The Crimean War полностью

The Tsar’s death was immediately announced in theatres, meeting places and other public spaces throughout the land. In Nottingham, the announcement came when the curtain fell on the first act of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. The audience cheered, the orchestra played the national anthem, and people poured into the streets to celebrate. Everyone assumed that the war was won, because Nicholas had brought about the war through his aggressive policies and, now that he was gone, Russia would at last come to its senses and sue for an early peace. The Times declared the death of Nicholas an act of divine intervention, God’s punishment of the man responsible for the outbreak of the war, and looked forward to a rapid victory for the allies. Shares rose steeply on the Paris Bourse and the London Stock Exchange.

The news took longer to reach the allied forces in the Crimea, and it came by unexpected means. On the evening of 4 March, several days before the announcement of the Tsar’s death arrived by telegram, a French trooper found a note attached to a stone that had been thrown from the Russian trenches outside the walls of Sevastopol. Written in French, the note claimed to represent the view of many Russian officers:

The tyrant of the Russians is dead. Peace will soon be concluded, and we will have no more cause to fight the French, whom we esteem; if Sevastopol falls, it will be the despot who desired it.

A true Russian,

who loves his country, but hates ambitious autocrats.²

Alexander II

However much such Russians may have wanted peace, the new Tsar Alexander II was not about to give up on his father’s policies. He was 36 when he ascended to the throne, had been the heir apparent for thirty years, and remained firmly in the shadow of his father in the first year of his rule. He was more liberally inclined than Nicholas, having been exposed to the influence of the liberal poet Vasily Zhukovsky, his tutor at the court, and having travelled widely in Europe; to the disappointment of his father, he took no interest in military affairs, but he was a Russian nationalist with pronounced sympathies for the pan-Slav cause. On taking over from his father, Alexander quickly ruled out any talk of peace that he deemed humiliating for Russia (the only peace acceptable to the British) and pledged to go on fighting for his country’s ‘sacred cause’ and ‘glory in the world’. Through Nesselrode, however, he also made it clear that he was amenable to negotiations for a settlement in accordance with ‘the integrity and honour of Russia’. Alexander was aware of the growing opposition to the war in France. The main aim of this initiative was to draw the French away from British influence by offering them the prospect of an early end to the hostilities. ‘Between France and Russia the war is without hatred,’ wrote Nesselrode to his son-in-law, Baron von Seebach, the Saxon Minister in Paris, who read his letter to Napoleon: ‘Peace will be made when the Emperor Napoleon wants it.’³

Yet throughout these early months of 1855, Napoleon was under growing pressure from his British allies to commit to a more ambitious war against Russia. Palmerston, the new Prime Minister, had long been pushing for this – not just to destroy the naval base at Sevastopol but to roll back Russian power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland, Finland and the Baltic by drawing in new allies and supporting liberation movements against tsarist rule. This assault on the Russian Empire went well beyond the Four Points agreed by the British and the French with the Austrians as the basis of the allied war plans against Russia in 1854 – plans that were carefully circumscribed by the coalition government of Aberdeen. Where Aberdeen had wanted a limited campaign to force the Russians to negotiate on these Four Points, Palmerston was determined to develop the campaign in the Crimea into a wide-ranging war against Russia in Europe and the Near East.

Almost a year earlier, in March 1854, Palmerston had outlined his ‘beau ideal of the result of the war’ in a letter to the British cabinet:

Aaland (islands in the Baltic) and Finland restored to Sweden. Some of the German provinces of Russia on the Baltic ceded to Prussia. A substantive kingdom of Poland re-established as a barrier between Germany and Russia … The Crimea, Circassia and Georgia wrested from Russia, the Crimea and Georgia given to Turkey, and Circassia either independent or given to the Sultan as Suzerain. Such results, it is true, could be accomplished only by a combination of Sweden, Prussia and Austria, with England, France and Turkey, and such results presuppose great defeats of Russia. But such results are not impossible, and should not be wholly discarded from our thoughts.