Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias: Nicholas I
The diplomacy of Nicholas I, then, all too often consisted
in using inadequate means to try to reach the unattainable. Nicholas’s approach
to the use of his military power was also faulty. Consider, for example, his
practice of using his army as an instrument of deterrence and intimidation. It
is always risky to stage such threats; instead of cowing one’s enemies into
submission, they may galvanize them into action. Such was often the case during
the reign of Nicholas I. His blustering against the Turks, for instance, led
them to declare war on Russia first in 1827 and again in 1853. The bellicose
posturing of the Russia was also counterproductive in its relations with the
French and, most particularly, the British. The Tsar’s conversations with the
British Ambassador in early 1853, when he had suggested the need for an
agreement with London in advance about how to fill the vacuum of power that
would occur should the Ottomans collapse was misinterpreted by the British as
evidence of Russian annexationist designs. The Russian destruction of the
Turkish fleet at Sinope the following November—which the Tsar had intended to
use to force Turkish capitulation—inflamed British public opinion against
Russia and set the stage for the British declaration of war. Nicholas’s
practice of trying to bully and intimidate his neighbors with his military
might often backfired, much as similar Soviet efforts did under Brezhnev in the
1970s and early 1980s.
Still further, mobilizing the army to send signals or to
make military demonstrations was often fundamentally detrimental to Russia if
war broke out. Deploying forces as a signal could make the prosecution of a
real war much more difficult. The requirements of intimidation and the
requirements of warfighting at times radically diverged. Take, for instance,
Russia’s occupation of the Danubian principalities in 1828 and 1853. On the
former occasion Russia marched into the principalities, despite the fact that
Turkey had already declared war, in the hope of scaring the Porte to the
bargaining table. Not only did the gesture fail to achieve its purpose, but it
also complicated the execution of the Russian campaign plan, as the occupation
of the principalities subtracted 20,000 men (almost one-third of its strength)
from the ranks of the army. Nor was Russia any more successful in 1853, when as
before it seized the principalities and then stopped. That action both
antagonized the Austrians and provided the Turks with a breathing space of
several months in which to organize their defenses. In international relations,
no less than on the street, it can be perilous to draw a gun if one does not
really intend to use it.
Once shooting war broke out, Nicholas’s ideas about how to
wage it also had harmful results. In the first place the Tsar, who had a
grotesquely distorted opinion of his own military talents, meddled far too much
in the military planning and operational decision-making. The letters and
memoranda he showered on his commanders analyzed the military options available
to them in excruciating detail. The Tsar’s gratuitous advice and exhortation
naturally enough hobbled his generals, stifling even what little initiative
they had. Some of Nicholas’s military recommendations were simply boneheadly
wrong, as the proposal he seriously made in February 1854 for a suicide naval
attack should the British and French fleets enter the Black Sea and anchor off
Feodosiia. Further, the Tsar’s constant insistence on the need for speedy
victory, although founded on a shrewd estimation of the limitations of Russian
power, often resulted in spreading forces too thin or incurring unacceptable
risks. During the Turkish campaign of 1828, for instance, Nicholas ordered
simultaneous sieges of three Turkish forts—Varna, Silistriia, and
Shumla—despite the intelligent counsel of General Wittgenstein that it would be
better to concentrate all effort on merely one objective. As Wittgenstein had
foreseen, Russia did not have the forces with which to capture all three
fortresses at once. Shumla and Silistriia successfully resisted Russian sieges,
and although Varna fell, it took eighty-nine days to do so, principally because
of the minuscule resources the Russian army was able to devote to investing it.
Nicholas’s decision here was clearly one of the capital blunders of the
campaign. Although his purpose had been to accelerate the progress of the war,
arguably he only succeeded in protracting it. Nicholas’s demand for rapid
results was not much of an asset to the Russian army during the war with Shamyl
in Transcaucasia, either. It inclined at least some commanders to reckless
haste, such as Viceroy Vorontsov, whose forces Shamyl trounced at Dargo in 1845
for that very reason. It took Nicholas too long to grasp the fact that
pacification of guerrilla tribesmen in the extraordinarily difficult terrain of
the Caucasus would perforce have to be accomplished gradually and slowly.
