The Crimean War

He caught pneumonia. Doctors could hear liquid in his lungs, a sign that finally persuaded his personal physician, Dr Mandt, that there was no hope of a recovery. Badly shaken by the defeat at Evpatoria, on the advice of Mandt, Nicholas handed over government to his son, the Tsarevich Alexander. He asked his son to dismiss Khrulev and replace Menshikov (who was then sick himself) with Gorchakov as the commander-in-chief. But everybody knew that Nicholas had himself to blame for having ordered the attack, and he was filled with shame. According to Mandt, who was with him when he died, the Tsar’s ‘spiritual suffering broke him more than his physical illness’, and news of the reverses at Evpatoria ‘struck the final blow’ to his already failing health.⁴⁷

Nicholas died on 2 March. The public had known nothing of the Tsar’s illness (he had forbidden any bulletins on his health to be published) and the announcement of his sudden death immediately gave rise to rumours that he had committed suicide. It was said that the Tsar had been distraught about Evpatoria and had asked Mandt to give him poison. A crowd assembled outside the Winter Palace, where the black flag was raised, and angry voices called for the death of the doctor with the German name. Fearing for his life, Mandt was whisked away in a carriage from the palace, and left Russia shortly afterwards.⁴⁸

Various other rumours began to circulate: that Mandt had killed the Tsar (a version advanced by certain figures at the court to counteract the idea that Nicholas had killed himself); that Mandt was rewarded for his loyalty with a portrait of the Tsar in a diamond-studded frame; and that a doctor by the name of Gruber had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for showing too much interest in the Tsar’s death. Rumours of the Tsar’s suicide were readily believed by those who were opposed to his authoritarian rule: that he should have taken his own life seemed to them a tacit recognition of his sins. The rumours were given credence by distinguished scholars in the final decades before 1917, including Nikolai Shil’der, the author of a four-volume biography of Nicholas, whose father, Karl Shil’der, had been at his court; and they were widely cited by historians in the Soviet period. They are still believed by some historians today.⁴⁹

In her intimate diary of life at court, Anna Tiutcheva presents enough details of the Tsar’s final hours to rule out the serious possibility of suicide. But she also makes it clear that Nicholas was broken morally, that he was so filled with remorse for his mistakes, for the disastrous war that he had brought to Russia through his impulsive foreign policies, that he welcomed death. Perhaps he thought that he no longer had God on his side. Before he died, the Tsar called his son to him and asked him to tell the army and in particular the defenders of Sevastopol that ‘I have always tried to do my best for them, and, where I failed, it was not for lack of good will, but from lack of knowledge and intelligence. I ask them to forgive me.’⁵⁰

Dressed in military uniform, Nicholas was buried in the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the burial place of all Russia’s rulers since Peter the Great. Just before the lid of his coffin was closed, the Empress laid upon the heart of Nicholas a silver cross with a depiction of the Church of St Sophia in Constantinople, ‘so that in Heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’.⁵¹

10

Cannon Fodder

News of the Tsar’s death arrived in Paris and London later on 2 March. Queen Victoria was among the first to hear. She reflected on his death in her journal:

Poor Emperor, he has alas! the blood of many thousands on his conscience, but he was once a great man, and he had his great qualities, as well as good ones. What he did was from a mistaken, obstinate notion of what was right and of what he thought he had a right to do and to have. 11 years ago, he was here – all kindness, and certainly wonderfully fascinating and handsome. For some years afterwards, he was full of feelings of friendship for us! What the consequences of his death may be, no one can pretend to foresee.¹

The Tsar’s death was immediately announced in theatres, meeting places and other public spaces throughout the land. In Nottingham, the announcement came when the curtain fell on the first act of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. The audience cheered, the orchestra played the national anthem, and people poured into the streets to celebrate. Everyone assumed that the war was won, because Nicholas had brought about the war through his aggressive policies and, now that he was gone, Russia would at last come to its senses and sue for an early peace. The Times declared the death of Nicholas an act of divine intervention, God’s punishment of the man responsible for the outbreak of the war, and looked forward to a rapid victory for the allies. Shares rose steeply on the Paris Bourse and the London Stock Exchange.

The news took longer to reach the allied forces in the Crimea, and it came by unexpected means. On the evening of 4 March, several days before the announcement of the Tsar’s death arrived by telegram, a French trooper found a note attached to a stone that had been thrown from the Russian trenches outside the walls of Sevastopol. Written in French, the note claimed to represent the view of many Russian officers:

The tyrant of the Russians is dead. Peace will soon be concluded, and we will have no more cause to fight the French, whom we esteem; if Sevastopol falls, it will be the despot who desired it.

A true Russian,

who loves his country, but hates ambitious autocrats.²

Alexander II

However much such Russians may have wanted peace, the new Tsar Alexander II was not about to give up on his father’s policies. He was 36 when he ascended to the throne, had been the heir apparent for thirty years, and remained firmly in the shadow of his father in the first year of his rule. He was more liberally inclined than Nicholas, having been exposed to the influence of the liberal poet Vasily Zhukovsky, his tutor at the court, and having travelled widely in Europe; to the disappointment of his father, he took no interest in military affairs, but he was a Russian nationalist with pronounced sympathies for the pan-Slav cause. On taking over from his father, Alexander quickly ruled out any talk of peace that he deemed humiliating for Russia (the only peace acceptable to the British) and pledged to go on fighting for his country’s ‘sacred cause’ and ‘glory in the world’. Through Nesselrode, however, he also made it clear that he was amenable to negotiations for a settlement in accordance with ‘the integrity and honour of Russia’. Alexander was aware of the growing opposition to the war in France. The main aim of this initiative was to draw the French away from British influence by offering them the prospect of an early end to the hostilities. ‘Between France and Russia the war is without hatred,’ wrote Nesselrode to his son-in-law, Baron von Seebach, the Saxon Minister in Paris, who read his letter to Napoleon: ‘Peace will be made when the Emperor Napoleon wants it.’³

Yet throughout these early months of 1855, Napoleon was under growing pressure from his British allies to commit to a more ambitious war against Russia. Palmerston, the new Prime Minister, had long been pushing for this – not just to destroy the naval base at Sevastopol but to roll back Russian power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland, Finland and the Baltic by drawing in new allies and supporting liberation movements against tsarist rule. This assault on the Russian Empire went well beyond the Four Points agreed by the British and the French with the Austrians as the basis of the allied war plans against Russia in 1854 – plans that were carefully circumscribed by the coalition government of Aberdeen. Where Aberdeen had wanted a limited campaign to force the Russians to negotiate on these Four Points, Palmerston was determined to develop the campaign in the Crimea into a wide-ranging war against Russia in Europe and the Near East.