The commemoration of the Crimean War was entangled in a similar ideological conflict. Conservatives and Church leaders portrayed it as a holy war, the fulfilment of Russia’s divine mission to defend Orthodoxy in the broader world. They claimed that this had been achieved with the international declaration to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and the Paris Treaty’s preservation of the status quo, as the Russians had demanded, in the Holy Places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In their writings and sermons on the war, they described the defenders of the Crimea as selfless and courageous Christian soldiers who had sacrificed their lives as martyrs for the ‘Russian holy land’. They re-emphasized the sanctity of the Crimea as the place where Christianity had first appeared in Russia. From the moment the war had ended, the monarchy sought to connect its commemoration to the memory of 1812. The Tsar’s visit to Moscow following the surrender of Sevastopol was staged as a re-enactment of Alexander I’s dramatic appearance in the former Russian capital in 1812, when he had been greeted by vast crowds of Muscovites. In 1856 the Tsar delayed his coronation until the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, Russia’s victory against Napoleon in September 1812. It was a symbolic move to compensate for the painful loss of the Crimean War and reunite the people with the monarchy on the basis of a more glorious memory.27
For the democratic intellectual circles in which Tolstoy moved, however, the thread connecting the Crimean War to 1812 was not the holy mission of the Tsar but the patriotic sacrifice of the Russian people, who laid down their lives in the defence of their native land. That sacrifice, however, was hard to quantify. No one knew how many soldiers died. Precise figures for Russian casualties were never collected, and any information about heavy losses was distorted or concealed by the tsarist military authorities, but estimates of the Russians killed during the Crimean War vary between 400,000 and 600,000 men for all theatres of the war. The Medical Department of the Ministry of War later published a figure of 450,015 deaths in the army for the four years between 1853 and 1856. This is probably the most accurate estimate.28 Without precise figures, the people’s sacrifice grew to assume a mythic status in the democratic imagination.
Sevastopol itself was elevated to a quasi-sacred site in the collective memory. The veneration of the fallen heroes of the siege began as soon as the war ended, not on the initiative of the government and official circles, but through popular efforts, by families and groups of veterans erecting monuments or founding churches, cemeteries and benevolent funds with money raised from public donations. The focal point of this democratic cult was the commemoration of admirals Nakhimov, Kornilov and Istomin, the popular heroes of Sevastopol. They were idolized as ‘men of the people’, devoted to the welfare of their troops, who had all died as martyrs in the defence of the town. In 1856 a national fund was organized to pay for the erection of a monument to the admirals in Sevastopol, and there were similar initiatives in many other towns. Kornilov was the central figure of numerous histories of the war. Nakhimov, the hero of Sinope and virtually a saint in the folklore of the siege, appeared in tales and prints as a brave and selfless soldier, a martyr of the people’s holy cause, who was ready for his death when he was struck down while inspecting the Fourth Bastion. It was entirely through private funding that the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet was established in Sevastopol in 1869. On display to the crowds who came on the opening day were various weapons, artefacts and personal items, manuscripts and maps, drawings and engravings collected from veterans. It was the first historical museum of this public nature in Russia.bl