A final flaw in Nicholas I’s appreciation of warfare was the
pernicious influence upon it of the image of the War of 1812. As we saw in the
previous chapter, a considerable gap existed between the reality of the
Fatherland War and the myth. The Fatherland War had not in fact seen the
forging of unshakable national unity. Nicholas thought that it had. He
considered its chief lesson to have been that the Russian army was invincible when
in defense of its own territory. That was a dangerous belief for the Tsar to
hold, for it engendered overconfidence no less than his erroneous reliance on
alliances with the German Powers. Unrealistic expectations befogged the
Emperor’s mind during the Crimean War. It was as if he expected his troops to
be able to compensate for every advantage the enemy possessed by dint of
gallantry alone. That gallantry, although evident on many occasions, was
inadequate to the task.
Weaknesses in the
Armed Forces
Nicholas’s use of military forces to gain his objectives
often misfired. Part of the trouble lay in the quality of the military
instrument itself. Grave inadequacies in the army, many stemming from
Nicholas’s preference for using it to threaten, not fight, crippled the
execution of Russia’s wartime strategies.
Of all of the problems of the Nicholaevan army, perhaps the
most severe was that of manpower. Nicholas’s army was larger on paper than it
was on the parade ground or in the field. In every war waged by Russia
throughout the reign, its generals were chronically embarrassed by a shortage
of troops. During the Turkish War of 1828–29, for instance, the Second Army
mustered only 65,000 men, roughly half what it was supposed to contain by
statute. Adjutant General Vasil’chikov, entrusted by the Tsar with drafting a
report on the failure of the 1828 campaign, concluded that it had occurred in
large measure because of insufficient military manpower. Ninety thousand men,
he wrote, were simply too few with which to occupy Wallachia and Moldavia,
block the Danubian forts, and conduct the sieges of Brailov, Varna, and Shumla.
Three years later, during the Polish war, the situation was no different. The
initial contingent of Russian forces earmarked for field operations consisted
of only 120,000 men, and it required two months to assemble even that number.
When Paskevich begged for reinforcements in August 1831, Nicholas replied that
only 10,000 infantry men were immediately available and that there would be no
more at least until the spring. Still later in the reign, when Russia went to
war against Britain, France, and Turkey, it experienced grave (and notorious)
difficulties in bringing its military power to bear in the chief theater of
conflict. Out of total military forces that were supposed to amount to 1.4
million soldiers, fewer than one hundred thousand were initially available for
the defense of the Crimean peninsula. Indeed, Russia’s military effort in the
Crimea would be crippled throughout the two and a half years of war by
inadequate numbers of troops.
What explains the fact that in Nicholaevan Russia, the
outbreak of any war was immediately attended by a crisis of military manpower?
Several factors were responsible. In the first place casualties were always
high whenever the Russian army embarked on a campaign, and for the traditional
reasons: miserable weather, bad hygiene, and inferior military medicine. During
the Persian campaign of 1827 Russian losses from heat prostration (temperatures
hit well over 100 degrees F. that July) so weakened the army that the siege of
Erivan had to be postponed. During the subsequent Turkish war, disease in
combination with extreme cold during the terrible winter of 1828 resulted in
the loss of 40,000 men, virtually half the army. Operations in Poland in 1831
were stymied by an epidemic of cholera, which carried off the Tsar’s Viceroy
and his commander-in-chief along with thousands of common soldiers. Excessive
mortality and morbidity were also features of the campaigns in the Caucasus.
Conditions of service in the Black Sea forts that Russia built to blockade the
coast were so harsh that a soldier’s life expectancy there was estimated at
three years. D. A. Miliutin, who was a participant, remarked that the rapid
spread of sickness among the Russian soldiers during the siege of Akhulgo in
1839 was the result of “prolonged encampment in the same positions, on
sunparched cliffs and in air poisoned by corpses.”
