In November of 1854, a handsome Russian count with closely trimmed, dagger-shaped whiskers and a thin mustache that betrayed his relative youth, rowed ashore to participate in his country’s heroic defense of Sevastopol, then under siege by the French and British.
The count in question was Leo Tolstoy, whose Sevastopol Sketches, a collection of stories with an unflinching — and, at times, seemingly unpatriotic — view of warfare, would cement his literary reputation back home.
It always amazed me that Tolstoy, who would become one of history’s greatest advocates for non-violence, was not only a witness to the Crimean War, but an active combatant. Try to imagine Mahatma Gandhi — a fervent disciple of Tolstoy’s philosophy and tactics — in an officer’s dress uniform, with his hair slicked back, his epaulettes prominent, and a rakish, lady-killing gleam in his eye!
The recent turmoil in Ukraine, which has focused the world’s attention on Russia’s presence in the Crimea, may seem to be an expression of modern geopolitics, but it’s worth remembering that the region has been a flashpoint of conflict for centuries — conflicts in which Russia has historically been the loser.
It all starts with geography. The Crimean Peninsula juts down into the Black Sea much the way Italy does in the Mediterranean. Today, the Black Sea touches Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania, but in the 18th century, when Catherine the Great of Russia set her eye on it, the Black Sea was encircled by Islamic empires.
The dominant force in the region was the Ottoman Empire, but the Crimean Peninsula was the heart of the Crimean Khanate, whose roots went all the way back to the empire of Genghis Khan. In fact, the word “Crimea” is derived from the Turkic word “Qirim,” [kee-reem] or “hills.” You can hear the origin of the modern name a bit better in the Russian word for “Crimean,” which is pronounced “Kreemskoyuh.”
Over the centuries, the Christian principalities in the region had endured countless military incursions into their territory. The number of people taken as slaves is estimated to be in the millions. And, in fact, Catherine the Great’s justification for waging war in the territory will have a familiar ring to those following Vladimir Putin’s press releases: military intervention was necessary, she said, to protect ethnic Russians living abroad.
Then, as now, there was a larger geopolitical calculus behind the patriotic rhetoric. Catherine saw an opportunity to create a naval base at the southern tip of Crimea that would enable Russia to project its power throughout the region and open a vast new territory of influence.
A state-of-the-art Russian fortress at Sevastopol was completed in 1788, just as the newly minted United States Congress was drawing up plans to relocate the nation’s capital to some swampland along the Potomac River.
In the decades that followed, Russia grew in wealth and military power. By the 1850s, the country was in a position to dictate terms to the Ottoman Empire. The so-called Crimean War was a result of Russia’s destruction of the Ottoman fleet, on the pretext of protecting Russian Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule.
France and Britain, alarmed by the prospect of the Russian fleet running rampant in the Black Sea and disrupting their highly profitable colonial trade — not to mention the specter of Russian armies massed near vulnerable European borders — joined forces with the Ottomans to contain the Russian aggression.
A bloody stalemate ensued, but eventually the Russians were forced to beat an exhausted retreat.
The fall of Sevastopol was a great national trauma. Tolstoy witnessed the retreat first hand, and his account of the simple, stubborn heroism of the Russian troops was balanced by a sense of the great futility and barbarism of war. On the British side, Alfred, Lord Tennyson immortalized the bravery of the doomed, but obedient, soldier in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Tolstoy’s view of valor, on the other hand, was more nuanced. The less attractive dimensions of bravery — vanity, ambition, and foolishness — haunted him for the rest of his life, shaping War and Peace, and ultimately causing him to reject the idea of war altogether.
Chastened, the Russians adopted a softer posture in Crimea, which served them well into the 20th century, until the Nazi invasion in 1942. This time, Sevastopol endured a withering Axis siege that lasted 250 days and basically flattened the city, which suffered Nazi occupation until the Red Army liberated it in 1944. Since then, despite the symbolic handover of the territory to Ukraine in 1992, Russian influence in the city, which stills serves as the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, has predominated.
We would do well to remember, as the Russians surely do, the history of heroic military resistance — and humiliating defeat — that has marked the Russian experience in Crimea.
War in Sevastopol changed a hawkish young Leo Tolstoy into a peacenik; whereas Mr. Putin seems intent on adding a triumphal chapter to Russia’s bloody involvement on the peninsula.
