Empire: World History - 82. Crimea: The War on Repeat

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

A slow grind of sieges and massacres. Long distance bombardments and gruelling inch-by-inch trench warfare. Battles for Sevastopol, Odessa, and control of the Black Sea. Is it 1853 or 2023? The parallels between the Crimean War and what is happening now in Ukraine are startling. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Orlando Figes to discuss this totemic 19th century clash and all of its modern-day resonances. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mper.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. And we're very excited about today because we are joined by Orlando Fijis. And we're mostly excited because we got his name right. I have had so many variations on that theme.

Elgar would be entirely jealous of it. And my favourite Orlando, apart from being the greatest historian of Russia writing today, author of Crimea, the definitive book of the Crimean War, which is what we're talking about today. You have the name that is most twistable. I thought it was mine, but it's yours.

My favourite version was Figgies, which made me feel like it was Christmas. I've had Figues. Figgy pudding. I've been called all sorts of names. but yeah, Fijis will do. Explain yourself. Where does Fijis come from?

And well done, William, for always saying it right. Well, we're not sure. I mean, as far as one can tell on Ancestry.com, we're a bunch of Londoners ever since records began. But I suspect we're either Huguenot immigrants or I like to think Catalans, because the one place they know how to pronounce, my name is in Barcelona.

So we must have been from that part of the world somewhere. Not a bad spot to be recognised. No, no, I'm happy. And no, I'm happy. And no sellers of figgy pudding in your ancestry? No. No, no. All basic labourers from London, South London.

We are toiling with fire juice today. What we're doing is we're talking about the crime in, which throws up so many names you're going to be familiar with. I mean, names like Florence Lighting immediately comes to mind, Tennyson, Tolstoy. But what I wanted to start with, if it's all right with you, Orlando, is to talk about why this is so resonant, what happened then to what's happening now. And if I can sort of take you to a really pivotal moment, which was just this year, which was

the Ukrainians bombing the Kersh Bridge, which is the connection between Russia and Crimea. Now, that seemed to be just an absolutely seismic moment in this confrontation that's going on. Explain why it mattered so much to Putin that that bridge was destroyed. Well, it was a symbol of all the investments that the Putin regime had put into Crimea since the Russians had annexed it back in 2014. And it's absolutely crucial to the logistical supply of Russian forces in Crimea, especially since, you know, the great fear of Putin is the idea of NATO-backed Ukrainian forces marching into the peninsula.

So the supply of the Crimea, which is absolutely crucial also to the history of the first Crimea war, if we can call the subject of my book, that is central. And you talk about the residents, actually, I mean, when I started this book, I mean, we're talking about a book I wrote 15 years ago. So my record might not be absolute. But I do remember that Anthony Beaver, for one, told me, what on earth are you doing writing a book about the Crimean War? No one will want to read it. Totally relevant today. And then four years after publication with the Russian annexation of Crimea, you know, I saw on Twitter someone saying, Crimea, trending for the first time since 1850. And I got myself absolutely barrage by journalists wanting to know everything from where is the Crimea to why is it important and so on. And since then looking back on the book, I am struck by absolutely how completely relevant that war is to the current war between Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, it's sort of almost as if the conflict of the mid-1850s, it sort of set some sort of pattern of being set in deep history somewhere that is. echoed in the First World War to some extent, but obviously, more importantly now.

I mean, we should sort of give a little thumbnail sketch of what Crimea is, because for many people, it is a headline in a newspaper or a strap line on a news broadcast. So people may know that it's, you know, a great port and therefore of great strategic importance. That's the way it's covered. But also, I mean, until recently, it was quite a jolly holiday destination, wasn't it? For rich Russians to go, it was their Riviera in many ways. Not just rich Russians, but I mean, all Russians saw the Crimea's their favoured holiday spot, a bit like the Costa Brahma, I suppose, for the English. And there were all sorts of sanatoria there, all sorts of pioneer camps that children went to. And it had a long crucial part in the formation of Russia's national identity, because it was the place where back in 9-88 in the first millennium, the grand prince Vladimir or Volodymy, as the Ukrainians call him, had converted on behalf of,

of the Russe's people to Christianity. And the church where that spot was marked in Kersenesis, just outside Sevastopol, the Russian naval base, was in fact where the French encamped and in the process destroyed the church, causing great consternation and outrage in Russia. And a subsequent wave of atrocities because of it, wasn't it? Indeed.

And that was something I wanted to bring out in this book, that it really was, you know, religion was really crucial to this war, certainly for the Russians. in a way that has been lost from the historiography of the 19th century, where we tend to think in terms of geopolitics and secular conflicts and battles for empire and so on. And in fact, religion and the sensibilities invested in the Crimea, a spot not just of Vladimir's conversion,

but of church building, monastery building, and Russian Orthodox priests from the early 19th century backing archaeological excavations to sort of claim Crimea as the sort of erland of Russian Christianity. All of that played into the war. It's very interesting, Orlando. I've been working on a very similar period of history, the Great Uprising 1857,

which in a sense is the next big imperial confrontation. And the same thing there, that you have 20th century historians looking for every explanation for that, other than religious, looking for economic, political, empire, the whole thing, and ignoring what is very clear on the ground when you look at the primary sources

that people are really upset about religion. And we, coming from the 21st century, we recently had the anniversary of 9-11 in early September. And for our generation, it makes sense that people will fight about religion. We know that this is something that will stir people up. Yeah. And if we look at the origins of the war in terms of its main protagonist, Nicholas, the first Tsar of Russia, I mean, for sure,

religion was at the heart of his motivations, His desire to bully the Turks to favour the Orthodox in the Holy Land's dispute, his insistence that he was fighting a holy war against the West for the defence of the Orthodox of the Ottoman Empire persecuted by the Turks in his vision. His idea influenced by so many of the Panslav ideologists of the 1830s and 40s that Russia was bigger than just the territory it occupied. It was like a new Israel. It was a holy land which stretched for.