We should note, inter alia, that poor hygiene and bad food
plagued the health of the troops in peace as well as in war. The Ministry of
War admitted, for instance, that dysentery “was a frequent, even common”
ailment suffered by the troops every summer. Official statistics indicate that
more than 16 million cases were treated in military hospitals and clinics from
1825 to 1850. Over the same time period, whereas 30,000 Russian soldiers
perished in combat, more than 900,000 succumbed to diseases of all kinds.
Another strain upon available military manpower in war was
the widespread use of military units to perform a variety of nonmilitary
services within the empire. During the first twenty-five years of Nicholas’s
reign some 2,500 battalions of troops were at some time employed in state works
for the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Communications, the Engineers, or
the military colonies. Elements of the Russian army performed such essential
tasks as the road repair and bridge-building. A still more serious headache for
military planners was the deployment of large numbers of troops as permanent
garrisons throughout the empire for the maintenance of internal order. In
addition to the fifty battalions of the Internal Guard, troops were also
stationed in quantity for this purpose in Finland, Orenburg, and Siberia.
During the Crimean War forces detached for internal duty (and consequently
excused from combat) may have numbered as many as 500,000. Also complicating
the manpower problem during 1853–56 was the need to deploy troops in auxiliary
and potential theaters of war other than the Crimean peninsula. The struggle
against Shamyl’s murids tied up the entire 200,000-man army of the Caucasus;
300,000 soldiers were emplaced in the northeast to defend against possible
attacks on the Baltic coast; and Paskevich insisted on retaining sizable forces
in Poland to deter potential Austrian intervention.
A final limitation on military manpower inhered in the
defects of recruitment. Throughout the reign of Nicholas, Russia continued to
replenish its armed forces on the basis of the old Petrine conscription system.
In times of peace the state decreed levies of from two to three soldiers per
100 taxable men in the empire. The system was naturally burdensome to the
Russian economy, and Nicholas, for one, was troubled by that fact. Although
early on he rejected the idea that the military colonies should be enlarged so
as eventually to create a captive pool of manpower equal to the army’s entire
annual needs, he was keenly interested in reducing the strain of recruitment on
the population of his empire. He experimented with various reforms, including
dividing the country into halves from which conscripts would be taken only in
alternate years. Yet none of his reforms came up to the Tsar’s expectations,
principally because the system as it was almost guaranteed that the quality of
recruits would be poor. To be sure, selection of recruits by means of
lotteries, which was gradually made mandatory for state peasants
(gosudarstvennye krestiane) under Nicholas, was a reasonable safeguard against
the tendency of that segment of the population to defraud the army of quality
men. But for the majority of peasants—the proprietary serfs—selection of
recruits was still in the hands of local landlords and village communes. Both
the landlords and the communes still had every incentive to fob the dregs of
the village off on the army. Because the conscription laws were often quite
slackly enforced during peacetime, the consequence of the system was that the Russian
army began each of the wars it fought under Nicholas seriously under strength.
When the Turkish war broke out in 1828, for instance, the army was undermanned
by no less than 40 percent. Since Nicholas almost never foresaw the outbreak of
any war (expecting his military bluster to prevent it), the army was always
severely short of men at the precise moment when operations began. The
government therefore had no choice but to institute draconian recruitment
procedures, including a doubling or tripling of the conscription levy, in order
to fill the ranks of the army as quickly as possible. Yet despite all of the
emergency efforts of the recruitment officers, numbers of recruits dispatched
to the theater of war always lagged behind army requirements. The forced
marches the new recruits endured, in addition to their almost total lack of
training, seriously impaired their military value once they arrived on the
battlefield. During wartime, in Nicholas’s words, the regiments “either did not
receive reinforcements or received naked, unshod, and exhausted recruits; the
regiments melted away, perished, and behind them stood nothing.”
It was precisely because he was alive to this problem that
Nicholas had tried to overhaul the recruitment system by introducing provisions
for “unlimited furloughs” in 1834. As already noted, the purpose of the reform
was to build up a supply of trained reservists who would be available for
recall to the army in the event of a crisis. After fifteen years of blameless
service, a demobilized soldier was assigned to a reserve battalion that was in
turn linked to an actual field regiment. On one level the “unlimited furloughs”
were doubtless a boon to the Russian army, for having reserves was clearly
preferable to having none. For example, in 1848 and 1849 the state succeeded in
calling up more than 175,000 men in this category. Unlimited leaves were
probably beneficial to army morale as well. Surely the prospect of an early
discharge from the ranks was a powerful incentive for good behavior.
