A century and a half ago, Russia lost a war it might have expected to win. The consequences reached far and wide
Can history offer any clues? Vladimir Putin likes to talk about the second world war, Russia’s best war, but the closest parallel is probably the Crimean war, which dragged on for two and a half years, from 1853 to 1856, before the exhausted belligerents worked out a peace agreement.
The Ottomans were joined by France and Britain, which sent ships and troops to the Black Sea. A war of attrition ensued, including naval battles as far away as the Baltic and the Pacific. The invention of the camera and the telegraph allowed a new breed of witness to cover the Crimean war in detail. There were still treacly accounts of derring-do – an insipid memento of the conflict was Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem,, which turned a colossal act of stupidity – the rash order of a general to attack an impregnable position – into a puddle of Victorian piety.
The Treaty of Paris ended hostilities in 1856 but left unaddressed many other concerns, including the porousness of south-eastern Europe’s boundaries – the “Eastern Question” would plague leaders until the first world war in 1914. After a relatively long peace following the Napoleonic era, the Crimean war unleashed a new volatility in great power politics. Europe would see a series of small, nasty wars before the immense carnage of the 20th century.Nicholas I died in 1855.
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