The Tsar was hopeful of mobilizing troops from the Bulgarians and other Slavs. Although he was wary of inflaming Serb passions against the Austrians, he hoped that his offensive would trigger Christian uprisings, leading to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when a victorious Russia would impose a new religious settlement on the Balkans. ‘All the Christian parts of Turkey’, he wrote in the spring of 1854, ‘must necessarily become independent, they must become again what they previously were, principalities, Christian states, and as such rejoin the family of the Christian states of Europe.’ Such was his commitment to this religious cause that he was prepared to exploit revolutions against even Austria, should this be necessitated by the opposition of the Austrians to a Russian settlement of the Eastern Question. ‘It is highly likely that our victories will lead to Slav revolts in Hungary,’ he wrote to the Russian ambassador in Vienna. ‘We shall use them to threaten the heart of the Austrian Empire and force her government to accept our conditions.’ Indeed the Tsar was ready by now to abandon virtually all his legitimist principles in the interests of his holy war. Angered by the anti-Russian stance of the European powers, he talked of stirring up the revolutionary disturbances in Spain to divert French troops from the east, and even thought of forming an alliance with Mazzini’s liberation movement in Lombardy and Venice to undermine the Austrians. But in both cases the Tsar was dissuaded from supporting revolutionary democrats.4
The start of the spring offensive was hailed by Slavophiles as the dawning of a new religious era in the history of the world, the first step towards the resurrection of the Eastern Christian empire with its capital in Tsargrad, the name they gave to Constantinople. In ‘To Russia’ (1854), the poet Khomiakov greeted the beginning of the offensive with ‘A call to holy war’:
Arise my motherland!
For our Brothers! God calls you
To cross the waves of the fiery Danube …
In an earlier poem by the same title, written in 1839, Khomiakov had referred to Russia’s mission to bring the true Orthodox religion to the peoples of the world, but had warned Russia against pride. Now, in his poem of 1854, he called on Russia to engage in ‘bloody battles’ and ‘Smite with the sword – the sword of God’.5
The Russians advanced slowly, fighting against stubborn Turkish resistance at several points on the northern side of the Danube, before coming to a virtual halt. At Ibrail, 20,000 Russian grenadiers, supported by river gunboats and steamers, were unable to defeat the well-defended Turkish fortresses. At Maçin there were 60,000 Russian troops encamped in bivouacs outside the fortress town but unable to take it. Held up by the Turks, the Russians spent their time constructing rafts and pontoon bridges from pine masts in preparation for a surprise crossing of the Danube at Gala
Advancing south towards Silistria, the Russians got bogged down in the marshlands of the Danube delta, the place where so many of them had been struck down by cholera and typhus in 1828–9. These were sparsely populated lands without food supplies for the invading troops, who soon succumbed to the effects of hunger and disease. Of 210,000 Russian troops in the principalities, 90,000 were too sick for action by April. Soldiers were fed on rations of dry bread that were so devoid of nutrition that not even rats and dogs would eat them, according to a French officer, who saw these husks abandoned in the fortress town of Giurgevo after the retreat of the Russian forces in the summer of 1854. A German doctor in the tsarist army thought that ‘the bad quality of food habitually served to the Russian troops’ was one of the main reasons why they ‘dropped like flies’ once they were wounded or exposed to illnesses. ‘The Russian soldier has such a small nervous system that he sinks under the loss of a few ounces of blood and frequently dies of wounds such as would be sure to heal if inflicted on persons better constituted.’7
Soldiers wrote home to their families about the terrible conditions in the ranks, many begging them to send money. Some of these letters were intercepted and sent to Gorchakov by the police, who considered them politically dangerous, and they ended up in the archives. These simple letters give a unique insight into the world of the ordinary Russian troops. Grigory Zubianka, a foot soldier in the 8th Hussars Squadron, wrote to his wife Maria on 24 March:
