The war generated varied responses throughout Russian society. The invasion of the Crimea caused outrage in educated circles, which rallied round the patriotic memory of 1812. Ironically, however, most of the public anger seemed to be focused on the English rather than the French, who, as a result of the Russian victory against Napoleon, were treated ‘as a people too insignificant and helpless to merit any other sentiment but that of the most profound pity and compassion’, according to our unknown Englishwoman in St Petersburg. Anglophobia had a long tradition in Russia. ‘Perfidious Albion’ was blamed for everything in some circles of high society. ‘To hear them talk one would imagine that all the evils existing in the world are to be ascribed to British influence,’ the Englishwoman wrote. In the salons of St Petersburg it was a commonplace that England had been the aggressor responsible for the war, and that English money was at the root of the trouble. Some said the English had made war to gain possession of the Russian gold mines in Siberia; others that they wanted to expand their empire to the Caucasus and the Crimea. They all saw Palmerston as the prime mover of British policy and as the author of their misfortunes. Over much of the European continent, Palmerston was hated as a symbol of the bullying and dishonest British, who preached free trade and liberty as a means of advancing their own economic and imperial interests in the world. But the Russians had a special reason to despise the statesman who had spearheaded Europe’s anti-Russian policy. According to the Englishwoman in St Petersburg, the names of Palmerston and Napier, the admiral in charge of the campaign in the Baltic, ‘inspired the lower classes with so great a terror’ that women would frighten their children off to bed by saying ‘that the English Admiral was coming!’
And among the common men, after exhausting all the opprobious terms they could think of (and the Russian language is singularly rich in that respect), one would turn to the other and say, ‘You are an English dog!’ Then followed a few more civilities, which they would finish by calling each other, ‘Palmerston!’, without having the remotest idea of what the word meant; but at the very climax of hatred and revenge, they would bawl out ‘Napier!’, as if he were fifty times worse than Satan himself.
A poem widely circulated among Russian officers caught the patriotic mood:
And so in bellicose ardour
Commander Palmerston
Defeats Russia on the map
With his index finger.
Roused by his valour,
The Frenchman, too, following fast behind,
Brandishes his uncle’s sword
And cries:
The pan-Slavs and Slavophiles were the most enthusiastic supporters of the war. They had hailed the Russian invasion of the Balkans as the start of a religious war for the liberation of the Slavs, and were disappointed when the Tsar had ordered the retreat from the Danube, many of them urging him to go to war against the whole of Europe on his own. Pogodin, the editor of the Moscow journal