But the “unlimited furlough” system imposed costs on the
state as well. In granting up to 17,000 men a year indefinite leave, the
Russian government in effect created a legally anomalous and impoverished new
class. Where, after all, were these discharged men to go? State peasants on
indefinite leave might rejoin their communities, but for the majority of men on
leave, former proprietary serfs, there was no welcome at home. Now legally
free, they had nonetheless lost all of their claims on land or property within
the village the moment they had entered the army. If they tried to rejoin their
families, the latter were burdened with feeding them and paying their taxes.
Thus neither their relatives nor their former landlords, for that matter,
wished to see them return. The result was that many apparently took to begging,
vagabondage, or crime. The plight of those miserable outcasts properly ought to
have been a matter of grave state concern; in actuality, the Russian government
was even more worried lest the former soldiers prove to be an unstable element
in the villages and towns where they took up temporary residence. One prominent
general warned Nicholas that “a man who is not attached to society by either
property or family ties, wandering without work or goals, easily gets involved
in disorders.” The head of the political police himself reported to the monarch
in 1842 that in his opinion indefinite leaves had produced “an undesirable
change in the morals of the Russian soldier.”
In any event, the reform of 1834 was a palliative, not a
solution. Although it was able to provide the army with enough reservists to
undertake the punitive expedition into Hungary in 1849, the program was too
small in scale to satisfy the army’s need for reinforcements in case of a major
war. All the 200,000 reservists on the books had been called up within the
first year of the Crimean War. As that number was insufficient, the government
once again had to resort to ad hoc emergency levies, which inducted possibly as
many as 800,000 men into the ranks of the army during the conflict. Even that
quantity proved in the end to be too small.
Problems other than inadequate manpower sapped the combat
strength of the Russian army. The omnipresent evils of corruption and
peculation are an example. On all too many occasions, officers devised
ingenious methods for robbing both the state and the soldiers under their
command. They ranged from outright theft, to doctoring the books, to
substituting inferior goods for state supplies and pocketing the difference. To
be sure, soldiers themselves stole as well. Then, too, as one scholar has
recently emphasized, in view of the haphazard issuance of pay, the snail’s pace
of logistical deliveries, and in general the relatively small state resources
expended on its maintenance, the Russian army could not even have survived
without some corruption. Still, egregious thieving could not but be detrimental
to the morale of the troops. Some colonels were known to have syphoned off as
much as 60,000 rubles from the regiments in a single year. It was not uncommon
for soldiers to be deprived of such necessities as rations and firewood because
of the criminal greed of their commanders. Abuses like those, a War Ministry
report of the 1850s commented, “have a harmful effect on discipline”—an
understatement if there ever was one.
Bad consequences arose also from what has been termed the
“platz parad” (parade ground) tradition during the reign of Nicholas I. The
tradition has often been portrayed as more dysfunctional than it actually was:
goose-stepping and meticulously executed drill really did make the army look fearsome
and imposing, which is how the Emperor wanted to look to potential enemies
abroad or potential dissidents at home. Still, as was the case also with
military deployments, drill that served the interest of military intimidation
often did not prepare the troops for war. At inspections and exercises troops
were required to observe petty rules: ranks had to be perfectly dressed;
intervals between each man had to be identical; and boots had to be polished
just so. Failure to measure up could incur many blows of the stick. In general,
disciplinary measures were brutal. Army authorities meted out harsh punishments
(including often fatal sentences of running the gauntlet) for quite trivial
offenses. Although better off than common soldiers, officers themselves were
not spared the rigors of Nicholaevan discipline. One young officer complained
in his diary that as he found it physically impossible to fulfill all of his
service obligations, he was under intolerable mental strain, fearing that any
moment he might be visited with summary punishment for dereliction of duty.
