Memories of the Crimean War continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment of the West. In 2006 a conference on the Crimean War was organized by the Centre of National Glory of Russia with the support of Vladimir Putin’s Presidential Administration and the ministries of Education and Defence. The conclusion of the conference, issued by its organizers in a press release, was that the war should be seen not as a defeat for Russia, but as a moral and religious victory, a national act of sacrifice in a just war; Russians should honour the authoritarian example of Nicholas I, a tsar unfairly derided by the liberal intelligentsia, for standing up against the West in the defence of his country’s interests.32 The reputation of Nicholas I, the man who led the Russians into the Crimean War against the world, has been restored in Putin’s Russia. Today, on Putin’s orders, Nicholas’s portrait hangs in the antechamber of the presidential office in the Kremlin.
At the end of the Crimean War a quarter of a million Russians had been buried in mass graves in various locations around Sevastopol. All around the battle sites of Inkerman and Alma, the Chernaia valley, Balaklava and Sevastopol there are unknown soldiers buried underground. In August 2006 the remains of fourteen Russian infantrymen from the Vladimir and Kazan regiments were discovered not far from the spot where they were killed during the battle at the Alma. Alongside their skeletons were their knapsacks, water-bottles, crucifixes and grenades. The bones were reburied with military honours in a ceremony attended by Ukrainian and Russian officials at the Museum of the Alma near Bakhchiserai, and there are plans in Russia to build a chapel on the site.
The Eastern Question’s conflict zone
The Danube conflict zone
The Allied advance towards Sevastopol
The battle of the Alma
The Caucasus
The battle of Balaklava
The battle of Inkerman
The siege of Sevastopol
The research for this book took place over many years and thanks are due to a large number of people.
In the early stages of research Helen Rappaport helped me to compile a working bibliography from the potentially endless list of books, published memoirs, diaries and letters by participants in the Crimean War. She also gave invaluable advice on the social history of the war, sharing information from her own research for
At the National Army Museum in London I am grateful to Alastair Massie, whose own works,
Various people commented on all or sections of the draft – Norman Stone, Sean Brady, Douglas Austin, Tony Margrave, Mike Hinton, Miles Taylor, Dominic Lieven and Mark Mazower – and I am grateful to them all. Douglas Austin and Tony Margrave, in particular, were a mine of information on various military aspects. Thanks are also due to Mara Kozelsky for allowing me to read the typescript of her then unfinished book on the Crimea, to Metin Kunt and Onur Önul for help on Turkish matters, to Edmund Herzig on Armenian affairs, to Lucy Riall for advice on Italy, to Joanna Bourke for her thoughts on military psychology, to Antony Beevor for his help on the hussars, to Ross Belson for background information on the resignation of Sidney Herbert, to Keith Smith for his generous donation of the extraordinary photograph ‘Old Scutari and Modern Üsküdar’ by James Robertson, and to Hugh Small, whose book
