POWs of the Crimean War

The subject today comes out of the Crimean war (1853-1856).

I talked to Professor Donald Rayfield, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian history at Queen Mary University of London, about the war itself and in particular what happened to those taken prisoner.  Surprisingly life could be pretty good!

Transcript

Welcome And Series Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and welcome to Subject Change with me, Russell Hollock. My guest today is Professor Donald Rayfield, and Donald is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian history at Queen Mary University of London. One thing that's interested me for a while now is the question of how prisoners of war are treated, and it's varied so widely at different times and places. So when I came across a piece by uh Donald about prisoners in the Crimean War, uh I couldn't wait to get him on the show. So that's our subject today, prisoners in the Crimean War. But when I was preparing for this, uh I began to look at more of Donald's work on the history of Russia and the Caucasus, and I realized uh there was much more we could talk about. So the plan is this. Um today's episode is going to be the first of three, and each episode will be pretty much self-contained. So today we're going to be focusing on the Crimean War itself and what happened to the men who were taking prisoner, and then the later episodes will go into the history of the Crimea more widely. Anyway, welcome Donald to the podcast. Thank you. So

When The Crimean War Begins

SPEAKER_00 1:15

to make sure listeners have their bearings, can you just remind us when the Crimean War was fought and who was involved and not just that, but but why it was fought at all. And I must admit I'm slightly nervous about the why it was fought a bit because I sort of feel that could be a whole podcast, so maybe we could maybe we just have the headline version there. Um the Crimean War, as we now know it, began in eighteen fifty-three, in in spring, and it finally ended completely three years later in eighteen fifty-six with the Treaty of Paris. And originally it wasn't a Crimean War, it was a war of Russia against the Ottoman Empire, against Turkey, part of its hundred year struggle to get Turkey out of Europe, a Russian project. It started by trying to retrieve the Christian provinces, which are today's Romania, from the Ottoman Empire, and Russia had to stop because the Austrian Empire didn't want to see these Christian countries ruled by Russia instead, and threatened to join in the war on Turkey's side. So it switched. And the reason it became the Crimean War was that Russia still wanted to attack Turkey, but it found it would be much better if it attacked it by sea from the Crimea, only a day's sailing away from Istanbul. And in the Crimea there was a wonderful harbour, Sebastopol, well protected by mountains and well fortified, and so it became for that reason the Crimean War. But it didn't stay the Crimean War because when the British and the French decided, with a lot of opposition from their own people, to join in the war against Russia on the side of Turkey, Christian countries deciding to defend a Muslim nation against a Christian one, they decided to attack Russia in the Baltic, and uh sent ships up and even round the top of Norway and went into the White Sea and later on into the Pacific and attacked uh Siberian ports, rather half-heartedly and unsuccessfully. So most of the fighting was to do with the Crimea and defending Turkey. The war itself had an official uh excuse that there was an argument over access to churches in Jerusalem between Catholics and Orthodox, which made the French very angry with the Russians. But the real reasons are much more obvious. Nobody wanted Russia to have more influence in Eastern Europe, especially as Eastern Europe was the source of wheat for the British working classes, and uh they didn't want Russia to have a stranglehold on it. So that was, I think, the main commercial reason. And the other was that Russia would then get access if it was successful to the Mediterranean, easy access, and that would interfere with Britain's access and France's access to their empires. The Suez Canal hadn't been built yet, but they were planning to uh get that access, and they didn't want Russian ships getting in the way. So those were the real reasons for the Crimean War. You