In any event, contemporaries often bemoaned the deleterious
effects of this rigorous and punctilious training on the health of the troops.
Tight uniforms and incessant parading are said to have born fruit in disease.
Parade ground exercises also wreaked havoc with military equipment. The manual
of arms, which required a soldier to slam his musket violently onto the ground,
often dislocated the firing mechanism, which could later result in the breech
exploding in his face when he tried to take a shot. At least one commander
placed such an emphasis on the smartness of his unit when on parade that his
men’s gun barrels were actually worn thin through excessive burnishing.
Drill can obviously be of great military use. It can teach
civilians to think of themselves as soldiers and can help build confidence and
esprit de corps. There can, however, be too much drill. Pushed too far, as it
was under Nicholas I, drill contributed little to preparing the soldiers for
battle. Still worse, if soldiers attempted to perform in the field as they had
been trained to on the Champs de Mars, the results could be disastrous.
Intelligent young officers assigned to the Army of the Caucasus during
Nicholas’s reign quickly discovered that it behooved them to forget everything
they had learned on the parade ground—that is, if they wished to remain alive.
A final set of difficulties stemmed from the state’s efforts
to economize on the maintenance of its army. Take, for example, the military
colonies. One of the principal reasons for establishing them was the desire of
the government to keep the military budget under control. Yet despite the fact
that the colonies allowed (and indeed encouraged) soldiers to marry and raise
families, both the soldiers and the peasants settled in the colonies regarded
them as little more than hells on earth. Count A. A. Arakcheev, the driving
force behind the colonies, was a sadistic martinet, and the administration of
the settlements bore the imprint of the deformities of his character. Every
aspect of life and behavior in the colonies was regimented; each colonist was
attired in military uniform; hours of drill were demanded on top of
backbreaking agricultural labor; discipline was both harsh and capricious.
Conditions in the colonies, frankly unendurable, resulted in high incidences of
suicide and eventual rebellion. In 1831 military colonists in Novogord suddenly
rose up in revolt and massacred more than two hundred bailiffs, nobles, and
officials; 3,600 men and women implicated in the atrocities were tried and
punished.
The rebellion forced the state to ameliorate the regimen
that existed within the colonies. In the immediate aftermath of the 1831
uprising many of the colonists were reclassified as “farming soldiers.” That
relieved them of the responsibilities of military drill and placed them more or
less on a par with the state peasants. Their children were no longer
automatically enrolled as cantonists. Those reforms, however, represented a
retreat from the principle of squeezing the colonies to provide food, money,
and conscripts for the army.
Although Nicholas’s regime was unquestionably militaristic
and although the Tsar personally was devoted to his army, the fact remained
that the state simply did not possess enough revenue to support its armed
forces or its ambitious military policies. Despite all the efforts of the
Ministry of Finance, the state ran a budgetary deficit almost constantly during
the reign of Nicholas I. Although the army continued to claim a high proportion
of total governmental outlays, the bad harvests of 1839–41 compelled St.
Petersburg to cut even its military spending.
Financial pressure had obvious consequences for military
preparedness. Nicholas I was, for instance, very interested in constructing or
improving fortifications along the western perimeters of his empire from Åland
Island to Aleksandropol. Yet while Nicholas started nine large-scale
fortress-building projects during his reign, he completed few. Of the three
forts deemed indispensable for the defense of Poland—Novogeorgievsk, Ivangorod,
and Brest—only the first had been finished when Nicholas died.
Revenue problems were still damaging to the armed forces
during the 1840s and after. During that time Russia’s European competitors
increasingly adopted advanced (and expensive) military technologies.
Impoverished Russia lacked the money with which to compete. The navy was the
first to suffer. In the early years Nicholas had been concerned with upgrading
and improving his fleets. Indeed, sea power had served Nicholas well at
Navarino in 1827 and at Constantinople in 1833, to mention but two occasions.
