CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE ILLUSIONS OF WAR
Nicholas sent his troops across the Danube into Eastern Bulgaria on 23 March 1854 and immediately besieged Silistria, which was only seventy miles north of Varna. He hoped that some quick victories would stir up the natives, demoralize the Turks, disabuse the British and French of any thoughts of an easy success, and create the conditions for a negotiated settlement. However, the Prussian-backed Austrian threat to attack Russian positions and the counsels of Paskevich and Nesselrode convinced the Tsar to retreat. He called off the promising siege in mid-June and then withdrew his two well-supplied but disease-ridden corps from the Principalities in August. Henceforth Russian troops were on the defensive, 600,000, among them some of the best being deployed from Finland to Bessarabia to guard against Swedish, Prussian and Austrian eventualities.1 Only in the Caucasus and Transcaucasia did the Russians mount counterattacks, invariably with outnumbered forces, initially to protect Georgia and Armenia and then to advance into eastern Anatolia. Russian armies temporarily held Bayazid, which traversed an important caravan route, and prepared to invest Kars, the key regional stronghold.2
The British and French did not have an easy time. The Baltic expeditionary squadron under the timid, superannuated Charles Napier with his ten screw battleships and 3,500 guns, accomplished little in the first year, save for reconnoitring Kronstadt and destroying the new Russian fortifications at Bomarsund on the Aland Islands.3 Down in the Black Sea theatre, the bombardment of Odessa was more noise than damage. Then 85,000 Allied troops went to Varna, where over 7,000 died from cholera after the Russians had retired from Silistria. A Franco-Turkish foray eastward into disease-infested Dobrudja was also a wasteful operation.4
An Anglo-French war council on 17 July then decided to invade the Crimea and invest Sevastopol even though they lacked any good maps or estimations of Russian forces. In early September 62,000 unopposed British and French with 130 artillery pieces disembarked at Evpatoria, about forty miles north of Sevastopol by land. Menshikov had 55,000–60,000 men at Sevastopol and about 4,000 guns, three-quarters of them naval and very few of them facing the land approaches. He also had six months’ supply of food for the garrison, but lacked staff, maps, construction tools, sufficient powder and the means of keeping his fleet functional. The French were reasonably well provisioned, but the English did not have transportation and siege equipment. All sides suffered from inadequate medical facilities.
Menshikov deployed 35,000 of his troops along the Alma River, half way between Evpatoria and Sevastopol. His columns were savaged by French artillery and British line tactics, but the Allies also paid for a spirited drive against the Russian artillery batteries. Following the retreat from the Alma, the Russians concentrated on shoring up Sevastopol, sinking their heavy ships in the harbour, converting the sailors into soldiers, and constructing a set of earthworks with heavy guns on the northern side under the direction of engineer Adjutant E.I. Totleben. Menshikov himself departed from the stronghold and turned the command over to Admiral Kornilov.5
On 17 October the Allies, who had redeployed to Balaklava about twelve miles southwest of Sevastopol, started to bombard the fortress. Russian direct hits on the French artillery demoralized them and prevented any assault. Kornilov was killed on one of the key outer defences, the Malakhov Kurgan, and the supreme command passed to Admiral Nakhimov.
Eight days later the celebrated Battle of Balaklava took place, in which a 16,000-man Russian force tried and failed to drive off the British and Turks with a surprise attack. The suicidal British ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ through cross-fire had in fact a ‘reason why’ – to attempt to recapture several artillery pieces. The Russians ‘won’ Balaklava in terms of casualities, but the overall result was to strengthen the British position, since they reinforced and were now on the lookout.
Following Balaklava, the Allies advanced towards Sevastopol from the south and dug in near the Inkerman ruins, about ten miles from the stronghold. Two Russian units totalling 35,000 men, one a field army under Menshikov, the other a troop from Sevastopol, made uncoordinated, inconclusive, and costly bayonet attacks uphill against two lines of 23,000 British backed by an equal number of French reserves. The Allies were stunned, the under-supplied British now quite demoralized. But the Russians were in a far worse position to resupply on their own turf than the Allies, whose ships ferried between Marseilles and Balaklava.
The Allies proceeded to build trenches, tunnels and mines opposite the Sevastopol towers. Despite an especially rough winter for the poorly clad British, the Allies did find reinforcements. Piedmont, under pressure not to cause any problems for Austria, but still eager to raise the Italian Question again, joined the war alliance and sent 15,000 troops. The Allies were also able to bring in a Turkish corps, while Paskevich’s fear of Austria stopped him from reinforcing the Crimea in time.
Nicholas’s last move was to order the Crimean field army to take Evpatoria in February to prevent a full Turkish corps from landing there. However, in view of poor reconnaissance and the twin problems caused to any advance by a water-filled ditch and strong Franco-Turkish artillery, the Russian commander, K.A. Khrulev, called off the siege. It is said that this failure pushed Nicholas over the brink from his normal melancholy to a depression that sapped his strength, after he caught a bad cold. He died on 18 February/2 March 1855.6
Investing Sevastopol was a tedious and difficult process, since it was never totally cut off from provisions and thousands of reinforcements. Ingenious French attempts in February and March to outflank the Russian redoubts and earthworks were met with successful countermeasures. Allied bombardments in March failed to breach the main walls. Ten days of fierce Allied bombardments in April did not break resistance. On the other hand, Admiral Lyons, who was in charge of the British Black Sea squadron, succeeded in a daring campaign in May along the Straits of Kerch and into the Sea of Azov in weakening Russian supply lines. This enabled the new French Commander-in-Chief, A.J.J. Pélissier, to wear down Sevastopol in stages.
