Professor of History at the University of London Orlando Figes in his book Crimea: The Last Crusade described the consequences of the Crimean War for Moscow:
“The demilitarization of the Black Sea was a major blow to Russia, which was no longer able to protect its vulnerable southern coastal frontier against the British or any other fleet… The destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and other naval docks was a humiliation. No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a great power previously… The Allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power in Russia. They regarded Russia as a semi-Asiatic state… In Russia itself, the Crimean defeat discredited the armed services and highlighted the need to modernize the country’s defences, not just in the strictly military sense, but also through the building of railways, industrialization, sound finances and so on… The image many Russians had built up of their country—the biggest, richest and most powerful in the world—had suddenly been shattered. Russia’s backwardness had been exposed…
The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia—not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways that accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state of war against industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself.”
The Crimean War of 1854 and its parallels to the current Russia’s war on Ukraine >
Title image to the article: Montagne Russe was a name given by the French to the earliest rollercoasters, brought to Paris in 1816, inspired by the Russian custom of building perilous snow slopes for racing sledges. Here the apparently nonchalant Tsar rides the sledge of despotism off a cliff edge.
Below: In the parody of an Orthodox Christian icon, the Tsar is seated on cannon balls, with a ramrod as a crozier, a mortar as a mitre, and a halo of bayonets.
The Tsar’s aggression against the Ottoman Empire was motivated by his desire to defend the Greek and Russian Orthodox faith against Islam. He assumed Christian nations of Europe would join him in this ‘sacred duty’. However, general opinion in Catholic France and Protestant Britain was that Ottoman rule was more tolerant of their faiths than the feared despotic rule of the Orthodox Church.
