Everywhere the story was the same. The peasants were convinced that the Tsar Batiushka had issued a decree promising them freedom if they volunteered, and, when told that this was not true, they assumed the decree had been hidden or replaced by his evil officials. It is hard to tell how far their belief was innocent, and how far deliberate, an expression of their hopes for liberation from serfdom. In many places the rumours were confused with older peasant notions of a ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land. One group of peasants, for example, turned up at a recuiting station, having heard that the Tsar was sitting in a ‘golden chamber’ on top of a mountain in the Crimea: ‘he gives freedom to all who come to him, but those who do not come or are too late will remain serfs to their masters as before.’ In other areas the rumours were replaced by stories that the English and the French would liberate the serfs who volunteered to join them in the Crimea, stories which began a flight of peasants to the south. In the peasant mind the south was linked to the idea of land and liberty: since medieval times it was to the steppelands of the south that the serfs had run away from their masters. The traditions of the free Cossacks remained strong among the peasantry of the southern provinces, where the volunteer movement assumed an almost revolutionary character. Bands of peasants marched to the local garrisons, demanding to be enlisted in the army and refusing to work any longer for their landowners. Armed with pikes, knives and clubs, the peasants clashed with soldiers and police.43
With no shortage of volunteers, and all the resources of their empire to draw from, the Russians had an ideal opportunity in these winter months to attack and destroy the weakened allied armies on the frozen heights above Sevastopol. But there was no initiative. The Russian high command had lost authority and self-confidence since the defeat at Inkerman. Without faith in his commanders, the Tsar had become increasingly gloomy and despondent, believing that the war could not be won and perhaps regretting that he had caused it in the first place. Courtiers described him as a broken man, physically ill, exhausted and depressed, who had aged ten years since the beginning of the war.
Perhaps the Tsar was still counting on his trusted ‘Generals January and February’ to defeat the British and the French. As long as they were losing men from cold, disease and hunger on the open heights, he was happy for his commanders to limit their attacks to small nightly sorties against the allies’ forward positions. These sorties caused little damage but added to their exhaustion. ‘Our Tsar won’t let them eat or sleep,’ wrote a Cossack to his family from Sevastopol on 12 January. ‘It’s only a shame they don’t all die so we don’t have to fight them.’44
The Russians had supply problems that prevented them developing a more ambitious strategy. With the allied fleets in control of the sea, the Russians had to bring in all their supplies by horse or oxen-driven peasant carts on snow-bound and muddy roads from south Russia. There were no railways. By the time of the hurricane, the whole of the Crimea was suffering from shortages of hay; the draft animals began to die at an alarming rate. Pirogov saw ‘the swollen bodies of dead oxen at every step along the road’ from Perekop to Sevastopol in the first week of December. By January the Russian army in the Crimea had just 2,000 carts to bring in supplies, one-third the number it had deployed at the start of November. In Sevastopol, rations were drastically reduced. The only meat available was rotten salted beef from the dead oxen. Transferred to Esky-Ord near Simferopol in December, Tolstoy found the soldiers there had no winter coats but plentiful supplies of vodka which they had been given to keep warm. In Sevastopol, the defenders of the bastions were just as cold and hungry as the British and the French in the trenches. Every day through these winter months at least a dozen Russians ran away.45
