The Crimean War полностью

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.^be 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