The Crimean War (74 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
The ‘epic of Sevastopol’ turned defeat into a national triumph for Russia. ‘Sevastopol fell, but it did so with such glory that Russians should take pride in such a fall, which is worth a brilliant victory,’ wrote a former Decembrist.
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Upon this grand defeat, the Russians built a patriotic myth, a national narrative of the people’s selfless heroism, resilience and sacrifice. Poets likened it to the patriotic spirit of 1812 – as did Aleksei Apukhtin in his well-known ballad ‘A Soldier’s Song about Sevastopol’ (1869), which came to be learned by many Russian schoolboys in the final decades of the nineteenth century:
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Upon this grand defeat, the Russians built a patriotic myth, a national narrative of the people’s selfless heroism, resilience and sacrifice. Poets likened it to the patriotic spirit of 1812 – as did Aleksei Apukhtin in his well-known ballad ‘A Soldier’s Song about Sevastopol’ (1869), which came to be learned by many Russian schoolboys in the final decades of the nineteenth century:
The song I’ll sing to you, lads, isn’t a jolly one;
It’s not a mighty song of victory
Like the one our fathers sang at Borodino,
Or our grandfathers sang at Ochakov.I’ll sing to you of how a cloud of dust
Swirled up from the southern fields,
Of how countless enemies disembarked
And how they came and defeated us.But such was our defeat that since then
They haven’t come back looking for trouble,
Such was our defeat that they sailed away
With sour faces and bashed noses.I’ll sing of how leaving hearth and home behind
The rich landowner joined the militia,
Of how the peasant, bidding his wife farewell,
Came out of his hut to serve as a volunteer.I’ll sing of how the mighty army grew
As warriors came, strong as iron and steel,
Who knew they were heading for death,
And how piously did they die!Of how our fair women went as nurses
To share their cheerless lot,
And how for every inch of our Russian land
Our foes paid us with their blood;Of how through smoke and fire, grenades
Thundering, and heavy groans all round,
Redoubts emerged one after another,
Like a grim spectre the bastions grew –And eleven months lasted the carnage,
And during all these eleven months
The miraculous fortress, shielding Russia,
Buried her courageous sons …Let the song I sing to you not be joyful:
It’s no less glorious than the song of victory
Our fathers sang at Borodino
Or our grandfathers at Ochakov.
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This was the context in which Tolstoy wrote his own ‘national epic’,
War and Peace
. Tolstoy’s conception of the war against Napoleon as Russia’s national awakening – the rediscovery of ‘Russian principles’ by the Europeanized nobility and the recognition of the patriotic spirit of the serf soldiers as the basis of a democratic nationhood – was a reflection of his reaction to the heroic deeds of the Russian people during the Crimean War. Written between 1862 and 1865, in the years immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, when Russian liberal society was inspired by ideals of national reform and reconciliation between the landed classes and the peasantry,
War and Peace
was originally conceived as a Decembrist novel set in the aftermath of the Crimean War. In the novel’s early form (‘The Decembrist’), the hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for reform are in the air. But the more Tolstoy researched the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812, and so set his novel then.
War and Peace
. Tolstoy’s conception of the war against Napoleon as Russia’s national awakening – the rediscovery of ‘Russian principles’ by the Europeanized nobility and the recognition of the patriotic spirit of the serf soldiers as the basis of a democratic nationhood – was a reflection of his reaction to the heroic deeds of the Russian people during the Crimean War. Written between 1862 and 1865, in the years immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, when Russian liberal society was inspired by ideals of national reform and reconciliation between the landed classes and the peasantry,
War and Peace
was originally conceived as a Decembrist novel set in the aftermath of the Crimean War. In the novel’s early form (‘The Decembrist’), the hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for reform are in the air. But the more Tolstoy researched the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812, and so set his novel then.
The memory of 1812 was bitterly contested after the Crimean War, which had opened up a new perspective on the national character. Democrats like Tolstoy, inspired by the recent sacrifices of the Russian peasant soldiers, saw 1812 as a people’s war, a victory attained by the patriotic spirit of the whole nation. To conservatives, on the other hand, 1812 represented the holy triumph of the Russian autocratic principle, which alone saved Europe from Napoleon.