from Muscovy, right through Constantinople or Tsargrad, as they call it, the origin of Russia's Christianity to Jerusalem itself, where they claimed the Turks had given them privileges to defend the Orthodox. So it was definitely for Nicholas a religious war. I've just come back from the island of Patmos, and in the monastery there, in the monastery museum, very, very clearly, you've got this whole line of gifts from Russian emperors to the Orthodox monastery, starting with Peter the Great, through Catherine the Great,

and her Admiral Orlov, all these gifts are displayed. And you get a very clear impression there that the Russians are not just in a very general and overarching sense, but in a very real connected sense, interacting with Orthodox all over the Middle East and the Aegean. Absolutely. I mean, the Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem dominated that sort of journey. They were more Russian pilgrims than all the rest of the Christian communities put together in Jerusalem. They built their own hostel there. And that was the immediate cause. of the war in the sense that it created a conflict with the French, who saw that they had their own mission there. But yeah, this is really one of the first and most obvious parallels with the war today,

I guess, that Nicholas I first saw Russia as greater than the territory of Russia and his duty as the last defender of orthodoxy to defend his orthodox brethren throughout the Ottoman Empire, so the Greeks, the Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Maldavians, the Wallachians, and moreover, to assert Russia's rights of religious protection over the Holy Lands themselves. And he, you know, made a direct connection between Jerusalem and Moscow by a building or on the site of the new Jerusalem monastery just outside Moscow at church to replicate the Holy Sepulchal Church in Jerusalem. So this was the idea that motivated the war party behind Nicholas, that Russia was a sort of civilization defined by its international orthodox role, which is exactly the same as Putin,

believing that it's his righteous mission to defend so-called Russian speakers outside the borders of the Russian Federation, that Russia is something bigger than just the geopolitical entity, the state, the territory it controls. It is an idea, it is a mission to save humanity. Right, okay. I mean, that is the contemporary reading of what he says, but he dips very much into history. And, you know, I mean, I've used this quote before on the podcast. I think it's Twain, but someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And this very much is that case. What I wanted to ask you is that this seems to be the conflict between two origin stories here. And he's dipping into the past to justify what he's going to do in the future. Tell us about the origin. in stories that both sides are leaning on in this conflict? Yeah, well, in 2016, November the 4th, Putin oversaw the unveiling of a monstrous kitsch monument to the Grand Prince Vladimir, who was this guy I mentioned who converted for the Rus to Christianity entering Byzantium. And it was a statute that already existed, I mean, in the sense that the Ukrainians had their

own statue, the Grand Prince of Volodymy, as they call him in Kiev, which had been erected in 1853 when Ukraine was still part of the Russian Empire, obviously. But that statue had become a source of Ukrainian identity even before 1917, and certainly after 1991, it was an important sort of symbol of Ukrainian independence from Russia. When they unveiled that monument in Moscow, Putin said that Grand Prince Vladimir was the founder of the modern Russian state, in other words, drawing a direct line from Rus, Keevan Rus' conversion to Christianity and the building of a state and the modern Russian state. And the Patriarch Kirill reinforced that by saying that, you know, basically the Orthodox community established by the Grand Prince was the Orthodox community headed by Moscow.

And in Kiev, of course, that was a terrible insult because they saw the Grand Prince Volodymy as the founder of the modern European, as they would call it, Ukrainian state. Piotr Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president of the time, tweeted immediately saying that Russians were usurping their history, that what this monument symbolized was Ukraine's birth as a modern nation, slightly questionable back in the first millennium, and its entry into the European world by joining Byzantium and the Eastern Christian Church. So, in other words, they were saying, we don't want Russia to claim our history as theirs. We have our own history, which is precisely what Putin was doing.

saying effectively. Right. And so that really does explain why the blowing up of a bridge that connects these two landmasses that connected, Crimea and Russia, is an absolute physical manifestation of what Putin may feel is the humiliations and betrayals of the past. And what Ukraine would deem to be is an expression of their independence of Russia. So it's like, I found that bridge just fascinating and the kind of violence that had unleashed. And that, That explains it. Sorry, Willie, you wanted to say. Yes, Orlando, in your new book, the story of Russia, which I've hugely enjoyed, you actually go as far as saying this is really a war about history, that there are two rival exceptions

of history that lie at the heart of the current conflict. Well, it's the justification Putin has used to launch the war that, as he argued in his terrible historical essay of July 2021 on the historical unity of Russians and Ukraine, as he argued that basically Ukraine has never been a state. It does not contain state. within it as a principle. It has never been more than a region of Russia. Ukraine, he will point out, just means in Russian, the edge, the borderland, which is how Russia always saw it in its imperial discourse. It called Ukraine Little Russia. It refused to recognize Ukrainian language. Under the value of laws of the 1860s, it banned publications in the Ukrainian language.

