The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  But Paskevich was more cautious. He was nervous that a Serb uprising would force the Austrians to intervene in order to prevent it from spreading to Habsburg lands. In December he advised the Tsar to keep reserves in Poland in case of an Austrian attack, and to march south-east from Bucharest towards Silistria, where the Russians could rely on the support of the Bulgarians without fear of Austria. Paskevich thought Silistria could be taken in three weeks, allowing the Tsar to launch a spring attack on Adrianople and bring Turkey to its knees before the Western powers had time to intervene, and on this basis Nicholas deferred to the plan of his commander.14

  However, as the Russian troops advanced towards Silistria there was no mass uprising by the Bulgarians, nor by any other Slavs, although the Bulgarians were generally pro-Russian and had taken part in large-scale revolts against Muslim rule in Vidin, Nish and other towns during recent years. The Bulgarians welcomed the Russian troops as liberators from the Turks, they joined them in attacks on Turkish positions, but few signed up as volunteers, and there were only small, sporadic uprisings, nearly all of them put down with brutal violence by Omer Pasha’s men. In Stara Zagora, where the largest Bulgarian revolt took place, dozens of women and young girls were raped by Turkish troops.15

  In January 1854 the British consul in Wallachia noted that the occupying force was ‘actively engaged in enrolling a corps of volunteers comprised principally of Greeks, Albanians, Serbs and Bulgarians’. They were incorporated into the Russian army as a ‘Greek-Slavonic Legion’. So far only a thousand volunteers had been recruited, the consul reported. Called up to fight a ‘holy war’ against the Turks, ‘they are to form a body of crusaders, to be equipped and armed at the expense of the Russian military authorities’, he noted. The volunteers were known as the ‘cross-carriers’, because they wore on their shakos a ‘red Orthodox cross on a white background’. According to a Russian officer, nearly all these volunteers had to be employed as police auxiliaries to maintain order in the rear, although they had received training for military purposes. The repressive nature of the Russian occupation, with public meetings closed, local councils taken over by the military, censorship tightened and food and transport requisitioned by the troops, bred widespread resentment. The Russians were despised by the Moldavians and Wallachians, the British consul reported, ‘and everybody laughs at them when it can be done with safety’. There were dozens of uprisings in the countryside against the requisitioning, some of them repressed by the Cossacks with ruthless violence, killing peasants and burning villages. Omer Pasha’s Turkish forces also carried out a war of terror against dozens of Bulgarian settlements – destroying churches, beheading priests, mutilating murder victims and raping girls – to deter others from rising up against them or sending volunteers to the Russians.16

  Omer Pasha was even more concerned to prevent the Russians breaking through to Serbia, on the Turkish flank, where there was strong support for an uprising in favour of the Russians among the Serbian Orthodox clergy and some sections of the peasantry (suggesting that the Tsar’s assessment and preference for an attack towards Serbia had been right). The commander of the Turkish forces concentrated his defences in the strategic area around Vidin, the eastern gateway to Serb lands on the Danube, and in late December used 18,000 troops to drive 4,000 Russians from Cetatea on the other side of the river (in a foretaste of the sort of fighting yet to come in the Crimean War the Turks killed more than a thousand wounded Russians left behind on the battlefield).17

  The urgency with which the Turks defended Serbia was dictated by the country’s instability. Prince Alexander, who ruled under licence from the Porte, had lost all authority, and pro-Russian elements in the Serbian Church and court were actively preparing for an uprising against his government timed to coincide with the anticipated arrival of Russian troops in Serbia. The leaders of the Serb army were resigned to and even colluding in a Russian takeover, according to the British consul in Belgrade. In January 1854 the commander-in-chief of the Serbian army told him that it was ‘pointless to resist a power as invincible as Russia, which would conquer the Balkans and turn Constantinople into the capital of Orthodox Slavdom’.18

