The ‘epic of Sevastopol’ turned defeat into a national triumph for Russia. ‘Sevastopol fell, but it did so with such glory that Russians should take pride in such a fall, which is worth a brilliant victory,’ wrote a former Decembrist.25 Upon this grand defeat, the Russians built a patriotic myth, a national narrative of the people’s selfless heroism, resilience and sacrifice. Poets likened it to the patriotic spirit of 1812 – as did Aleksei Apukhtin in his well-known ballad ‘A Soldier’s Song about Sevastopol’ (1869), which came to be learned by many Russian schoolboys in the final decades of the nineteenth century:
The song I’ll sing to you, lads, isn’t a jolly one;
It’s not a mighty song of victory
Like the one our fathers sang at Borodino,
Or our grandfathers sang at Ochakov.
I’ll sing to you of how a cloud of dust
Swirled up from the southern fields,
Of how countless enemies disembarked
And how they came and defeated us.
But such was our defeat that since then
They haven’t come back looking for trouble,
Such was our defeat that they sailed away
With sour faces and bashed noses.
I’ll sing of how leaving hearth and home behind
The rich landowner joined the militia,
Of how the peasant, bidding his wife farewell,
Came out of his hut to serve as a volunteer.
I’ll sing of how the mighty army grew
As warriors came, strong as iron and steel,
Who knew they were heading for death,
And how piously did they die!
Of how our fair women went as nurses
To share their cheerless lot,
And how for every inch of our Russian land
Our foes paid us with their blood;
Of how through smoke and fire, grenades
Thundering, and heavy groans all round,
Redoubts emerged one after another,
Like a grim spectre the bastions grew –
And eleven months lasted the carnage,
And during all these eleven months
The miraculous fortress, shielding Russia,
Buried her courageous sons …
Let the song I sing to you not be joyfuclass="underline"
It’s no less glorious than the song of victory
Our fathers sang at Borodino
Or our grandfathers at Ochakov.26
This was the context in which Tolstoy wrote his own ‘national epic’, War and Peace. Tolstoy’s conception of the war against Napoleon as Russia’s national awakening – the rediscovery of ‘Russian principles’ by the Europeanized nobility and the recognition of the patriotic spirit of the serf soldiers as the basis of a democratic nationhood – was a reflection of his reaction to the heroic deeds of the Russian people during the Crimean War. Written between 1862 and 1865, in the years immediately after the emancipation of the serfs, when Russian liberal society was inspired by ideals of national reform and reconciliation between the landed classes and the peasantry, War and Peace was originally conceived as a Decembrist novel set in the aftermath of the Crimean War. In the novel’s early form (‘The Decembrist’), the hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for reform are in the air. But the more Tolstoy researched the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812, and so set his novel then.
The memory of 1812 was bitterly contested after the Crimean War, which had opened up a new perspective on the national character. Democrats like Tolstoy, inspired by the recent sacrifices of the Russian peasant soldiers, saw 1812 as a people’s war, a victory attained by the patriotic spirit of the whole nation. To conservatives, on the other hand, 1812 represented the holy triumph of the Russian autocratic principle, which alone saved Europe from Napoleon.
The commemoration of the Crimean War was entangled in a similar ideological conflict. Conservatives and Church leaders portrayed it as a holy war, the fulfilment of Russia’s divine mission to defend Orthodoxy in the broader world. They claimed that this had been achieved with the international declaration to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and the Paris Treaty’s preservation of the status quo, as the Russians had demanded, in the Holy Places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In their writings and sermons on the war, they described the defenders of the Crimea as selfless and courageous Christian soldiers who had sacrificed their lives as martyrs for the ‘Russian holy land’. They re-emphasized the sanctity of the Crimea as the place where Christianity had first appeared in Russia. From the moment the war had ended, the monarchy sought to connect its commemoration to the memory of 1812. The Tsar’s visit to Moscow following the surrender of Sevastopol was staged as a re-enactment of Alexander I’s dramatic appearance in the former Russian capital in 1812, when he had been greeted by vast crowds of Muscovites. In 1856 the Tsar delayed his coronation until the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, Russia’s victory against Napoleon in September 1812. It was a symbolic move to compensate for the painful loss of the Crimean War and reunite the people with the monarchy on the basis of a more glorious memory.27
For the democratic intellectual circles in which Tolstoy moved, however, the thread connecting the Crimean War to 1812 was not the holy mission of the Tsar but the patriotic sacrifice of the Russian people, who laid down their lives in the defence of their native land. That sacrifice, however, was hard to quantify. No one knew how many soldiers died. Precise figures for Russian casualties were never collected, and any information about heavy losses was distorted or concealed by the tsarist military authorities, but estimates of the Russians killed during the Crimean War vary between 400,000 and 600,000 men for all theatres of the war. The Medical Department of the Ministry of War later published a figure of 450,015 deaths in the army for the four years between 1853 and 1856. This is probably the most accurate estimate.28 Without precise figures, the people’s sacrifice grew to assume a mythic status in the democratic imagination.