On 15 August, as ordered by Nicholas’s son Alexander II, the Sevastopol forces tried a final, hopeless counterattack with 60,000 troops near the River Chernaia. There was only a faint possibility of the Russians holding any heights they might have taken from the well-entrenched Allies. They did succeed momentarily against the Piedmontese, but misinterpreted a set of orders and sent infantry straight uphill into French artillery, before the defeatist General Gorchakov called off another one-sided battle.
Now nothing could prevent the fall of Sevastopol, but the Russians did have the foresight to bring in timbers and construct a bridge across the bay for the retreat. As the Allies resumed their bombardment on 18 August, the Russian shell supply was fast dwindling, and the garrison was losing, 1,000–2,500 men per day. Then, on 8 September, the French finally captured the key Malakhov Kurgan. Thereupon Gorchakov, now Russia’s supreme commander, resolved to abandon the city, sink the remainder of the fleet, lay sea mines and take up new positions further to the north in the Crimea. Both sides continued to skirmish in the Crimea, but avoided pitched battles. The total casualties for a year’s fighting at Sevastopol were 102,000 Russians and 71,000 Allies, making it one of the bloodiest scenes of battle ever until the First World War. The British waged some maritime operations against other Russian Black Sea strongholds and were successful against Kinburn and Ochakov at the mouth of the Dnieper estuary, but did not attack Odessa again, partially because Napoleon vetoed the idea.7
Outside the northern Black Sea theatre, the British probed Kronstadt and Russia’s innovative sea mines once more in June 1855, but feared the Paixhans guns there and bombarded Sveaborg off Helsingfors instead. Modest attempts to land in Finland were easily beaten off, and the chief English gain remained the destruction of Russian commercial shipping. Meanwhile the Russians had held their positions in the western Caucasus and Transcaucasia, and began a lackadaisical siege of Kars. With the fall of Sevastopol, Omer Pasha’s 40,000-man army was free to leave the Crimea, and time was critical. The new local Commander-in-Chief, N.N. Muraviev, tried an immediate, costly assault and then laid a regular siege that led, at the end of December, both to capitulation and to the end of the Turkish Anatolian Army as an effective force. For Russia Kars was both a point of honour and a bargaining chip at the peace table. Meanwhile Omer Pasha’s army landed at Sukhumi in September, preparatory to campaigns into the heart of Georgia that the British hardliners favoured, but the Turks were unable to execute.
All fighting ended in early 1856. The grim reaper had collected about 450,000 Russian subjects, 80,000–95,000 French, 20,000–25,000 British, 2,000 Italians, and an unknown number of Ottomans (200,000–400,000), most of all of these unfortunates from disease.8 Excluding the Tai-Ping Rebellion in China, but including the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Japanese clashes, the Crimean War was the costliest conflict in human terms between 1815 and 1914.
THE LOGIC OF PEACE… OR… ANOTHER WAR AVERTED
The Crimean War was a classic case of diplomacy interrupted by warfare. The Vienna Conference operated on and off throughout, and Russian diplomats talked with the British and French in many capitals. An almost constant chain reaction was in effect – Russia restraining Prussia, restraining Austria, restraining France, restraining Britain, restraining Turkey. After Austria threatened to join the war to force Russia from the Principalities, Nicholas replaced Meyendorff in Vienna with Alexander Gorchakov, a partisan of entente with France. Buol, however, was able to gain Turkish and Anglo-French concurrence to an Austrian wartime occupation of the Principalities. This move made Vienna an equal protector of Turkey with London and Paris. Meanwhile Prussia and the German Confederation saw to it that Buol did not lead Austria into full participation in the war on the Allied side.9
The Russians had been ready as early as March to drop exclusive protectorates and accept the Prussian plan for five-power supervision of the Ottoman Christians in return for mutual withdrawal. The British, French and Austrians, however, had already added the freeing of the Sulina Channel and some reduction of Russia’s regional preponderance, as well as a firm guarantee for Turkey to their list of peace terms. On 8 August 1854, before the landings in the Crimea, these demands were formalized into Four Points. By 29 November, after the Russian reverses at Bomarsund, Alma and Inkerman, St Petersburg was willing in principle to accept these terms too, but not unconditionally, since Point Three regarding the balance of power in the Black Sea was dangerously elastic. Here is where Sevastopol became crucial. So long as it held, Russia refused anything but a restricted interpretation of this condition.
Austria’s joining the Anglo-French alliance in early December 1854 and Nicholas’s death in January 1855 had no immediate effect, while Palmerston’s replacing Aberdeen then was merely symptomatic of a British public annoyed that Russia was not crying ‘uncle’. The British in fact had to pressure Napoleon not to accept Austria’s loose interpretation of Point Three, leading to Drouyn’s resignation and replacement by Walewski. The French, however, would still promise no more than to press the siege of Sevastopol to a successful conclusion.