  If Serbia was lost, there was a real danger that the entire Balkans would rebel against the Ottomans. From Serbia it was not far to Thessaly and Epirus, where 40,000 Greeks were already organized in armed rebellion against the Turks and were supported by the government in Athens, which took the opportunity provided by the Russian occupation of the principalities to start a war with Turkey for the rebellious territories. Warned by the British not to intervene in Thessaly and Epirus, King Otto chose to ignore them. Gambling on a Russian victory, or at least a prolonged war on the Danube, Otto hoped to win support for his monarchical dictatorship by establishing a greater Greece. Nationalist feelings were running high in Greece in 1853, the 400th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and many Greeks were looking towards Russia to restore a new Greek empire on the ruins of Byzantium.19

  Afraid of losing all their Balkan territories, the Turks decided to hold a defensive line on the Danube and attack the Russians in the Caucasus, where they could draw on the support of the Muslim tribes, to force them to withdraw some of their troops from the Danubian front. They could count on the support of the Muslim rebels against Russian rule in the Caucasus. In March 1853, Shamil, the imam of the rebel tribesmen, had appealed to the Ottomans for help in his war against the Tsar. ‘We your subjects’, he had written to the Sultan, ‘have lost our strength, having fought the enemies of our Faith for a long time … . We have lost all our means and now stand in a disastrous position.’ Shamil’s army had been squeezed out of its guerrilla bases in Chechnya and Daghestan by the Russian forces, which had steadily increased their numbers since 1845, when Mikhail Vorontsov, the governor-general of New Russia and the Crimea, was appointed commander-in-chief and viceroy of the Caucasus.o Instead of attacking the rebel strongholds directly, Vorontsov had encircled them and starved them out of existence by burning crops and villages; his troops had cut down forests to flush the rebels out and built roads into the insurgent areas. By 1853, the strategy was showing signs of real success: hundreds of Chechen villages had gone over to the Russian side in the hope of being left alone to farm their land; and the rebels had become demoralized. Thinking they had contained the insurgency, the Russians started to reduce their forces in the Caucasus, transferring most of them to the Danubian front. They closed down many of their smaller forts along the Circassian coast.20

  This was the opportunity the Turks now decided to exploit. A successful war against the Russians in the Caucasus would encourage the Persians and Muslims throughout the Black Sea area, perhaps even leading to the downfall of the Russian Empire in the region. It was also bound to attract the support of the British, who for several years had secretly been running guns and money to the rebels in Circassia and Georgia, and had long been planning to link up with Shamil.21

  Before 1853, the Turks had not dared support Shamil. By the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), the Porte had agreed to give up all its claims on Russian territories in the Caucasus; and since then the Russians had protected it from Mehmet Ali of Egypt (who had good relations with Shamil). But everything was changed by the Turkish declaration of war. On 9 October the Sultan answered Shamil’s appeal, calling on him to launch a ‘holy war’ for the defence of Islam and to attack the Russians in the Caucasus in collaboration with the Anatolian army under the command of Abdi Pasha. Anticipating this, Shamil had already marched with 10,000 men towards Tbilisi, and further volunteers were moved up from Circassia and Abkhazia for an assault on the Russian military capital. On 17 October the British consul in Erzurum told the Foreign Office in London that Shamil had placed 20,000 troops at the disposal of Abdi Pasha to fight against Russia. Eight days later the Turkish campaign in the Caucasus began when the Bashi Bazouks of Abdi Pasha’s army in Ardahan captured the important Russian fortress of St Nicholas (Shekvetili in Georgian), to the north of Batumi,
killing up to a thousand Cossacks and, according to a report by Prince Menshikov, the commander-in-chief, torturing hundreds of civilians, raping women and taking shiploads of Georgian boys and girls to sell as slaves in Constantinople.22