And for Putin, the only time that Ukraine ever had anything like a statehood was when Lenin, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. New Russia. Well, New Russia's a slightly different issue because when the New Russia refers to those provinces of what we now call southern Ukraine presently occupied by the Russians, which had been conquered by Catherine the Great

in the late 18th century, and they called them the province of New Russia before 1917. And after 1991, when Ukraine inherited those territories along with the Crimea, which had been transferred by Khrushchev to the Ukrainian Republic in 1954. A new Russia movement emerged among Russian nationalists, like Solzhenitsyn, like Sobtschuk, Putin's great mentor as a young politician in Petersburg in the 1990s, who said, well, you know, these are historic Russian lands.

Catherine took them, Pachomkin took them. They are part of Russia's historical legacy, and we require them back. So that was always there from the early 1990s, the sense among Russian nationalists that too much have been gained by Ukraine at the expense of Russia. And that festered throughout the 1990s. But of course, once Putin comes to power and from about 2012, the beginning of his third presidency, picks up this idea of the restoration of a great Russia, that is fueled to this historically driven campaign to either neutralize and make sense. dysfunctional Ukraine as a border state that could threaten Russia, and certainly if Ukraine could not

be mastered in this way to take back those territories, which is exactly what has happened. Well, let's actually go back then. I mean, we're talking about the modern day, but let's go back to the Crimean war that Putin is so leaning on in his current foreign policy. And it all is enmeshed with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. We've done an entire series on the Ottoman Empire, and if you haven't heard it, it's really good, go back. But I mean, the Ottoman Empire is declining. Russia in response is seeing an opportunity to fill a vacuum. And is it true to say that they're kind of inspiring Slavic nations within what is now the crumbling edifice of the Ottoman Empire to rise up and throw them off? I mean, is that a correct assessment of what the breadcrumbs are that lead to the

Crimean war. It's sort of correct in a fairly simplified way, if I may say. Oh, thanks. Thanks very much. Nobody's ever said something is lovely, except Peter Francapan. Thanks. I'm keeping quiet here. I'll give you B plus.

I feel like your time will come, Willie. It may well. It may well. Do go on, Orlando. Well, look, I think we have to take it a little bit further back than that because Russia have been fighting wars against the Turks. throughout the 18th century. And it was because of the instability of Russia's southern border.

I mean, here, geopolitics is important because effectively the whole line from the Danube, Silistria, through to the Caucasus, was a religious fault line between Christian Russia and the Muslim world. I have to say, this is the thing that I thought was absolutely startling about your reworking of the Crimean War in your new book. You don't get an A for sucking up, by the way. I'm sucking up.

But I genuinely, no, I genuinely. He gets an A-plus, yeah. Seriously. I'm still working with A-plus here. I see you, Dower and Paul. Yes, go on. So, teach his part. The idea that it's this huge frontage,

it isn't just the Crimea, it's the whole southern border of the Russians. It is. And, of course, in the 18th century, Catherine, the Great's policy, was to push back the Turks, to expel them from Europe, as they thought. And in her own mind,

she had some vague idea. we don't know how practical or realistic it was to establish a new Greek empire, new sort of Byzantine Empire. She called her son Constantine. Indeed. And that was part of her supposed plan to conquer Constantinople, make it the capital of a sort of mega-Orthodox empire centered in Constantinople, but stretching from Moscow effectively to Jerusalem. And it was also tied with the geopolitics of the Black Sea, because effectively Russia needed to compete with Western powers.

Peter the Great had begun that by importing Western technologies, and he defeated the Swedes to become a Baltic power in the early 18th century. But to compete with the West, Russia needed to move away from its traditional exports, which were timber, fur, wax, honey and stuff like that, to exporting their great product of the Southern Steppe, wheat, above all, through the ports such as Adyessa. into the Western markets. And indeed, Yasser became an important part of international trade.

I mean, it was the Durham wheat coming through a jessa that enabled pasta to develop in the 19th century. Brilliant. I love that. That's a good fact. This was her sort of reorientation of Russia towards the South and the Black Sea. And you say they call it in Russia the Great Eastern War. It's not the Crimean War. It's the Great Eastern War. Well, that's because they saw it in geopolitical terms as broad.

than the question of expelling the Allied forces landing on the Crimea to punish Russia for its intervention in the principalities against Turkey. But we can come to that. It's a bit complicated. But for the moment, I think the important thing to bear in mind is that there are geopolitical and imperial in terms of this neo-Greek empire they wanted to establish supposedly and religious motivations for Russia to push south, annexing eventually the Crimean Peninsula in 1780. And the Crimea Peninsula had been under the control of the Hanate until that point. The Hanate of Crimea was the last of Ginghis Khan's Hanates after the collapse of the Mongol Empire. And it caused a great deal of trouble for Russia because the Nagai tribes and other Tatar-speaking tribes of the Crimea Peninsula and southern Ukraine, as we would call it today, had raided north periodically.

So she wanted to establish Russian garrisons and make a presence there to eliminate any Muslim or Tatar threat to Muscovy. It essentially could still at that point be conceived. You've brought up sort of markets and ethnic composition and both of those things are fascinating. So when people talk about Crimea then, what is the ethnic mix? Is it this kind of pseudo-religious Orthodox, not pseudo-religious, but of... They've been actually ethnically cleansing, haven't they, since the time of Catherine the Great? They have. Yeah.

What is it? What does it look like? It's not really Russian at all. About 80% of the peninsula at the time of the Crimea was tartar in population. 80? 80. Yeah. Gosh.

And there had been, as you say, Willie, there had been concerted efforts in the early 19th century to Russify and Christianize the peninsula. So, Bacchisarai, which was the old capital of the Khanate, was sort of downgraded. was sort of downgraded by the building of new roads, and Simferopal, which was an important supply town to get provisions from southern Russia into the Crimea, was upgraded. And Sevastopol, the naval base, was built in a sort of neoclassical style and became sort of stronghold of Russian presence. But as you say, it was a long-term plan of the Russians to Christianize, and the Crimean War accelerated, a process, I believe, that had already been taking place to encourage Tata populations to evacuate and move back to the Ottoman Empire.

What you ought to do, I mean, we're sort of, we keep referring back to the Crimean War as if everyone will know when, how and why it started. So I think it's a good point now to describe the months leading up to the war itself and what sparked it. Well, we need to think of the Crimean War in two phases. The first phase, the first is Russia's attempt to secure its advantages, which it believed have been enshrined in a treaty, signed back in the 18th century and reinforced in 1833, to protect the Orthodox within the Ottoman Empire. So that's the Balkanslavs, but also, more importantly, for the immediate origins of the Crimean War, to preserve what Nicholas believe were the privileges of the Greeks or the Orthodox in the Holy Lands,

particularly their control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and more importantly, perhaps even, of the Church of the Nativity, where the Latins, backed by the French and the Greeks, back by the Russians, have been fighting for some time over who should hold a key to get access to the supposed birthplace of Jesus Christ, where the Latins had laid a silver star, which is still there, and also who was to have the rights to repair the roof, which had fallen in, and under Ottoman law, who owned the roof, owned the house?

So you can see that symbolically a fight over the church keys and the control of the roof was actually a fight over who should have precedence over control of the holy places at a time when there were, as we said, lots of pilgrims going to the Holy Lands, and when this was being used by all the powers as a sort of foothold into the Ottoman Empire, which, as we know, was increasingly weak and open to foreign influence. Let me take us then. To 1853, I mean, that is the year of the Crimean War.

You have Nicholas I, who has arguably the largest land army in all Europe. I mean, how powerful, how strong is he, and how do others in Europe regard him? Well, in 1853, when Nicholas essentially decides to mobilize his forces and send in his senior Admiral Menshikov to bully the Turks into giving the Russians what they want in the holy lands, and moreover, to reinforce which for the Western powers was an alarming development, the treaty rights they thought they had gained in 1833 to close the Dardanelles to Western military shipping when required by the Russians. The Turks were encouraged by the British in particular to resist, and they had their own reasons for resisting Russian bullying.

But the Russians had the advantage of being able to make a lightning strike towards Constantinople because they had troops already gathered, as they always had done, on the Danubian front. And it was only a few days marching to get to Constantinople. and they'd used that tactic before. They'd used it in 1829 when the Russians had come to the defense of the Greeks in their war for independence and had marched towards Constantinople to try and impose their will on the Turks, but also effectively to bring in the Western powers on the side of the Greeks. Were the stories that they were stuffing the Russian monasteries on Mount Athos with Russian troops?

When you go there today, they're like barracks, these huge monasteries in Mount Athos at Rusikon. Yes. And the idea was that they were using these as troop depots to launch against Constantinople. Indeed. And that connection between Mount Athos in northern Greece and the Russian Orthodox Church was terribly important because many pilgrims had been there. There was thought to be a spiritual connection with the Orthodox communities in Russia as a result of that link. In 1853, when Nicholas the first sent his armies into the Danubian principalities, what we now call basically Romania. and the idea was that the threat of the seizure of Constantinople would force the Turks into giving

into Russia's demands. The Turks, a little bit like the Ukrainians today, actually thought much better than the Russians assume they would. The Turks have been modernising their army, partly under French influence since the 1830s and 40s, and they were quite good at siege warfare. So they defended Salishtria, which was the main town, the Russians decided to attack quite well. And the Russians eventually had to give up trying to take Solistria on the way to Constantinople. We were all brought up on this idea of the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman is this decaying state. But I think historians today see it as oddly resilient, don't they, that this was something which was actually stronger than it looked. Indeed. And they fought particularly well in the defense of Solishtria. And partly they were

helped by the fact that that area was badly provisioned. It was basically marshland, cholera, typhus infested. More Russian troops died from disease than they did from the fighting, and demoralization soon set in. But once the Turks effectively repelled the Russians, you know, at that point, there needn't to have been a Crimean War at all, because effectively the Russians were being sent back with a tail between their legs, not just by Turkish resistance, but by the fear of Austrian intervention. Now, here's another factor we have to bring it, because essentially Russia had counted on the support of Austria. Nicholas I had rescued France Joseph, the young emperor of Austria in 1849, by sending in 250,000 Russian troops to crush the Hungarian uprising. And he thought that the Austrians owed him one

and certainly support them. It turned out that the Austrians were more concerned about the effect that Russia's incursion into the Balkans might have on their own Balkan Serbs. Because Romania is immediately next door to Hungary. Exactly. They feared that Russia's encouragement of Balkan uprisings against the Ottomans would spill over into Balkan Serb uprisings against the Austrians, which of course we know would happen much later. later in 1914, indeed, through the Balkan wars before that. And so the Austrians adopted a stance of arm neutrality, but then when the Russians were actually on their march to Constantinople, they delivered an ultimatum to the Russians,

get out, or we will use the forces that they had mobilized on the borders. So at that point, you would have thought, well, the Western powers could sort of just send the Russians back and impose the peace plan they had already engineered through Ostens. is intervention, which is known as the four points. And effectively what that would have done would be to say, well, let's go back to the status quo antebellum and we will put the Ottoman Orthodox populations under some sort of international supervision. We will demilitarize the straits, in other words, reversing that treaty provision the Russians thought they had got to turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake in 1833, and that they would reaffir the

and basically fudge the issue of what was to happen in the Holy Lands. They could have done that. At that point, there wouldn't have been a Crimean War. No one had thought of landing Allied forces in the Crimea. But having, you know, this is true of so many imperial wars, isn't it? I mean, having mobilized society against the Russians, there was a tremendous wave of Russophobia as a result of Russia's bullying of Turkey. The Russian destruction of the Turkish fleet at Sinope,

which is in the south of the Black Sea in 1853 had been called a massacre in the British press. Although you could say the Russians were perfectly justified in destroying an enemy fleet. I mean, Turkey had declared war in Russia first in 1853, and their fleet was supplying Muslims of the Caucasus with armaments, as the Russians suspected. And indeed, when they destroyed the fleet,

they discovered that was right. But the destruction of the Turkish fleet was sort of taken as a moral cause by the British who's, whose press was baying for war against Russia. Palmerston was leading a war party to punish Russia for its aggression. And so once they had sort of gone through the whole rigmarole of sending troops from Britain and France to Varna as they were then, which is on the Black Sea coast of today's Bulgaria, where these troops were sort of basically festering among cholera and typhus and bad supplies

and itching either to go home or see some action. The viewpoint of most of the Allied commanders was, well, we've taken them this far. Let's now finish the job. Yeah, look, it's a good point to take a break. Join us after the break when we find out these troops that are amassed facing each other, itching to do something. What happens next? Welcome back.

So our guest, Orlando FIGs, was just holding a spellbound about the rumblings and machinations that led to what he's now calling the first Crimean War because there are so many parallels that can be drawn to what's going on in Russia today. And what you were painting was a picture that again seems very, very resonant now where Russia really doesn't think that the rest of Europe is going to mind very much,

that they're not going to do anything very much. You know, they've struck a blow in Constantinople, they're defending Christianity, come on, we're the good guys. And suddenly, the Western powers, the Allies, Britain and France, in particular, we were just talking about their troop movements before we went to the break, are saying no. We actually don't, we're not on your side. Even the Austrians who owe them are saying, no, we're not on your side either. So there's suddenly a range of Western European powers facing off against Russia, and Russia

is saying, this is just our right. I don't understand why you're meddling, this is our affair. Now, you were saying that the Turks were not as weak as everyone suspected. It's also true to say the Russians were as strong as everybody suspected either. I mean, they had the numbers. I mean, we're talking about, I mean, I believe Nicholas I had an army of what, between 800,000 and 900,000 men. But they weren't disciplined. They had to walk everywhere. I mean, I found that fascinating reading that in your book,

because there was no sort of development of sea travel and ship capability. So tell me more about this army now, because we've got two sets of troops who are now, you know, getting into position to have this conflict. What shape is the Russian army in? There are so many powers of what you said with today, aren't there, I need, because, yeah, Nicholas underestimated the resolve of Western powers to defend the Turks against the Russians. And that was largely based on Nicholas's assumption, I think it was, more than anything. that the British and the Russians as the two major powers in Europe would agree among themselves how to divide up the Ottoman Empire, which Nicholas believed was collapsing,

in order to avoid a sort of fight for all and a general European war over the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. And in 1844, he'd come to London unexpectedly, met Queen Victoria, met Lord Aberdeen, and thought he had something of a gentleman's agreement on that basis. A man, they could do business. with. Sorry, I just keep, I keep sort of resonating with things that people have said in modern politics. This is a man we can do business with. It was all very cordial. Well, it was. I mean, he was already

showing signs of the rashness that he probably inherited as part of a mental illness from his father. And Queen Victoria noticed that. But he got the wrong signals. He thought that basically London would back him and that they also were interested in an orderly dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. When he came to London, when he, when he had that strange sort of visit to Queen Victoria and the meeting in Chiswick House, a mile from where I'm speaking. He understood that the British had basically given him a green light to go ahead with a dismantling or a joint dismantling of the Ottoman Empire.