Once Sevastopol fell, Russian political disarray and inertia prevented any immediate concessions, while Palmerston’s Cabinet wished to continue the war until Russia was driven from the Black and Baltic Seas. Napoleon now was ready to back the English, if the Russians would not agree to Allied terms. Austria, Prussia and (to a lesser extent) Sweden, however, remained crucial partners for any widened war, but they all held back. Then in November 1855, Napoleon, bolstered by a new type of steamship, whose big guns might offset Russian shore batteries, seduced King Oscar I of Sweden into a defensive alliance.10 However, other Frenchmen, backed by financial circles, made simultaneous overtures to Gorchakov. The French generals, moreover, who commanded the largest Allied land forces, doubted that the Allies could do much more on land – let alone take the entire Crimea. Then Buol and Morny finally reconciled divergent Austrian and French war aims, agreeing upon a ‘weak’ interpretation of Point Three, whereby Turkey and Russia would be equal powers in a ‘neutralized’ Black Sea, Russia also relinquishing control over the mouth of the Danube. The additional British ‘Point Five’ or ‘particular conditions’ was thus effectively diluted.
Armed with the agreement with the French and a very reluctant British compromise and facing the financial strains of continuous mobilization, Buol sent Russia another ultimatum in December. Fearing a possible Franco-Russian deal at his expense or the domestic fallout from a general war, the King of Prussia vehemently urged the Russians to concede. Some Russian statesmen took this as a threat and thus favoured guarded acceptance at an extraordinary council in late December. The Austrians, however, insisted upon absolute compliance, while Nesselrode demolished the argument that Russia could delay and bargain separately with the French, who now were asking the least from Russia.11 The Russians had almost two million men mobilized, but were in no position to fight a war of attrition against a coalition with twice their population and more than three times their national income. A second special council, comprising Russia’s civil and military élite, provisionally accepted Austria’s terms to avoid the potential loss of Finnish, Baltic and Polish provinces.
The incipient Franco-Russian entente led to the official peace conference meeting at Paris, where many of the key actors from before the war represented their countries: Clarendon and Cowley, Walewski and Bourgueney, Buol and Hübner, Orlov and Brunnow, Fuad, Camillo Cavour from Piedmont and, eventually, Manteuffel. Napoleon also loomed in the background.12
The victorious coalition obtained the abolition of the bilateral Russo-Turkish treaties: Kuchuk-Kainarji, Adrianople and the 1849 Convention of Balta Liman. The autonomy of Moldavia, Wallachia and Serbia, as well as general rights of Ottoman Christians were placed under the protection of the five Great Powers and also Piedmont. Turkey, having ceded at last to Stratford’s pressures and granted civil equality to all subjects, was now a recognized European power, with an unworkable six-power limitation on the Sultan’s sovereignty over his Christians.
Austria’s and Turkey’s specific pay-off was that the Sulina Channel and the southern chunk of Bessarabia, Russia’s sole territorial loss, was returned to (Ottoman) Moldavia and Russia ceased to be a Danubian power. A Commission of riparian powers only, dominated by Austria, was established to oversee the Danube and its traffic. Russia evacuated Eastern Anatolia and Kars, and the Allies left the Crimea and Sevastopol.
The revision of the 1841 Treaty in the interest of the ‘European equilibrium’ and the ‘neutralization’ of the Black Sea were tricky, the choices being to open the Straits to all fleets or eliminate local Russian sea power. The Russians and Turks on their own agreed to demilitarize the Black Sea and continue Straits closure in peace time. These ‘Black Sea Clauses’ were thus a partial concession to Russia, as well as a humiliation. Open Straits would have been chiefly to Britain’s advantage.
England’s ‘particular conditions’ proved less tractable. The fruit of two seasons of Baltic campaigns was demilitarization of the Aland Islands. The British fleet also remained in the Black Sea into 1857, in the hope of weakening the Russians in Transcaucasia and thereby supposedly increasing the security of India. The only result of this action was that Russia ceded a few fine points concerning what constituted Southern Bessarabia.13
Turkey, saddled with wartime debt, was an anomaly. Reshid had resigned during the war over Mehmed Ali’s rehabilitation, Fuad and Aali were back in power, and the Porte was pursuing its own interests, while the French finally dispatched to Constantinople an ambassador – Thouvenel – who proved to be a match for Stratford. The irony of Stratford’s diplomacy was the Porte’s clear disdain for his imperiousness, request for his recall and blockage of any effective Great Power protectorate over the subject Christians. In this regard, Stratford did not consider his career to have been a success,14 for his ‘pig’ had bolted and slipped away.
The French, whose demands regarding the Holy Places ignited the pre-war crisis, demanded little in particular, and even kept a leash on their aggressive clerics in the Levant. Napoleon’s real victory was restoring Paris to the central place of European politics on the Continent. He was more interested in courting the Russians on the side than in following the details of the negotiations. The Holy Places settlement, which the Turks desired and Stratford had brokered in 1853, held – and more or less still does in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the Greeks, Latins and Armenians are together overseeing the present redecoration of the inside of the dome. The Russians were able to construct their church and hospice under the protection of their local consul. Twelve years later Napoleon III and Alexander II presided over the restoration of the cupola. As a fitting tribute to the power of industry, which had enabled the Catholics to recover some lost ground in Jerusalem, the basic reconstruction material was steel.
NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM TRIUMPHANT
The real victor of the Crimean War in Europe, as many people recognized, was Germany. Prussia and the Confederation had facilitated Austria’s successful diplomacy by standing up to France, England and Russia. The Italians gained too from Piedmont’s participation and seat at the peace Congress. Balkan nationalism as a whole profited from Great Power protection of the Serbian and Romanian states. Moreover, both Russia and Austria emerged from the war financially strapped and soon had to initiate reforms which benefited most East and East Central European national movements and also touched off another rebellion in Tsarist Poland. Ironically, it was the Crimean War, rather than the Revolutions of 1848–49, that created the real ‘springtime of nations’ and also hastened the abolition of serfdom in Russia, Russian Poland and the Principalities.
Imperialism as a whole was the big winner outside of Europe and North America. The British and French succeeded via their loans to the Turks to bind them more securely to Europe and promote policies that opened their empire further to economic and cultural penetration. The British and French also increased their influence within Egypt and other Ottoman provinces.15
A fact which is often neglected in analyses of the Crimean War is that Russia may have lost in the Baltic and the Black Sea, but really won in Asia. The last great Daghestani and Circassian offensives failed before the war erupted. Anglo-Turkish attempts to support the Shamyl and some of the Caucasus peoples against Russia flopped. Once the war was over the Russians had a surplus of trained veterans who were to finish the subjugation of the Caucasus in 1864. This freed some of the troops there to move across the Caspian Sea, where the Russian conquest of Central Asia south of the Kazakh Steppe began the next year. The British Imperial and Indian lobbies objected, but the English as a whole had lost their taste for Russian wars.16
The Caucasus and Central Asia are only part of this story. Immediately after the Crimean War the Russians supported another Persian march on Afghanistan. The Britain army’s loss of prestige during the war and the mobilization of the Anglo-Indians to counter the Persians helped touch off the Great Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion. This uprising may have led eventually to a more effective English raj in India, but it also immediately drew British attention away from the Black Sea and limited Russia’s losses there. Palmerston’s beau idéal of a major rollback of Russia thus petered out completely as a result of a sepoy jacquerie. This was another one of those explosions resulting from the clash of Western values, military modernization and native traditions, including in this case some very elemental taboos.17
The imperialist repercussions of the Crimean War stretched to East Asia as well. After Commodore Matthew C. Perry with only three steamers, four sail, 2,000 men and 144 solid guns, ‘opened’ Japan for the United States in late 1853, small British, French and Russian squadrons nearby were able to acquire similar rights.18 Meanwhile 300 Russians beat off an Anglo-French landing on Kamchatka in northeastern Siberia with 900 men, and Admiral Putiatin activated a flotilla along the River Amur, well to the south of the Russian-Manchurian boundary that had been stable since 1689. When the war ended in 1856 the British and the French moved to extort more treaty ports from the Chinese, leading to the second ‘Opium War’. The Manchu-Chinese regime at this time was coping with the extensive Tai-Ping Rebellion, which had started in 1850 in the south, partially under the impact of Western ideas. Russian diplomacy in turn activated a protection racket under Putiatin and Nicholas Ignatiev, a young officer, who after the Crimean War had been posted in London to study the methods of British imperialism in Asia. The overall results were the following: fifteen Chinese ‘treaty ports’ were opened to the maritime nations with extraterritoriality; a special tariff administration was established under an Englishman to finance China’s war indemnity; the British then helped the Chinese to suppress the rebellion; and the Russians annexed the Amur-Ussuri region (comprising as much territory as Italy and France put together), including the future Vladivostok, with its potential as a naval base.19
An offshoot of the Russian consolidation and expansion of holdings in north-east Asia was the decision to sell Alaska to the United States. California had been supplying Russian America since the 1840s. In order to accommodate the interests of the United States, the British had agreed in 1854 to a wartime truce between the Russian-American and Hudson Bay Companies, whose respective domains met in northwestern Canada. The Anglo-French alliance prevented the Americans from moving into Cuba or Hawaii during the war, but America’s version of sovereign neutrality ensured that Alaska would not fall into British hands.20
A generally neglected transoceanic linkage concerns the revolutionary effects of the Crimean War in North America, where the wartime export and shipping boom in the United States North was followed by the return of Russian grain to European markets, a post-war British credit squeeze on railroad expansion, and the Panic of 1857. The subsequent depression destroyed not only the growing national trade union movement, but also the Democratic Party’s old alliance of Northern workers and Southern planters, and with it the political Compromise of 1850 over the expansion of slavery. The less severely affected South gained in the confidence that it no longer needed the Union. Just as important, the Northern workers allied politically for the first time with the Free Soil farmers of the Midwest, capturing for the Republicans first many seats in Congress in 1858 and then the White House in 1860. The result of this temporary worker-peasant alliance was the central event in American history and a new stimulus for industrial development and territorial expansion. Whether the secession of the South was inevitable before or after the 1857 Panic will be debated by historians for many years to come.21 At any rate, before the dust had settled in 1867, a bloody Civil War had been fought, slavery abolished, Alaska transferred by Russia to the United States for $7,200,000 earmarked for railroad construction and the core of Canada had achieved Dominion status with meaningful autonomy for French-speaking Quebec.