  To support their land offensive in the Caucasus the Turks depended on their Black Sea fleet to bring in supplies. The Turkish fleet had never fully recovered from its crushing defeat at Navarino in 1827. According to the British naval adviser to the Porte, Adolphus Slade, the Turkish navy in 1851 had 15,000 sailors and 68 vessels in more or less seaworthy condition, but it lacked good officers and most of its sailors were untrained. Although no match for the Russian fleet, the Turkish navy grew in confidence in late October, when the French and British fleets dropped anchor in Beykoz, a suburb of Constantinople in the Bosporus: with five line-of-battle ships (two- or three-decked vessels with at least seventy guns each), eleven twin-deckers, four frigates and thirteen steamers, their combined power was more than enough to keep the Russian fleet at bay. The Russian Black Sea Fleet was divided into two squadrons: one under Admiral Vladimir Kornilov patrolled the western half of the Black Sea; the other under Vice-Admiral Pavel Nakhimov patrolled the eastern half. Both had orders from Menshikov to destroy any Turkish ships carrying supplies to the Caucasus. The Turkish ministers and senior commanders were aware of the enemy’s patrols but resolved nonetheless to send a small fleet into the Black Sea. The Russians had every reason to believe that the Turkish ships were carrying arms and men to the Caucasus, as indeed they were. But the Turks were confident that if their ships were attacked by the Russians, the British and the French would come to their rescue. Perhaps that was indeed their aim – to provoke an attack by the Russians and thereby force the Western powers to become involved in a naval war in the Black Sea. They certainly seemed indifferent to the precarious situation of their fleet, which lay anchored in Sinope on the Anatolian coast, within easy range of Nakhimov’s larger and more powerful squadron (six modern battleships, two frigates and three steamers).23

  On 30 November Nakhimov gave the order of attack. The heavy guns and explosive shells of his squadron obliterated the Turkish fleet. It was the first time explosive shells were used in a sea battle. The Russians had designed an advanced type of shell that penetrated into the wooden planking of the Turkish ships before releasing its explosive charge, ripping them apart from the inside. Slade was on the single Turkish ship that got away, a paddle steamer called Taif. He left this account:

  In one hour or one hour and a half, the action had virtually ceased, save dropping shot here and there from the want of means on one side to continue it, half the crews of the Turkish Ships were slain, their guns were mostly dismounted and their sides literally beaten in by the number and weight of the enemy’s shot. Some of the ships were on fire … . The Russians cheered, they had obtained the object for which they had come into the bay, the destruction of the Turkish Squadron, and on every consideration they should then have ceased firing, and had they done so, they would have avoided merited censure, but they reopened their fire on the stranded hulks, and in addition to the ships already engaged, their frigates came into the Bay to range close to them and complete their demolition. Many men thus lost their lives either by the shot or by drowning in their attempts to reach the shore … Together with the ships the Russians destroyed the Turkish quarter of Sinope with shells and carcasses, the ruin is complete, not a house is standing, the inhabitants having followed the Governor in their flights from the town at the first shot.

  According to Slade, the Russian attack killed 2,700 Turkish sailors, out of a total of 4,200 at Sinope. In the town there was chaos and destruction everywhere. Cafés became makeshift hospitals. There were hundreds of wounded civilians but just three doctors in the town. Six days passed before the Russians ceased their bombardment and the wounded could be taken off in ships to Constantinople.24

  A few days later Slade related the details of the battle to the Porte. He found the ministers strangely unaffected by the news – reinforcing the suspicion that the Turks had provoked the attack by the Russians to bring the Western powers into the war:

  Their cheerful cushioned apartment and sleek fur-robed persons deepened in imagination, by the force of contrast, the gloom of the dingy cafés of Sinope with their writhing occupants. They listened, apparently unconcerned, to the woeful tale; they regarded composedly a panoramic view of the Bay of Sinope, taken a few days after the action by Lieutenant O’Reilly of the Retribution. A stranger, ignorant of the nil admirari of Ottomans, would have fancied them listening to an account and looking at a picture of a disaster in Chinese waters.25

  In fact, the defeat gave new life to diplomatic efforts from the Porte. It was a sign of Reshid’s influence and his determination to prevent an escalation of the war. In his view, one last effort to involve the Western powers in a settlement was needed if they were to be won over to the Turkish side in the event of a general war.

