In Italy, there are very few landmarks to remind Italians of their country’s part in the Crimean War. Even in Piedmont, where one might expect to see the war remembered, there is very little to commemorate the 2,166 soldiers who were killed in the fighting or died from disease, according to official statistics, though the actual number was almost certainly higher. In Turin, there is a Corso Sebastopoli and a Via Cernaia, in memory of the only major battle in which the Italians took part. The nationalist painter Gerolamo Induno, who went with the Sardinian troops to the Crimea and made many sketches of the fighting there, painted several battle scenes on his return in 1855, including The Battle of the Chernaia, commissioned by Victor Emmanuel II, and The Capture of the Malakoff Tower, both of which excited patriotic sentiment for a few years in northern Italy. But the war of 1859 and everything that happened afterwards – the Garibaldi expedition to the south, the conquest of Naples, the annexation of Venetia from the Austrians during the war of 1866 and the final unification of Italy with the capture of Rome in 1870 – soon overshadowed the Crimean War. These were the defining events of the Risorgimento, the popular ‘resurrection’ of the nation, by which Italians would come to see the making of modern Italy. As a foreign war led by Piedmont and Cavour, a problematic figure for the populist interpretation of the Risorgimento, the campaign in the Crimea had no great claim for commemoration by Italian nationalists. There were no public demonstrations for the war, no volunteer movements, no great victories or glorious defeats in the Crimea.
In Turkey the Crimean War has been not so much forgotten as obliterated from the nation’s historical memory, even though it was there that the war began and Turkish casualties were as many as 120,000 soldiers, almost half the troops involved, according to official statistics. In Istanbul, there are monuments to the allied soldiers who fought in the war, but none to the Turks. Until very recently the war was almost totally ignored by Turkish historiography. It did not fit the nationalist version of Turkish history, and fell between the earlier ‘golden age’ of the Ottoman Empire and the later history of Atatürk and the birth of the modern Turkish state. Indeed, if anything, despite its victorious conclusion for the Turks, the war has come to be seen as a shameful period in Ottoman history, a turning point in the decline of the empire, when the state fell into massive debt and became dependent on the Western powers, who turned out to be false friends. History textbooks in most Turkish schools charge the decline of Islamic traditions to the growing intervention of the West in Turkey as a result of the Crimean War.21 So do the official Turkish military histories, like this one, published by the General Staff in 1981, which contains this characteristic conclusion, reflecting many aspects of the deep resentments nationalists and Muslims in Turkey feel towards the West:
During the Crimean War Turkey had almost no real friends in the outside world. Those who appeared to be our friends were not real friends … In this war Turkey lost its treasury. For the first time it became indebted to Europe. Even worse, by participating in this war with Western allies, thousands of foreign soldiers and civilians were able to see closely the most secret places and shortcomings of Turkey … Another negative effect of the war was that some semi-intellectual circles of Turkish society came to admire Western fashions and values, losing their identity. The city of Istanbul, with its hospitals, schools and military buildings, was put at the disposal of the allied commanders, but the Western armies allowed historic buildings to catch fire through their carelessness … The Turkish people showed their traditional hospitality and opened their seaside villas to the allied commanders, but the Western soldiers did not show the same respect to the Turkish people or to Turkish graves. The allies prevented Turkish troops from landing on the shores of the Caucasus [to support Shamil’s war against the Russians] because this was against their national interests. In sum, Turkish soldiers showed every sign of selflessness and shed their blood on all the fronts of the Crimean War, but our Western allies took all the glory for themselves.22
The effect of the war in Britain was matched only by its impact in Russia, where the events played a significant role in shaping the national identity. But that role was contradictory. The war was of course experienced as a terrible humiliation, inflaming profound feelings of resentment against the West for siding with the Turks. But it also fuelled a sense of national pride in the defenders of Sevastopol, a feeling that the sacrifices they made and the Christian motives for which they had fought had turned their defeat into a moral victory. The idea was articulated by the Tsar in his Manifesto to the Russians on learning of the fall of Sevastopoclass="underline"
The defence of Sevastopol is unprecedented in the annals of military history, and it has won the admiration not just of Russia but of all Europe. The defenders are worthy of their place among those heroes who have brought glory to our Fatherland. For eleven months the Sevastopol garrison withstood the attacks of a stronger enemy against our native land, and in every act it distinguished itself through its extraordinary bravery … Its courageous deeds will always be an inspiration to our troops, who share its belief in Providence and in the holiness of Russia’s cause. The name of Sevastopol, which has given so much blood, will be eternal, and the memory of its defenders will remain always in our hearts together with the memory of those Russian heroes who fought on the battlefields of Poltava and Borodino.23
The heroic status of Sevastopol owed much to the influence of Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, which were read by almost the entire Russian literate public in 1855–6. Sevastopol Sketches fixed in the national imagination the idea of the city as a microcosm of that special ‘Russian’ spirit of resilience and courage which had always saved the country when it was invaded by a foreign enemy. As Tolstoy wrote in the closing passage of ‘Sevastopol in December’, composed in April 1855, at the height of the siege:
So now you have seen the defenders of Sevastopol on the lines of defence themselves, and you retrace your steps, for some reason paying no attention now to the cannonballs and bullets that continue to whistle across your route all the way back to the demolished theatre [i.e. the city of Sevastopol], and you walk in a state of calm exaltation. The one central, reassuring conviction you have come away with is that it is quite impossible for Sevastopol ever to be taken by the enemy. Not only that: you are convinced that the strength of the Russian people cannot possibly ever falter, no matter in what part of the world it may be put to the test. This impossibility you have observed, not in that proliferation of traverses, parapets, ingeniously interwoven trenches, mines and artillery pieces of which you have understood nothing, but in the eyes, words and behaviour – that which is called the spirit – of the defenders of Sevastopol. What they do, they do so straightforwardly, with so little strain or effort, that you are convinced they must be capable of a hundred times as much … they could do anything. You realize now that the feeling which drives them has nothing in common with the vain, petty and mindless emotions you yourself have experienced, but is of an altogether different and more powerful nature; it has turned them into men capable of living with as much calm beneath a hail of cannonballs, faced with a hundred chances of death, as people who, like most of us, are faced with only one such chance, and of living in those conditions while putting up with sleeplessness, dirt and ceaseless hard labour. Men will not put up with terrible conditions like these for the sake of a cross or an honour, or because they have been threatened: there must be another, higher motivation. This motivation is a feeling that surfaces only rarely in the Russian, but lies deeply embedded in his soul – a love of his native land. Only now do the stories of the early days of the siege of Sevastopol, when there were no fortifications, no troops, when there was no physical possibility of holding the town and there was nevertheless not the slightest doubt that it would be kept from the enemy – of the days when Kornilov, that hero worthy of ancient Greece, would say as he inspected his troops: ‘We will die, men, rather than surrender Sevastopol,’ and when our Russian soldiers, unversed in phrase-mongering, would answer: ‘We will die! Hurrah!’ – only now do the stories of those days cease to be a beautiful historic legend and become a reality, a fact. You will suddenly have a clear and vivid awareness that those men you have just seen are the very same heroes who in those difficult days did not allow their spirits to sink but rather felt them rise as they joyfully prepared to die, not for the town but for their native land. Long will Russia bear the imposing traces of this epic of Sevastopol, the hero of which was the Russian people.24