In sum, all the Great Powers (including British India) benefited from the Crimean War and its aftermath – if of course one discounts the human cost from the casualties. The real losers were the Ottoman Empire, the native Indian states, China, Persia and the American South. Austria won too, though she was unable to compete with Prussia in Germany. Early industrial imperialism was alive and well, Russia was rejuvenating, and the so-called New Imperialism that would subjugate most of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific islands to Europe, the United States and Japan, was soon to take off.
REPERCUSSIONS AND LEGACIES
One of the most sarcastic of diplomatic historians has quipped: ‘Men always learn from their mistakes how to make new ones.’22 And so it was, but only in part, after the Crimean War. The Russians learned the real costs of comparative backwardness for the first time since Peter the Great and tried to do something about it by instituting a gamut of reforms, including military ones. The English learned how ramshackle their army was in comparison to the French and had started to accelerate reform during the war. Anybody who so desired could learn the utility of railroads, telegraphs, steamships, rifles, citizen armies, reserve systems and more professionalized medical services in warfare. The English and the Russians also basically learned to be more careful with each other in their ‘Great Game’.
Napoleon III concluded that he learned that he could get away with adventurism and playing with combinations that supported and opposed the same power simultaneously. This worked more or less through 1862, as long as he had his English alliance. By 1867 his ploys with Italy, Austria, Russian Poland, Mexico and Germany had succeeded in angering and alienating all the other Great Powers. When cornered by Bismarck in 1870 and pressed by outraged, ill-informed and hypocritical nationalist opinion at home, Napoleon III gambled on single combat with a militarily more prepared opponent, and lost badly.23
Buol thought (or hoped) that the Crimean War showed that Austria was an essential element of England’s containment of Russia and that Prussia and the Confederation would back a Vienna that mobilized or fought for ‘German’ interests. In fact, however, Austria had been in a position to protect German interests in 1854 only because Nicholas I had helped put down the Hungarians in 1849–50. Many English still sympathized with the Italians, while Prussians cared for Prussia or Germany, and few people cared for Austria except as a factor in the balance of power. Nevertheless, Buol allowed Cavour and Napoleon III to manoeuvre Austria into the same position with respect to Piedmont in 1859 as Russia had been vis-à-vis Turkey in 1853. A resentful Russia refused to support Austria. By the end of 1860 the French and English had aided the unification of most of Italy under Piedmont, Germany and Prussia, allowing Austria to retain just Venetia. Six years later Bismarck used Venetia as bait to obtain Italian aid in expelling Austria from North Germany. Austria had to find her ‘compensation’ in the Balkans, something she had rejected when offered as an enticement by both the Russians and the Anglo-French in 1853.
The Russians had already learned in 1849 that the Straits Convention of 1841 would not prevent the Turks from inviting in a friendly squadron if they felt menaced. Now, without a Black Sea fleet or fortifications, the Russians were even more threatened, and so could not give up the idea that only their own control of the Straits could secure their Black Sea commerce and coasts. The Russians also discovered from this crisis that their communities of interest lay more with Prussia, France, Piedmont/Italy or the United States than with Austria or England. The Russians additionally found that they could live without the legal fictions of Kuchuk-Kainarji and compete as another Great Power in the Balkans by utilizing real assets and common interests with either the native Christians or the Ottoman Empire.24 The Russians even learned from Jomini’s confidential Foreign Ministry history that Nicholas I had made some mistakes in not taking other powers’ views seriously in 1853 and that his ambassadors had been less than forthright with him concerning the pitfalls of his policies.
Most importantly, the Russians learned that the ‘Crimean Coalition’ of France, Britain and Austria was highly unlikely (if able at all) to mobilize the necessary resources to threaten the Russian heartland. When Russia’s Poles revolted again in 1863, the British and French wanted to support them and attempted to activate Austria to force Russia to restore ‘Poland’ as a separate state on the basis of the 1815 Treaty. Austria, possessing her own Poles, only supported Polish rights in principle; Prussia, also having Polish provinces, leaned toward Russia; Nesselrode’s successor Alexander Gorchakov threatened the British and French with a new edition of 1812; and the plan for coalition intervention collapsed.25
The Turkish hold over the Balkans was quite shaky after the Crimean War, as European pressure to execute the essentially paper reforms only increased domestic unrest. The French shepherded a unification of the two Romanian Principalities in 1859, which were able to install their own Hohenzollern prince in 1866. The Serbian principality almost engineered rebellion by a Balkan League in 1868. Native revolts continually threatened to erupt and during a Bosnian uprising in 1860 Gorchakov proclaimed: ‘the eleventh hour of the Ottoman Empire’ was at hand. In 1868 he tried to revive the Convention of Münchengrätz and initiate talks about spheres of influence with Austria.26
One of the ironies of post-Crimean War Turkey is that Ignatiev, as Russia’s ambassador in Constantinople (1864–77), was sometimes the dominant foreign envoy there. This is because without the Kuchuk-Kainarji nonsense, the Russian argument that Western reform advice was worse than the opium the British forced upon the Chinese made good sense to many Turks. During his period of ascendancy Ignatiev was able to effect far more in peacetime for subject Orthodox Slavs than any of his predecessors had done. His crowning achievement was aiding the establishment of an ecclesiastical Exarchate of Bulgaria in 1870, freeing these Slavs from the Greek patriarchal administration and creating an incipient Bulgarian principality under Russian protection.27