  On 5 December, Count Buol, the Austrian Foreign Minister, presented to the Russians a set of peace terms from the Porte which had been agreed by the four powers (Austria, Prussia, Britain and France) at the Vienna Conference. If the Tsar agreed to the immediate evacuation of the Danubian principalities, the Turks would send representatives to negotiate a peace directly with the Russians under international supervision. They promised to renew their treaties with Russia and accept her proposals regarding the Holy Lands. On 18 December the Grand Council resolved to accept peace on these conditions.

  In Constantinople, there were angry demonstrations by religious students against the decision of the Grand Council. ‘For the last three days the Turkish capital has been in a state of insurrection,’ reported Stratford Canning on the 23rd. The students gathered in illegal assemblies and threatened Reshid Pasha and the other ministers. There were rumours of a massacre of Christians in the European quarters of the city. Stratford invited diplomats and their families to take shelter in the British embassy. He wrote to Reshid Pasha urging him to stand firm against the students, but Reshid, who was not known for his personal courage, had resigned and was hiding from the mob in his son’s house at Besiktas. Stratford was unable to reach him. Fearing a religious revolution, he brought up several steamers from the British fleet at Beykoz to the centre of the capital, and went to the Sultan to demand firm measures against the potential insurrectionaries. The next day, 160 religious students were arrested by the police and brought before the Grand Council. Asked to account for their insurrection, their leaders replied ‘that the conditions prescribed by the Koran for peace after war had been disregarded’ by the Grand Council. After it was explained that the Porte had not made peace, only set the conditions for negotiations, the students were asked whether they would like to go to the battlefront, if they wanted war so much, but they replied that their duty was to preach and not to fight. They were sent into exile in Crete instead.26

  News of Sinope reached London on 11 December. The destruction of the Turkish fleet was a justified action by the Russians, who were after all at war with Turkey, but the British press immediately declared it a ‘violent outrage’ and a ‘massacre’, and made wildly exaggerated claims of 4,000 civilians killed by the Russians. ‘Sinope’, declared The Times, ‘dispels the hopes we have been led to entertain of pacification … We have thought it our duty to uphold and defend the cause of peace as long as peace was compatible with the honour and dignity of our country … but the Emperor of Russia has thrown down the gauntlet to the maritime Powers … and now war has begun in earnest.’ The Chronicle declared: ‘We shall draw the sword, if draw it we must, not only to preserve the independence of an ally, but to humble the ambitions and thwart the machinations of a despot whose intolerable pretensions have made him the enemy of all civilized nations.’ The provincial press followed the bellicose and Russophobic line of Fleet Street. ‘Mere talking to the Tsar will do nothing,’ argued an editorial in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. ‘The time appears to be at hand when we must act so as
to dissipate the evil designs and efforts of Russia.’ In London, Manchester, Rochdale, Sheffield, Newcastle and many other towns, there were public meetings in defence of Turkey. In Paisley, the anti-Russian propagandist David Urquhart addressed a crowd for two hours, ending with a plea to ‘the people of England … to call on their Sovereign to require that either war shall be proclaimed against Russia, or the British squadron withdrawn from the Turkish waters’. Newspapers published petitions to the Queen demanding a more active stand against Russia.27

  The position of the British government – a fragile coalition of Liberals and free-trade Conservatives weakly held together by Lord Aberdeen – was dramatically altered by the public reaction to Sinope. At first the government reacted calmly to the news. Most of the cabinet took the view of the Prime Minister that more time should be given to the peace initiatives promoted by the Austrians. It was agreed that the British and French fleets would have to make their presence felt in the Black Sea, but that this show of naval strength should be used to force the Russians to accept peace talks rather than provoke a war. There was a general feeling that Britain should not be dragged into a war by the Turks, who had brought the disaster on themselves. As Queen Victoria herself had warned:

  we have taken on ourselves in conjunction with France all the risks of a European war without having bound Turkey to any conditions with respect to provoking it. The hundred and twenty fanatical Turks constituting the Divan at Constantinople are left sole judges of the line of policy to be pursued, and made cognisant at the same time of the fact that England and France have bound themselves to defend the Turkish territory! This is entrusting them with a power which Parliament has been jealous to confide even to the hands of the British Crown.28