse than Satan himself.

A poem widely circulated among Russian officers caught the patriotic mood:

And so in bellicose ardour

Commander Palmerston

Defeats Russia on the map

With his index finger.

Roused by his valour,

The Frenchman, too, following fast behind,

Brandishes his uncle’s sword

And cries: allons courage!³⁹

The pan-Slavs and Slavophiles were the most enthusiastic supporters of the war. They had hailed the Russian invasion of the Balkans as the start of a religious war for the liberation of the Slavs, and were disappointed when the Tsar had ordered the retreat from the Danube, many of them urging him to go to war against the whole of Europe on his own. Pogodin, the editor of the Moscow journal Moskvitianin, became even more extreme in his pan-Slav views as a result of the retreat, calling on the Tsar to throw all caution to the wind and launch a revolutionary war against the Austrians as well as the Ottomans for the liberation of the Slavs. The allied invasion of Russia turned their calls for a European war into a reality, and their bellicose ideas were carried on a wave of patriotic sentiment that swept through society. Pogodin received the blessing of the Tsar, which gave him access to the court and the chance to write to him with opinions on foreign policy. How much influence Pogodin had on Nicholas remains unclear, but his presence at the court gave a green light to the aristocracy to subscribe openly to his ideas. According to the Englishwoman in St Petersburg: ‘How much soever the Tsar might have sought to disguise his intentions concerning Turkey and Constantinople, his nobles did not attempt to do so, and that even two years ago, long ere this war was certain. “Quant a Constantinople, nous l’aurons, soyez tranquille,”^as said a nobleman one evening.’⁴⁰

Among the more liberal and pro-Western circles of society, however, there was less support for the war, and those with access to the foreign press were likely to be critical of it. Many did not see the need for Russia to become involved in the Eastern Question, let alone to become entangled in a potentially disastrous war against the Western powers. ‘All sorts of dirty tricks are performed in the name of Holy Rus?,’ wrote Prince Viazemsky, a veteran of the war against the French in 1812, a critic and a poet of liberal persuasions, who served for twenty years in the Ministry of Finance before becoming chief of censorship in 1856. ‘How will it all end? In my modest view … we have no chance of victory. The English allied to the French will always be stronger than us.’ According to the reports of the Third Section in 1854, many people in the educated classes were basically hostile to the war and wanted the government to continue with negotiations to avoid it.⁴¹

The opinion of the lower classes is harder to discern. Merchants were afraid of losing trade and tended to be hostile to the war. In St Petersburg, the unnamed Englishwoman noted, ‘not only every street but every house gave some intimation of the struggle in which they are engaged; trade was almost at a standstill; scarcely any of the shops had customers in them; everybody seemed to be economizing their money lest poverty should come’. The serf peasants suffered most, losing young and able-bodied men from their family farms to the military drafts and at the same time shouldering most of the increased burden of taxation that resulted from the war. The peasant population declined dramatically – in some areas by as much as 6 per cent – during the Crimean War. There were crop failures, partly because of bad weather but also due to shortages of labour and draught animals that had been conscripted by the army, and around 300 serf uprisings or serious disturbances with physical attacks on landowners and the burning of their property. Among the upper classes, there was a fear of revolution, wrote the Englishwoman: ‘It was the opinion of many when I left St Petersburg that the 80,000 soldiers (as the Russian said) who were bivouacked in the streets and billeted on the houses were a great deal more for the purpose of ensuring peace within the barriers of the town than for that of repelling a foreign invader.’⁴²