The Crimean War полностью

The Tsar set up a ‘Commission for the Improvement of the Military Sphere’ under General Ridiger, but then began to waver over implementing its proposed reforms, with which he clearly sympathized, although plans for a network of railways to link Moscow and St Petersburg with the major centres of agriculture and the border areas were approved by the Tsar as early as January 1857. Alexander was afraid of a possible reaction by the aristocracy at a time when he needed its support for the emancipation of the serfs. He put in charge of the War Ministry a man well known for his loyalty and military incompetence, General Nikolai Sukhozanet, who oversaw a period of tinkering reforms, mostly minor statutes altering the appearance of the Guards’ uniforms, but including two initiatives that were to have more significance: a revision of the Military Criminal Statute to reduce the maximum number of lashes permissible as corporal punishment from 6,000 to 1,500 (a figure still quite adequate to kill any soldier); and measures to improve the education and military training of the peasant soldiers, who were nearly all illiterate and unfit for modern war, as the Crimean War had clearly shown.

One of the results of these attempts to improve the army’s education was the creation of a new journal, Voennyi sbornik (Military Miscellany). Its aim was to appeal to officers and soldiers by presenting them with lively articles about military science and affairs, stories, poems and articles about society written in a liberal spirit of reform. Exempted from military censorship, it was similar in conception to the ‘Military Gazette’ which Tolstoy had proposed in 1854. Its literary section was edited by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, editor of the hugely influential democratic journal the Contemporary, in which Tolstoy’s own works had appeared. Chernyshevsky was himself the author of the novel What Is to Be Done? (1862) which would inspire several generations of revolutionaries, including Lenin. By the 1860s, Voennyi sbornik was rivalling the sales of the Contemporary, with more than 5,000 subscribers, demonstrating that ideas of reform had a receptive audience in the Russian army after the Crimean War.

The idea of setting up Voennyi sbornik had come from Dmitry Miliutin, the main driving force behind the military reforms after the Crimean War. A professor at the Military Academy, where he had taught since being gravely wounded in the campaign against Shamil in the Caucasus in 1838, Miliutin was a brilliant military analyst who quickly took on board the lessons of the defeat in the Crimea: the need to reform and modernize the military on the model of the Western forces that had so roundly beaten Russia’s backward serf army. He soon had a chance to apply these lessons to the Tsar’s ongoing struggles in the Caucasus.

In 1856 the Tsar had appointed his long-time confidant Prince A. I. Bariatinsky as viceroy of the Caucasus, with extraordinary powers to finish off the war against Shamil. Bariatinsky was an advocate of expanding Russia’s influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia as an antidote to the curtailment of her influence in Europe after the Crimean War. Alexander was persuaded by his arguments. Even before the Paris Treaty was announced, the Tsar announced his intention to step up the campaign against the Muslim rebels in the Caucasus. He exempted units in the Caucasus from the general military demobilization, mobilized new regiments, and ordered a consignment of 10,000 Minié rifles purchased from abroad to be sent to Bariatinsky, who by the end of 1857 had overall control of more than one-sixth of the military budget and 300,000 men. Bariatinsky brought in Miliutin as his chief of staff to introduce the military reforms which he saw were needed in the Caucasus: if they were successful there, they would reinforce the arguments for the reform of the Russian army as a whole. Drawing on Western military thinking as well as the proposals of General Ridiger, Miliutin proposed to rationalize the chain of command, giving more initiative and control of resources to local commanders to exercise their judgement in response to local conditions, an idea predicated on a general improvement in the training of officers.⁴²

The end of the Crimean War had left Shamil’s movement completely demoralized. Without the intervention of the Western powers and little real assistance from the Ottomans, the guerrilla movement of the Muslim tribes came to the end of its ability to continue fighting the Russians. The Chechens were exhausted by the war, which had lasted forty years, and delegations from all over Chechnya were appealing to Shamil to make peace with the Russians. Shamil wanted to fight on. But against the massive surge of military forces deployed by Bariatinsky he was unable to hold out for long and he finally surrendered to the Russians on 25 August 1859.^bh