The Crimean War: A History

12 Paris and the New Order

The Peace Congress was scheduled to begin at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay in the afternoon of 25 February. By midday a large and excited crowd of spectators had gathered along the Quai d’Orsay to watch the arrival of the delegates. Stretching from the Pont de la Concorde to the rue d’Iéna, the onlookers had to be kept back by infantrymen and the gendarmerie to allow the carriages of the foreign dignitaries to pass by and pull up outside the newly completed buildings of the Foreign Ministry. The delegates arrived from one o’clock, each one cheered with cries of ‘Vive la paix!’ and ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as they stepped out and entered into the building. Dressed in morning coats, the delegates assembled in the magnificent Hall of Ambassadors, where a large round table covered with green velvet and twelve armchairs around it had been laid out for the conference. The hall was a showcase for the decorative arts of the Second Empire. Satin crimson drapes hung from the walls. The only pictures were life-size portraits of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, whose dominating gaze was a constant reminder to the delegates of France’s new position as the arbiter of international affairs. On a console by the fireplace was a marble bust of Napoleon I – persona non grata in diplomatic circles for more than forty years. The Paris congress marked what Napoleon III wanted to believe was the return of Napoleonic France to the Concert of Europe.¹

The choice of Paris as the venue for the congress was a sign of France’s new position as the pre-eminent power on the Continent. The only other city where it might have taken place was Vienna, where the 1815 treaty had been signed, but the idea was rejected by the British, who had been suspicious of the diplomatic efforts of the Austrians since the beginning of the war. With diplomatic power shifting briefly to Paris, Vienna now appeared a city of the past. ‘Who could deny that France comes out of all of this enlarged,’ wrote Count Walewski to Napoleon, after learning that he would become the host of the congress. ‘France alone will have profited in this struggle. Today she holds first place in Europe.’

The congress came only three months after the ending of the Exposition Universelle, a glittering international event rivalling London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Five million visitors had made their way through the exhibition halls on the Champs-Elysées. The two events placed Paris at the centre of Europe. This was a major victory for Napoleon III, whose decision to enter the war had always been influenced by his need for prestige at home and abroad. From the start of the peace talks the previous autumn, he had emerged as the key player, on whom all the other powers depended for the satisfaction of their interests. ‘I am struck by the general deference to the Emperor Napoleon,’ wrote Princess Lieven to Baroness Meyendorff on 9 November. ‘The war has carried him pretty high, him and France: it has not enhanced England.’²

Peace talks had been going on throughout the winter, and by the time the delegates arrived in Paris, most of the controversial issues had already been resolved. The main sticking point was the tough stance of the British, who were in no hurry to end a war in which they had not had a major victory to satisfy their honour and justify their losses of the previous eighteen months. The capture of Sevastopol had, after all, been a French success. Urged on by a belligerent press and public, Palmerston reiterated the minimum conditions he had set out on 9 October, and threatened to keep on with the war, starting with a spring campaign in the Baltic, if the Russians failed to come to peace on British terms. He pressed Clarendon, his Foreign Secretary, to accept nothing less than complete Russian submission to his conditions at the Paris congress.

Despite his assertions, Palmerston’s demands were in a state of flux. By November he had given up on the idea of securing independence for Circassia: no representative from that confused territory could be found to sign a treaty on its behalf. Yet he continued to insist that Russia should be deprived of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and was adamant that British firmness could obtain this. Russia was negotiating from a weak position, he wrote to Clarendon on 25 February, and was showing ‘impudence’ by arguing against the latest version of the British terms: the complete removal of Russian ships and arsenals from the Black Sea and the evacuation ‘of every part of Turkish territory [including Kars] now occupied by Russian troops’. These conditions, Palmerston maintained, were ‘not dishonourable to Russia… but only calculated to be manifest and patent pledges of the sincerity of her disclaimer of aggressive intentions’. Warning Clarendon about Count Orlov, the leader of the Russian delegation to Paris, he revealed his Russophobic attitudes:

The French and the Italians were disgusted by Palmerston’s behaviour (Victor Emmanuel, the Piedmontese king, described him as a ‘rabid animal’). Eager for peace, the French did not share the British inclination to punish Russia. They needed a rapprochement with the Russians to realize Napoleon’s plans in Italy. Sympathetic to the cause of Italian unification, the French Emperor calculated that he could regain Savoy and Nice – captured by the French in 1792 but returned to Piedmont by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 – by helping the Piedmontese to conquer Lombardy-Venetia from the Austrians and expel the Habsburgs from the rest of Italy. Requiring the support or armed neutrality of the Russians to defeat the Austrians, the French were unwilling to go along with Palmerston’s punitive initiatives against Russia. Their main point of difference with the British concerned the boundary of Bessarabia, a territory to be given back by Russia to Ottoman Moldavia. Palmerston, supported by Austria, took a tough line, arguing that Russia must not have any means of access to the Danube, the key Austrian anxiety. The Russians wanted to use Kars as a counterweight to Bessarabia, and the French supported them. But, under pressure from the British and the Austrians, Napoleon persuaded Orlov to accept a compromise at Paris. Overall, the Russians lost about a third of the Bessarabian land they had taken from the Turks in 1812, including the Danube delta, but they retained the Bulgarian communities of Bessarabia and the strategically important mountain ridge running south-east from Chotin. The British claimed a victory; Austria celebrated the liberation of the Danube; and the Russians felt the loss of (southern) Bessarabia as a national humiliation. It was the first territory the Russians had ceded to the Turks since the seventeenth century.⁴

On the other major issues the powers largely came to terms before the Paris congress met, guided by the Four Points agreed by the allies in 1854. The British had attempted to add a fifth point that would take away from Russia all its lands in the southern Caucasus (Circassia, Georgia, Erivan and Nakhichevan) but the Russians insisted that they held these territories by the Treaty of Adrianople and the Turks backed up their claims. However, the Russians were forced to surrender Kars. They also lost out in their efforts to avoid the full effect of the Third Point – the demilitarization of the Black Sea – by negotiating an exclusion for Nikolaev (20 kilometres inland from the coastline on the Bug river) and for the Sea of Azov.

On the question of the two Danubian principalities (the main subject of the First Point), there was a lively exchange of ideas. The British were broadly in favour of restoring Ottoman control. The French gave their backing to the Romanian liberals and nationalists who wanted to unite the principalities as an independent state. The Austrians were flatly opposed to the establishment of a nation state on their south-eastern border, as they had significant Slav minorities with national aspirations of their own. The Austrians rightly suspected that the French were backing the Romanians as a way of putting pressure on the Austrians to give up their interests in northern Italy. The three powers all agreed to end the Russian protectorate over the Danubian principalities and to guarantee the free commercial navigation of the Danube (the Second Point). But they could not agree on what to replace it with – other than the collective guarantee of the great powers under the nominal sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire with vague plans for elections at some point in the future to determine the views of the population in Moldavia and Wallachia.

As for the question of protecting the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire (the Fourth Point), representatives of the allied powers met with the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha and the Tanzimat reformer Fuad Pasha (the Sultan’s delegates to the Paris congress) in Constantinople in early January to impress on them the need for the Porte to show that it was serious about granting full religious and civil equality to the Empire’s non-Muslims (including Jews). Reporting on the conference to Clarendon on 9 January, Stratford Canning was sceptical about the Turkish ministers’ expressions of commitment to reform. He thought they were resentful of the foreign imposition of reform, that they saw it as undermining Ottoman sovereignty, and concluded that it would be difficult to get any protection for the Christians implemented properly. The Turks had always lived in the belief that the Christians were inferior, and no law passed by the Sultan could overcome that prejudice in the short period of time expected by the West. ‘We may expect procrastination on the ground of respect of religious antipathies, popular prejudices, and unassociating habits,’ wrote the veteran diplomat, who further warned that forcing through reforms might lead to a revolt by the Muslims against the Sultan’s Westernizing policies. In response to a 21-point draft programme presented by the allies’ representatives, the Sultan issued the Hatt-i Hümayun on 18 February. The decree promised to his non-Muslim subjects full religious and legal equality, rights of property, and open entry on merit to the Ottoman military and civil service. The Turks hoped that the reform would prevent any further European intervention into Ottoman affairs. They wanted the Hatt-i Hümayun excluded from the Paris talks, on the grounds of Turkish sovereignty. But the Russians – who had been named in the Fourth Point as one of the five great powers that would guarantee the security of the Sultan’s Christian subjects – insisted that the issue was brought up. They were satisfied with the compromise solution – an international declaration joined by the Porte on the importance of Christian rights in the Ottoman Empire – and in their domestic propaganda the Russians even used it as a symbol of their ‘moral victory’ in the Crimean War. In one sense they were right, in so far as the Paris congress restored the status quo in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, as Russia had demanded on behalf of the Greeks against the Latin claims, a point made by the Tsar many times. In a manifesto published on the day the peace was signed, Alexander invoked Providence for bringing to pass ‘the original and principal aim of the war… Russians! Your efforts and sacrifices have not been in vain!’⁵

Finally, there was the unspoken question of Poland. The idea of restoring Polish independence from Russia had first been advanced among the wartime allied diplomats by Walewski, the son of Napoleon I by the Polish Countess Marie Walewska. After the capture of Sevastopol, the French Emperor wanted to do something for Poland: an independent Polish kingdom fitted the Napoleonic ideal of a new Europe based on nation states to overthrow the 1815 settlement. At first Napoleon III supported Czartoryski’s programme for the restoration of Congress Poland, the autonomous kingdom established by the Vienna treaty, whose freedoms had been undermined by the Russians. Later on, as the pre-congress talks got under way and it became apparent that none of the other powers would come out in favour of the Poles, Napoleon gave his backing to Czartoryski’s pared-down list of conditions for Polish language rights and the defence of Poland against Russification. But Orlov would have none of this, insisting that Russia’s rights in Poland were based, not on the 1815 treaty, but on the Russian conquest of Poland during the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1830–31. In the interests of improving his relations with Russia, whose support would be needed against the Austrians in Italy, Napoleon decided to give up on the Poles. Nothing more was said about the Polish question at the Paris congress. Even Palmerston, who rarely missed a chance to confront Russia, advised Clarendon not to make an issue of the Poles. ‘It would not be expedient,’ he explained, ‘to require Russia to restore the Kingdom of Poland.’

‘Poor Poland!’ remarked Stratford Canning to Lord Harrowby, one of Czartoryski’s supporters. ‘Her revival is a regular flying Dutchman. Never is – always to be.’⁶

With all the major issues resolved beforehand, the Paris congress proceeded smoothly without any major arguments. Just three sessions were required to draft the settlement. There was plenty of spare time for a full range of social engagements – banquets, dinners, concerts, balls and receptions, and a special celebration to mark the birth of the Prince Imperial, Louis-Napoleon, the only child of Napeolon III and the Empress Eugénie – before the diplomats finally assembled for the formal signing of the peace treaty at one o’clock on Sunday, 30 March.

Announcements of the peace were made throughout Paris. Telegraphs worked overtime to spread the news across the world. At two o’clock, the ending of the war was signalled by a thunderous cannonade fired by the guns at Les Invalides. Cheering crowds assembled in the streets, restaurants and cafés did a roaring trade, and in the evening the Paris sky was lit by fireworks. The next day, there was a parade on the Champ de Mars. French troops passed by the Emperor and Prince Napoleon, senior French commanders and foreign dignitaries, watched by tens of thousands of Parisians. ‘There was an electrical tremor of excitement in the crowd,’ claimed the official history of the congress, published the next year, ‘and from the people there was a deafening cheer of national pride and enthusiasm that filled the Champ de Mars better than a thousand cannon could.’⁷ Here was the glory and popular acclaim Napoleon had wanted when he went to war.

