The Crimean War (8 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
Such ideas were widely shared by high officials, army officers and intellectuals, who were increasingly united in the early 1820s by their Russian nationalism and at times by an almost messianic commitment to the Orthodox cause. There was talk of ‘crossing the Danube and delivering the Greeks from the cruelties of Muslim rule’. One leader in the southern army called for a war against the Turks to unite the Balkan Christians in a ‘Greek Kingdom’. The pro-war lobby also had supporters at the court, where the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance were more strictly recognized. The most enthusiastic was Baroness von Krüdener, a religious mystic who encouraged Tsar Alexander to believe in his messianic role and campaigned for an Orthodox crusade to drive the Muslims out of Europe and raise the cross in Constantinople and Jerusalem. She was dismissed from the court and ordered by the Tsar to leave St Petersburg.
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Alexander was far too committed to the Concert of Europe to give serious consideration to the idea of unilateral Russian intervention to liberate the Greeks. He stood firmly by the Congress System established at Vienna by which the great powers had agreed to resolve major crises through international negotiation, and realized that any action in the Greek crisis was bound to be opposed. By October 1821 a European policy of international mediation over Greece had already been coordinated by Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister and chief conductor of the Concert of Europe, together with the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. So when the Tsar appealed to them for support against Turkey, in February 1822, it was agreed to convene an international congress to resolve the crisis.
Alexander called for the creation of a large autonomous Greek state under Russian protection, much like Moldavia and Wallachia. However, Britain feared that this would be a means for Russia to advance its own interests and intervene in Ottoman affairs on the pretext of protecting its co-religionists. Austria was equally afraid that a successful Greek revolt would set off uprisings in parts of central Europe under its control. Since Alexander prized the Austrian alliance above all, he held back assistance to the Greeks, while continuing to urge collective European action to help them. None of the powers would support the Greeks. But two things happened in 1825 to change their minds: first, the Sultan called in Mehmet Ali, his powerful vassal in Egypt, to put down the Greeks, which the Egyptians did with new atrocities, giving rise to an ever-growing wave of pro-Greek sympathy and ever-louder calls for intervention in liberal Europe; and then Alexander died.
The new tsar – the man responsible, more than anyone, for the Crimean War – was 29 when he succeeded his brother to the Russian throne. Tall and imposing, with a large, balding head, long sideburns and an officer’s moustache, Nicholas I was every inch a ‘military man’. From an early age he had developed an obsessive interest in military affairs, learning all the names of his brother’s generals, designing uniforms, and attending with excitement military parades and manoeuvres. Having missed out on his boyhood dream of fighting in the war against Napoleon, he prepared himself for a soldier’s life. In 1817 he received his first appointment, Inspector-General of Engineers, from which he derived a lifelong interest in army engineering and artillery (the strongest elements of the Russian military during the Crimean War). He loved the routines and discipline of army life: they appealed to his strict and pedantic character as well as to his spartan tastes (throughout his life he insisted on sleeping on a military campbed). Courteous and charming to those in his intimate circle, to others Nicholas was cold and stern. In later life he grew increasingly irritable and impatient, inclined to rash behaviour and angry rages, as he succumbed to the hereditary mental illness that troubled Alexander and Nicholas’s other older brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, who renounced the throne in 1825.
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More than Alexander, Nicholas placed the defence of Orthodoxy at the centre of his foreign policy. Throughout his reign he was governed by an absolute conviction in his divine mission to save Orthodox Europe from the Western heresies of liberalism, rationalism and revolution. During his last years he was led by this calling to fantastic dreams of a religious war against the Turks to liberate the Balkan Christians and unite them with Russia in an Orthodox empire with its spiritual centres in Constantinople and Jerusalem. Anna Tiutcheva, who was at his court from 1853, described Nicholas as ‘the Don Quixote of autocrats – terrible in his chivalry and power to subordinate everything to his futile struggle against History’.