And the British just didn't get that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if it was a green light he expected, but he thought that if he used a bit of force major, the British would somehow accommodate him. And it wasn't an unreasonable assumption, because there was, a very strong peace movement in Britain. There was also a prime minister in Lord Aberdeen, who was essentially Russophile and wanted to do everything to avoid war. So that even when the Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet at Sinope in 1853, Aberdeen advised Queen Victoria that this shouldn't be taken as a cause for war. And Queen Victoria herself was fairly hostile to the Turks.

I mean, it was really something to stick in the throat of many British politicians, especially high Anglicans like Aberdeen and Gladstone, the idea of defending a Muslim power against a Christian state like Russia. That was hard for them to swallow. Gladstone had quite a lot of interest also in the Eastern Christians, didn't he? He spoke out against the Bulgarian atrocities and so on, these various massacres. Well, indeed, much later. I mean, under the influence of people like Stratford Canning,

Urquhart, the British had taken the view that the Turks could and should be supported because they were being westernised, that Rashid Pasha, the Prime Minister in Constantinople, who sort of dressed in the European manner, had been to foreign schools, had visited London and drawn up a series of reforms, the Tanzimac reforms, as we called them in, I think, Bryansston Square, where Stratford Canning lived. And this was the idea that the problem of the Ottoman Empire's treatment of its Christian minorities would be resolved by reform. But of course, that was always slower than the Western powers wanted. I mean, there was a certain amount of idealisation of the Turks among Turkophiles like Urquhart in Britain.

And there was a certain amount of wishful thinking that the Turks could be somehow civilised, which would, of course, then open the doors to British free trade. Turkey was the most important export market for British manufacturers. Really? Absolutely. And an important geographical point for the land route to India, as you know, Willie. So that was one of the reasons why the British turkophiles were so insistent on dragging Britain into a war in the defence of the Turks. Because they thought that if they didn't go in, then their initiative to westernize and reform the Turkish system would lose strength.

And the Russians would go in instead. One of the things I find most interesting in your book was that you point out that actually the British contribution to the Crimean War was far smaller than many of the other armies that were sent in. And the French, I didn't know this, that the French army that went to Crimea was far, far larger than ours. What are the French doing at this point? Well, the French are essentially at this point tagging along behind the British. It's the British who are leading the campaign to turn the crisis of 1853 into a war to punish Russia. Above all, Palmerston backed by the Times and other newspapers like The Morning Chronicle, who were effectively casting Russia as a sort of savage, Asianatic nations, threatening the liberties of Europe

because they had suppressed the 1848 revolutions. The British had made a hero out of Kasuth, the Hungarian rebel, who came to London, greeted as a hero. And the Polish cause, above all, was taken up by the French and the British. British as a sort of cause to defend Western civilization and liberties against the Russian menace, as they called it. The French were interested in, well, Louis Napoleon, the new emperor of 1852, needed support and he was looking to the church. He was the Napoleon's what? Nephew. Nephew. So as nephew, his foreign policy was effectively to assert France again as a great power and a quick victorious war against the Russia in the Crimea would suit that. But also,

I think the French were suspicious of letting the British have it their own way in the Ottoman Empire and the Near East more generally. They had their own interests in Egypt in particular. So they went along with the British and agreed eventually to sending this Allied fleet, which landed on the western shores of Crimea, north of Sevastopol. This is actually an invasion of the Crimea by French and British forces. Indeed. And indeed, King Lake, the first great historian of the Crimean War, called it the invasion of Russia. So you could really describe the Crimean expedition as a European war, led by the British and the French, later joined by the Italians for their own reasons, and indeed, to some extent, supported by the Austrians against Russia,

to punish Russia for its bullying of the Ottoman Empire. Orlando, paint a picture for us of of what's actually happening on the ground. So, steamships are leaving... What are they? Are they steamships? They're not yet steamships. There are a few steamships, but that first Allied landing was essentially large frigates with sails. And they're sailing from Bulgaria, this large invasion fleet.

From Varna in Bulgaria, across the Black Sea, landing on the Crimean Peninsula. What date? We're talking about April 1854. It's a little bit badly planned and executed, because, you know, they don't have maps of the Crimea. They're dependent on... It seems to be a great feature of British invasions of places at this point.

They have everything except the maps. Yeah. They had no idea what Crimea was like. They had read various travelogues of the Crimea, which... That's exactly what happens in Afghanistan. 1839, they have a sketchbook by some guy. Yeah, it's the same. They thought Crimea was some sort of tropical paradise

and that they wouldn't need any winter gear. So, of course, that becomes their major. problem. Generals January and February 1855 would decimate the British forces. In a way, coming back to your original question, Anita, it didn't decimate the French. The French were better supplied. The French were a more professional army. They had more military experience in the recent past. They'd fought a war of conquest in Algeria. And they had in, particularly in the Zouavs, which were these sort of daredevil infantry, they had a sort of shock troop force. that proved extremely good in the Crimea, particularly in the Battle of the Alma Heights,

which took place in the days after the Allied landing on the Allies route towards Sevastopol, which was their ultimate objective. And in the Battle of Incomen, the heights above Sevastopol, where the Zouabes fought brilliantly in fog to overcome the Russians. So the French were better trained, had better experience, so a bigger army. And they were also much better equipped and better provisioned. I mean, that was also one of the great lessons of the Crimean War, don't send a large army to do battle without providing suit kitchens and the rest of it. I'd really love to know about the Russian troops in all of this,

because they seem to be even worse equipped, to be honest. I mean, I sort of said that they were walking everywhere. That's because they never really concentrated on a fleet before this. man in charge? Is it Prince Menshikov at this time? Is the commander-in-chief of the forces? It is. Or tell us about him, because is it true that he has no downstairs? I mean, is that a true story? Can you tell us about that? That he was emasculated. He was, I was trying to be a bit more delicate.

