Like the French, Pirogov attached great importance to the role of nurses in his hospitals. Nurses helped to sort the wounded and brought comfort to the men. They dispensed medicines, brought them tea or wine, wrote letters to their families, and gave spiritual support to the dying. The affection of the nurses won the hearts of many men, who often likened them to their mothers. ‘It is astonishing’, wrote Pirogov to his wife, ‘how the presence of a woman, nicely dressed, among the helpers in a hospital alleviates the distress of the men and relieves their suffering.’ Pirogov encouraged the initiatives of Russian noblewomen to recruit teams of nurses for the Crimea. The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the Tsar’s German-born sister-in-law,ao founded the Community of the Holy Cross shortly after news of the defeat at Inkerman. Its first group of thirty-four nurses followed Pirogov to the Crimea, arriving in Simferopol on 1 December after a long and difficult journey over a thousand kilometres of dirt roads from St Petersburg. Most of them were the daughters, wives or widows of military men, with some from families of merchants, priests and state officials of the minor nobility, though they themselves of course had no experience of the harsh conditions of a battle zone and many of them soon fell ill with typhus and the other epidemics that raged among the men. Pirogov divided the nurses into three groups: those who were to attend to the wounded and help in operations; those who dispensed medicines; and those in charge of the general housekeeping in the hospital. For Alexandra Stakhovich, who was assigned to the operating room, the first amputation was a personal trial, but she got through it, as she wrote to tell her family:
I was at two operations by Pirogov; we amputated an arm in one, and a leg in another; and by the grace of God I did not pass out, because in the first, where we cut off his arm, I had to hold the poor man’s back and then dress his wound. Of my boldness I am writing only so that you are reassured that I am not afraid of anything. If only you knew how gratifying it can be to help these suffering men – you cannot imagine how much the doctors appreciate our presence here.26
In the Crimea itself, women from various communities had organized themselves into teams of nurses and made their way to the dressing stations and field hospitals of the battlefields around Sevastopol. Among them was Dasha Sevastopolskaia, the girl who had cared for the wounded at the Alma, who worked with Pirogov in the operating theatre at the Assembly of Nobles. Another was Elizaveta Khlopotina, the wife of a battery commander wounded in the head at the Alma, who had followed her husband into battle and worked as a nurse in the dressing station at Kacha. Pirogov was full of admiration for the courage of these women, and battled hard against the objections of the military establishment, which was opposed to a female presence among the troops, for more teams of nurses to be organized. The influence of the Grand Duchess eventually told, and the Tsar agreed to recognize the work of the Community of the Holy Cross. Much of its early medical work in the Crimea was financed by the Grand Duchess, who had purchased medical supplies, including precious quinine, through family contacts in England and stored them in the basement of her home in the Mikhailovsky Palace in St Petersburg. But once it had the blessing of the Tsar, donations poured in from the Russian aristocracy, merchants, state officials and the Church. In January two more contingents of nurses organized by the Community arrived in Sevastopol, the second of them led by Ekaterina Bakunina, the daughter of the governor of St Petersburg and a cousin of the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (at that time imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in the Russian capital). Like many of the Russian upper class, she had spent her childhood summers in the Crimea, and was horrified by the invasion of her favourite holiday resort. ‘I could not imagine that this beautiful little corner of our great empire could be turned into a brutal theatre of war.’27
