The Crimean War полностью

In Italy and Turkey, as in France, the Crimean War was eclipsed by later wars and quickly dropped out of the nationalist myths and narratives that came to dominate the way these countries reconstructed their nineteenth-century history.

In Italy, there are very few landmarks to remind Italians of their country’s part in the Crimean War. Even in Piedmont, where one might expect to see the war remembered, there is very little to commemorate the 2,166 soldiers who were killed in the fighting or died from disease, according to official statistics, though the actual number was almost certainly higher. In Turin, there is a Corso Sebastopoli and a Via Cernaia, in memory of the only major battle in which the Italians took part. The nationalist painter Gerolamo Induno, who went with the Sardinian troops to the Crimea and made many sketches of the fighting there, painted several battle scenes on his return in 1855, including The Battle of the Chernaia, commissioned by Victor Emmanuel II, and The Capture of the Malakoff Tower, both of which excited patriotic sentiment for a few years in northern Italy. But the war of 1859 and everything that happened afterwards – the Garibaldi expedition to the south, the conquest of Naples, the annexation of Venetia from the Austrians during the war of 1866 and the final unification of Italy with the capture of Rome in 1870 – soon overshadowed the Crimean War. These were the defining events of the Risorgimento, the popular ‘resurrection’ of the nation, by which Italians would come to see the making of modern Italy. As a foreign war led by Piedmont and Cavour, a problematic figure for the populist interpretation of the Risorgimento, the campaign in the Crimea had no great claim for commemoration by Italian nationalists. There were no public demonstrations for the war, no volunteer movements, no great victories or glorious defeats in the Crimea.

In Turkey the Crimean War has been not so much forgotten as obliterated from the nation’s historical memory, even though it was there that the war began and Turkish casualties were as many as 120,000 soldiers, almost half the troops involved, according to official statistics. In Istanbul, there are monuments to the allied soldiers who fought in the war, but none to the Turks. Until very recently the war was almost totally ignored by Turkish historiography. It did not fit the nationalist version of Turkish history, and fell between the earlier ‘golden age’ of the Ottoman Empire and the later history of Atatürk and the birth of the modern Turkish state. Indeed, if anything, despite its victorious conclusion for the Turks, the war has come to be seen as a shameful period in Ottoman history, a turning point in the decline of the empire, when the state fell into massive debt and became dependent on the Western powers, who turned out to be false friends. History textbooks in most Turkish schools charge the decline of Islamic traditions to the growing intervention of the West in Turkey as a result of the Crimean War.²¹ So do the official Turkish military histories, like this one, published by the General Staff in 1981, which contains this characteristic conclusion, reflecting many aspects of the deep resentments nationalists and Muslims in Turkey feel towards the West:

During the Crimean War Turkey had almost no real friends in the outside world. Those who appeared to be our friends were not real friends … In this war Turkey lost its treasury. For the first time it became indebted to Europe. Even worse, by participating in this war with Western allies, thousands of foreign soldiers and civilians were able to see closely the most secret places and shortcomings of Turkey … Another negative effect of the war was that some semi-intellectual circles of Turkish society came to admire Western fashions and values, losing their identity. The city of Istanbul, with its hospitals, schools and military buildings, was put at the disposal of the allied commanders, but the Western armies allowed historic buildings to catch fire through their carelessness … The Turkish people showed their traditional hospitality and opened their seaside villas to the allied commanders, but the Western soldiers did not show the same respect to the Turkish people or to Turkish graves. The allies prevented Turkish troops from landing on the shores of the Caucasus [to support Shamil’s war against the Russians] because this was against their national interests. In sum, Turkish soldiers showed every sign of selflessness and shed their blood on all the fronts of the Crimean War, but our Western allies took all the glory for themselves.²²