In 1854, Britain and France allied together to defend the Ottoman Empire against what they saw as Russian aggression. This move began not only the Crimean War, but also a history of confrontation between Western and Eastern Europe that continues to this day. In this opening act, Russia quickly admitted defeat by 1856, and gave up its influence in Europe for a generation. How did the Allies manage such a feat? The Allies won the Crimean War despite their poor grand strategy, which resulted from multiple constraints. At the international level, Britain and France remained geopolitical rivals,
and each sought to stop the other from making excessive gains against Russia. At the domestic level, neither the British Prime Ministers – Aberdeen, then Palmerston – nor the new French Emperor Napoleon III enjoyed secure political support, which placed further limits on the scope and conduct of their war. Ultimately, the Allies could only agree on a barebones set of goals, laid out in the '4 Points' of August 1854. In them, the Allies pledged to remove Russia's right to intervene in the affairs of Ottoman vassals, Ottoman Orthodox Christians and the Danube River trade, and also to roll back Russia's naval strength in the Black Sea. For hawks like Palmerston or Napoleon, these terms were a climbdown from their deeper desire to redraw Europe at Russia's expense.
Even in this reduced state, the' 4 Points' represented a significant rollback of Russian influence, and an end to the Czarist dream of dominating the Balkans. Russia would only agree to this if the Allies posed a large enough threat: logically speaking, the Allies needed to mobilize large numbers of men and material to create precisely that. But the political weakness of the Allied leaders made it impossible to launch such a large mobilization, last seen during the Napoleonic Wars 40 years ago. Instead, they could only conduct a limited mobilization that drew on a much smaller portion of their national strength.
On land, the most the Allies fielded was 300 thousand men: even accounting for their superior armaments and the additional 250 thousand from the Ottomans, this was hardly enough to threaten the Russians and their 800 thousand men. In the same vein, the British navy only reached about a third of its Napoleonic size. This mismatch between means and ends was the fundamental strategic dilemma of the Crimean War. The Allies wanted to threaten Russia into making large concessions, but didn't mobilize the resources to pose as a large enough threat. Without a solution, Russia would feel no pressure to submit, and the War would degenerate into a grinding stalemate. One obvious solution to the Allied strategic dilemma was diplomacy.
If other states could contribute their resources alongside the limited Allied mobilization, the sum total might be enough to get Russia to cave, perhaps even before any actual fighting. Accordingly, as War loomed the Allies reached out to the neutral states of Europe, especially the Great Powers of Austria and Prussia. A few minor powers showed interest in fighting Russia. Their reasons for doing so were reflected in the pre-conditions they set for an alliance: Sweden wanted Allied support in recovering Russian Finland, while Spain and Sardinia-Piedmont wanted protection from the United States and Austria respectively. While superficially different, these requests all basically asked for the same thing: Allied resources.
Such requests made the proposed alliances worthless in Allied eyes: after all, they would be diverting their scarce first-tier units away from Russia, only to receive a few second-tier units in return. As such, the Allies insisted that the minor neutrals drop their pre-conditions: in the end, only Sardinia-Piedmont did so, hoping that this would buy French goodwill for its planned unification of Italy. Its 20 thousand men did not add much extra threat against Russia. Things seemed even less promising when it came to the Great Powers. Russia had a longstanding anti-revolutionary alliance with Austria and Prussia: in particular, it had just saved Austria's Empire twice: first by suppressing the Hungarian Revolution, then by stopping Prussia from usurping the German leadership. In return, the Czar expected the two powers to quietly accept his Balkan expansion.
Instead Austria, to paraphrase a contemporary quip, would 'shock' Russia 'with the depths of its ingratitude'. In reality, Russia had made a major strategic miscalculation, and it should have been clear that Austria would not accept more Russian influence in the Balkans. It would mean Russia controlling the lower Danube, which was Austria's trade lifeline; it would boost Russian influence over the region's Orthodox Christians, many of whom lived in Austria; and it would encourage another round of nationalist revolts, when Austria was still recovering from the previous one. For Austria, going along with Russian plans would mean the end of its Great Power status, if not its very existence. So right from the beginning, Austria was on the Allied side.
It warned the Russians against attacking the Ottomans; it helped Britain and France craft the '4 Points'; and when Russia actually invaded the Balkans, it mobilized its army and demanded the Russians leave. In late 1854, the Austrians even pledged to join the Allies and enter the War next year. With Austrian resources now on their side, the Allies could finally become a major threat to Russia. In response, the Czar meekly accepted the Austrian demands and withdrew his army, ending his dreams of Balkan expansion. But the War continued – so why didn't Russia give in to the rest of the Allied demands? The simple answer is that Austria didn't want the other Allied demands either. As a multiethnic state wary of nationalist movements and border changes, Austria fundamentally wanted to preserve the existing European political landscape, not just from Russian expansion, but also from Allied hawks bent on redrawing Eastern Europe.