Russian policy, though, was conditioned by two overriding strategic goals, which were also points of honour: Southern Bessarabia and the ‘Black Sea Clauses’. Hoping to obtain support against the chief obstacles to treaty revision, Austria and Britain, the Russians backed France, Italy, Prussia and the United States in a variety of ways. The first real pay-off came during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, when Gorchakov, backed by Bismarck, threatened unilaterally to abrogate the Clauses, but agreed to a new London conference to authorize remilitarization with continued Straits closure in peacetime.28
Russia’s next pay-off came when Bismarck, with his new German Empire, presided over a reconciliation of Austria and Russia, creating a loose Dreikaiserbund (‘Three Emperors’ League’) in 1873. This ‘Neo-Holy alliance’ fulfilled one of Nicholas I’s dreams by activating the secret clause of the Convention of Münchengrätz, whereby Russia and Austria would consult if the Ottoman Empire started to collapse in the Balkans.29 The upshot of this arrangement was initial Austro-Russian cooperation, when native revolts against Turkey erupted first in Herzegovina and Bosnia in 1875 and then in Bulgaria in 1876. The Austrians had a hand in inciting the first, and the Russians in setting off the second. When the Serbians declared war in 1875 in support of the Bosnians, 2,000 Russian volunteers went to Serbia under General Mikhail Cherniaev, one of Russia’s conquistadors in Central Asia. Neither Serb nor Russian fought very effectively against the Ottoman regulars, but the Austrian and Russian governments finally started discussing spheres of influence in the Western Balkans, spearheading a Great Power move to prevent the Turks from exploiting their military defeat of the Serbs.30
Tsar Alexander II (1855–81) now faced tremendous pressure from Russia’s nationalists and the military to go to war against Turkey, especially after the Bulgarian rebellion erupted. Due to one-sided press reports of ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ inflicted by the Turks, English opinion also swung in favour of the rebels. This gave Russia a situation similar to the one of 1826–28, when the well-publicized Greek rebellion preceded an Eastern crisis and a Russo-Turkish war, rather than that of 1853, when the recent Bosnian disturbances had not created any international stir. Russian policy in turn was reminiscent of 1826–28. Russia cooperated with other Great Powers to suggest new autonomy schemes, but prepared for war and made special engagements concerning the peace terms. Gorchakov assured the Austrian (now Austro-Hungarian) Foreign Minister, Count Andrassy, that Vienna could dominate Bosnia-Herzegovina and that Russia would not create a ‘big Slavic or other state’. On this basis, Austria agreed to facilitate Russia’s crossing the Danube – a reversal of the policy of 1853–54. Meanwhile, Brunnow’s successor in London, Count Peter Shuvalov, told the British that Russia would not threaten the Straits. The Russians also promised Romania full independence and pretended that they would not reannex Southern Bessarabia.31
The Turks, like good reactionaries, having neither learned nor forgotten anything, did what had worked in 1853 but failed in 1826–28. They rejected Great Power projects in the name of sovereignty, decreed more reforms, prepared to fight and gambled on the ‘conditional neutrality’ of England – a source of mixed messages – to save them from Russia.32 This tactic would have been problematic, had the Liberals under Gladstone (a disciple of Peel and Aberdeen) been in power in London. The Conservative Disraeli, however, was more in the tradition of George Canning and Palmerston in outlook and very much wanted to preserve Turkey and dominate Egypt for the sake of India, if nothing else. Stratford de Redcliffe, now ninety years old and apparently still lucid, fearful of Russian power and bitter over Ottoman failure to reform, recommended his original policy of early 1853: trust Russian assurances, but ‘observe their movement with vigilance and prepare to counter any failure in the promises’.33
Twenty-three years after Paskevich called off the siege of Silistria, Nicholas l’s great plan was put into effect. In April 1877 Russian troops crossed the Danube again in several places, aiming to take the Turkish fortresses in Eastern Bulgaria, proceed past Varna along the coast, and also to march directly south over the central Balkans towards the Bosphorus. Eastern Bulgaria held, but the southward campaign worked. Although the Russians were temporarily held up by a new Turkish stronghold at Plevna in central Bulgaria, they were joined by Romanian troops, some Bulgarian volunteers and eventually Serbs and Montenegrins. By January the advance guard had taken Adrianople.34
At this point, as in 1853, the Russians forgot the experience of 1829. Under pressure from élite and popular nationalist and Panslavic opinion, the Russian government had started in the summer to expand war aims regarding Serbian and Montenegrin territorial expansion and the extent of Bulgarian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian autonomy, and also talked of a temporary occupation of Constantinople. In December the Tsar authorized his generals and Ignatiev to forward peace preliminaries on the basis of these goals, contradicting some of the earlier commitments to London and Vienna. The autonomous Bulgaria envisioned, based on the Exarchate, was a ‘big Slavic state’, bordering on the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea, only a hundred miles from the Bosphorus.35
As the Russian troops approached the Straits, Disraeli sent the Malta squadron to Besika Bay. The new British ambassador there, Assyriologist Austin Henry Layard, who had been more hawkish than Stratford in 1853, brought the warships almost up to Constantinople. The Russians then advanced almost to the suburbs. In order to get them to pull back, the Porte signed the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878 on Russian terms, which also included full Serbian, Montenegrin and Romanian independence, expanded reforms for Bosnia-Herzegovina, the retrocession of Southern Bessarabia and the cession of Batum, Ardahan, Kars and Bayazid to Russia, but nothing for Austria. When these conditions became known, the British threatened to go to war. The Austrians straddled the fence and tempered the British hawks, but eventually agreed to work with London. As in 1853, British public opinion was split, but the moderate newspapers like The Times reacted less to the flow of Russian military moves and diplomacy.
