Yet there were peasants who viewed the war as an opportunity. During the spring of 1854 a rumour spread through the countryside that freedom had been promised to any peasant serf who volunteered for the army or navy. The rumour had its roots in the decision of the government to create a fleet of galleys in the Baltic by recruiting peasant volunteers: they would be released by their landowners for the period of service provided they agreed to return to their estates afterwards. The result was a massive rush of peasants to the northern ports. Police blocked the roads, and thousands of peasants were locked up in jails, until they could be marched home in chained convoys. Once these rumours of emancipation spread, subsequent troop levies were interpreted in the same way. Priests, peasant scribes and agitators helped to spread the wrong idea. In Riazan’, for example, a deacon told the serfs that if they joined the army they would be given eight silver roubles every month and that after three years of military service they and their families would be liberated from serfdom.
Everywhere the story was the same. The peasants were convinced that the Tsar Batiushka had issued a decree promising them freedom if they volunteered, and, when told that this was not true, they assumed the decree had been hidden or replaced by his evil officials. It is hard to tell how far their belief was innocent, and how far deliberate, an expression of their hopes for liberation from serfdom. In many places the rumours were confused with older peasant notions of a ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land. One group of peasants, for example, turned up at a recuiting station, having heard that the Tsar was sitting in a ‘golden chamber’ on top of a mountain in the Crimea: ‘he gives freedom to all who come to him, but those who do not come or are too late will remain serfs to their masters as before.’ In other areas the rumours were replaced by stories that the English and the French would liberate the serfs who volunteered to join them in the Crimea, stories which began a flight of peasants to the south. In the peasant mind the south was linked to the idea of land and liberty: since medieval times it was to the steppelands of the south that the serfs had run away from their masters. The traditions of the free Cossacks remained strong among the peasantry of the southern provinces, where the volunteer movement assumed an almost revolutionary character. Bands of peasants marched to the local garrisons, demanding to be enlisted in the army and refusing to work any longer for their landowners. Armed with pikes, knives and clubs, the peasants clashed with soldiers and police.43
With no shortage of volunteers, and all the resources of their empire to draw from, the Russians had an ideal opportunity in these winter months to attack and destroy the weakened allied armies on the frozen heights above Sevastopol. But there was no initiative. The Russian high command had lost authority and self-confidence since the defeat at Inkerman. Without faith in his commanders, the Tsar had become increasingly gloomy and despondent, believing that the war could not be won and perhaps regretting that he had caused it in the first place. Courtiers described him as a broken man, physically ill, exhausted and depressed, who had aged ten years since the beginning of the war.
Perhaps the Tsar was still counting on his trusted ‘Generals January and February’ to defeat the British and the French. As long as they were losing men from cold, disease and hunger on the open heights, he was happy for his commanders to limit their attacks to small nightly sorties against the allies’ forward positions. These sorties caused little damage but added to their exhaustion. ‘Our Tsar won’t let them eat or sleep,’ wrote a Cossack to his family from Sevastopol on 12 January. ‘It’s only a shame they don’t all die so we don’t have to fight them.’44
The Russians had supply problems that prevented them developing a more ambitious strategy. With the allied fleets in control of the sea, the Russians had to bring in all their supplies by horse or oxen-driven peasant carts on snow-bound and muddy roads from south Russia. There were no railways. By the time of the hurricane, the whole of the Crimea was suffering from shortages of hay; the draft animals began to die at an alarming rate. Pirogov saw ‘the swollen bodies of dead oxen at every step along the road’ from Perekop to Sevastopol in the first week of December. By January the Russian army in the Crimea had just 2,000 carts to bring in supplies, one-third the number it had deployed at the start of November. In Sevastopol, rations were drastically reduced. The only meat available was rotten salted beef from the dead oxen. Transferred to Esky-Ord near Simferopol in December, Tolstoy found the soldiers there had no winter coats but plentiful supplies of vodka which they had been given to keep warm. In Sevastopol, the defenders of the bastions were just as cold and hungry as the British and the French in the trenches. Every day through these winter months at least a dozen Russians ran away.45