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Nicholas had a personal connection to the Holy Land through the New Jerusalem Monastery near Moscow. Founded by Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s, the monastery was situated on a site chosen for its symbolic resemblance to the Holy Land (with the River Istra symbolizing the Jordan). The ensemble of the monastery’s churches was laid out in a sacred topographical arrangement to represent the Holy Places of Jerusalem. Nikon also took in foreign monks so that the monastery would represent the multinational Orthodoxy linking Moscow to Jerusalem. Nicholas had visited the monastery in 1818 – the year his first son, the heir to the throne, was born (a coincidence he took to be a sign of divine providence). After the monastery was partially destroyed by fire Nicholas directed plans to reconstruct its centrepiece, the Church of the Resurrection, as a replica of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, even sending his own artist on a pilgrimage to make drawings of the original, so that it could be rebuilt on Russian soil.
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None of Nicholas’s religious ambitions were immediately obvious in 1825. There was a gradual evolution in his views from the first years of his reign, when he upheld the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance, to the final period before the Crimean War, when he made the championing of Orthodoxy the primary goal of his aggressive foreign policy in the Balkans and the Holy Lands. But from the start there were clear signs that he was determined to defend his co-religionists and take a tough position against Turkey, beginning with the struggle over Greece.
Nicholas restored relations with Kapodistrias, whose active support for the Greek cause had forced him to resign from the Foreign Ministry and leave Russia for exile in 1822. He threatened war against the Turks unless they evacuated the Danubian principalities, and accepted plans from his military advisers to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia in support of the Greek cause. The Tsar was closely guided by his Foreign Minister, Karl Nesselrode, who had lost patience with the Concert of Europe and joined the war party, not out of love for the Greek rebels, but because he realized that a war against the Turks would promote Russian goals in the Near East. At the very least, reasoned Nesselrode, the threat of Russian intervention would force the British into joining Russia in efforts to resolve the Greek Question, if only to prevent the Tsar from exercising overwhelming influence in the region.
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In 1826 the Duke of Wellington, the commander of the allied forces against Napoleon, who was now a senior statesman in the British government, travelled to St Petersburg to negotiate an Anglo-Russian accord (later joined by France in the Treaty of London in 1827) that would mediate between the Greeks and Turks. Britain, Russia and France agreed to call for the establishment of an autonomous Greek province under Ottoman sovereignty. When the Sultan rejected their proposals, the three powers sent a combined naval force under the command of the fiery British philhellene Admiral Edward Codrington, with instructions to impose a resolution by peaceful means if possible, and ‘by cannon’ as a last resort. Codrington was not known for diplomacy, and in October 1827 he destroyed the entire Turkish and Egyptian fleets in the battle of Navarino. Enraged by this action, the Sultan refused any further mediation, declared a jihad, and rejected the Russian ultimatum to withdraw his troops from the Danubian principalities. His defiance played into Russia’s hands.
Nicholas had long suspected that the British were unwilling to go to war for the Greek cause. He had been considering an occupation of the principalities to force the Turks into submission, but feared that would encourage the British to renounce the Treaty of London. Now the Sultan’s rejection of his ultimatum had given him a legitimate excuse to declare war against Turkey without the British or the French. Russia would fight on its own to secure a ‘national government in Greece’, Nesselrode wrote to Kapodistrias in January 1828. The Tsar sent money and weapons to Kapodistrias’s revolutionary government, and received from him an assurance that Russia would enjoy an ‘exclusive influence’ in Greece.
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In April 1828 a Russian attack-force of 65,000 fighting men and Cossacks crossed the Danube and struck in three directions, against Vidin, Silistria and Varna, on the road to Constantinople. Nicholas insisted on joining the campaign: it was his first experience of war. The Russians advanced quickly (the land was full of forage for their horses) but then got bogged down in fighting around Varna, where they succumbed to the pestilent conditions of the Danube delta and suffered severe losses. Half the Russian soldiers died from illness and diseases during 1828–9. Reinforcements soon got sick as well. Between May 1828 and February 1829 a staggering 210,000 soldiers received treatment in military hospitals – twice the troop strength of the whole campaign.