Russian was now in an analogous position to the second half of 1853, San Stefano representing precisely the same kind of unacceptable interpretation of Russia’s earlier commitments that the Menshikov Note and Nesselrode’s Examen had done. Certain factors, however, were now different for Russia. The press was much freer and divided over continuing the war. More importantly, the Ministers of War and Finance told the Tsar that Russia was in no position to fight further and this neutralized the pressure of bellicose nationalists, who were ready to challenge Britain. Facing domestic discontent from social radicals as well, the Tsar accepted Bismarck’s offer to host a congress in Berlin, where Russia could retreat more or less back to her original promises. Alexander II was not Nicholas I, and Russia was no longer the same kind of autocracy. Bismarck thus succeeded where Buol had failed: preventing the expansion of a Russo-Turkish war into a coalition war against Russia.36
The fate of the Balkan and Ottoman Christians, as well as vulnerability at the Straits, subsequently bedevilled Russian foreign policy until the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. The British wanted the Turks to open the Straits during the 1884–85 Afghan crisis, after the Russians occupied Merv in eastern Turkmenistan, but Bismarck’s diplomatic pressure would not allow it. Ignatiev’s successor at Constantinople in the 1880s and 1890s, Alexander Nelidov, who had formulated Russia’s demands at San Stefano, tried no less than four times to induce his more cautious superiors in St Petersburg to attempt a coup de main at the Bosphorus.37 The Balkan crises of 1908–14 that preceded the First World War were due in part to Russia’s trying first to acquire greater power over the Straits in 1908–09 and, this failing, to renege on a secret promise made to Austria in 1881 regarding the latter’s eventual annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.38 A Russian government, however, never initiated hostilities over the Balkans or the Straits after 1877. In the light of the growth of German and then American power in Europe, starting a war over the Eastern Question became for Russia a luxury of a bygone age.
THE IRONY OF ‘SICKNESS’
Curiously, after the First World War, with both Russia and Turkey defeated and facing revolution and civil war, the victorious British attempted again to become a Black Sea power and patronize independent states in the Caucasus. This British game was doomed, however, when the Bolsheviks, with tremendous losses, drove the main remaining force of Russia’s White Army from the Crimea in 1920. In 1942 the Germans occupied the Crimea by land and took Sevastopol after another long and costly siege, but were forced to evacuate two years later. Then in 1945 Stalin’s Foreign Minister, Viacheslav Molotov, invoked the Russo-Turkish Treaties of 1805 and 1833 in a bid for a base at the Straits, only to find in Winston Churchill an able successor to Castlereagh, Palmerston and Disraeli.39 By late 1991 the Soviet Union had rather unexpectedly become a very sick man and disintegrated into national states. Russia remains very large and still contains many restless minority Muslims, including Daghestanis and Chechens, whose ancestors had supported Shamyl against Nicholas I. Semi-capitalist, national Turkey, on the other hand, has only one real minority left – the Muslim Kurds, some of whom have been in rebellion for decades. Turkey also still controls the Straits and is toying with the idea of becoming a regional economic power in the Black Sea region, where every other state is committed to institute a market economy. Behind Turkey stand the fully capitalist countries of Europe, together with America and some oil-rich Arab states. Meanwhile, at the time of writing (autumn 1992), Russia has been squabbling on and off with Ukraine over respective shares of the former Soviet Black Sea fleet, which neither can afford, the fate of Sevastopol, which neither really needs for deterrence in the nuclear age, and the Crimea itself, whose minority Tatars desire sovereignty. It would be another great act of folly if the Black Sea states failed to cooperate and compromise, and this book had to be renamed: ‘The Origin of the First Crimean War’.
NOTES
1.For the military side of the war from the Russian standpoint, see Curtiss, The Russian Army under Nicholas I, pp. 315–56, and RCW: 299–341, 408–71; Beskrovnyi R VI: 224–89, almost entirely from Russian archival sources; from the standpoints of all three major powers, Palmer BB: 80–308.
2.For the Transcaucasia front, also Allen/Muratoff: 68–102.
3.Greenville/Giffard: 109–337; Lambert CW: 158–93.
4.For a set of French viewpoints, Gooch NBG: 81–251.
5.For the defence of Sevastopol, Eduard Totleben, Opsanie oborony goroda Sevastopola (2 vols in 3, St Petersburg 1863).
6.Lincoln, Nicholas I, pp. 348–50.
7.For the Black Sea operations, Lambert CW: 223–34, 251–63.
8.Palmer BB: 242–3.