But the main reason why the Tsar would not commit to a major new offensive in the Crimea was his growing fear of an Austrian invasion of Russia. The cautious Paskevich, the only one of his senior commanders in whom he really trusted after Inkerman, had long been warning of the Austrian threat to Russian Poland, which he thought was far more serious than the danger to the Crimea. In a letter to the Tsar on 20 December, Paskevich persuaded him to keep a large corps of infantry in the Dubno, Kamenets and Galicia border regions in case of an attack by the Austrians rather than send them to the Crimea. The Austrian threat had been underlined two weeks before, when the Austrians had entered a military alliance with France and Britain promising to defend the Danubian principalities against the Russians in exchange for the allies’ pledge to defend them against the Russians and guarantee their possessions in Italy for the duration of the war. In reality, the Austrians were far more concerned to use their new alliance to force the Western powers to negotiate a peace with the Russians under their own influence at Vienna than they were to go to war against Russia. But the Tsar still felt the betrayal of the Austrians, who had mobilized their troops to force the Russians out of the Danubian principalities only the previous summer, and he was afraid of them. Between 7 January and 12 February the Tsar wrote long notes in his own hand in which he planned the measures he would take if Russia faced a war against the Austrians, the Prussians and the other German states. In each memorandum he became more convinced that such a war was imminent. It was perhaps a symptom of the growing desperation that took hold of the Tsar in his final days. He was haunted by the possibility that the whole Russian Empire would collapse – that all the territorial gains of his ancestors would be lost in this foolish ‘holy war’ – with Britain and the Swedes attacking Russia through the Baltic, Austria and Prussia attacking through Poland and the Ukraine, and the Western powers attacking in the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Realizing that it was impossible to defend all sectors simultaneously, he agonized over where to place his defences, and concluded that in the last resort it would be better to lose the Ukraine to the Austrians than to weaken the defences of the centre and ‘the heart of Russia’.46
At last, in early February, fearing that the Western powers were about to land a new invasion force to cut off the Crimea from the Russian mainland at Perekop, the Tsar ordered an offensive to recapture their likely landing base at the port of Evpatoria, which was then held by a Turkish force of around 20,000 troops under the command of Omer Pasha, supported by the guns of part of the allied fleets. The port’s defensive works, which included 34 pieces of heavy artillery, were formidable, so much so that Lieutenant General Baron Wrangel, the commander of the Russian cavalry in the Evpatoria area, thought that its capture was impossible, and would not take responsibility for an offensive. But Nicholas insisted that the attack should go ahead, giving the command to Wrangel’s deputy, Lieutenant General Khrulev, an artilleryman who was once described by Gorchakov as having ‘not much in the head, but very brave and active, who will do exactly what you tell him’. Asked by Menshikov whether it was possible to capture Evpatoria, Khrulev was confident of success. His force of 19,000 men (with 24 squadrons of cavalry and 108 guns) set off at daylight on 17 February, by which time the Tsar was having second thoughts about the wisdom of the expedition, thinking that it might be better to let the allies land their troops and attack them on their flank as they moved to Perekop. But it was too late to stop Khrulev. The offensive lasted three hours. The Russian troops were easily repulsed, with the loss of 1,500 men, and retreated across the open country towards Simferopol. Without shelter, many of them died from exhaustion and the cold, their frozen bodies abandoned on the steppe.
By the time the news of the defeat reached the Tsar in St Petersburg on 24 February, he was already gravely ill. The Tsar had come down with influenza on 8 February, but he continued with the daily tasks of government. On the 16th, feeling slightly better and ignoring the advice of his doctors, he went out without a winter coat in a frost of 23 degrees below zero to review the troops in St Petersburg. The next day he went out again. From that evening his health began to deteriorate terminally.