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Such huge losses were not unusual in the tsarist army, where there was little care for the welfare of the serf soldiers.
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Such huge losses were not unusual in the tsarist army, where there was little care for the welfare of the serf soldiers.
Renewing the offensive in the spring of 1829, the Russians captured the Turkish fortress of Silistria, followed by the city of Edirne (Adrianople), a short march from Constantinople, where the cannons of the nearby Russian fleet could be heard. At this point the Russians could easily have seized the Turkish capital and overthrown the Sultan. Their fleet controlled the Black Sea and the Aegean, they had reinforcements on which they could draw from Greek or Bulgarian volunteers, and the Turkish forces were in complete disarray. In the Caucasus, where the Russians had advanced simultaneously, they had captured the Turkish fortresses of Kars and Erzurum, opening the way for an attack on Turkish territories in Anatolia. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire appeared so imminent that the French King Charles X proposed partitioning its territories between the great powers.
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Nicholas, too, was convinced that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was at hand. He was prepared to hasten its demise and liberate the Balkan Christians, provided he could get the other powers, or at least Austria (his closest ally with interests in the Balkans), on his side. As his troops advanced towards the Turkish capital, Nicholas informed the Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg that the Ottoman Empire was ‘about to fall’, and suggested that it would be in Austria’s interests to join Russia in the partition of its territories in order to ‘forestall the people who would fill the vacuum’. The Austrians, however, mistrusted Russia and chose instead to preserve the Concert of Europe. Without their support, Nicholas held back from dealing the fatal blow to the Ottoman Empire in 1829. He was afraid of a European war against Russia should his attack on Turkey move the other powers to unite in its defence, and even more afraid that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would result in a frantic rush by the European powers to seize Turkish territories. Either way, Russia would lose out. For this reason, Nicholas abided by the viewpoint of his cool and calculating Foreign Minister: that it would best serve Russia’s interests to keep the Ottoman Empire in existence, but in a weakened state, where its dependence on Russia for survival would enable the promotion of Russian interests in the Balkans and the Black Sea area. A sick Turkey was more useful to Russia than a dead one.
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Consequently, the Treaty of Adrianople was surprisingly kind to the defeated Turks. Imposed by the Russians in September 1829, the treaty established the virtual autonomy of Moldavia and Wallachia under Russian protection. It gave the Russians some islands in the mouth of the Danube, a couple of forts in Georgia and the Sultan’s recognition of their possession of the rest of Georgia as well as the south Caucasian khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan, which they had wrested from the Persians in 1828, but compared to what the Russians might have forced out of the defeated Turks, these were relatively minor gains. The two most important clauses of the treaty secured concessions from the Porte that had been wanted by all the signatories of the Treaty of London: Turkish recognition of Greek autonomy; and the opening of the Straits to all commercial ships.
The Western powers did not trust these appearances of Russian moderation, however. The treaty’s silence on warship movements through the Straits led them to conclude that Russia must have gained some secret clause or verbal promise from the Turks, allowing them exclusive control of this crucial waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Western fears of Russia had been growing since the outbreak of the Greek revolt, and the treaty fuelled their Russophobia. The British were especially alarmed. Wellington, by now the Prime Minister, thought the treaty had transformed the Ottoman Empire into a Russian protectorate – an outcome worse than its partition (which at least would have been done by a concert of powers). Lord Heytesbury, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, declared (without any intended irony) that the Sultan would soon become as ‘submissive to the orders of the Tsar as any of the Princes of India to those of the [East India] Company’.
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The British may have totally supplanted the Mughal Empire in India, but they were determined to stop the Russians doing the same to the Ottomans, presenting themselves as the honest defenders of the status quo in the Near East.
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The British may have totally supplanted the Mughal Empire in India, but they were determined to stop the Russians doing the same to the Ottomans, presenting themselves as the honest defenders of the status quo in the Near East.
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