News of the peace arrived in the Crimea the next day – as long as it took for the telegram to be relayed from Paris to Varna and communicated by the underwater cable to Balaklava. On 2 April the allied guns in the Crimea were fired for the final time – in salute to mark the end of the war.

Six months were given to the allies to evacuate their armed forces. The British used the port of Sevastopol, where they oversaw the destruction of the magnificent docks by a series of explosions, while the French destroyed Fort Nicholas. There were enormous quantities of war matériel to be counted, loaded onto ships and taken home: captured guns and cannon, munitions, scrap metal and food supplies, including vast amounts of booty from the Russians. It was a complicated logistical operation to allocate it all to the various departments of the ministries of war, and many things were left behind, sold off to the Russians, or, like the English wooden huts and barracks, donated to them on condition that they were used ‘for the inhabitants of the Crimea who had been made homeless by the war’ (the Russians accepted the English offer but kept the huts and barracks for the army). ‘It is an enormous endeavour to carry off, in just a few months, everything that was brought here over a period of two years,’ wrote Captain Herbé to his family on 28 April. ‘A large number of the horses and mules will have to be abandoned or sold off cheaply to the population of the Crimea, and I don’t count on ever seeing mine again.’ The animals were not the only means of transport to be sold off privately. The Balaklava railway was purchased by a company established by Sir Culling Eardly and Moses Montefiore, who wanted to use the equipment to build a new railroad between Jaffa and Jerusalem, a communication that would ‘civilize and develop the resources of a district now wild and disorderly’, according to Palmerston, who authorized the sale. It would serve the growing traffic of religious pilgrims to the Holy Lands. The Jaffa railway was never built and in the end the Balaklava line was sold to the Turks as scrap.⁸

Considering how long it took to ship all these supplies to the Crimea, the evacuation was completed speedily. By 12 July Codrington was ready to hand over possession of Balaklava to the Russians before departing with the final British troops on HMS Algiers. A stickler for military etiquette, the commander-in-chief was offended by the low rank and appearance of the Russian delegation sent to meet him and receive control of Balaklava:

Left behind in the Crimea were the remains of many thousands of soldiers. During the last weeks before their departure, the allied troops laboured hard to build graveyards and erect memorials to those comrades they would leave behind. In one of his last reports from the Crimea, William Russell described the military cemeteries:

After the allied armies left, the Russians, who had withdrawn towards Perekop during their evacuation, moved back to the southern towns and plains of the Crimea. The battlefields of the Crimean War returned to farms and grazing lands. Cattle roamed across the graveyards of the allied troops. Gradually, the Crimea recovered from the economic damage of the war. Sevastopol was rebuilt. Roads and bridges were repaired. But in other ways the peninsula was permanently changed.

Most dramatically, the Tatar population had largely disappeared. Small groups had begun to leave their farms at the start of the conflict, but their numbers grew towards the end of the war, in line with their fear of reprisals by the Russians after the departure of the allied troops. There had already been reprisals for the atrocities at Kerch, with mass arrests, confiscations of property, and summary executions of ‘suspicious’ Tatars by the Russian military. The inhabitants of the Baidar valley petitioned Codrington to help them leave the Crimea, fearing what would happen to them if their villages should fall into the hands of the Russians, ‘as our past experience of them gives us little ground to hope for good treatment’. Written and translated into English by a local Tatar scribe, their supplication continued:

Codrington did nothing to help the Tatars, even though they had provided the allies with foodstuffs, spies and transport services throughout the Crimean War. The idea of protecting the Tatars against Russian reprisals never crossed the minds of the allied diplomats, who might have included a stronger clause about their treatment in the peace treaty. Article V of the Paris Treaty obliged all warring nations to ‘give full pardon to those of their subjects who appeared guilty of actively participating in the military affairs of the enemy’ – a clause that appeared to protect not only the Crimean Tatars but the Bulgarians and Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, who had sided with the Russians during the Danubian campaigns. But Count Stroganov, the governor-general of New Russia, found a way around this clause by claiming that the Tatars had lost their treaty rights, if they had broken Russian law by departing from their place of residence without prior approval from the military authorities – as tens of thousands of them had been forced to do during the Crimean War. In other words, any Tatar who had left his home without a stamp in his passport was deemed to be a traitor by the Russian government, and was subject to penal exile in Siberia.¹²

As the allied armies began their evacuation of the Crimea, the first large groups of Tatars also left. On 22 April, 4,500 Tatars set sail from Balaklava for Constantinople in the belief that the Turkish government had invited them to relocate in the Ottoman Empire. Alarmed by the mass exodus, which was a threat to the Crimean agricultural economy, Russian local officials looked for guidance from St Petersburg as to whether they should stop the departure of the Tatars. Having been informed that the Tatars had collaborated en masse with the enemy, the Tsar responded that nothing should be done to prevent their exodus, adding that in fact it ‘would be advantageous to rid the peninsula of this harmful population’ (a concept re-enacted by Stalin during the Second World War). Communicating Alexander’s statement to his officials, Stroganov interpreted it as a direct order for the expulsion of the Muslim population from the Crimea by claiming that the Tsar had said that it was ‘necessary’ (and not just ‘advantageous’) to make the Tatars leave. Various pressures were applied to encourage their departure: there were rumours of a planned mass deportation to the north, of Cossack raids on Tatar villages, of campaigns to force the Tatars to learn Russian in Crimean schools, or to convert to Christianity. Taxes were increased on Tatar farms, and Tatar villages were deprived of access to water, forcing them to sell their land to Russian landowners.

Between 1856 and 1863 about 150,000 Crimean Tatars and perhaps 50,000 Nogai Tatars (roughly two-thirds of the combined Tatar population of the Crimea and southern Russia) emigrated to the Ottoman Empire. Precise figures are hard to calculate, and some historians have put the figures much higher. Concerned about growing labour shortages in the region, in 1867 the Russian authorities tried to work out from police statistics how many Tatars had left the peninsula since the ending of the war. It was reported that 104,211 men and 88,149 women had left the Crimea. There were 784 deserted villages, and 457 abandoned mosques.¹³

Along with the removal of the Tatar population, the Russian authorities pursued a policy of Christianizing the Crimea after 1856. More than ever, as a direct consequence of the Crimean War, they saw the peninsula as a religious borderland between Russia and the Muslim world over which they needed to consolidate their hold. Before the war, the relatively liberal governor-general, Prince Vorontsov, had opposed the spread of Christian institutions to the Crimea, on the grounds that it would ‘germinate among the [Tatar] natives unfounded dangerous thoughts about intentions of deflecting them from Islam and converting them to Orthodoxy’. But Vorontsov retired from his post in 1855, to be replaced by the aggressively Russian nationalist Stroganov, who actively supported the Christianizing goals of Innokenty, the Archbishop of the Kherson-Tauride diocese, within which the Crimea fell. Towards the end of the Crimean War, Innokenty’s sermons had been widely circlated to the Russian troops in the form of pamphlets and illustrated prints (lubki). Innokenty portrayed the conflict as a ‘holy war’ for the Crimea, the centre of the nation’s Orthodox identity, where Christianity had arrived in Russia. Highlighting the ancient heritage of the Greek Church in the peninsula, he depicted the Crimea as a ‘Russian Athos’, a sacred place in the ‘Holy Russian Empire’ connected by religion to the monastic centre of Orthodoxy on the peninsula of Mount Athos in north-eastern Greece. With Stroganov’s support, Innokenty oversaw the creation of a separate bishopric for the Crimea as well as the establishment of several new monasteries in the peninsula after the Crimean War.¹⁴

To encourage the Christian settlement of the Crimea, the tsarist government introduced a law in 1862 granting special rights and subsidies to colonists from Russia and abroad. Land abandoned by the Tatars was set aside for sale to foreigners. The influx of new Christian populations during the 1860s and 1870s transformed the ethnic profile of the Crimea. What had once been Tatar settlements were now populated by Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, even Germans and Estonians – all of them attracted by promises of cheap and fertile land or by special rights of entry into urban guilds and corporations not ordinarily available to newcomers. Armenians and Greeks turned Sevastopol and Evpatoria into major trading centres, while older Tatar towns like Kefe (Theodosia), Gözleve and Bakhchiserai fell into decline. Many of the rural immigrants were Bulgarian or other Christian refugees from Bessarabia, territory ceded by the Russians to the Turks after the Crimean War. They were settled by the government in 330 villages once occupied by the Tatars, and were helped financially to transform mosques into churches. Meanwhile, many of the Tatars who had fled from the Crimea were resettled on the lands abandoned by the Christians in Bessarabia.¹⁵

All around the Black Sea rim, the Crimean War resulted in the uprooting and transmigration of ethnic and religious groups. They crossed in both directions over the religious line separating Russia from the Muslim world. Greeks emigrated in their tens of thousands from Moldavia and Bessarabia to southern Russia after the Crimean War. Moving in the opposite direction, from Russia into Turkey, were tens of thousands of Polish refugees and soldiers who had fought in the Polish Legion (the so-called ‘Ottoman Cossacks’) against Russia in the Crimea and the Caucasus. They were settled by the Porte on Turkish lands in the Dobrudja region of the Danube delta, in Anatolia and other areas, while others ended up in Adampol (Polonezkoi), the Polish settlement established by Adam Czartoryski, the leader of the Polish emigration, on the outskirts of Constantinople in 1842.

On the other side of the Black Sea, tens of thousands of Christian Armenians left their homes in Anatolia and emigrated to Russian-controlled Transcaucasia in the wake of the Crimean War. They were fearful that the Turks would see them as allies of the Russians and carry out reprisals against them. The European commission appointed by the Paris Treaty to fix the Russian-Ottoman border found Armenian villages ‘half inhabited’ and churches in a state of ‘advanced decay’.¹⁶

Meanwhile, even larger numbers of Circassians, Abkhazians and other Muslim tribes were forced out of their homelands by the Russians, who after the Crimean War stepped up their military campaign against Shamil, engaging in a concerted policy of what today would be defined as ‘ethnic cleansing’ to Christianize the Caucasus. The campaign was largely driven by the strategic demands created by the Paris settlement in the Black Sea, where the Royal Navy could freely operate and the Russians had no means of self-defence in their vulnerable coastal areas where the Muslim population was hostile to Russia. The Russians focused first on the fertile lands of Circassia in the western Caucasus – territories close to the Black Sea coast. Muslim villages were attacked by Russian troops, men and women massacred, farms and homes destroyed to force the villagers to leave or starve. The Circassians were presented with the choice of moving north to the Kuban plains – far enough away from the coastal areas for them not to be a threat in case of an invasion – or emigrating to the Ottoman Empire. Tens of thousands resettled in the north but equally large numbers of Circassians were herded by the Russians to the Black Sea ports, where, sometimes after weeks of waiting by the docks in terrible conditions, they were loaded onto Turkish boats and taken off to Trebizond, Samsun and Sinope in Anatolia. The Ottoman authorities were unprepared for the mass influx of refugees and several thousands of them died from disease within months of their arrival in Turkey. By 1864 the Muslim population of Circassia had been entirely cleared. The British consul C. H. Dickson claimed that one could walk a whole day in formerly Circassian territories and not meet a living soul.¹⁷

After the Circassians, it was the turn of the Abkhazian Muslims, at that time settled in the Sukhumi – Kale region, where the Russian campaign to clear them off their lands began in 1866. The tactics were essentially the same as those employed against the Circassians, except this time the Russians had a policy of keeping back the able-bodied male workers out of fear for the economy, and forcing out their women, children and the elderly. The British consul and Arabic scholar William Gifford Palgrave, who made a tour of Abkhazia to collect information on the ethnic cleansing, estimated that three-quarters of the Muslim population had been forced to emigrate. Overall, counting both Circassians and Abkhazians, around 1.2 million Muslims were expelled from the Caucasus in the decade following the Crimean War, most of them resettling in the Ottoman Empire, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Muslims of these two regions were outnumbered by new Christian settlers by more than ten to one.¹⁸

As a signal of his intention to grant religious toleration, the Sultan agreed to attend two foreign balls in the Turkish capital, one at the British embassy, the other at the French, in February 1856. It was the first time in the history of the Ottoman Empire that a sultan had accepted invitations to a Christian entertainment in the house of a foreign ambassador.

