The Crimean War of 1853–1856 turned out to be a seminal conflict in the history of nineteenth-century Europe. For the first time, Russia found Europe united in its determination to check Russian expansion. This pattern, a European coalition facing a lone Russian aggressor, would often recur.
Geopolitically, the British-French strategy was brilliantly asymmetricaclass="underline" “You assail our interests on the periphery, we punch you in the gut.” To demonstrate their advantage over Russia’s purely land-based power, Britain and France also sent fleets to attack Kamchatka in the Pacific and Archangel on the White Sea, and made a showy appearance at the doorstep of St. Petersburg, the imperial capital on the Baltic Sea (the Romanovs grimly watched from shore).
Initially landing in Kalamita Bay north of Sevastopol, the Allied force took hold of the western part of the Crimean peninsula. The fighting almost immediately focused on Sevastopol, where the siege of the city lasted for 349 days.[45]
The war ended in a crushing defeat for Russia, but not before 450,000 Russian servicemen, 100,000 French, and 20,000 British died. The subsequent peace treaty required Russia to stay away from Ottoman territories and barred it from having a navy in the Black Sea, but the humiliation prompted the period known in Russian history as the Great Reforms—including emancipation of the serfs and the introduction of a jury system in the courts, to name just two. Russia recuperated fast, and despite the treaty resumed its attacks on the Ottomans in the Balkans. Independent Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia were products of these campaigns. The most lasting impacts of the Crimean War were culturaclass="underline" it was the first war in history to receive daily coverage in the press. Just as Florence Nightingale and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” became canonical pieces of British patriotic myth, the tragic perseverance of Russian troops in Crimea, particularly in Sevastopol, entered the Russian national pantheon. One writer laid down the foundations of this mythology: the young artillery officer Leo Tolstoy, in The Sebastopol Sketches.[46]
Another lasting effect of the war happened in Crimea. Accused of collaborating with the invading allies, Tatars once again departed for Turkey in large numbers. Aside from the fact that the colonizer was not entitled to any loyalty of the colonized, the Tatars had a language, culture, and religion in common with the Turkish troops. In any case, the anti-Russian hostilities were largely limited to the pillaging of Russian landlords’ estates.[47]
This second exodus started in 1860 and 1861. Some 135,000 Tatars left, roughly 40 percent of the Crimean Tatar community. It does not seem that Russian reprisals against the Tatars were gross or consistent enough to cause the flight. Scholars suggest that the general feeling of insecurity made the community “prone to calls for migration” from religious leaders. In other words, social distress manifested itself in religious terms. Tatars leaving for the Ottoman Empire identified as muhajir, Muslims fleeing a homeland occupied by unbelievers to reunite with the Dar al-Islam.[48]
For Russian and Ukrainian farmers, the departures were an opportunity. Tens of thousands of Slavs moved into the areas vacated by the Tatars. That should not have been a cause for celebration: Crimea may be fertile, but the chronic lack of water makes it a precarious garden. Experience, knowledge, and skills had departed with the Tatars. One example would be camels: widely and wisely used by Tatars in the arid parts of the peninsula, they were branded “Asiatic” and “backward” by settlers, to be quickly replaced by horses, which were not always suitable for the terrain. “No settler, Russian, Bulgarian, or German, would ever be able to create gardens and vineyards” that perfect “on a terrain foreign to him,” Princess Yelena Gorchakova sighed. Another Russian visitor wrote: “Every person who has spent at least a month in Crimea knows that with the Tatar exodus Crimea died.” Huge areas in the steppes began looking like “the coasts of the Dead Sea,” and the whole of Crimea was like a “house after a fire.” The second Tatar exodus sealed the fate of the peninsula. From then on, the Kirim people would always be a minority in the land of their ancestors.[49]
With Tatars leaving and new settlers coming, Crimea was developing as a confusing cultural mosaic, with old landmarks receding or gone, and new ones in the making. In Russian discourse, the empire had defeated “Oriental” backwardness in Crimea through “Occidental” modernization. Crimean towns came to be divided into what was called “new,” or “European,” and “Asiatic,” or “Tatar,” parts. The European neighborhoods faced the sea; the Tatar opening up on the steppes or the mountains. “Nothing of particular interest” could be found in the “Asiatic” parts, a Russian visitor wrote with much contempt, except for the “stillness of Oriental despotism,” represented by walled houses, narrow empty streets, women wearing hijabs, and idle males.[50]
Colonization brought modern agriculture, urban development, industry, education, and infrastructure. In 1875, a railroad connected Sevastopol to European Russia, making Crimea a Russian alternative to the French Riviera. The Romanovs built residences on the south shore. Aristocrats followed suit. Resort towns such as Yalta sprang up, and by the end of the nineteenth century the south shore had become the vacation spot for the middle class and the literati too. In 1892, Yalta had a population of ten thousand, and the Baedeker guide called it the “most fashionable and expensive of all” Crimean towns, popular for “sea bathing” and the “grape cure.” Another type of holistic healing, the “mud cure,” with resorts, clinics, and spas, enriched Yevpatoria.[51]
A Riviera it could have been called, but with the standards and services of an underdeveloped country. Said one American tourist in the 1910s: “If that place belonged to us, I guess we would make it the beauty-spot of Europe!”[52] Nonetheless, capitalist development brought a print boom, and for colonized minorities the colonizer’s language was a vehicle for accessing contemporary political theory. The anti-colonial Tatar movement in Crimea led to the creation of a party called Vatan, or Fatherland. It remained largely unnoticed by the peninsula’s Slavic majority until 1917.
Red Star
Just as in Ukraine, in Crimea the Russian revolutions of 1917 brought terror, civil war, and foreign intervention. As the central Russian government collapsed, the Vatan revolutionaries saw a one-off chance to create a national state for the Tatars. Fighting started between nationalist forces and the Red paramilitary units, proxies of Lenin’s government. Neither side shied away from brutality. The bloodbath was brought to an end only by the German occupation in April 1918.
Also as in Ukraine, in Crimea, nationalists, this time Tatar, allied with Germany, and the gambit backfired because they had chosen the losing side in the world war. The fighting that followed after the Germans evacuated at the end of 1918 was worse than what had gone before. The civil war in Crimea was not a bit less horrible than in Ukraine, and for the same reason: while the two major protagonists, the Reds and the Whites, danced a deadly waltz, smaller armies devastated any pockets the big guns missed.[53]
46
Figes,
49
Anna Moskvich,
50
Markov,
51
John C. Perry and Constantine Pleshakov,