Orlando Figes: The Crimean War

Peto & Grissell, the company he ran with his cousin Thomas Grissell, built many well-known London buildings, including the Reform Club, the Oxford & Cambridge Club, the Lyceum and Nelson’s Column.

This incident is the origin of the famous phrase, originally coined by Totleben: ‘The French army is an army of lions led by donkeys.’ The phrase was later used to describe the British army in the First World War.

A barrier about 2 metres high and a metre or so wide, made up of felled trees, timber and brushwood.

In an attempt to stop them from deserting, the Russian officers had told their men that if they gave themselves up to the enemy their ears would be cut off and given to the Turks (whose military custom was to cut off ears to receive a reward); but even this had not prevented Russian troops from running off in large numbers.

Lyde’s accusers claimed that he had fired wilfully at the beggar but the only witnesses of the shooting were three women. The testimony of women was inadmissible in a Turkish court.

It was from this time that Nice became a favourite resort of the Russian aristocracy, a ‘Russian Brighton’, according to the British press, which was alarmed by the appearance of Russian merchant ships in the Mediterranean, a sea dominated by the Royal Navy. There were dire warnings of an intrigue between Russia and the Catholic powers. When rumours later circulated that the Russians were intending to set up coaling stations in other parts of the Mediterranean, in 1858, Palmerston (by this stage out of office) called for a show of naval strength against the Sardinians. But the Conservative government of Lord Derby was less concerned, seeing Russia’s deal with the Sardinians as no more than a commercial agreement. The Villafranca contract lasted until 1917.

In 1857 the army song was published by the socialist exile Alexander Herzen in his periodical the Polar Star . The ballad was well known in the student revolutionary circles of the 1860s and was later even cited by Lenin. In fact, Tolstoy was not wholly responsible for the song, which expressed a discontent that was widely felt in the army. It originated with a group of artillery officers, including Tolstoy, who gathered round the piano in the rooms of their commander on an almost daily basis to drink and sing and make up songs. As he was already known for his writing, Tolstoy, who no doubt played a leading role in the composition of the verses, took most of the blame for them.

Under the terms of the emancipation, the peasants were obliged to pay redemption dues on the land transferred to them. These repayments, calculated by the gentry’s own land commissions, were to be repaid over a forty-nine-year period to the state, which recompensed the gentry in 1861. Thus, in effect, the serfs bought their freedom by paying off their masters’ debts. The redemption payments became increasingly difficult to collect, not least because the peasantry regarded them as unjust from the start. They were finally cancelled in 1905.

Overall, perhaps half the farming land in European Russia was transferred from the gentry’s ownership to the communal tenure of the peasantry, although the precise proportion depended largely on the landowner’s will.

Shamil was sent to St Petersburg for a meeting with the Tsar. There he was treated as a celebrity by the Russian public, which for years had lived on tales of his courage and daring. Exiled to Kaluga, Shamil suffered from the cold. In 1868 he was moved to the warmer climate of Kiev, where he was given a mansion and a pension, and placed under only loose surveillance by the authorities. In 1869 he was allowed to leave for a pilgrimage to Mecca on condition that he left his oldest sons in Russia as hostages. After completing his pilgrimage to Mecca, he died in Medina in 1871. Two of his sons became officers in the Russian army, but two others fought for the Turks against the Russians in 1877–8.

Ermak Timofeevich, the sixteenth-century Cossack leader and folk hero who began the exploration and military conquest of Siberia.

Including the character of Vronsky at the end of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina .

It has since been shown that the metal in fact came from antique Chinese guns (J. Glanfield, Bravest of the Brave: The Story of the Victoria Cross (London, 2005)).

The Rumiantsev Library and Museum, opened in Moscow in 1862, was not a public collection in this sense. It was donated to the public by a single nobleman.