Abdülmecid arrived at the British embassy wearing the Order of the Garter presented to him a few weeks before to mark the allied victory. Stratford Canning, the ambassador, met the Sultan at the carriage door. As the Sultan alighted, a signal was transmitted by electric wire to the British fleet, anchored in the Bosporus, which saluted then with prolonged salvoes of cannon. It was a costume ball and princes, pirates, musketeers, fake Circassians and shepherdesses were in attendance. Lady Hornby wrote down her impressions the next day.

At the ball at the French embassy the Sultan appeared wearing the medal of the Légion d’honneur that had been presented to him by Thouvenel, the French ambassador. Welcomed by a military salute, he talked to foreign dignitaries and moved among the dancers, who improvised to the Turkish marches performed by the army band.¹⁹

One of the things that pleased the Sultan most at these events was the appearance of the European women, whose dress he claimed greatly to prefer to that of Muslim women. ‘If socializing with these ladies is like their outer appearance,’ he told his Austrian physician, ‘then I certainly envy you Europeans.’ Encouraged by the Sultan, palace women and high officials’ wives began to adopt more elements of Western dress – corsets, silk capes and transparent veils. They appeared more often in society and socialized more frequently with men.

Domestic culture was also Westernized, with the appearance of European table manners, cutlery and crockery, furniture and decorative styles in the homes of the Ottoman élites in Constantinople.²⁰

In almost every sphere of life, the Crimean War marked a watershed in the opening up and Westernization of Turkish society. The mass influx of refugees from the Russian Empire was only one of many ways in which the Ottoman Empire became more exposed to external influence. The Crimean War brought new ideas and technologies into the Ottoman world, accelerated Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and greatly increased contacts between Turks and foreigners. More Europeans came to Constantinople during and immediately after the Crimean War than at any other time in its previous history; the many diplomats, financiers, military advisers and soldiers, engineers, tourists, merchants, missionaries and priests left a deep impression on Turkish society.

The war also led to a vast expansion of foreign capital investment in the Ottoman Empire, and with it an increase in Turkey’s financial dependence on Western banks and governments (foreign loans to finance the war and Tanzimat reforms spiralled from about £5 million in 1855 to a staggering £200 million by 1877). It stimulated the development of telegraphs and railways, and accelerated the emergence of what might be called Turkish public opinion through newspapers and a new type of journalistic writing that came about directly as a result of the huge demand for information during the Crimean War. With the New Ottomans (Yeni Osmanlilar), a loose group of journalists and would-be reformers who briefly came together in something like a political party during the 1860s, the war also triggered a reaction against some of these changes and fostered the emergence of the first Ottoman (Turkish) nationalist movement. The New Ottomans’ belief in adopting Western institutions within a framework of Muslim tradition made them in many ways the ‘spiritual fathers’ of the Young Turks, the creators of the modern Turkish state.²¹

The New Ottomans were opposed to the growing intervention of the European powers in the Ottoman Empire. They were against reforms which they believed had been imposed on Turkey by Western governments to promote the special interests of Christians. In particular, they disapproved of the Hatt-i Hümayun decree of 1856, which had indeed been imposed by the European powers. The decree was written by Stratford Canning along with Thouvenel and then presented to the Porte as a condition of the continuation of foreign loans. It reiterated the principles of religious toleration articulated in the Hatt-i Sharif of 1839 but defined them more clearly in Western legal terms, without reference to the Koran. In addition to promising toleration and civil rights for non-Muslims, it introduced some new political principles to Ottoman governance stipulated by the British: strict annual budgets by the government; the establishment of banks; the codification of criminal and civil law; the reform of Turkish prisons; and mixed courts to oversee a majority of cases involving Muslims and non-Muslims. It was a thoroughgoing programme of Westernization for the Ottoman Empire. The New Ottomans had supported the principles contained in the Hatt-i Sharif of 1839 as a necessary element of the Tanzimat reforms; unlike the decree of 1856, it had some domestic origins and had not threatened the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire. But they saw the Hatt-i Hümayun as a special dispensation for the non-Muslims conceded under pressure by the great powers, and they feared that it would compromise the interests of Islam and Turkish sovereignty.

The foreign origins and terminology of the Hatt-i Hümayun stirred even greater resentment among Muslim clerics and conservatives. Even the old Tanzimat reformer Mustafa Reshid – who returned for a brief spell as Grand Vizier after Stratford had insisted on his reappointment in November 1856 – thought it went too far in its concessions to the Christians. Angered by the Hatt-i Hümayun, a group of Muslim theologians and students plotted a conspiracy against the Sultan and his ministers, but they were arrested in 1859. Under interrogation their leaders claimed that the Hatt-i Hümayun was a contravention of shariah law because it had granted Christians equal rights to Muslims. Sheikh Ahmet, one of the main conspirators, claimed that the Christians had obtained these rights only through the help of foreign powers, and that the concessions would mean the end of the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire.²²

Their views were shared by many power-holders and beneficiaries of the old Muslim hierarchy – local pashas, governors, landowners and notables, clerics and officials, tax-farmers and moneylenders – who were all afraid that the better-educated and more active Christian minorities would soon come to dominate the political and social order, if they were granted civil and religious equality. For centuries the Muslims of the empire had been told that the Christians were inferior. Faced with the loss of their privileged position, the Muslims became increasingly rebellious. There were riots and attacks by Muslims against Christians in Bessarabia, in Nablus and in Gaza in 1856, in Jaffa during 1857, in the Hijaz during 1858, and in Lebanon and Syria, where 20,000 Maronite Christians were massacred by Druzes and Muslims during 1860. In each case religious and economic divisions reinforced each other: the livelihood of Muslims engaged in agriculture and small trades was directly threatened by the import of European goods by Christian middlemen. Rioters attacked Christian shops and houses, foreign churches and missionary schools, even embassies, after they had been stirred up by Muslim clerics opposed to the Hatt-i Hümayun.

In Nablus, to take just one example, the troubles began on 4 April, shortly after Muslim leaders had denounced the Hatt-i Hümayun at Friday prayers. There were 5,000 Christians in Nablus, a town of 10,000 people, and before the Crimean War they had lived peacefully with the Muslims. But the war had increased tensions between them. The defeat of Russia was seen as a ‘Muslim victory’ by the local Palestinians, whose religious pride was offended by the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Christians, for their part, saw it as an allied triumph. They raised French and British flags on their houses in Nablus and placed a new bell over the Protestant mission school. These were provocations to Islamic sentiment. At Friday prayers, the ulemas condemned these signs of Western domination, arguing that Muslims would soon be called to prayer by the English bell, unless they rose up to destroy the Christian churches, which, they said, would be ‘a proper form of prayer to God’. Calling for jihad, crowds spilled out onto the streets of Nablus, many of them gathering by the Protestant mission, where they tore down the British flag.

Amid these heightened tensions, violence was sparked by a bizarre incident involving the Reverend Mr Lyde, a Protestant missionary and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, who had accidentally shot a beggar attempting to steal his coat. ‘The cup of fanaticism was full, and one drop more caused it to run over,’ wrote James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem, who reported on the incident. Lyde had taken refuge from the mob in the house of the town governor, Mahmud Bek, who pacified the family of the dead man and proposed to bury him. But the ulemas were not satisfied with this. After a religious council, they forbade the burial and suspended public prayers in all the mosques ‘until the price of the blood of Islam should be paid’. Calling for ‘Vengeance on the Christians!’ a large crowd assembled outside the governor’s house and demanded to be given Lyde, who offered to sacrifice himself, but Mahmud Bek refused, whereupon the the mob began to rampage through the town, pillaging and destroying any property on which they could lay their hands. Christian houses, schools and churches were ransacked and burned. Several Prussian consular officials were murdered, along with a dozen Greeks, according to Finn, who also reported that ‘eleven women are known to have given premature birth to infants from the effect of fright’. Order was eventually restored by the intervention of the Sultan’s troops, and on 21 April Lyde was put on trial in a Turkish court in Jerusalem, where a mixed Muslim and Christian jury acquitted him of murder but ordered him to pay a large sum in compensation to the beggar’s family.[55] Lyde returned to England in a deranged mental state: he had delusions of himself as Christ. The ringleaders of the Muslim riots were never brought to trial, and attacks on Christians in the area continued for many months. In August 1856 the violence spread from Nablus to Gaza. In February 1857 Finn reported that 300 Christians were ‘still living in a state of terror in Gaza’, for ‘no one could control the Muslim fanatics’, and the Christians would not testify for fear of reprisals.²³

Faced with the prospect of this sort of violence almost anywhere, the Ottoman authorities dragged their heels over implementing the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Stratford Canning was increasingly frustrated with the Porte. ‘Turkish ministers are very little disposed to meet the demands of Her Majesty’s Government on the subject of religious persecution,’ he wrote to Clarendon. ‘They pretend to entertain apprehensions of popular discontent among the Mussulmans, if they were to give way.’ Turkish participation in the Crimean War had led to a resurgence of ‘Muslim triumphalism’, Stratford reported. As a result of the war, the Turks had become more protective of their sovereignty, and more resentful of Western intervention into their affairs. There was a new generation of Tanzimat reformers at the head of the Turkish government who were more secure in their personal position and less dependent on the patronage of foreign powers and ambassadors than Reshid’s generation of reformers had been before the Crimean War; they could afford to be more cautious and more practical in their implementation of reforms, carrying out the economic and political requirements of the Western powers but not hurrying to fulfil the religious promises contained in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Throughout his last year as ambassador, Stratford urged the Turkish leaders to be more serious about the protection of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire: it was the price, he told them, that Turkey had to pay for British and French help in the Crimean War. He was particularly exercised by the continued execution of Muslims for converting to Christianity, despite the Sultan’s promises to secure the Christians from religious persecution and abolish the ‘barbarous practice of putting seceders to death’. Citing numerous cases of Christian converts being driven from their homes and killed, Stratford wrote to the Porte on 23 December 1856:

Yet by the time of his return to London the next year, very little had been done by the Porte to satisfy the demands of the European governments. ‘Among the Christians,’ Finn reported in July 1857, ‘a strong feeling of discontent is on the increase because of the slowness of the Turkish government to implement religious toleration.’

In the rural areas of Palestine, according to Finn, the Hatt-i Hümayun remained unobserved for many years. Local governors were corrupt, ill-disciplined and closely linked to the Muslim notables, clerics and officials, who kept the Christians in their place, while the Porte was too remote and weak to curb their excesses, let alone to force them to uphold the new laws of equality.²⁵

But it was in the Balkans that the failure of the Porte to carry out reforms would have the most lasting consequences for the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Balkan region, Christian peasants would rise up against their Muslim landlords and officials, beginning in Bosnia in 1858. The continuation of the millet system would give rise to nationalist movements that would involve the Ottomans and the European powers in a long series of Balkan wars, culminating in the conflicts that would bring about the First World War.