Austria had hoped that its input regarding the '4 Points' would restrain Allied demands against Russia. But while Allied hawks were initially disappointed by the limited nature of the Points, they soon got around this by interpreting each Point in a way that justified greater punishment of Russia, even calling for a '5th Point' that would support independence movements within the Russian Empire. And as the British and French diplomatic positions shifted to reflect these new interpretations, Austria began to see them as the latest threat to its security.
It therefore ended its participation in the War, leaving the Allies, yet again, with the dilemma of confronting Russia without sufficient resources. Neutral diplomacy had failed, and with it, the hope that the Allies could successfully threaten Russia by assembling a significant resource advantage. Now the Allies had to consider the alternative, which was to threaten Russia through superior use of what resources they already had. In other words, if the Allies could use their small force to inflict enough strategic defeats on Russia, the Czar would eventually be threatened enough to give in to the '4 Points'. But where could the Allies outfight the Russians so decisively? Granted, the average Allied rifleman had a moderate technological edge over his Russian musketeer counterpart, and the Allies had the luxury of choosing when and where to invade. But if the Allies were to advance their war goals, they needed to take strategically-valuable territory, all of which the Russians were already heavily guarding. Furthermore, the overall Russian
numerical superiority meant that the small Allied force would need a string of one-sided victories just to avoid being ground down. It would have been impossible for any army to achieve decisive results under such conditions. At least, that was the case on land. At sea, the Allies enjoyed a decisive technological edge over the Russians, whose obsolete sail fleets stood no chance against steam-powered warships. Without effective naval opposition, the Allies expected that a mere couple of warships on Russia's seas and coasts would inflict the serious, one-sided, strategic defeats that were needed for victory. As such, the initial Allied war strategy revolved around naval and coastal aggression. Allied fleets would be sent to Russia's Black and Baltic coasts with two objectives: first, blockade and destroy Russia's maritime trade; second, win one-sided fights against Russian warships and coastal defenses.
The idea was to get Russia to waste a disproportionate amount of resources responding to the naval harassment, even as its economy was being strangled through the trade blockade. Eventually, the Czar would have to accept Allied terms or face economic collapse. Elements of this strategy would persist throughout the Crimean War. But the bulk
of it was derailed from the very start, when the Allies landed an oversized force in the Crimea as part of a 'Grand Raid' against the naval base of Sevastopol. Despite initially catching the Russians off-guard, overcautious generalship soon saw the Allies stalemated outside of the city. At this point, the Allies probably should have withdrawn and raided someplace easier, but it became politically impossible to have such a large force retreat without first achieving something. So Allied war strategy quickly began revolving around the Siege of Sevastopol, with Allied leaders convincing themselves that capturing the city would be enough to get Russia to admit defeat. This was a major strategic mistake.
Russia of course hoped to hold Sevastopol; but as a peripheral naval base that could always be rebuilt, it wasn't worth Russia's entire position in the Balkans. So in a strategic sense, the Allied effort in the Crimea became a huge diversion, tying down most of their already-scarce resources and stopping them from being used against more deserving targets. With the Allies now prioritizing Crimea, the naval campaigns envisioned in the original strategy were left starved of resources, especially when it came to the soldiers and specialized craft needed to attack the Russian coast effectively. Nevertheless, 1854 and 5 saw British-led fleets operating in the Black and Baltic Seas. Their tasks remained unchanged: economic blockade against Russian trade, and one-sided fighting against the Russian military. But once again, Allied efforts here were hamstrung by their own limited mobilization. Right
from the start, Britain wanted a cheap fleet mobilization, so it filled its ships with novice sailors. As a result, half the campaign season of 1854 was spent training the crews instead. Furthermore, if mobilization was to remain limited, the Allies couldn't possibly risk expanding the War by angering neutral states. This significantly undermined the Allied economic blockade, since it meant that Austrian and American vessels, for example, were allowed to continue some trade with Russian ports. More irritatingly, the Allies couldn't even stop Russia importing banned war materiel such as steam engines, because the goods were getting in via neutral Prussia. Indeed, much of what Prussia was selling actually came from Britain itself! The Allied fleets tried to overcome this problem by targeting Russian coastal infrastructure directly. This degenerated into near-piratical behavior in many cases, as Allied sailors looted and burned fishing villages that had little connection to Russian trade. This policy
was not only morally questionable for many fleet commanders, it also demonstrated the impotence of Allied naval power – the warships dared not attack anything more defended. For as soon as the Allies began serious reconnaissance, it became clear that the key Russian harbors were actually fortified beyond what their fleets could easily handle. To score the one-sided military victories envisaged by the initial war strategy, the fleets needed either soldiers to conduct landings, or specialized craft to bombard from afar – and the Siege of Sevastopol had priority over the both of these. As a result, up until mid-1855 the
Allied fleets, to everybody's frustration, could only capture a few forts on the Black Sea coast, and the Aland islands off Finland. This was hardly enough to threaten the Czar. But despite failures in both the economic and military fronts, the Allied strategy of naval aggression was still a qualified success; because above all else, the Russians believed in it. Fearing that Allied ships would indeed smash down their coastal defenses, the Russians raised excessive numbers of garrisons: 200 thousand of the Czar's elite troops, for example, spent the War around the capital St. Petersburg. The effect of this over-mobilization was significant: by 1856, the Russian state deficit reached 30% of state revenue, which was a sum 3 times the total value of Russia's pre-War exports. That meant that even the most complete blockade could only inflict a fraction of the damage Russia's government was doing to itself.
