ISBN: 978-0197798867, Oxford University Press, December 2024, 364 pages, $19.27 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by: Daniel Stotland, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida, United States
In Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare, Gregory Carleton offers an eloquently presented and exhaustively sourced contribution to the existing historiography of the Crimean War. Carleton—a professor of Russian Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts—is uniquely qualified to offer a fresh look at the topic, given his previous work on both military and cultural aspects of Russian history.
The conflict that erupted in 1853 and saw the Russian Empire confront a coalition consisting of the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Second French Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia has long been recognized as a seminal moment in military history, representing a paradigmatic shift in military affairs. That thesis—that the Crimean War was the first modern conflict—is central to Carleton’s argument, which conceptualizes the war as the encapsulation of a great transitional moment as Europe moved from the Age of Romanticism and into the Era of Realism.
The book’s foundational argument is that the Crimean War represented a sharp technological break with previous conflicts due to its monumentally improved lethality. The Industrial Revolution, having reached its apogee, endowed the combatants in this conflict with armaments that were able to bring about devastation that was markedly more savage than that remembered by veterans of the Napoleonic Wars.
Western armies (although not Russian armies) would march into combat armed with rifles, not smoothbore muskets—dramatically increasing range, accuracy, and casualties. They would also be armed with, and tormented by, long-range artillery, landmines, and improved ammunition.
Outside of the fields of battle, but still part of warfare, other new technologies contributed to making this a new kind of war—railroads and steamships ferried troops from Europe to Crimea. News reports on the conflict and depictions of its horrors and devastation reached the British public with shocking speed due to the fact that the Crimean War saw the first broad utilization of the telegraph as part of warfare. The advent of photography made the reporting visual as well as literary, connecting audiences to the lived experience of the soldiers on a newly visceral level.
The other far-reaching consequence of encroaching modernity was the unprecedentedly broad level of literacy, which created a unique, up to that point, opportunity for the experiences of the war’s participants to be recorded and transmitted back home, influence public opinion, and thus occasion the rise and fall of governments.
While Carleton ably utilizes a variety of primary sources to illustrate this dynamic, the two viewpoints central to his narrative are those of William Howard Russell and Leo Tolstoy.
Russell was an Irish correspondent for The Times of London, the flagship periodical of 19th-century Britain that commanded a massive audience absolutely captivated by the reportage provided by Russell, who is often seen as the founding father of modern war journalism and the first “embedded” reporter.
On the other side of the war, Leo Tolstoy, a scion of a noble Russian family, was taking his first steps toward building a towering literary reputation. His career as an author would start when he penned a series of stories relating his experiences on the battlefields of Crimea.
Both authors began the war as products of their era and its cultural zeitgeist. Their expectations of the conflict were framed by what Carleton refers to as the Homeric Ideal—a highly romanticized image of conflict defined by glory, adventure, and high-minded idealism. The crucible of the modern, increasingly mechanized battlefield, the dreary drudgery of interminable trench warfare, the grinding brutality of attritional combat, bureaucratic incompetence, and propagandistic mendacity would force a rapid evolution into grim, stark realism, as both Russell and Tolstoy would abandon their early attempts at myth-making in favor of an entirely new literary style, one that, according to Carleton, would lay the groundwork for the later literature produced by the Lost Generation, helping it grapple with the horrors of the First World War.
Russell’s early glorification of the Charge of the Light Brigade, which he would help make into the enduring symbol of the war, would soon be swept away by his new focus on exposing his readers to the reality of the travails being experienced by the troops, the incompetence of their commanders, and the cynicism of the political propaganda—the soldiers now portrayed as victims rather than warrior-heroes.
Tolstoy, whose first wartime work rhapsodized the heroism of the population of the besieged Russian city, would develop his style of stripping the symbolism and aura of unreality from his description of war, returning it to the plane of the mundane. The characters are not exceptional men but flawed, complex, and human—cowardice and courage coexist within the inhabitants of Tolstoy’s later work, as do nobility and malice.
Both Russell and Tolstoy sought to demythologize the depiction of wartime death and suffering and to present it in the starkest terms possible—in order to induce changes and reforms. It is the examination and analysis of Russell’s and Tolstoy’s contributions to the evolution of the literary zeitgeist, and of the impact of the Crimean War on this dynamic, that form the bulk of Carleton’s narrative and showcase the greatest strength of the book.
Carleton seamlessly connects this discussion to the third major theme of the book—the argument that the Crimean War was also the first in another way: the first of the modern quagmire wars, where privations and suffering were ultimately pointless, a war fought for no clear cause and with no clear victories. Here, the argument rests on more fragile foundations, especially as the author concludes the book with a polemic equating a wide range of conflicts as being essentially the same species of “quagmire”: the Crimean War, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
Even within the narrow bounds of the Crimean War itself, the author’s suggestion that the conflict lacked a clear rationale is somewhat tendentious, given the geopolitical tensions, the fundamentally divergent socio-political systems, and the imperial rivalry that defined the Anglo-Russian relationship throughout the 19th century. Nor is it entirely obvious how the Crimean War could be described as lacking clear victory conditions—having essentially stopped the Romanov expansion into Europe that had been progressing steadily since Peter I, as well as having shattered its image as a Great Power on par with the British Empire, fundamentally weakening Russia’s influence within the European balance of power.
Nevertheless, Carleton’s work remains an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of the Crimean War as a pivotal event of the 19th century, offering a unique prism for assessing its impact on the evolution of the modern world and its framework for engaging with fundamental questions of wartime experience. Moreover, while delving deeply into the primary sources and sophisticated cultural and political analysis, the book is intended for and remains accessible to a general audience with relatively little previous exposure to this topic.