The Paris Treaty did not make any major territorial changes to the map of Europe. To many at the time, the outcome did not appear worthy of a war in which so many people died. Russia ceded southern Bessarabia to Moldavia. But otherwise the treaty’s articles were statements of principle: the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were confirmed and guaranteed by the great powers (the first time a Muslim state was recognized by international law, the Congress of Vienna having specifically excluded Turkey from the European powers regulated by its international laws); the protection of the non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan was guaranteed by the signatory powers, thereby annulling Russia’s claims to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire; Russia’s protectorate over the Danubian principalities was negated by an article confirming the autonomy of these two states under Ottoman sovereignty; and, most humiliating of all for the Russians, Article XI declared the Black Sea to be a neutral zone, open to commercial shipping but closed to all warships in peacetime, thus depriving Russia of its naval ports and arsenals on this crucial southern coastal frontier.²⁶

But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany.

Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War, despite having barely taken part in it. Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (in the war against the Prussians in 1866) and in the Balkans (where it steadily retreated from the 1870s until 1914).

None of that was yet apparent in April 1856, when Austria joined France and Britain in a Triple Alliance to defend the Paris settlement. The three powers signed an agreement that any breach of the Paris Treaty would become a cause of war. Palmerston saw it as a ‘good additional Security and Bond of Union’ against Russia, which he fully expected to re-emerge in due course as a major threat to the Continent. He wanted to expand the entente into an anti-Russian league of European states.²⁷ Napoleon was not so sure. Since the fall of Sevastopol, there had been a growing rapprochement between the French and the Russians. Napoleon needed Russia for his plans against the Austrians in Italy. Meanwhile, for the Russians, and in particular for their new Foreign Minister, Alexander Gorchakov, who replaced Nesselrode in 1856, France represented the most likely power to support their efforts to remove the humiliating Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty. Both France and Russia were revisionist powers: where Russia wanted revisions to the treaty of 1856, France wanted to remove the remnants of the 1815 settlement. A deal between them could be made.

Unlike Nesselrode, a firm supporter of the Holy Alliance and its legitimist principles, Gorchakov took a pragmatic view of Russia’s role on the Continent. In his opinion, Russia should not form alliances that committed it to general principles, such as the defence of legitimate monarchies, as it had done before the Crimean War. The war had shown that Russia could not rely in any way on the solidarity of legitimate European monarchies. Nesselrode’s policy had made Russia vulnerable to the failings of other governments, Austria in particular, a power Gorchakov despised from his time as ambassador in Vienna. Instead, Gorchakov believed Russia should focus its diplomacy on its own national interests, and ally with other powers regardless of their ideology to further those interests. Here was a new type of diplomacy, the realpolitik later practised by Bismarck.

The Russians tested the Paris Treaty from the start, focusing on minor issues which they could exploit to open up divisions in the Crimean alliance. In May 1856 they claimed ownership of a lighthouse on tiny Serpent Island, in Turkish waters near the mouth of the Danube delta, and landed seven men with an officer to take up residence in the lighthouse. Walewski was inclined to let the Russians have the insignificant island, but Palmerston was adamant that they had to be ejected, on the grounds that they were infringing Turkish sovereignty. When the captain of a British ship made contact with the Turks on Serpent Island, he was told that they did not mind the Russians being there: they saw them as guests and were happy to sell them their supplies. Palmerston put his foot down. ‘We must avoid the fatal mistake made by Aberdeen in permitting the early movements and indications of Russian aggression to go on unnoticed and unrepressed,’ he wrote to Clarendon on 7 August. Orders were prepared to send the gunboats in to remove the Russians physically, but John Wodehouse, the British envoy in St Petersburg, was doubtful whether Britain had the right to do this, and the Queen shared these doubts, so Palmerston backed down and diplomatic pressure was used instead. Gorchakov insisted that the island had been owned by the Russians since 1833, and appealed to the French, who were thus manoeuvred into a position of international mediation between Britain and Russia.²⁸

Meanwhile, the Russians launched a second challenge to the Paris Treaty in connection with the border between Russian Bessarabia and Turkish-controlled Moldavia. By an accident of mapping and confusion over names, the allies had drawn the border running to the south of an old village called Bolgrad, 3 kilometres to the north of New Bolgrad, a market town situated on the shores of Lake Yalpuk, which runs into the Danube. The Russians made use of the lack of clarity, claiming that they should be given both Bolgrads, and thus joint ownership of Lake Yalpuk. Palmerston insisted that the border should remain at the old village – the intention of the treaty having been to deprive the Russians of access to the Danube. He urged the French to remain firm and show a united front against the Russians, who would otherwise exploit their differences. But the French were happy to concede the Russian claim as a matter of good faith, though they then proposed that the boundary should run along a narrow strip of land between the market town and Lake Yalpuk, thereby granting more territory to the Russians but depriving them of access to the lake. Once again, the French acted as intermediaries between Russia and Britain.

By mid-November the Duc de Morny had persuaded Gorchakov to give up Russia’s claim to Serpent Island, provided Russia was given New Bolgrad, without access to the lake, and territorial compensation for their loss in a form decided by the French Emperor. The deal was linked to a proposal by the Tsar and Gorchakov (drawn up with the help of Morny in St Petersburg) for a Franco-Russian convention for the protection of the neutrality of the Black Sea and the Danubian principalities, as set out in the Paris Treaty, but now necessitated, it was claimed by the Russians, ‘by the fact that the treaty has been violated by England and Austria’, who had ‘tried to cheat’ the Russians of legitimate possessions in the Danube area. Morny recommended the Russian proposal to Napoleon and passed on to the French Emperor a promise made to him by Gorchakov: Russia would support French acquisitions on the European continent if France signed the convention. ‘Mark well,’ Morny wrote, ‘Russia is the only power that will ratify the territorial gains of France. I have already been assured of that. Try and get the same from the English! And who knows, with our demanding and capricious people, one day we might have to come to Russia for their satisfaction.’ Details of the Russian attitude to French territorial acquisitions had been outlined in a secret instruction to Count Kiselev, the former governor of the Danubian principalities who became ambassador to France after the Crimean War: protocol required that a senior statesman represent the Tsar’s new policy of friendship towards France. Should Napoleon direct his attention to the Italian peninsula, Kiselev was told, Russia ‘would consent in advance to the reunion of Nice and Savoy with France, as well as to the union of Lombardy with Sardinia’. If his ambitions were directed to the Rhine, Russia would ‘use its good offices’ to help the French, while continuing to honour its commitments to Prussia.²⁹

A conference of the powers’ representatives in Paris brought about a speedy resolution of the two disputes in January 1857: Turkish ownership of Serpent Island was confirmed with an international commission to control the lighthouse; and New Bolgrad was given to Moldavia, with Russia compensated by a boundary change elsewhere in Bessarabia. On the face of it, the Russians had been forced to back down on both issues, but they had scored a political victory by weakening the bonds of the Crimean alliance. The French had made it clear that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was of secondary significance to them, and they were ready to enter into a deal with the Russians to redraw the European map.

Over the next eighteen months a number of high-level Russian visitors appeared in France. In 1857, the Grand Duke Constantine, the Tsar’s younger brother and the admiral in charge of the much-needed reform of the Russian navy after the Crimean War, made a trip to Paris, having decided that a partnership with France was the best way to get the technical assistance Russia needed to modernize its backward fleet (he gave to French firms all the orders that could not be fulfilled by Russian shipbuilders). On his way, he stopped at the Bay of Villafranca, near Nice, where he negotiated an agreement with Cavour for the Odessa Shipping Company to rent a coaling station from the Turin government, thereby providing Russia with a foothold in the Mediterranean.[56] Napoleon gave a splendid reception to the Grand Duke in Paris, and drew him into private conversations about the future of Europe. The French Emperor knew that the Grand Duke was trying to assert himself as a force in Russian foreign policy, and that he had pan-Slav views at odds with those of Gorchakov, so he played to his political ambitions. Napoleon referred specifically to the possibility of an Italian uprising against the Austrians and the eventual unification of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership, and talked about the likelihood of Christian uprisings in the Ottoman Empire, a subject of great interest to Constantine, suggesting that in both cases it would suit their interests to encourage the formation of smaller nation states.³⁰

Encouraged by the Grand Duke, Napoleon entered into direct contact with the Tsar with the aim of securing his support for a French-Piedmontese war against the Austrians in Italy. Having met the Tsar at Stuttgart in September 1857, Napoleon became so confident of his support that when he met Cavour the following July at Plombières to draw up war plans he assured the Piedmontese Prime Minister that he had Alexander’s solemn promise to back their plans in Italy: after the defeat of the Austrians in Lombardy-Venetia, an enlarged Piedmont would form a Kingdom of Northern Italy (as had emerged briefly in 1848–9) and become united with Tuscany, a reduced Papal State and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in an Italian Confederation; and for his efforts on behalf of the Italian cause, Napoleon would be rewarded with the return of Nice and Savoy to France. Cavour had pinned his hopes for Italy on the Franco-British alliance. That was why he had committed his Sardinian troops to the Crimean War. At the Paris congress he had won the sympathies of the British and the French through his influence behind the scenes, and although he had gained nothing tangible, no firm promise of support for the idea of Italy, he continued to believe that the Western powers were his only hope. Hardly believing that a Russian tsar would give his blessing to a national revolution, Cavour rushed to the nearby spa resort of Baden-Baden, where the ‘run-down kings and princes’ of Europe congregated, to consult with the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (Alexander’s influential liberal aunt), who confirmed that Russia could be counted on. ‘The Grand Duchess told me’, Cavour wrote to General Marmora, ‘that if France were to unite with us, public opinion would force the Russian government to participate.’³¹

But in truth, the Tsar was not keen to get involved in any war. In return for French commitments to cancel their support for the Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty, Alexander promised only armed neutrality, mobilizing a large Russian force on the border with Galicia to prevent the Austrians from sending troops to Italy. The Austrians had used armed neutrality in favour of the allies during the Crimean War, and Alexander’s decision to follow the same tactic let him take revenge on Austria for its betrayal. Napoleon, for his part, was unwilling to give a firm pledge on the Black Sea clauses, fearing it would damage his relations with Britain, so no formal treaty with the Russians could be reached. But there was a gentlemen’s agreement between the emperors, signed in March 1859, by which the Russians would adopt a stance of ‘benevolent neutrality’ in the event of a Franco-Austrian war in exchange for French ‘good offices’ at a ‘future date’.³²

It was on this basis that the French and Piedmontese began their war against Austria in April 1859, in the knowledge that the Russians would advance 300,000 troops towards the Austrian frontier while they attacked in Italy. Only a few years before, Russia would have given military support to Austria against any French attempts to revise the Vienna treaty. The Crimean War had changed everything.