Slowly but surely, the Czars were being forced to choose between foreign humiliation or economic ruination – just as Allied strategists initially predicted. Aside from the slow collapse of Russian finances, the Allies had little else to be happy about as 1854 drew to a close. Neither diplomatic nor military action had solved their strategic dilemma of having insufficient resources to impose their war goals upon Russia: in fact, the bulk of Allied forces were now committed to the strategic wild-goose chase that was the Siege of Sevastopol, their leaders operating under the mistaken assumption that the city’s capture would get Russia to give up the Balkans. Nevertheless, things were starting to change. Over the winter of 1854, the British began a
crash program to produce the specialized craft needed to bombard fortified harbors. The introduction of these new resources, inevitably on the Crimean front, produced an immediate result: in May 1855, 5 such craft entered the Sea of Azov and over the next month, one-sidedly destroyed the coastal infrastructure that supported Russian logistics in the Crimea. This victory made the Russian position at Sevastopol untenable and by August, the Russians had accepted that its fall was only a matter of time. But as mentioned
and to the horror of Allied leaders, this fact did not make the Russians give up. Still, with these new additions, the Allies were now far more able to implement their strategy of naval aggression. A new trade blockade was declared, more thorough compared with the previous year. Part of this was due to the specialized bombard craft, which one-sidedly demolished Russian fortified harbors in the Black and Baltic Seas. The impact of these victories, in turn, greatly enhanced the perceived power of the Allies and therefore the effectiveness of their diplomacy: Sweden finally joined the Allies in November, while Prussia came under serious pressure to comply with the Allied blockade.
And despite the limited value of Sevastopol itself, its fall in September 1855 was a decisive moment for the Allied war effort, because all the resources that had been tied down in the Siege were now freed for new operations against the Russian coast and periphery. Ottoman troops were sent to support revolts in the Northern Caucasus; the French planned a counter-invasion from the Ottoman Balkans; and the British Baltic fleet prepared to assault Kronstadt fortress just off St Petersburg. There was talk about supporting Romanian, Finnish and Polish national movements… The Allies seemed to be on the cusp of redrawing the map of Europe; and if there was one state that dreaded that as much as Russia, it was Austria. So it took decisive action to end the War as soon as possible: using negotiation and pressure, Austria quickly lined up the German states behind it, and in December 1855, issued another demand for the Czar to accept peace on the basis of the '4 Points'.
The Allied strategic dilemma was well and truly solved. Russia now faced the prospect of fighting almost every large and medium state in Europe, with no answer to the Allied naval attacks that were sure to come, relying on a collapsing economy and under a growing threat of nationalist revolts. This was a major, even mortal threat to the Russian state, and against this the loss of Balkan influence under the '4 Points' was a small price to pay. The Czar accepted Austria's terms in March 1856, much to the disappointment of the remaining British hawks, which brought an end to the Crimean War. Conclusion
From a strategic perspective, the Crimean War was defined by the Allied failure to set war goals that could be achieved by the resources they had on hand. Had they followed the Austrian interpretation of the '4 Points', the War probably would have ended early. Had they conducted a larger mobilization, Allied hawks might have achieved more of their aims. As it turned out, the Allies endured 2 years of grueling warfare only to arrive back at a somewhat harsher version of Austria's '4 Points'. During those 2 years, the Allies made several efforts to break out of their 'strategic dilemma'. Diplomacy merely replayed the dilemma on a different level, as the Allies lacked resources to entice the minor powers and wouldn't lower demands to satisfy the major ones.
A strategy of naval aggression proved to be effective, but it was hobbled due to constraints of the limited Allied mobilization. The notion that Sevastopol was a valuable enough asset to trade for Russia's Balkan influence was simply mistaken. In the end, the Allies brought in new resources over the winter of 1854, which set a self-reinforcing cycle in motion: more resources led to more victories, boosting perceptions of Allied power and making them seem like better allies as well as graver threats.
Most decisively, after Sevastopol the Allies also implicitly shifted their war aims back towards the Austrian version of the '4 Points'. The result was that Russia came under intense pressure, not just by the increasing damage caused by Allied military action, but also an overwhelming European coalition to boot. The Czar had little choice but to capitulate. The Allied effort during the Crimean War is a classic example of strategy within a 'Limited War', where a state fights with only a fraction of its strength. Strategymakers in such wars not only have to respect the limits this places on war strategy, they also have to set appropriate war goals that can be achieved with the available resources on hand. In a modern world where unlimited war inevitably leads to nuclear annihilation, these conditions make the Crimean War a very relevant case study indeed.
2022-08-28