The commemoration of the Crimean War was entangled in a similar ideological conflict. Conservatives and Church leaders portrayed it as a holy war, the fulfilment of Russia’s divine mission to defend Orthodoxy in the broader world. They claimed that this had been achieved with the international declaration to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and the Paris Treaty’s preservation of the status quo, as the Russians had demanded, in the Holy Places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In their writings and sermons on the war, they described the defenders of the Crimea as selfless and courageous Christian soldiers who had sacrificed their lives as martyrs for the ‘Russian holy land’. They re-emphasized the sanctity of the Crimea as the place where Christianity had first appeared in Russia. From the moment the war had ended, the monarchy sought to connect its commemoration to the memory of 1812. The Tsar’s visit to Moscow following the surrender of Sevastopol was staged as a re-enactment of Alexander I’s dramatic appearance in the former Russian capital in 1812, when he had been greeted by vast crowds of Muscovites. In 1856 the Tsar delayed his coronation until the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, Russia’s victory against Napoleon in September 1812. It was a symbolic move to compensate for the painful loss of the Crimean War and reunite the people with the monarchy on the basis of a more glorious memory.
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For the democratic intellectual circles in which Tolstoy moved, however, the thread connecting the Crimean War to 1812 was not the holy mission of the Tsar but the patriotic sacrifice of the Russian people, who laid down their lives in the defence of their native land. That sacrifice, however, was hard to quantify. No one knew how many soldiers died. Precise figures for Russian casualties were never collected, and any information about heavy losses was distorted or concealed by the tsarist military authorities, but estimates of the Russians killed during the Crimean War vary between 400,000 and 600,000 men for all theatres of the war. The Medical Department of the Ministry of War later published a figure of 450,015 deaths in the army for the four years between 1853 and 1856. This is probably the most accurate estimate.
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Without precise figures, the people’s sacrifice grew to assume a mythic status in the democratic imagination.
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Without precise figures, the people’s sacrifice grew to assume a mythic status in the democratic imagination.
Sevastopol itself was elevated to a quasi-sacred site in the collective memory. The veneration of the fallen heroes of the siege began as soon as the war ended, not on the initiative of the government and official circles, but through popular efforts, by families and groups of veterans erecting monuments or founding churches, cemeteries and benevolent funds with money raised from public donations. The focal point of this democratic cult was the commemoration of admirals Nakhimov, Kornilov and Istomin, the popular heroes of Sevastopol. They were idolized as ‘men of the people’, devoted to the welfare of their troops, who had all died as martyrs in the defence of the town. In 1856 a national fund was organized to pay for the erection of a monument to the admirals in Sevastopol, and there were similar initiatives in many other towns. Kornilov was the central figure of numerous histories of the war. Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and virtually a saint in the folklore of the siege, appeared in tales and prints as a brave and selfless soldier, a martyr of the people’s holy cause, who was ready for his death when he was struck down while inspecting the Fourth Bastion. It was entirely through private funding that the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet was established in Sevastopol in 1869. On display to the crowds who came on the opening day were various weapons, artefacts and personal items, manuscripts and maps, drawings and engravings collected from veterans. It was the first historical museum of this public nature in Russia.
bl
bl
The Death of Admiral Nakhimov
by Vasily Timm (1856)
by Vasily Timm (1856)
The Russian state became involved in the commemoration of Sevastopol only in the later 1870s, around the time of the Russo-Turkish war, mainly as a result of the growing influence of the pan-Slavs in government circles, but government initiatives focused on court favourites, such as General Gorchakov, and virtually neglected the people’s hero Nakhimov. By this time the admiral had become an icon of a popular nationalist movement that the regime attempted to subordinate to its own Official Nationality by building monuments to the Crimean War. In 1905, a year of revolution and war against Japan, a splendid panorama of
The Defence of Sevastopol
was opened to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the siege, in a purpose-built museum on a site where the Fourth Bastion had once stood. Government officials insisted on replacing the portrait of Nakhimov with one of Gorchakov in Franz Roubaud’s life-size painting-model re-creating the events of 18 June, when the defenders of Sevastopol had repelled the assault by the British and the French.
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Nakhimov did not appear in the museum, which was built upon the very ground where he had been mortally wounded.
The Defence of Sevastopol
was opened to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the siege, in a purpose-built museum on a site where the Fourth Bastion had once stood. Government officials insisted on replacing the portrait of Nakhimov with one of Gorchakov in Franz Roubaud’s life-size painting-model re-creating the events of 18 June, when the defenders of Sevastopol had repelled the assault by the British and the French.
29
Nakhimov did not appear in the museum, which was built upon the very ground where he had been mortally wounded.
The Soviet commemoration of the war returned the emphasis to the popular heroes. Nakhimov came to stand for the patriotic sacrifice and heroism of the Russian people in the defence of their motherland – a propaganda message that took on a new force during the war of 1941–5. From 1944, Soviet naval officers and sailors were decorated with the Nakhimov Medal, and trained in special cadet schools established in his name. In books and films he became a symbol of the Great Leader rallying the people against an aggressive foreign foe.