Under the command of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel, the Franco-Piedmontese army won a series of rapid victories, destroying the Austrian forces under the command of Emperor Franz Joseph at the battle of Solferino on 24 June, the last major battle in history in which all the armies were under the personal command of their monarchs. By this time, Napoleon was afraid that the German states might take up arms in support of Austria; therefore, without telling the Piedmontese, he signed an armistice with the Austrians at Villafranca, by which most of Lombardy, including its capital, Milan, was transferred to the French, who immediately gave it to Piedmont, as agreed by Napoleon and Cavour at Plombières. The Villafranca deal restored the monarchs of the central Italian states (Parma, Modena and Tuscany) who had been unseated by the popular revolts that broke out at the beginning of the war – a deal that enraged the Piedmontese, though it pleased the Russians, who had deep concerns about the way the Italian movement was taking a revolutionary turn. The Piedmontese army proceeded to annex the central states. Savoy and Nice were transferred to France, its agreed reward for helping the Italian cause. Their cession was opposed by the revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi, a hero of the war against the Austrians, who had been born in Nice. In the spring of 1860, he led his thousand Redshirts on an expedition to conquer Sicily and Naples and unite them with the rest of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership.

The revolutionary turn taken by the Garibaldians placed a severe strain on the Tsar’s relations with Napoleon. It brought home to him that giving his support to the French Emperor’s policies could have dangerous consequences. There was nothing to prevent the tide of nationalism spreading into Habsburg lands and from there into Poland and other Russian territories. In October 1860 Russia broke off relations with Piedmont as a protest against its annexation of Naples. Gorchakov condemned Piedmont for promoting revolution, pledged to oppose the territorial changes taking place in Italy unless they were approved by a new international congress, and gave his cautious backing to the Austrians in Italy (there was no chance of the Russians actually fighting to keep the Habsburgs in Venetia, the only part of the peninsula, along with the papal city of Rome, that had not yet been unified under the control of the first Italian parliament, which met at Turin in 1861). When Victor Emmanuel took the title of King of Italy, in March 1861, the Russians and the Austrians agreed together to refuse him recognition, despite pressure from the British and French. When the British asked Gorchakov to use his influence on the Prussians to recognize the King, the Russian Foreign Minister refused. The Holy Alliance was not quite dead, it seemed. Justifying his refusal to cooperate with Britain’s plans for Italy, Gorchakov maintained that Austria and Turkey might be undermined by revolutionary movements if the powers left unchecked the nationalist uprisings started by the Piedmontese. With tongue in cheek, perhaps, given how the British had justified their actions in the Crimean War, Gorchakov informed Lord Napier, the British ambassador in St Petersburg: ‘We have two cardinal objects: the preservation of Turkey and the preservation of Austria.’³³

The Polish uprising of 1863 was the final breaking point for Russia’s policy of friendship towards France. Inspired by Garibaldi, Polish students began demonstrations in 1861, prompting General Lambert, the Tsar’s viceroy, to impose martial law. The Polish leaders gathered secretly, some supporting the idea of a popular democratic revolution uniting peasants and workers, others, led by Czartoryski, more conservative, seeking to establish a national movement led by nobles and intellectuals. The uprising began as a spontaneous protest against conscription into the Russian army. Small groups of insurgents fought the mighty Russian army from guerrilla strongholds mainly in the forests of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and western (Catholic) Ukraine. Some of them had fought against the Russians during the Crimean War, including many of the ‘Zouaves of Death’, organized by François Rochebrune, who had served as an officer with the French Zouaves in the Crimea and had taken part in the Anglo-French expedition to China in the Second Opium War of 1857 before settling in Cracow in Austrian Poland, where he set up a fencing school. Dressed in a black uniform with a white cross and a red fez, and many of them armed with Minié rifles from the Crimean War, the Polish Zouaves swore to die rather than surrender to the Russians.

A clandestine revolutionary government was established in Warsaw. It declared ‘all sons of Poland free and equal citizens’, gave the peasants ownership of land, and appealed for help to the nations of Europe. Pope Pius IX ordered special prayers for the victory of Catholic Poland against Orthodox Russia, and was active in arousing sympathy for the Polish rebels in Italy and France. Napoleon wanted to land troops in the Baltic to support the Poles, but was held back by the British, who feared a renewal of the Crimean War. In the end, the competing French invasion of Mexico prevented troops from being sent. The diplomatic intervention of the Western powers on behalf of Poland angered the Russians, who felt betrayed by the French, in particular. It made the Russians even more determined to crush the Polish insurrectionaries. The Russian army burned whole towns and villages. Tens of thousands of Polish men and women were exiled to Siberia, and hundreds of insurgents were publicly hanged.

Alarmed by the consequences of their pro-French policies, the Russians moved away from France in the wake of the Polish uprising and returned to their old alliance with Prussia, another ruler of annexed Polish territory and the only power that had supported them against the Poles (a military convention had allowed the Russians to transport troops on Prussian trains). To Alexander, who had always had his doubts about the liberal French, Prussia seemed a more reliably conservative ally, and a counterbalance to the growing influence and power of the French on the Continent. The Russians gave considerable backing to Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Prime Minister, whose conservatism had been noted by the Tsar during his period as ambassador in St Petersburg between 1859 and 1862. Bismarck himself placed a high priority on his good relations with Russia, which consistently supported Prussia in its wars against Denmark (in 1864), Austria (in 1866) and France (in 1870). With the defeat of France and the support of a grateful Germany, united by Bismarck, in 1871 Russia finally succeeded in getting the removal of Article XI of the Paris Treaty, allowing it to recommission its Black Sea Fleet. Events moved so rapidly in the fifteen years since the treaty that the international landscape was almost unrecognizable: with Napoleon III in exile in England following his removal by the forces of the Third Republic, Austria and France reduced in power and prestige, and the establishment of Germany and Italy as new states, the issues and passions of the Crimean War rapidly receded into the distance.

Russia did not lose a lot in terms of territory but it was humbled by the Paris Treaty. Apart from the loss of its Black Sea Fleet and Bessarabia, it lost prestige in the Balkans and forfeited the gains that it had made in the Eastern Question since the eighteenth century. Russia did not recover the dominant position it had held in Europe until after 1945.

The demilitarization of the Black Sea was a major strategic blow to Russia, which was no longer able to protect its vulnerable southern coastal frontier against the British or any other fleet, should the Sultan call on them in the event of war. The destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and other naval docks was a humiliation. No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a great power previously. Not even France had been disarmed after the Napoleonic Wars. The way Russia had been treated was unprecedented for the Concert of Europe, which was supposed to honour the principle that no great power should be humbled by others. But the allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power in Russia. They regarded Russia as a semi-Asiatic state. During the negotiations at the Paris congress, Walewski had asked the British delegates whether it would not be too humiliating for the Russians if the Western powers installed consuls in their Black Sea ports to police the demobilization. Cowley insisted that it would not, pointing out that a similar condition had been imposed on China by the Treaty of Nanking after the First Opium War.³⁴

In Russia itself, the Crimean defeat discredited the armed services and highlighted the need to modernize the country’s defences, not just in the strictly military sense, but also through the building of railways, industrialization, sound finances and so on. The Ministry of War lost the favoured position it had held in the government system of Nicholas I and became overshadowed by the ministries of Finance and the Interior, although unavoidably it continued to receive the lion’s share of state expenditure.

The image many Russians had built up of their country – the biggest, richest and most powerful in the world – had suddenly been shattered. Russia’s backwardness had been exposed. Calls for reform were heard from every quarter of society. Everything was open to question. The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia – not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and the navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways that accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who had made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state at war against the industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself. Critics focused on Nicholas I, whose arrogant and wilful policies had led the country to ruin and sacrificed so many lives. ‘Public opinion is now very scornful of the memory of Nicholas,’ Tiutcheva noted in her diary.

Even in the governing élite the bankruptcy of the Nicholaevan system was recognized. ‘My God, so many victims,’ wrote the tsarist censor Alexander Nikitenko in his diary. ‘All at the behest of a mad will, drunk with absolute power and arrogance…. We have been waging war not for two years, but for thirty, maintaining an army of a million men and constantly threatening Europe. What was the point of it all? What profit, what glory has Russia reaped from this?’ A few years earlier, Nikitenko reflected, the pan-Slav nationalists in Moscow had been preaching that the West was in decline, that a new Slavic civilization under Russian leadership would take its place. ‘And now Europe has proved to us in our ignorance and apathy, our arrogant contempt for her civilization, just how decayed Russia really is! Oh what wretches we are!’³⁵

One of the voices calling for reform belonged to Tolstoy, whose Sevastopol Sketches had catapulted him to literary fame. Tolstoy’s experience of the Crimean War shaped his ideas on life and literature. He had witnessed at first hand the incompetence and corruption of many officers, and their often brutal treatment of the ordinary soldiers and sailors, whose courage and resilience had inspired him. It was in his diary of the campaign that he first developed his ideas for radical reform and vowed to fight injustice with his pen. On his way from Odessa to Sevastopol in November 1854, he was told by the pilot of his boat about the transport of the soldiers: ‘how a soldier lay down in the pouring rain on the wet bottom of the boat and fell asleep; how an officer beat a soldier for scratching himself; and how a soldier shot himself during the crossing for fear of having overstayed his leave by two days and how he was thrown overboard without burial.’ The contrast with the way he thought the ordinary soldier was treated in the Western armies brought home the need for change. ‘I spent a couple of hours chatting with French and English wounded,’ Tolstoy noted in his diary at Eski-Orda near Simferopol the same month.

It is doubtful whether many private soldiers in the French or British army had strong ideas about the arts. As with so much Russian admiration of ‘the West’, there was a good deal of naivety in Tolstoy’s assessment, but such ideals gave energy to his reformist zeal.

On the death of Nicholas I, Tolstoy drafted ‘A Plan for the Reform of the Army’ and presented it to Count Osten-Sacken, the commander of the Sevastopol garrison, in the hope that he would forward it to the new Tsar Alexander, who was said to favour more humane policies.

On the strength of this rumour, Tolstoy opened his proposal with a bold declaration of principle that was true in part yet hardly a fair comment on the brave defenders of Sevastopol:

Tolstoy strongly condemned the harsh treatment of the serf soldiers. In an early version of his proposals he even went so far as to maintain that in ‘every beaten soldier’ there was a buried ‘feeling of revenge’ that was ‘too suppressed to appear yet as a real force’ but was waiting to erupt (‘and Oh Lord what horrors lie in wait for our society if that should occur’). He later cut this inflammatory sentence, on the calculation that it would scotch his reform ideas in government circles. Tolstoy called for an end to corporal punishment in the army, blaming Russia’s poor performance in the Crimean War on the brutalization of the troops. He advanced plans for the reform of the artillery, which had been shown to be so ineffective against the Minié rifles. Putting forward his ideas about how to improve the command, he delivered a devastating critique of the officers in the Crimea, denouncing them as cruel and corrupt, concerned mainly with the minutiae of the soldiers’ uniforms and drill, and serving in the army only because they were unfit for anything else. But once again he cut out a fiery passage – in which he had claimed that the senior commanders were courtiers, selected because the Tsar liked them and not for their competence – on the grounds that it would lessen his chances of getting a hearing for his plans. It was already being rumoured that he was the anonymous author of a satirical army song in which the defeats in the Crimea were blamed on the incompetence of the officers with the biggest epaulettes. The ballad circulated widely in the army and society, earning Tolstoy, as its suspected author, a reprimand from the Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, the Tsar’s brother, who accused the verses of destroying the morale of the soldiers.[57] Though Tolstoy’s authorship was never established, he was denied promotion beyond second lieutenant, a rank he had obtained before his arrival in Sevastopol.³⁷