Yet when the transition from sail to steam began, the Russian navy lagged
behind. Russia did not acquire its first steamship until 1848. When the Crimean
War began, there were only ten small paddle-wheelers in the entire Black Sea
fleet, and they were completely outclassed by the French and British
ships-of-the line, driven by their screw propellers. Russia was to suffer for
that naval inferiority throughout the entire war. It was the reason that Russia
felt it had to detach such a high proportion of troops to guard its Baltic
coast in the 1853–56 period. It also meant that certain Russian possessions had
to be abandoned. In December 1854 the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich ordered
the governor-general of Eastern Siberia to evacuate all Russian troops from the
island of Kamchatka in view of the impossibility of defending it against an
amphibious invasion. Technological inferiority was also a great problem for the
army. The smoothbore muskets and cannon employed by the defenders of Sevastopol
were no match for the rifles and improved ordnance of the enemy. French and
British guns could fire faster and farther than Russian ones. The allies,
moreover, were more abundantly furnished with ammunition; during the siege the
French and the British fired at least 400,000 more shells on Sevastopol than
the Russians were able to fire back. There is something in the end pathetic
about Nicholas’s requests during the war that captured enemy rifles and shells
be brought to Petersburg for his personal inspection; he was making an all too
belated acquaintance with the implications of nineteenth-century technological
progress. Allied technological superiority was in the end to be decisive in the
Crimean War.
The Crimean War
As Russia interpreted them, the terms of the Peace of Kuchuk
Kainardzhi of 1774 gave it special rights to protect the interests of Orthodox
Christians living in the Ottoman Empire. In 1850, however, the government of
France began to pressure Constantinople to grant it exclusive rights over the
Churches of the Holy Sepulcher and the Nativity, in Jerusalem and Bethlehem
respectively. Those demands were advanced even more forcibly after 1852, when,
by means of a coup d’état, Louis Napoleon had swept away the Second Republic
and proclaimed himself Emperor of the French. As Emperor, Napoleon III was
eager both to enhance his international prestige and to curry favor with
Catholic opinion in France by posturing as the most devoted defender of the
Roman Catholic faith.
Napoleon’s negotiations with the Turks put Nicholas I in a
difficult position. While the Holy Places per se were of little concern to him,
he was unwilling to be perceived as backing down in the face of the French.
Then, too, he believed that Imperial France was about to embark on a
revolutionary policy, designed to win influence in Turkey at Russia’s expense.
After much abortive negotiating, Nicholas finally dispatched his Minister of
Marine, Prince Menshikov, to Constantinople as his personal emissary.
Menshikov’s mission was to demand that the Turks reconfirm the special
privilege of the Russian Tsar to protect the status of the 12 million Orthodox
believers who were Ottoman subjects. Regarding this as tantamount to a
surrender of sovereignty, the Turkish government rejected the demand, counting
on the support of both France and Britain. Napoleon III was only too glad to
oblige. And the coalition government of Lord Aberdeen, which included the
Russophobe Palmerston as Foreign Minister, was increasingly inclined to view
Russia’s activities as a prelude to an aggressive assault on the Near Eastern
balance of power.
After the fiasco of the Menshikov mission Nicholas I
attempted to threaten the Turks, as we have previously seen, by staging an
invasion of Wallachia and Moldavia, two provinces under the nominal suzerainty
of the Sultan. The Turks, however, were not inclined to give way. When a
last-minute attempt at mediation by the Austrian Chancellor, Count Buol, also
failed, Turkey declared war on October 4, 1853.
Although Russia intended to stand on the defensive against
the Turks on land, it undertook offensive naval action early. In November its
Black Sea fleet caught a Turkish naval flotilla in the Black Sea port of Sinope
and sent it to the bottom. Fearing that Turkey was now in danger of toppling,
France and Britain sent naval squadrons into the Black Sea and shortly
thereafter (March 1854) declared war themselves.
Although the Russians had successfully repulsed Turkish
attacks in the Balkans and the Caucasus during the first months of the war, the
correlation of forces was now different. In September 1854, under the cover of
the Royal Navy, an Anglo-French expeditionary force landed on the Crimean
peninsula roughly 30 miles north of the strategic fortress of Sevastopol. On
September 20 combined French, British, and Turkish forces ran into a Russian
detachment of 36,000 men at the Alma River. The battle of the Alma, which
featured senseless frontal assaults on both sides, resulted in a costly victory
for the allies. The Russians were forced to retreat into the fortress of
Sevastopol itself, reinforcing the 20,000-man garrison.