No, but isn't that the story that there was a shell that went off and removed his manhood? There are all sorts of stories. I'll tell us, Orlando. We love Scarless gossip. Go on Orlando. I can't give you the answer to that. It was probably, like most of these rumours in exaggeration. Okay, but we should tell people we're talking about this.

He sang in a high falsetto. We are sniggering at the back of the class without telling you. But, I mean, there was a rumor that there was a rumor that a Turkish cannon shall emasculinated him. Yeah. You asked me about the Russian army. Yeah. The Russian army. You asked me about the Russian army.

I shall answer this question. Go on. The Russian army was a serf army, and this is the most important point to be made. because the serf army of the Russian Empire was badly equipped. It was effectively dependent on the soldiers making much of their own equipment. So the soldiers were encouraged to form themselves into collectives, they called them Artels, and to bring their village trades into the garrisons to make their own uniforms, belts, boots and all the rest of it. And the ministry of war depended on this because it lacked the finance to provide them with the proper equipment.

It had muskets, but their range was only, they could only really shoot up to 300 meters, whereas the French and then later the British were equipped with these fantastic minier rifles, which could hit accurately at a range of about 1,000 meters. So they were much behind in rifle power, but what the Russians were quite good at was engineering and artillery and in siege warfare, which made the defence of Sevastopol so enduring on the Russian side. Orlando, everything I've ever learned at school about the Crimean War and indeed all the kind of movies about the charge of the Light Brigade and everything, the British commander has always made to be complete idiots. Lord Raglan is a kind of someone's never

been to war, it just has big moustaches. Is that a fair picture or it sounds a familiar picture? I think it's more or less fair. Yeah, I mean, it was essentially the army of Wellington. I mean, nothing could really be done to modernise the army or professionalize it. And it was still very much a class army. I mean, there was probably more similarity between the British and the Russian army than there were between the British and the French army. I mean, many soldiers noticed that. I mean, particularly in the French side, they would go over to the British camp and say, this is like the old days of serfdom, because the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the French officers would have a tent with servants and, you know, sort of, the newspaper, nicely iron for him to read. And, you know, on, among the counts in the Russian army, is the young count Tolstoy. Indeed. Tolstoy had led a life of profligacy, gambling, womanising, and then had gone into the army and landed in Bucharest at this first stage of the war when the Russians were marching on Constantinople and was under General Gutsakov. And then later transferred to the Crimea itself, where he was to write a sort of foet on, a sort of monthly update on the war published in periodic.

in Russia, which was later published as sketches from Sevastopol. And in some ways, although they were originally sort of journalistic pieces, were they? I mean, like early Hemingway or something. It was, yeah, that's a good comparison. It was sort of reportage, which was in Russia, the closest the Russians could get to Verite, because all newspapers were censored. There was only one newspaper in the whole battle zone published in Adyessa, and all it did was essentially published the communiques of the general staff. course it was very different in the West, particularly in England, where the Times and William Russell, their famous reporter, completely blew the lid on the incompetence of the command.

William Howard Russell, the world's first war reporter, a very important figure. Went on then to the Indian Mutiny, 857. Indeed. And that, along with photographic reporting from the front, was to have a transformative effect. So the troops have landed. Just talk us through the movements and how this war develops, Orlando? So the Allied expedition lands at a little place called Ifpatoria, which had no Russian defences in April 1854, it takes them a good deal of time to disembark and they find they don't have really enough supplies to go much further. They don't have any water. Men begin to drop like flies in the heat. But eventually, after a few skirmishes with the Cossacks, they engage the Russians in the first major battle of the Crimean War.

The Battle of Alma. The Battle of the Alma Heights, which stood between Yipateria and Sevastopol, Russia's great naval base, which the Allied forces had set out to destroy. And the Russians had occupied the Heights and found themselves confronted by the Allied forces, who essentially got the better of them, thanks mainly to the Minier rifle, which could fire further than the Russian muskets, and to the bravery of the French's war forces who clambered up the rocks of the Alma Heights and forced the Russians to effectively flee and panic. At that point, the British, if they had pursued the correct strategy, could have captured Sevastopol

immediately, because it was undefended. The Russians had not expected the Allies to land on the Crimea, let alone at such a point, and they had not fortified the Sevastopol at all. Could they have just bombarded it? I mean, if they'd sent enough warships, then that's what they were doing in North Africa at the same time, for example. You have all those... Even simpler than that, will you, they could simply have sent in a few squadrons of soldiers and taken Sevastopol with few losses. But they believed mistakenly, partly because of bad intelligence from their Tata spies,

that the city was heavily fortified and so decided to circumvent the whole of Sevastopol and attack it from the south through siege warfare, which is what they did. Just before we get to Sebastopol or Sevastopol just give it us a picture. I'm very

intrigued by these zoaves. Are they French North African or are they fighting it? Yeah. They're a motley force but mainly they are French North African Tunisians. Some French You know, I mean, it's a Mediterranean force, we might call it, which have been forged in the Algerian War of 1831. So it was battle-hardened. Burbers, Arabs.