Tolstoy’s experience in the Crimean War had led him to question more than just the military system. The poet Afanasy Fet, who first met Tolstoy in Turgenev’s St Petersburg apartment in the winter of 1855, was struck by the young man’s ‘automatic opposition to all generally accepted opinions’. Living side by side with the ordinary soldiers in the Crimea had opened Tolstoy’s eyes to the simple virtues of the peasantry; it had set him on a restless search for a new truth, for a way to live morally as a Russian nobleman and landowner, given the injustices of serfdom. He had touched on these matters before. In A Landowner’s Morning (1852), he wrote about a landowner (for which read: Tolstoy) who seeks a life of happiness and justice in the country and learns that it can only be found in constant labour for the good of others less happy than himself. At around the same time, he had proposed to reduce the dues of the serfs on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, but the serfs were suspicious of his intentions (they were not accustomed to such benevolence) and had turned his offer down. But it was only in the Crimea that Tolstoy began to feel a close attachment to the serfs in uniform – those ‘simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war’. He was disgusted with his former life – the gambling, the whoring, the excessive feasting and drinking, the embarrassment of riches, and the lack of any real work or purpose in his life. And after the war, he threw himself into the task of living with the peasants in ‘a life of truth’ with new determination.³⁸

By the time of Tolstoy’s return, there was a new reformist spirit in the air. Among the more liberal and enlightened noblemen it was generally accepted that the time had come to liberate their serfs. In the words of Sergei Volkonsky, the famous Decembrist and one of Tolstoy’s distant relatives, who was released from his Siberian exile in 1856, the abolition of serfdom was ‘the least the state could do to recognize the sacrifice the peasantry has made in the last two wars: it is time to recognize that the Russian peasant is a citizen as well’. The peasant soldiers who had fought in the Crimea had been led to expect their freedom. In the spring of 1854 thousands of peasants had turned up at the recuiting stations after hearing rumours that freedom had been promised by the Tsar to any serf who volunteered for the army or navy, and there had been clashes with the soldiers and police when they were turned away. Expectations of emancipation mounted after the Crimean War. In the first six years of Alexander’s reign there were 500 peasant uprisings and strikes against the gentry on the land.³⁹

The new Tsar believed that the liberation of the serfs was a necessary measure to prevent a revolution. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it begins to abolish itself from below,’ he told a group of Moscow noblemen in 1856. The defeat in the Crimean War had persuaded Alexander that Russia could not compete with the Western powers until it swept aside its old serf economy and modernized itself. The gentry had very little idea how to make a profit from their estates. Most of them knew next to nothing about agriculture or accounting. Yet they went on spending in the same old lavish way as they had always done, mounting up enormous debts. By 1859 one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and noble banks. The economic argument for emancipation was becoming irrefutable, and many landowners were shifting willy-nilly to the free labour system by contracting other people’s serfs. Since the peasantry’s redemption payments would cancel out the gentry’s debts, the economic rationale was becoming irresistible.[58]

In 1858 the Tsar appointed a special commission to formulate proposals for the emancipation in consultation with provincial gentry committees. Under pressure from diehard squires to limit the reform or to fix the rules for the land transfers in their favour, the commission became bogged down in political wrangling for the best part of two years. In the end, the reactionary gentry were defeated and the moderate reformists got their way, thanks in no small measure to the personal intervention of the Tsar. The Edict of Emancipation was signed by Alexander on 19 February 1861 and read to the peasants by their parish priests. It was not as far-reaching as the peasantry had expected. The Edict allowed the landowners considerable leeway in choosing the bits of land for transfer to the peasantry, and in setting the redemption dues the peasant communes would have to pay for them, whereas the peasants had expected to be given all the land without payment.[59] There were rebellions in many areas, sometimes after rumours circulated that the published law was not the one the Tsar had meant to sign but a forgery by nobles and officials who wanted to prevent the real emancipation, the long-awaited ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land.

Despite the disappointment of the peasantry, the emancipation was a crucial watershed. Freedom of a sort, however limited it may have been in practice, had at last been granted to the mass of the people, and there were grounds to hope for a national rebirth. Writers compared the Edict to the conversion of Russia to Christianity in the tenth century. They spoke about the need for Young Russia to liberate itself from the sins of its past, whose riches had been purchased by the people’s sweat and blood, about the need for the landlord and the peasant to overcome their old divisions and become reconciled by nationality. For, as Fedor Dostoevsky wrote in 1861, ‘every Russian is a Russian first of all’.⁴⁰

Along with the emancipation of the serfs, the defeat in the Crimean War accelerated the Tsar’s plans for a reform of the army. Tolstoy was not the only officer to advance proposals for reform during the Crimean War. In the summer of 1855, Count Fedor Ridiger, commander of the Guards and Grenadiers, endorsed many of Tolstoy’s criticisms of the officers corps in a memorandum to the Tsar. Blaming Russia’s imminent defeat on the gross incompetence of the senior command and the army’s administration, Ridiger advised that officers should be trained in military science rather than in parades and reviews, and that those with talent should be given wider scope to take responsibility on the battlefield. Shortly afterwards, similar ideas were put forward by another high-ranking member of the military establishment, Adjutant General V. A. Glinka, who also criticized the army’s system of supply. Proposals were advanced for the building of railways, the lack of which, it was agreed by everyone, had been a major reason for the supply problems of the military during the Crimean War.⁴¹

The Tsar set up a ‘Commission for the Improvement of the Military Sphere’ under General Ridiger, but then began to waver over implementing its proposed reforms, with which he clearly sympathized, although plans for a network of railways to link Moscow and St Petersburg with the major centres of agriculture and the border areas were approved by the Tsar as early as January 1857. Alexander was afraid of a possible reaction by the aristocracy at a time when he needed its support for the emancipation of the serfs. He put in charge of the War Ministry a man well known for his loyalty and military incompetence, General Nikolai Sukhozanet, who oversaw a period of tinkering reforms, mostly minor statutes altering the appearance of the Guards’ uniforms, but including two initiatives that were to have more significance: a revision of the Military Criminal Statute to reduce the maximum number of lashes permissible as corporal punishment from 6,000 to 1,500 (a figure still quite adequate to kill any soldier); and measures to improve the education and military training of the peasant soldiers, who were nearly all illiterate and unfit for modern war, as the Crimean War had clearly shown.

One of the results of these attempts to improve the army’s education was the creation of a new journal, Voennyi sbornik (Military Miscellany). Its aim was to appeal to officers and soldiers by presenting them with lively articles about military science and affairs, stories, poems and articles about society written in a liberal spirit of reform. Exempted from military censorship, it was similar in conception to the ‘Military Gazette’ which Tolstoy had proposed in 1854. Its literary section was edited by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, editor of the hugely influential democratic journal the Contemporary, in which Tolstoy’s own works had appeared. Chernyshevsky was himself the author of the novel What Is to Be Done? (1862) which would inspire several generations of revolutionaries, including Lenin. By the 1860s, Voennyi sbornik was rivalling the sales of the Contemporary, with more than 5,000 subscribers, demonstrating that ideas of reform had a receptive audience in the Russian army after the Crimean War.

The idea of setting up Voennyi sbornik had come from Dmitry Miliutin, the main driving force behind the military reforms after the Crimean War. A professor at the Military Academy, where he had taught since being gravely wounded in the campaign against Shamil in the Caucasus in 1838, Miliutin was a brilliant military analyst who quickly took on board the lessons of the defeat in the Crimea: the need to reform and modernize the military on the model of the Western forces that had so roundly beaten Russia’s backward serf army. He soon had a chance to apply these lessons to the Tsar’s ongoing struggles in the Caucasus.

In 1856 the Tsar had appointed his long-time confidant Prince A. I. Bariatinsky as viceroy of the Caucasus, with extraordinary powers to finish off the war against Shamil. Bariatinsky was an advocate of expanding Russia’s influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia as an antidote to the curtailment of her influence in Europe after the Crimean War. Alexander was persuaded by his arguments. Even before the Paris Treaty was announced, the Tsar announced his intention to step up the campaign against the Muslim rebels in the Caucasus. He exempted units in the Caucasus from the general military demobilization, mobilized new regiments, and ordered a consignment of 10,000 Minié rifles purchased from abroad to be sent to Bariatinsky, who by the end of 1857 had overall control of more than one-sixth of the military budget and 300,000 men. Bariatinsky brought in Miliutin as his chief of staff to introduce the military reforms which he saw were needed in the Caucasus: if they were successful there, they would reinforce the arguments for the reform of the Russian army as a whole. Drawing on Western military thinking as well as the proposals of General Ridiger, Miliutin proposed to rationalize the chain of command, giving more initiative and control of resources to local commanders to exercise their judgement in response to local conditions, an idea predicated on a general improvement in the training of officers.⁴²

The end of the Crimean War had left Shamil’s movement completely demoralized. Without the intervention of the Western powers and little real assistance from the Ottomans, the guerrilla movement of the Muslim tribes came to the end of its ability to continue fighting the Russians. The Chechens were exhausted by the war, which had lasted forty years, and delegations from all over Chechnya were appealing to Shamil to make peace with the Russians. Shamil wanted to fight on. But against the massive surge of military forces deployed by Bariatinsky he was unable to hold out for long and he finally surrendered to the Russians on 25 August 1859.[60]

On the basis of the army’s triumph in the Caucasus, in November 1861 Miliutin was appointed Minister of War on Bariatinsky’s recommendation to the Tsar. Once the Edict of Emancipation had been passed, Alexander felt the time had at last come to push through the military reforms. The legislative package presented by Miliutin to the Tsar built upon his earlier plans. The most important piece of legislation (passed only in 1874) was the introduction of universal conscription, with military service declared compulsory for all males at the age of 20. Organized through a territorial system of military districts for the maintenance of a peacetime standing army, the new Russian system was similar to the modern conscript armies of other European states, although in tsarist Russia, where government finances were inadequate and class, religious and ethnic hierarchies continued to be felt in the application of every policy, the universal principle was never fully realized. The main emphasis of Miliutin’s legislation was on military efficiency but humanitarian concerns were never far behind in his reform. His fundamental mission was to reshape the army’s culture so that it related to the peasant soldier as a citizen and no longer as a serf. The army schools were modernized, with greater emphasis on the teaching of military science and technology. Elementary schooling was made compulsory for all recruits, so that the army became an important means of education for the peasantry. The military justice system was reformed and corporal punishment was abolished, in theory at least, for in practice the Russian soldier continued to be punished physically and sometimes even flogged for relatively minor infringements of discipline. The army’s culture of serfdom continued to be felt by the common soldier until 1917.

The Crimean War reinforced in Russia a long-felt sense of resentment against Europe. There was a feeling of betrayal that the West had sided with the Turks against Russia. It was the first time in history that a European alliance had fought on the side of a Muslim power against another Christian state in a major war.

No one resented Europe more than Dostoevsky. At the time of the Crimean War, he was serving as a soldier in the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Central Asia following his release from a Siberian prison camp, to which he had been exiled for his involvement in the left-wing Petrashevsky circle in 1849. In the only published verse he ever wrote (and the poetic qualities of ‘On the European Events of 1854’ are such that one can see why this was so), Dostoevsky portrayed the Crimean War as the ‘crucifixion of the Russian Christ’. But, as he warned the Western readers of his poem, Russia would arise and, when she did so, she would turn towards the East in her providential mission to Christianize the world.

Having been defeated by the West, Russia turned towards Asia in its imperial plans. For Bariatinsky and the War Ministry, the defeat of Shamil in the Caucasus was to serve as a springboard for the Russian conquest of the independent khanates of Central Asia. Gorchakov and the Foreign Ministry were not so sure, fearing that an expansionist policy would set back their attempts to mend relations with the British and the French. Caught at first between these opposing policies, in 1856–7 the Tsar moved towards the view that Russia’s destiny lay in Asia and that only Britain stood in the way of its fulfilment. Deeply influenced by the climate of mutual suspicion between Russia and Britain after the Crimean War, it was a viewpoint that would define Russia’s policies in the Great Game, its imperial rivalry with Britain for supremacy in Central Asia.

