Crimea and punishment

HISTORY: IAN THOMSONreviews Crimea: The Last CrusadeBy Orlando Figes Allen Lane, 575pp. £30

THESE DAYS news is what we can digest after Sunday lunch, along with shopping advice and tips on gardening. Television make-believe, not newspaper journalism, increasingly shapes our view of the world, as life turns into a high-speed information mosaic and much journalism becomes a glossy adjunct of advertising.

During the 1854-6 Crimean War, by contrast, journalism was a respectable trade that counted for much. Indeed the Crimea was the first war to see the emergence of the war correspondent as a witness to atrocity and human infamy. In pursuit of copy, reporters risked their lives under Russian fire, and public opinion was often determined by what they found. Pre-eminent among the new breed of war reporter was the Dublin-born William Howard Russell, whose dispatches for the London Timesblatantly rejected conservative pieties about the infallibility of the English officer class (and the dastardliness of all Russians) and set out instead to question and provoke.

No doubt Russell’s Anglo-Irish background helped to distance him from the English military establishment (which despised him). His account of the Charge of the Light Brigade, when Lord Cardigan’s cavalry galloped suicidally into the maw of Russian artillery at Balaclava, still moves with its controlled understatement and scrupulous, unsparing lucidity. “At twenty-five to twelve not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of these bloody Muscovite guns.” Published in the Times on October 25th, 1854, the article brought consternation to many a British breakfast table.

Orlando Figes, author of this exhaustive new history of the Crimea, is no stranger to newspaper exposure. Earlier this year he admitted that he had written anonymous Amazon online reviews attacking books by fellow Russianists. One of the reviews, published under a pen name, was intensely hostile to Molotov's Magic Lantern, by Rachel Polonsky ("This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published"); another review excoriated Robert Service's Comrades. A third review, curiously, was brimful of praise for The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, by Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck college, part of the University of London.

Luckily for Figes, whose previous books include Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Crimeais rather a good book. The Crimea was a religious war before all else, and Figes expertly teases out the East-West complexities of the two-year conflict. France and Britain, in an attempt to defend their own imperial interests and curb the expansionist ambitions of Tsar Nicholas I, sided with Ottoman Turkey in a war to the death against Russia. Russia was then the fastest-growing empire, and Britain had reason to fear tsarist incursions into India and elsewhere in the East. The Crimea was the first time in history that a European alliance had fought with a Muslim power against another Christian state. In Moscow and St Petersburg, unsurprisingly, it was bitterly resented that the West should seek to undermine Russia's "holy cause" in this way: Slavic Christians should be protectedagainst the forces of Islam, not subjected to them.

Dostoevsky, a virulent Slavophile, reckoned that the war would ensure the “crucifixion of the Russian Christ”, while Nicholas I was seen as a crusader intent on driving the Muslims out of Europe and raising the flag of eastern Christian Orthodoxy over Constantinople and Jerusalem. In the course of the conflict an estimated 750,000 soldiers died, two-thirds of them Russian. The first “total war” in history involved hordes of civilian refugees, and such carnage as would not be seen again until the first World War.

After the fall of Sebastopol in 1855 it was clear that Russia had lost; not until 1945 did it recover its dominant position in Europe. No defeat is ever quite straightforward, however, as downfall often brings it own kind of posthumous victory. Though Russians were made to feel humiliated by their losses, they managed to recast themselves as Christ-like victims exalted by defeat. A mood of spiritual defiance prevailed as the reputation of Holy Russia was elevated above that of mere land-grabbing, money-grubbing Britain and France. Russia’s myth of having been stabbed in the back by foreign elements was a useful way of rebuilding national identity in the wake of the catastrophe: nations are anyway often incapable of imagining their defeat.

Dutifully, Figes charts Florence Nightingale’s nursing exploits in the Crimean peninsula (where the British army previously had no nurses) but devotes less than a page to the war’s celebrated black nurse, Mary Seacole. Born in Jamaica in 1805, Seacole became legendary for her fearlessness under enemy fire, even riding to the front line to help the wounded. She set up the “British Hotel” outside war-torn Balaclava, where she worked as a sutler (or camp follower) by providing Britain’s beleaguered troops with food and rum. Like Nightingale, Seacole firmly believed that “it is in scenes of horror and distress that a woman can do so much”. She was not much liked by Nightingale, however. Perhaps the Lady of the Lamp resented any rival to the title “chaperone and mother of the army”, especially if she was a West Indian trader-nurse with a gaudy taste in clothes. By dispensing alcohol, moreover, Seacole was reckoned to have discredited the new profession of nursing, and this may have incurred Nightingale’s displeasure. After her 16 months in the Crimea, Seacole settled in London to a life of gala fund-raising and freelance nursing; thousands of ex-servicemen hailed her as their saviour.

For all its narrative verve, Crimeais marred by lazy journalese – "crucial watershed", "major turning point", "crucial buffer zone", "roaring trade", "sea change", "fever pitch". Nevertheless, it remains a good history of what the Russians call the Eastern War ( Vostochnaia voina), scholarly as well as informative.

Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award in 2003; his most recent book, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, won the Ondaatje Prize 2010