Crimean War

Crimean War, 1853–6. Known to contemporaries as ‘the Russian War’, this arose from long‐term Russian ambitions to expand westward and southward. The immediate cause was a petty struggle between Russia and France over rights in Ottoman Turkey. This produced an ultimatum from Russia to Turkey in March 1853, followed by Russian occupation of the Ottoman Danubian provinces (modern Romania) and a naval victory over Turkey at Sinope on 27 November. Britain and France (later joined by Sardinia as well as Turkey) issued their own ultimatum against Russia on 27 March 1854.

The Black Sea theatre dominated contemporary perspectives of the war. Britain supplied a field army of about 28, 000, which, with a French contingent of equal size, landed in May 1854 at Varna to defend it against Russian forces crossing the Danube. When this threat failed to materialize, the allied armies were transferred to the Crimean peninsula, landing north of the main Russian naval base of Sebastopol on 14 September. Their first victory, at the Alma six days later, enabled them to continue south around Sebastopol to Balaclava, so establishing a partial siege of the base.

Through the autumn the Russians tried to break the siege of Sebastopol, the major attacks being at Balaclava in October and Inkerman in November. After surviving a bad winter, the allies launched naval expeditions against the smaller Russian bases of Kerch in May and Kinburn (near Odessa) in October 1855. Meanwhile, the Russians made one final attempt to relieve Sebastopol in August at the Tchernaya. Repeated British and French attacks on Sebastopol finally led to the base becoming untenable and the Russians abandoned it in October.

Modern historical study pays as much attention to the naval campaign fought in the Baltic as to the Crimean theatre. The end of the war came about not through the fall of Sebastopol but through the British victory in August 1855 in destroying the Russian dockyard at Sweaborg (outside modern Helsinki). Rather than face the loss of Cronstadt as well as Sebastopol, the Russians agreed to moderate peace terms in the treaty of Paris of 30 March 1856, with the Black Sea declared neutral and the Danube an open waterway.

The result of the Crimean War has been much debated. By pursuing a limited aim the allies held Russia in check for a generation, rather than destroying themselves by marching on Moscow. Equally, although British performance in the Crimea was a contemporary byword for incompetence, it is recognized that by the winter of 1855 most of its problems were solved.