The Tsar was concerned by the growing presence of the British in Persia following their victory in the Anglo-Persian War of 1856–7. By the Paris Treaty of March 1857, the Persians withdrew from Herat, the north-western Afghan city they had occupied with Russian backing in 1852 and 1856. From his correspondence with Bariatinsky, it is clear that Alexander was afraid that the British would use their influence in Tehran to install themselves on the southern shores of the Caspian. He shared Bariatinsky’s gloomy prediction that ‘the appearance of the British flag on the Caspian would be a fatal blow not only to our influence in the East, not only to our foreign trade, but also to the political independence of the [Russian] Empire’.

Alexander commissioned a report from Sukhozanet, ‘On the Possibility of an Armed Clash between Russia and England in Central Asia’. Although the report rejected the idea of a British military threat, the Tsar persisted in his fear that the British might deploy their Indian army to conquer Central Asia and expel the Russians from the Caucasus. In the spring of 1857 the British steamer Kangaroo and several smaller vessels carrying military supplies for Shamil’s forces had been caught on the Circassian coast. Russia no longer had a Black Sea Fleet to block such acts of intervention into its affairs by the British. Alexander demanded ‘categorical explanations’ from the British government, but received none. The ‘unmentionable infamy’, as he called the Kangaroo affair, reinforced the Tsar’s belief that Russia would not be secure against the British threat as long as the Caucasus remained unconquered and the Central Asian steppe beyond her political control.

Throughout the Crimean War the Russians had considered various ideas for an attack through Central Asia towards Kandahar and India, mainly as a means of diverting British troops from the Crimea. Although these plans were all rejected as impracticable, rumours of a Russian invasion were widely circulated and believed in India, where inflammatory pamphlets called on Muslims and Hindus to take advantage of the exhaustion of the British in the Crimea to rise up against their rule. The outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in the early summer of 1857 encouraged the Tsar to reconsider his Central Asia plans. The Royal Navy could threaten Russia’s coastline in the Baltic, in the Pacific Ocean and in the Black Sea, which was now defenceless as a result of the demilitarization imposed on the Russians by the Paris Treaty. The only place where the Russians could even pretend to mount a counter-threat was in India. The British were extremely sensitive to any threat against their Indian empire, mainly because of their fragile tax-base there, which they dared not increase for political reasons. Few Russians strategists believed in the reality of a campaign against India, but exploiting British nervousness was good tactics.

In the autumn of 1857 the Tsar commissioned a strategic memorandum on Central Asia by a brilliant young military attaché, Nikolai Ignat′ev, who had been brought to his attention after he had represented Russia on the question of its disputed border with Moldavia at the Paris congress. Considering the possibility of a renewed war against Britain, Ignat′ev argued that the only place where Russia stood a chance of victory was in Asia. Russia’s strength in Central Asia was the ‘best guarantee of peace’, so Russia should exploit the Indian crisis to strengthen its position at the expense of Britain in ‘the countries which separate Russia from the British possessions’. Ignat′ev proposed sending expeditions to explore and map the ‘undiscovered’ steppe of Central Asia for the benefit of Russian trade and military intelligence. By developing commercial and diplomatic ties with the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, Russia could turn them into buffer states against British expansion. Giving his approval to the plan, the Tsar sent an exploratory party to Khiva and Bukhara under the leadership of Ignat′ev which concluded economic treaties with the two khanates in the summer of 1858. Officially, the mission had been sent by the Foreign Ministry, but unofficially it was also working for the War Ministry, collecting topographical, statistical and ‘general military information’ on various routes into Central Asia. From the start of the Russian initiative there was a more forward policy, favoured by the followers of Bariatinsky in the War Ministry, to set up protectorates and military bases in the khanates for the conquest of Turkestan and the Central Asian steppe right up to the borders of Afghanistan.⁴⁴

The Russian advance into Central Asia was led by two veterans of the Crimean War. One was Mikhail Cherniaev, who had fought against the Turks on the Danube in 1853 and had distinguished himself for his bravery at Inkerman and Sevastopol, before being transferred to defend Russian colonists against the raids of the Central Asian tribes on the steppes of southern Orenburg. From 1858 Cherniaev began launching his own raids deep into the territory of Turkestan, destroying Kirghiz and other hostile tribal settlements and supporting rebellions against the khanates of Khiva and Kokand by other Central Asian tribes who were willing to declare their allegiance to Russia. Cherniaev’s military initiatives, quietly supported but not endorsed officially by the War Ministry, led by stealth to the Russian annexation of Turkestan. In 1864, Cherniaev led a force of a thousand men across the steppes of Turkestan to occupy the fortress of Chimkent. Joined by a second Russian column from Semipalatinsk, they then seized Tashkent, 130 kilometres to the south, effectively imposing Russian rule on this vital power-base of the Central Asian cotton trade. Cherniaev was awarded the St George Cross and appointed military governor of Turkestan in 1865. After angry diplomatic protests by the British, who were afraid that the Russian troops might continue their advance from Tashkent to India, the Russian government disowned responsibility for the invasion carried out by Cherniaev. The general was forced into retirement in 1866. But unofficially he was received as a hero in Russia. The nationalist press proclaimed him the ‘Ermak of the nineteenth century’.[61]

Meanwhile, the conquest of the Central Asian steppe was carried on by General Kaufman, a second veteran of the Crimean War, who had led the sappers at the siege of Kars before becoming Miliutin’s chief of engineers at the War Ministry. Kaufman replaced Cherniaev as the military governor of Turkestan. In 1868 he completed the conquest of Samarkand and Bukhara. Five years later Khiva also fell to the Russians, followed by Kokand in 1876. Left in the hands of their respective khans as far as their internal government was concerned, but subject to the control of the Russians in their foreign relations, Bukhara and Khiva became essentially protectorates along the lines of the Princely States of British India.

Cherniaev and Ignat′ev became leading figures in the pan-Slav movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Along with Russia’s turn towards the East, pan-Slavism was the other main reaction by the Russians to their defeat in the Crimean War, as their feelings of resentment against Europe led to an explosion of nationalist sentiment. With censorship relaxed by the liberal reforms of the new Tsar, a new slew of pan-Slav journals forcefully criticized Russia’s foreign policy before the Crimean War. In particular, they attacked the legitimist policies of Nicholas I for having sacrificed the Balkan Christians to Muslim rule in the interests of the Concert of Europe. ‘For the sake of the balance of Europe,’ Pogodin wrote in the first number of the pan-Slav journal Parus in January 1859, ‘ten million Slavs are forced to groan, suffer, and agonize under the yoke of the most savage despotism, the most unbridled fanaticism, and the most desperate ignorance.’⁴⁵ With Gorchakov’s abandonment of these legitimist principles, the pan-Slavs renewed their calls on the government to support the liberation of the Balkan Slavs from Turkish rule. Some went so far as to claim that Russia should protect itself against a hostile West by uniting all the Slavs of Europe under Russian leadership – an idea first put forward by Pogodin during the Crimean War and repeated with even more insistence in his writings afterwards.

As pan-Slav ideas gained influence in Russian intellectual and government circles, there was a proliferation of philanthropic organizations to promote the pan-Slav cause by sending money to the Balkan Slavs for schools and churches, or by bringing students to Russia. The Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee was established in 1858, with separate branches opening in St Petersburg and Kiev in the 1860s. Funded by private benefactors and the Ministry of Education, it brought together officials and miltary men (many of them veterans of the Crimean War who had fought in the Balkans) with academics and writers (including Dostoevsky and Tiutchev, who both belonged to the St Petersburg Committee).

During the first post-war years the pan-Slavs were cautious not to discuss openly their more radical ideas of Slavic political unification, nor to criticize too severely the foreign policy of the government (the views expressed by Pogodin led to Parus being banned). But by the early 1860s, when Ignat′ev emerged as a pan-Slav supporter and became a leading figure in the government, they became more vocal in their views. Ignat′ev’s growing influence in foreign affairs was based largely on his highly successful negotiation of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, in November 1860, which gave Russia possession of the Amur and Ussuri regions as well as Vladivostok in the Far East. In 1861 Ignat′ev became Director of the Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry, the office responsible for Russia’s policy in the Balkans. Three years later he was appointed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople – a post he held until the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. Throughout these years Ignat′ev pushed for a military solution to the Eastern Question in the Balkans: Russian-sponsored Slav uprisings against Turkish rule and the intervention of the tsarist army, leading to the liberation of the Slavs and the creation of a Slavic Union under Russian leadership.

Pan-Slav ambitions for the Balkans focused first on Serbia, where the restoration of the Europeanized but autocratic Prince Mihailo to the throne in 1860 was seen as a victory for Russian influence and yet another defeat for the Austrians. Gorchakov supported the Serb movement for liberation from the Turks, fearing otherwise that, if they gained independence on their own, the Serbs would fall under Austrian or Western influence. Writing to the Russian consul in Bucharest, the Foreign Minister underlined that ‘our policy in the East is directed mainly toward strengthening Serbia materially and morally and giving her the opportunity to stand at the head of the movement in the Balkans’. Ignat’ev went further, advocating an immediate solution to the Eastern Question by military means. Taking up a proposal by Mihailo, he urged the Russian government to support the Serbs in a war against the Turks and help them form a confederation with the Bulgarians, to which Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro could be joined.

Under pan-Slav pressure, the Russian Foreign Ministry increased its support for the Serb movement. After a Turkish bombardment of Belgrade in 1862, the Russians called a special conference of the signatories of the Paris Treaty at Kanlidze near Constantinople and eventually succeeded in getting the removal of the final Turkish garrisons from Serbia in 1867. It was their first major diplomatic victory since the end of the Crimean War. Encouraged by their success, the Russians gave their backing to the Serbian attempt to create a Balkan League. Serbia formed a military alliance with Montenegro and Greece and a pact of friendship with the Romanian leadership, and established closer ties with Croatian and Bulgarian nationalists. The Russians subsidized the Serb army, though a mission sent by Miliutin to inspect it found it in a chronic state. Then in the autumn of 1867 Prince Mihailo backed away from war against the Turks, prompting Russia to suspend its war credits. The assassination of Mihailo the following June confirmed the end of Russian-Serb cooperation and the collapse of the Balkan League.⁴⁶

The next seven years were a period of relative calm in the Balkans. The imperial monarchies of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany (the Three Emperors’ League of 1873) guaranteed the preservation of the status quo in the Balkans. Official Russian policy in these years was based on a firm commitment to the European balance of power, and on that basis Gorchakov secured a major diplomatic victory with the annulment of the Paris Treaty’s Black Sea clauses at a conference of the European powers in London in 1871. But unofficially the policy of Russia remained the encouragement of the pan-Slav movement in the Balkans – a policy coordinated by Ignat′ev from the Russian embassy in Constantinople through its consulates in the Balkan capitals. In his memoirs, written at the end of his long life in the 1900s, Ignat′ev explained that his aim in the Balkans in the 1860s and 1870s had been to destroy the Treaty of Paris, to recover southern Bessarabia, and to control the Turkish Straits, either directly through military conquest or indirectly through a treaty with a dependent Turkey, of the kind Russia had enjoyed before the Crimean War. ‘All my activities in Turkey and among the Slavs’, he wrote, ‘were inspired by… the view that Russia alone could rule in the Balkan peninsula and Black Sea… Austria-Hungary’s expansion would be halted and the Balkan peoples, especially the Slavs, would direct their gaze exclusively to Russia and make their future dependent on her.’⁴⁷

In the summer of 1875 revolts by Christians against Turkish rule in Herzegovina spread north into Bosnia, and then into Montenegro and Bulgaria. The revolts had been sparked by a sharp increase in taxes levied by the Turkish government on the Christian peasants after harvest failures had left the Porte in a financial crisis. But they soon took on the character of a religious war. The leaders of the uprisings looked to Serbia and Russia for support. Encouraged by Ignat′ev, Serbian nationalists in Belgrade called on their government to send in troops to defend the Slavs against the Turks and unite them in a Greater Serbia.