Exactly. It was motley force, but they were real fighters. I mean, they were probably the best ground troops of their day. And there's a great moment with the grenadiers and the Cold Stream Guards forming a line 2,000 strong and firing 14 volleys up the hill, which is apparently the equivalent of a dozen machine gun. It's all good sort of straightforward military stuff this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the battle of the Alma Heights is not complicated.

I mean, essentially the Russians were easily overcome and fled. The real part of the war is the siege of Sevastopol. And I suppose the attempts by the Russians to break the siege by cutting the supply lines, particularly at Balaclava, which was to result in the catastrophic charge of the Light Brigade. I pulled off on the charge of the Light Brigade, because we're going to carry on in the next episode. But while all this is going on,

and you were talking about the sort of Russophobia that has been whipped up, even in the run-up to this, is now at critical mass everywhere, because these are armies that are engaged. And what's interesting is that the whole of the British public are now behind this. There's fundraising, there's sort of concerts, there's jingoism. I don't know whether you know this, William,

but, you know, Dilip Singh, Maharaja Dilip Singh, his little miniature, that Winterhalter painting, is put on sale. to raise money for the troops of Crimea. Absolutely right, absolutely, which is ironic, because eventually he's going to try and get the Tsar to help him get the Brits out of India. But this is like a wholesale effort

to repel, repel, repel the Russians. And I'm very interested in what happens again at the end of this battle of the Almhites. You've got the Russian lieutenant general Kiriakoff, who's meant to be one of the most incompetent drunken of all Russian generals. And he leaves in disorder. And then the Brits even capture

Mechnikov's own carriage, which includes a field kitchen, letters from the Tsars, 50,000 francs, and most importantly, pornographic French novels. Do you find that most important, the fact there's ladies underwear in there as well? I was going to leave that for you. Well, no, it's a subject to itself. There were quite a lot of camp followers on both sides, yeah, as well as war tourists, of course, but I'm sure Menshikov was well provided. Okay, it sort of answers my last question of my moment.

But they're good. Good to know. The one that even may not have been true after all. Turns out. No, I agree. That goes very. As we know, war produces a lot of rumour, myth. I just say that's why I'm a journalist because I see these things. I see through these. You've spotted the line here. Very good. She doesn't present PM for nothing. Let's very briefly talk about the siege of Sevastopol without, you know, how bad does it get? Who is locked in? Who is surrounding? Just just give us, paint his picture of that siege.

Well, I mean, it's, it's an 11-month siege. The French under fire took the lead in building trenches in a zigzag formation. Is this the first great trench warfare? Have we seen trench warfare before? There's been siege warfare, but I think this is the first really major example

of trench warfare such as we have to see in the first world. Barb wire? Have you got that sort of thing yet? Not Barb Wife, but gabbion's, which were like baskets filled with mud as defences and three-foot trenches, which the soldiers lived in before they could retreat for rest. So in some ways, this is the first modern war with women. Absolutely. And it's all about who can supply the trenches with the necessary artillery, because it's a war of attrition in which, you know, they're firing thousands of rounds every day. Just like today. just like today. And yeah, it's missiles being launched from one side against the other day in, day out to try and wear down the enemy. And here, coming back to Anita's point about the Russian serf army, I mean, this is where eventually the Russians were to lose. Because as you say, Anita, they had to walk or go by horse and carriage into the Crimea because they didn't have railways. And because the shipping to the Crimea was blockaded by the Allies.

Whereas the Allies could bring in lots of materials, so shells and cannon and all the rest of it, from Britain and France by steamship, which was brought into operation. And from 1855, the British even built a little railway about 10 kilometres long from Balaclava, where their supplies came in, to the siege positions in front of Sevastopol. And yet the Russians do manage to hold Sevastopol. They do. They do. I mean, Severstopo is a special town, I must say. I mean, it is a military town, and it has a sort of unity, which I don't want to romanticize it, but Tolstoy's slightly romantic picture of Sevastopol as a very unified Russian town fighting for its survival.

He's probably not incredibly far removed from reality. There was a sort of spirit to the place, which does come across in all of the memoir literature of the defense of Sevastopol that I read. This is such a familiar picture now. It's so odd because we're now in a period where we've got trenches, we've got modern rifles, we've got a war reporter, we've got long-range artillery going backwards and forwards. This is a very familiar world. This is the birth of a new type of warfare.

Indeed. And on the Russian side, their big advantage was that they had in Totleben, who was a brilliant military engineer, they had a series of fortifications, Redan's forts, which would be extremely, hard for the Allies to take. I mean, they tried once with an assault on June 18th, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, which was hope would reunify the British and the French, to take the Marajov Redan, and they failed because they were to take it, the advanced troops,

the Zawabs would have had to climb with ladders, up fortifications, and then fight by hand against the Russian forces. So as we end this first half of our two-part episode on the Crimean War with Orlando Fijis, we are in a very familiar situation of the Russians hunkered down behind very effective defences and waiting for the Western assault. Join us next time when we tell you what happens next. Till then, is goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And from me, William Derrimpul.