New Tolstoys

In Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the birth of modern warfare, Gregory Carleton argues that the Crimean War (1854–6) “changed forever the face of modern warfare” through its weapons (rifles and artillery), communications (telegraph and trains) and medical advances (triage and chloroform). But the core contention of this concise volume is that Leo Tolstoy and William Howard Russell revolutionized war reporting. As eye­witnesses, Tolstoy, then a Russian soldier and budding writer, and Russell, a celebrated journalist embedded with the British, created the myths of the Siege of Sevastopol and the Charge of the Light Brigade respectively, only to puncture the Homeric view of death as a meaningful heroic sacrifice. Tolstoy’s sketch “Sevastopol in May” depicted death dispassionately, without symbolism. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, which celebrates blind obedience and the incomprehensibility of the war, was published weeks after the battle and drew on Russell’s eyewitness account in The Times. Russell’s subsequent reporting further exposed the ineptitude and logistical catastrophes that had led to enormous casualties. Both writers rejected sentiment for experiential truth and detail, techniques that would be refined in writing about the First World War by Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, among others, and again in Vietnam and beyond.

Carleton’s command of Russian and British sources offers a stereo vision and reveals striking parallels between the two countries, each of which cultivated a sense of exceptionalism that had been supercharged by pride after the defeat of Napoleon. This was, the author says, the first time public opinion played a role in war, as stalemate and public dissatisfaction brought political change following the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855 and the fall of the Whig-led coalition government of Lord Aberdeen. The latter led to a shift from aristocratic hegemony to a middle-class order and concern for the fate of the common soldier. But most of the million who died during the Crimean War were subjects of the Russian Empire, and fear of revolts over conscription was one driver for the legal, political and military reforms enacted by Nicholas’s son Alex­ander II, the “liberator”.

The parallels are ultimately somewhat forced, especially as Carleton extends them to Russia’s current quagmire: the stalemate in a war of choice that was motivated by a tissue of lies and still offers no clear prospect of victory. Crimea can more productively be compared to past Russian wars that became “graveyards of exceptionalism” – the Russo-Japanese war, the First World War and Afghanistan – where military defeats begat political transformations. Will Russia’s Crimean (and wider Ukrainian) quagmire lead to political change? The cult of the warrior hero again dominates the echo chamber of its media, but is there a Tolstoy who will succeed in subverting it and holding up a mirror to Russian society?

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