In Bulgaria, the rebels were badly armed and organized, but their hatred of the Turks was intense. In the spring of 1876 the revolt spilled over into massacres against the Muslim population, which had increased massively since the Crimean War as a result of the immigration of about half a million Crimean Tatars and Circassians fleeing from the Russians to Bulgaria. Tensions with the Christians were intensified when the newcomers reverted to a semi-nomadic way of life, launching raids on the Christian settlements and stealing livestock in a way not experienced before by the peasants in the area. Lacking enough regular troops to quell the Bulgarians, the Ottoman authorities used the Bashi Bazouks, irregulars mostly drawn from the local Muslim population, who brutally suppressed their Christian neighbours, massacring around 12,000 people in the process. In the mountain village of Batak, where a thousand Christians had taken refuge in a church, the Bashi Bazouks set fire to the building, burning to death all but one old woman, who survived to tell the tale.⁴⁸

News of the Bulgarian atrocities spread throughout the world. The British press claimed that ‘tens of thousands’ of defenceless Christian villagers had been slaughtered by ‘fanatical Muslims’. British attitudes to Turkey changed dramatically. The old policy of promoting the Tanzimat reforms in the belief that the Turks were willing pupils of English liberal governance was seriously questioned, and for many Christians completely undermined, by the Bulgarian massacres. Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal opposition whose views on foreign policy were closely linked to his High Church Anglican moral principles, took the lead in a popular campaign for British intervention to protect the Balkan Christians against Turkish violence. Gladstone had only cautiously supported the Crimean War. He was hostile to the presence of the Turks in Europe on religious grounds, and had long wanted to use British influence to secure more autonomy for the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In 1856 he had even advanced the idea of a new Greek empire in the Balkans to protect the Christians, not just against the Muslims of Turkey, but against the Russians and the Pope.⁴⁹

The strongest reaction to the Bulgarian atrocities was in Russia. Sympathy for the Bulgarians engulfed the whole of educated society in a surge of patriotic feeling, intensified by a national desire for revenge against the Turks after the Crimean War. Calls for intervention to protect the Bulgarians were heard from all quarters: from Slavophiles, such as Dostoevsky, who saw in a war for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs the fulfilment of Russia’s historical destiny to unite the Orthodox; and from Westernizers, such as Turgenev, who thought it was the duty of the liberal world to liberate enslaved Bulgaria. Here was a golden opportunity for the pan-Slavs to realize their dreams.

Officially, the Russian government denounced the Christian revolts in the Balkans. It was on the defensive, having been accused by Western governments of instigating the revolts. But pan-Slav opinion, and in particular the journal Russkii mir (Russian World), owned and edited by Cherniaev, the former military governor of Turkestan, came out in support of the Balkan Christian cause and called on the government to support it. ‘Speak but one word, Russia,’ Russkii mir predicted, ‘and not only the entire Balkans… but all the Slav peoples… will rise in arms against their oppressors. In alliance with her 25 million fellow Orthodox, Russia will strike fear into all of Western Europe.’ Everything depended on the actions of Serbia, the ‘Piedmont of the Balkans’, in the phrase of Cherniaev. The Tsar and Gorchakov warned the Serbian leaders not to intervene in the uprisings, though privately they sympathized with the pan-Slavs (‘Do anything you like provided we do not know anything about it officially,’ Baron Jomini, the acting head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, told a member of the St Petersburg Committee). Encouraged by Ignat’ev and the Russian consul in Belgrade, as well as by the arrival of Cherniaev as a volunteer for the Slav cause in April, the Serb leaders declared war on Turkey in June 1876.⁵⁰

The Serbs were counting on the armed intervention of Russia. Cherniaev was in charge of their main army. Along with his presence, Ignat′ev’s promises had led them to believe that this would be a repetition of the Balkan war of 1853–4, when Nicholas I had sent his army into the Danubian principalities in the expectation – ultimately disappointed – that it would encourage a war of liberation by the Slavs. Public opinion in Russia was increasingly belligerent. The nationalist press called on the army to defend the Christians against the Turks. Pan-Slav groups sent volunteers to fight on their behalf – and about five thousand made their way to Serbia.[62] Subscriptions were organized to send money to the Slavs. Pro-Slav feeling swept across society. People talked about the war as a crusade – a repeat of the war against the Turks in 1854.

By the autumn of 1876 war fever had spread to the Russian court and government circles. Cherniaev’s army faced defeat. Responding to his desperate pleas for help, the Tsar sent an ultimatum to the Porte and mobilized his troops. This was enough to force the Turks to end hostilities against the Serbs, who duly made their peace with them. Abandoning the Serbs, the Russians shifted their support to the Bulgarians and demanded autonomy for them, which the Turks would not accept. With Austria’s neutrality assured through promises of gains in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in April 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey once again.

From the start, the Russian offensive in the Balkans assumed the character of a religious war. It was overwhelmingly redolent of the opening Russo-Turkish phase of the Crimean War. As the Russians crossed the Danube under the command of the Grand Duke Nikolai, they were joined by Slav irregulars, Bulgarians and Serbs, some of them demanding money to fight, but most fighting for their national cause against the Turks. This was the sort of Christian war that Nicholas had wanted when his troops had crossed the Danube in 1853–4. Encouraged by the rising of the Slavs, Alexander considered pushing on to seize Constantinople and impose a Russian settlement on the Balkans. He was urged to do so not only by the pan-Slav press but by his own brother, the Grand Duke Nikolai, who wrote to him after his armies had captured Adrianople, a short march from Constantinople, in January 1878: ‘We must go to the centre, to Tsargrad, and there finish the holy cause you have assumed.’ Pan-Slav hopes were at their height. ‘Constantinople must be ours,’ wrote Dostoevsky, who saw its conquest by the Russian armies as nothing less than God’s own resolution of the Eastern Question and as the fulfilment of Russia’s destiny to liberate Orthodox Christianity.

Alarmed by the advance of the Russian troops to Adrianople, the British ordered their Mediterranean fleet to enter the Dardanelles and agreed in Parliament to raise £6 million for military purposes. It was a repeat of the movements that had led to the Crimean War. Under pressure from the British, the Russians agreed to an armistice with the Ottomans but continued advancing towards Constantinople, halting only under threat from the Royal Navy at San Stefano, a village just outside the Turkish capital, where on 3 March they signed a treaty with the Turks. By the Treaty of San Stefano, the Porte agreed to recognize the full independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as the autonomy of a large Bulgarian state (to include Macedonia and part of Thrace). In exchange for a narrow strip of land to the south of the Danube, Romania ceded back to Russia southern Bessarabia, the territory taken from the Russians by the Treaty of Paris. With the restoration of her Black Sea status completed seven years before, Russia had succeeded in reversing all the losses she had suffered after the Crimean War.

The Treaty of San Stefano was mainly Ignat′ev’s doing. It was the realization of most of his pan-Slav dreams. But it was totally unacceptable to the Western powers, which had not gone to war to stop the Russians bullying the Turks in 1854 only to allow them to do so again twenty-four years afterwards. In Britain, the old warlike feelings against Russia were expressed in ‘jingoism’, a new aggressive mood of can-do foreign policy summed up by the current hit song of pubs and music halls:

Afraid of British intervention and a possible repeat of the Crimean War, the Tsar ordered the Grand Duke to withdraw his troops to the Danube. As they did so they took part in revenge attacks against the Muslims of Bulgaria which were joined and sometimes instigated by Christian volunteers: several hundred thousand Muslims fled Bulgaria for the Ottoman Empire at the end of the Russo-Turkish war.

Determined to halt the extension of Russian power into the Balkans, the great powers met at the Congress of Berlin to revise the Treaty of San Stefano. The main objection of the British and the French was the establishment of a greater Bulgaria, which they viewed as a Russian Trojan horse threatening the Ottoman Empire in Europe. With direct access to the Aegean Sea in Macedonia, this enlarged Bulgarian state could easily be used by the Russians to attack the Turkish Straits. The British forced the Russians to agree to the division of Bulgaria, returning Macedonia and Thrace to direct Ottoman control. A week before the Berlin congress, Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, had concluded a secret alliance with the Ottomans against Russia, whereby Britain was allowed to occupy the strategic island of Cyprus and bring in troops from India. The revelation of this alliance, along with Disraeli’s threats of war, forced the Russians to concede to his demands.

The Congress of Berlin ended Russia’s pan-Slav hopes. Ignat’ev was dismissed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople and went into retirement. Arriving back in London to a hero’s welcome, Disraeli claimed that he had brought back ‘Peace with honour’ from Berlin. He told the House of Commons that the Treaty of Berlin and the Cyprus Convention would protect Britain and its route to India against Russian aggression for years to come. But tensions in the Balkans would remain. In many ways the congress sowed the seeds of the future Balkan wars and the First World War by leaving so many border disputes unresolved. Above all, the fundamental problem of the Eastern Question, the ‘sick man of Europe’, Turkey, remained without a cure. As the British Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Salisbury, acknowledged on his return from Berlin, ‘We shall set up a rickety sort of Turkish rule south of the Balkans once again. But it is a mere respite. There is no vitality left in it.’⁵²

In Jerusalem, where all these international conflicts had begun, the end of the Crimean War was proclaimed on 14 April 1856. A salute from the Castle guns announced that the Pasha had been informed of the peace, and his troops assembled on the public square outside the Jaffa Gate for thanksgiving prayers led by the imam. It was to the same square that they had been summoned in September 1853 to go and fight for their Sultan against Russia.⁵³ History had come full circle in Jerusalem.

Twelve days later, on 26 April, the old religious rivalries began once again. Fights broke out between the Greeks and the Armenians during the ceremony of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For several days before the sacred ceremony, rival groups of pilgrims had smuggled various weapons into the church and concealed them there. Others were supplied with knives and iron spikes thrown from a window near the roof of the St Nicholas Convent. It was not clear how the fighting started, the British consul Finn, who witnessed it, reported three days afterwards, but ‘during the conflict the missiles were also flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps and tearing church pictures representing the most sacred subjects of faith – glass and oil pouring down upon their heads – and silver lamps on silver chains were beaten down and the materials have since vanished’. The Pasha left his place in the gallery and ordered up his guard to separate the fighters. But he was badly hurt by a blow to his head and had to be carried away on his men’s shoulders – the crowd in the church being too thick to allow a passage otherwise – while his secretary was also beaten up. Eventually, a squadron of the Pasha’s soldiers rounded up the rioters, the church attendants cleared up all the mess, and the ceremony of the Holy Fire proceeded as usual, the monks standing guard before the tomb of Christ, the congregation chanting ‘Lord have mercy’, until the patriarch emerged bearing lighted candles, and, as the church bells rang, the pilgrims pressed towards him to light their torches from the miraculous flames.⁵⁴