Production of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s patriotic film
Admiral Nakhimov
(1947) began in 1943, when Britain was an ally of the Soviet Union. Planned as a Soviet counterpart to Alexander Korda’s wartime epic about Lord Nelson,
Lady Hamilton
(1941), its first cut made light of Britain’s role as an enemy of Russia during the Crimean War, focusing instead on Nakhimov’s private life and on his relations with the population of Sevastopol. But as it went through editing, the film got caught up in the opening skirmishes of the Cold War – a conflict that arose in the Turkish Straits and the Caucasus, the starting points of the Crimean War. From the autumn of 1945, the Soviets pushed for a revision of the 1936 Montreux Convention on the neutrality of the Straits. Stalin demanded joint Soviet – Turkish control of the Dardanelles and the cession to the Soviet Union of Kars and Ardahan, territories conquered by tsarist Russia but ceded to the Turks in 1922. Mindful of the build-up of Soviet troops in the Caucasus, the United States sent warships to the eastern Mediterranean in August 1946. It was precisely at this moment that Stalin demanded changes to Pudovkin’s film: the focus shifted from Nakhimov as a man to Nakhimov as a military leader against the foreign foe; and Britain was depicted as the enemy of Russia who had used the Turks to pursue its aggressive imperialist aims in the Black Sea, just as Stalin claimed the Americans were doing in the early stages of the Cold War.
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Admiral Nakhimov
(1947) began in 1943, when Britain was an ally of the Soviet Union. Planned as a Soviet counterpart to Alexander Korda’s wartime epic about Lord Nelson,
Lady Hamilton
(1941), its first cut made light of Britain’s role as an enemy of Russia during the Crimean War, focusing instead on Nakhimov’s private life and on his relations with the population of Sevastopol. But as it went through editing, the film got caught up in the opening skirmishes of the Cold War – a conflict that arose in the Turkish Straits and the Caucasus, the starting points of the Crimean War. From the autumn of 1945, the Soviets pushed for a revision of the 1936 Montreux Convention on the neutrality of the Straits. Stalin demanded joint Soviet – Turkish control of the Dardanelles and the cession to the Soviet Union of Kars and Ardahan, territories conquered by tsarist Russia but ceded to the Turks in 1922. Mindful of the build-up of Soviet troops in the Caucasus, the United States sent warships to the eastern Mediterranean in August 1946. It was precisely at this moment that Stalin demanded changes to Pudovkin’s film: the focus shifted from Nakhimov as a man to Nakhimov as a military leader against the foreign foe; and Britain was depicted as the enemy of Russia who had used the Turks to pursue its aggressive imperialist aims in the Black Sea, just as Stalin claimed the Americans were doing in the early stages of the Cold War.
30
A similar patriotic line was taken by the great historian of the Stalin era, Evgeny Tarle, in his two-volume history of
The Crimean War
(1941–3), his biography
Nakhimov
(1948), and in his later book,
The City of Russian Glory: Sevastopol in 1854–55
(1955), published to commemorate the centenary. Tarle was very critical of the tsarist leadership, but he glorified the patriotic courage and resilience of the Russian people, led and inspired by the example of such heroic leaders as Nakhimov and Kornilov, who laid down their lives for the defence of Russia against the ‘imperialist aggression’ of the Western powers. The fact that Russia’s enemies in the Crimean War – Britain, France and Turkey – were now all NATO members and adversaries of the newly founded Warsaw Pact in 1955 added greater tension to the Soviet celebration of the war’s centenary.
The Crimean War
(1941–3), his biography
Nakhimov
(1948), and in his later book,
The City of Russian Glory: Sevastopol in 1854–55
(1955), published to commemorate the centenary. Tarle was very critical of the tsarist leadership, but he glorified the patriotic courage and resilience of the Russian people, led and inspired by the example of such heroic leaders as Nakhimov and Kornilov, who laid down their lives for the defence of Russia against the ‘imperialist aggression’ of the Western powers. The fact that Russia’s enemies in the Crimean War – Britain, France and Turkey – were now all NATO members and adversaries of the newly founded Warsaw Pact in 1955 added greater tension to the Soviet celebration of the war’s centenary.
Pride in the heroes of Sevastopol, the ‘city of Russian glory’, remains an important source of national identity, although today it is situated in a foreign land – a result of the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 and the declaration of Ukrainian independence on the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the words of one Russian nationalist poet:
On the ruins of our superpower There is a major paradox of history: Sevastopol – the city of Russian glory – Is … outside Russian territory.
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