9.The wartime diplomacy is covered brilliantly by Schroeder AGBCW: 169–346; also Curtiss RCW: 238–96, 342–407, 472–501; more irreverently, Wetzel: 99–181, and more succinctly and very clearly, Rich: 107–23, 140–81.
10.Paul Knaplund, ‘Finnmark in British Diplomacy’, pp. 493–502.
11.Cf. Curtiss RCW: 498–9.
12.Winfried Baumgart, The Peace of Paris, 1856, Studies in War, Diplomacy, and Peacemaking (Santa Barbara 1981), pp. 101–77; also Curtiss RCW: 502–29; Wetzel: 183–200; Rich: 182–97; for the 30 March 1856 Treaty and Russo-Turkish Conventions, CTS CXIV: 101–35, trans., Hertslet II.264–7, MENA I.105.
13.Werner E. Mosse, ‘Britain, Russia, and the Questions of Serpents Island and Bolgrad, SEER XXX (Dec. 1950): 89–98.
14.Temperley, ‘The Last Phase of Stratford de Redcliffe, 1853–1858’, EHR 47 (1932): 216–33, 257; Lynn Case, ‘The Duel of Giants in old Stambul: Stratford Versus Thou vend’, JMH XXXV (1953): 262–73.
15.Donald C. Blaisdell, European Financial Control in the Ottoman Empire: a Study of the Establishment, Activities, and Significance of the Ottoman Public Debt (New York 1929).
16.Baddeley: 458–72; Allen/Muratoff: 105–6; N.S. Kiniapina, M.M. Bliev and V.V. Degoev, Kaukaz i Sredniaia Aziia vo vneshnoi politike Rossii. Vtoraia polovina XVIII–80-e gody XIX v. (Moscow 1982), pp. 189–98, 252–315.
17.Christopher Hibbet, The Great Mutiny. India 1857 (Middlesex UK/New York 1978/80), and many other works.
18.Arthur Walworth, Black Ships of Japan (New York 1946), p. 239.
19.R.K.I. Quested, The Expansion of Russia in East Asia, 1857–1860, pp. 64–174.
20.Dowty, The Limits of Isolation, pp. 81–3; Bolkhovitinov: 91–103.
21.Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857. A Nation on the Brink (Oxford 1990), pp. 231–331.
22.Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, p. 111.
23.Carr, Wars of German Unification, pp. 151–203.
24.I.V. Koz’menko, ‘Rossiiskaia diplomatiia v oborone’, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia na Balkanakh, 1856–78 gg. (ed. V.N. Vinogradov, Moscow 1986), pp. 52–73.
25.R.F. Leslie, Reform and Insurrection in Poland 1856–1865 (London 1963), pp. 170–202.
26.Kathryn Schach, Russian Foreign Policy under Prince Alexander M. Gorchakov. The Diplomatic Game Plan vs. Austria (Dissertation, Univ. of Nebraska 1973), pp. 191, 364–466.
27.Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, pp. 147–66; Thomas A. Meininger, Ignatiev and the Establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, 1864–1872: a Study in Personal Diplomacy (Madison WI 1970).
28.Barbara Jelavich, The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and the Straits Question (Bloomington 1973), pp. 25–84.
29.William Langer, European Alliances and Alignments, 1871–1890 (2nd edn, New York 1956), pp. 19–26, 59–72.
30.David MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism (Ithaca NY 1967), pp. 61–193; B.H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, 1870–80 (Oxford 1937), pp. 99, 137–45.
31.Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 196–308; cf. AVPR Sek. Arkh. 20, 22, for the Russian commitments to Austria in 1876–77.
32.For the Ottoman side of developments, Davison ROE: 270–408; on Britain during this war, Richard Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875–1878 (Oxford 1979); also R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (London 1935).
33.Stratford de Redcliffe, The Eastern Question (London 1878), p. 133.
34.For military side of the war, Beskrovnyi R VI: 309–54, supplemented by Allen/Muratoff: 105–217; for a new assessment, Fuller: 317–27.
35.For a Russian view of these diplomatic manoeuvres, S.L. Chernov, Rossiia na zavershaiushchem etape Vostochnogo krizisa, 1875–1878 gg. (Moscow 1984), pp. 25–55; also Barbara Jelavich, ‘Negotiating the Treaty of San Stefano’, Southeastern Europe VI.2 (1979): 171–93.
36.W.N. Medlicott, The Congress of Berlin and After. A Diplomatic History of the Near Eastern Settlement, 1878–1880 (2nd edn, London 1963).
37.Barbara Jelavich, The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers and the Straits Question, 1870–1887 (Bloomington 1973), pp. 35–45, and Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, pp. 173, 205.
38.Alfred F. Pribam, The Secret Treaties of Austria-Hungary, 1879–1914 (Cambridge MA 1920), p. 43 (Secret Convention of Berlin, 18 June 1881, Separate Protocol, art. 1); Robert E. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism (2 vols, New York 1935): I: 373–5; Andrew Rossos, Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Russian Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908–1914 (Toronto 1981).
39.On Anglo-French intervention in the Black Sea and the Crimea after the First World War, see Richard Henry Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921 (3 vols, Princeton NJ 1961–73), for 1945, Hurewitz, ‘Russia and the Turkish Straits’, pp. 605–6.