The Russians now made extensive preparations for the defense
of the city. Under the direction of the brilliant engineer Colonel Totleben,
Russian troops constructed an intricate system of earthworks and fortifications
on the southern or inland side of the town. Those works were so formidable that
the allies hesitated to risk an assault on them. Finally, in early October 1854
the allies launched the first of their attempts to take Sevastopol. The allied
fleet bombarded the seaward side of the fortress with more than 40,000 rounds,
while siege guns dragged into positions inland hammered at Totleben’s
fortifications. The struggle, however, proved inconclusive, for if many of
Sevastopol’s guns were silenced, several allied warships also took heavy damage.
But food and ammunition supplies were running low inside
Sevastopol. Precisely because of powder shortages, Menshikov, the commander of
the garrison, now ordered a Russian counterattack in the hope of raising the
siege. The Russians selected as their target Balaclava, the site of a great
concentration of British food and stores. The upshot was the Battle of
Balaclava (October 12, 1854). The Russian 12th Division under Liprandi early on
captured four Turkish redoubts on the British right flank. It soon appeared
that the entire battle would turn on the British efforts to retake them. This
was the engagement that witnessed the notorious Charge of the Light Brigade.
Misunderstanding its orders, which were to harass the Russians on Causeway
Heights, Cardogan’s light brigade instead attacked directly into the massed
Russian artillery, with predictably catastrophic results. Despite wholescale
carnage on both sides, Balaclava was also curiously indecisive. Although the
Russians had failed to break through the allied lines, their military position
actually improved after this defeat, for they shortly received a large number
of reinforcements.
On October 24 Menshikov once again tried to break out of the
allied encirclement by assaulting the forces of the British right flank on
Inkerman Heights. Initially hard pressed by the Russian assault, the British
troops were saved by the timely arrival of French troops from Bosquet’s corps
of observation. The Russians were once again rebuffed, taking 11,000
casualties—roughly 40 percent of the men they had committed to the battle.
The war now settled into the dreary pattern of siegecraft,
bombardment, and sorties. But time was not on the Russian side. Finally, after
losing the suicide engagement at Black River (August 4[16], 1855), the Russians
decided that Sevastopol had to be abandoned. The outgunned and outnumbered
Russian soldiers and sailors began the evacuation; Sevastopol fell to allied
forces at the end of August. Russia was now at the point of exhaustion. It was
fighting a coalition composed of France, Britain, Turkey, and Sardinia. Sweden
was growing increasingly hostile. When the Austrian government presented its
ultimatum, demanding that Russia negotiate or face war, the new Emperor,
Alexander II, felt that he had no choice but to agree.
The Crimean War represented the death knell of the
Nicholaevan system. That system, and much of what it stood for, was thoroughly
discredited. The Crimean defeat put into motion a process of reassessment that
eventually resulted in such important reforms as the abolition of serfdom in
1861. Efforts by Russian diplomats to undo the humiliating Peace of Paris,
which ended the war, were to occupy them for years afterward. But the impact of
the war on the Russian military establishment was no less momentous. For more
than a hundred and fifty years, the Russian military system with its impressed
peasant army had proved equal to almost any challenge that could be brought
against it. The Russian army had been an extraordinarily reliable instrument of
the state’s grand strategy. But the Crimean War demonstrated that this was not
necessarily the case any longer. The old military system was no longer of value
under the changed conditions of warfare. That system now had to be
reinvented—taken apart and replaced with something else that would permit
Russia to be victorious on the battlefield once again. The problem was complex.
What new sort of military system ought Russia to have? How could Russia
integrate modern military technologies into its armed forces? Finally, how
could it pay for it all? In one way or another, those questions continued to
bedevil Russian statesmen for the next eighty years, until Stalin finally and
conclusively resolved them in the 1930s. But a first attempt to answer them came
in the reign of Alexander II. It is to this subject that we must now turn.
