The Crimean War

Review by Dennis Showalter

The historiography of the Crimean War tends to be Anglocentric, and to focus on the war’s errors and disasters: Lord Raglan’s comprehensive incompetence, the horrors of the hospital at Scutari, above all the Charge of the Light Brigade. Figes, of Birkbeck College, University of London, offers a wider perspective. He incorporates extensive research in Russian archival and published sources. He pays significant direct attention than usual to French and Ottoman participation, as opposed to describing it primarily from a British viewpoint. The result is a provocative analysis of the Crimea as a complex synergy of modern war, total war and religious crusade.

Figes’ Crimean War was directly shaped by artifacts of the industrial revolution: electronic communication, steam transportation, rifled weapons. In wider political contexts the war broke the post-Napoleonic conservative alliance between Russia and Austria, thereby facilitating the emergence of Italy and Germany as nation-states. The war left France and Britain with a sense of Russia as an alien entity, capable of unpredictable malevolence. The war affirmed Russia’s growing distrust of the West, a feeling of betrayal in religious, ideological and cultural contexts that destabilized great-power relations up to 1914.

In human terms the Crimean War featured widespread, deliberate civilian victimization. Communities starved in sieges, or were wiped out by disease and massacre. Other communities’ manpower was drained by the war’s immense casualties—three-quarters of a million, two-thirds of them Russians.

The Crimean War was also a mutual crusade. Figes successfully establishes religious concerns as far more than a cloak for economic and imperialist ambitions. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I resorted to arms in part from pride, in part from overconfidence and in part from miscalculation. But above all Nicholas believed he was embarking on a sacred mission to defend the Ottoman Empire’s Christians and create an Orthodox Empire including Constantinople and Jerusalem.

For the French and the British as well, far from being senseless and unnecessary, the Crimea was also a crusade. The war was a defense of political and religious liberty against a “barbaric and despotic” Russia whose ambitions represented a threat to Western Christendom. Even the Ottoman Empire was an acceptable ally, in that it was a much lesser danger than Russia’s revitalizing tyranny.

Figes concludes with a provocative epilogue describing the war in “myth and memory.” If on the continent the Crimea was eclipsed by later wars, in Britain it did much to reshape national identity. Figes describes a new-found confidence in the British middle class, and a new-found respect not only for soldiers, but for manly and martial virtues in general—a cult of “muscular Christianity” that endured through the Great War.

In Russia the Crimea’s legacy was deeper and more comprehensive. Its material sacrifices and Christian motives turned military defeat into moral victory: the matrix for Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the context of Russia’s attitude towards the West into the 21st century. Figes’ interpretation, often controversial, nevertheless successfully brings the Crimean War to stage center of modern Europe’s history.