The Pacific Raid That Collapsed

SPEAKER_00 4:26

mentioned that the British were were attacking, not just in the Crimea. There was a story uh, I think, about a British attack which ended rather badly. Poor old Admiral Price. Do you just want to tell the story of Admiral Price? Yes, this is a uh this is a a tragic comedy. In deciding to destroy Russian naval bases all round the Russian Empire, they got together a small fleet of French and British sailing boats, with just one steamer to give it a bit of pull, and they went right past China into the wilds of eastern Siberia to Kamchatka, to the port of Petropavlovsk, and to do this they brought out a retired captain and made him an admiral, David Price. He was not very sure of himself, it took a long time to get the fleet together, and he was late arriving, and they made a complete mess of it. The Russian Cossacks manning the Petropavlovsk were very well prepared. They they knew they were coming, they heard from American whalers in the area that the fleet was on its way, and they had their guns ready. And the British and French attempted a landing. They were very optimistic. They landed not just with guns, but lots of shackles, so they could take lots of prisoners. And uh it was a complete massacre. They lost two hundred men. Admiral Price officially uh died of an accidental uh shot from his pistol when he was cleaning it. In fact, he shot himself, um and even he bungled that. It took him hours to die. The Cossacks who manned the um the fortifications were very kind. They announced a truce and they said, You can bring your admiral on shore and we'll bury him for you. And they buried him nicely and even put a monument up, and the British and French sailed away with um just a few captives. They left behind some wounded men, and to their amazement, when they came back six months later, they collected them and they'd all recovered. Uh minus a leg or two. And they took their prisoners, um the few prisons they had, and they decided to interfere with the shipping between Siberia and Alaska, which as you may know was Russian territory. And they didn't realize what the situation was, um, that uh Alaska and uh Vancouver in British what is British Columbia today were declared neutral, because neither Russia nor Britain had the forces available to fortify them or defend them. And on the way there, the um the British and French managed to capture one Russian ship and make all the passengers and the crew prisoners, and they sailed off to Vancouver, and they had to found that they had to um disembark all their Russian civilians. There were priests, traders, civil servants. And the British still had about two dozen Russian prisoners, prisons of war, and they couldn't think where to take them. But first they went to San Francisco, and the Russian consul in San Francisco heard about this. He had a list of all the men, and he went to an American judge, and he said it is illegal for a belligerent party like the British or the French to hold prisoners of war in a neutral country. And an American judge, Judge Norton, issued a writ, habes corpus, demanding that the Russian prisoners should be freed. The English captain heard about this, he got the writ, and instead of replying to it, he sailed away, and offshore he transferred all his prisoners to a French ship and another British ship, and then he sailed his captured Russian ship all the way down the coast to Cape Horn, all the way up the Atlantic to France, where they auctioned the valuable cargo. Meanwhile, those prisoners did a tour of Polynesia. They dropped off at Honolulu because they had one of the prisoners was an eleven year old cadet, and they thought it was perhaps a bit wrong. He said the cadet said he'd rather be a prisoner British than go on serving in the Russian Navy. But they dropped him off at Honolulu, and they arranged with an American whaler to take him to the Siberian coast and take him back again. And then they did a two-month tour of the Polynesian Islands, and they finally got to Tahiti, which was French territory, and the Tahitian newspapers report there was a lot of music and dancing and fraternization on board, and everyone seemed extremely happy, and they were disembarked. So these Russian prisoners had um oh nine months in Tahiti, and um they were finally uh shipped back to France um uh for repatriation eventually. So that was the Pacific episode. One of the uh Russian prisoners uh was on a French boat, and he was so popular with the crew, and he was such a good sailor, they persuaded him to stay on the boat. And his name was Simeon Udaloy. Everything was wonderful until six months later the French decided they go back to Petropavlovsk and retrieve the three wounded men they'd left there. Poor old Simeon Udaloy was so frightened he thought he might be landed and arrested as a traitor. Um nobody quite knows what what was going through his mind, but he climbed up to the top of the mast, made the sign of the cross, and jumped into the sea. That was the end of him. Gosh, so I was gonna sort of say that. It's a tragic comedy of that Pacific expedition. And Petra Pavlovsk, when they got there the second time, was completely deserted. They'd moved all the guns somewhere else, and to find their wounded men who were prisoners, they had to ask an American whaler again. A lot of American whalers all over Siberia, they knew exactly what was going on, and uh they they had good relations with the Russians. All these details, you know, which uh which happened far away from the main action, and people just mmm they just don't quite fit. Well, the Brit it made the British look silly and incompetent, and so that type of history tends to be repressed. Yes, quite.

How POW Treatment Changes Over Time

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Um So before we talk about Crimean war prisoners, I just wondered, d do you have a sense of how prisoners of war have been treated historically? I mean I'm thinking back to things like ancient Rome, where if you were on the losing side, you know, I guess enslaved if you were very, very lucky, you know, is about the size of it. One could say that there has been progress. Generally speaking, I mean it began with the the the the view in well if we go back to classical times, let's say, that if you were taken prisoner, it was your fault really, you'd done something wrong. Either you had failed to fight the death, and that was no reason to treat you well, or you had carried on fighting when it's clearly hopeless to fight and you'd caused unnecessary bloodshed. And in that case, you also deserved to die. There's no use. And in European history, generally speaking, wars were fought over ideologies, Catholic versus Protestant, uh, Christian versus Muslim, and they tended to be merciless. Uh the idea that your religious uh infidel didn't deserve to live. And there were some exceptions during the Crusades when Saladin, the Kurdish uh defender of o of the of the Levant, was very nice to French and British knights, but generally speaking, uh it was pretty murderous. And I think it came to an end, really, this murderous state, in about 1648, when the Thirty Years' War ended. That was the last big war of Catholic versus Protestant. After that, wars tended to be about territory, about access to waterways, about access to wealth. There was no actual personal hatred involved to any great degree. And it was seen as uh probably a good politic to be reasonably nice to prisoners of war because you might be friendly with that country when peace treaties were signed, and you might get reciprocal treatment that your prisoners might be treated better if you treated their prisoners. So during the eighteenth century things improved. And I must say that the Russians took the initiative in in the 1820s when they had a lot of Ottoman prisoners. Nicholas I, who is a Tsar that's not popular, people think of him as a hard-hearted martinet with no imagination or mercy, but in fact he he liked order and he liked good s common sense, and he instituted uh a principle in which prisoners of war were treated as your own soldiers, you paid them uh what they would have received in in salary, you made sure they had accommodation and food. And generally speaking, this practice was was continued. In fact, even when Napoleon invaded um Russia and and burnt down Moscow, there was no proper system for looking after prisoners. In fact, Napoleon moved so fast that he couldn't take prisoners with him. He just if he didn't kill them, he just uh let left them to stra uh find shelter and food themselves. After the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, you found stray Frenchmen and Germans from the Grande Armee living in rif Russian villages with the peasants quite quite happily. A few were were organized and uh from Moscow and sent to Siberia. But they were treated very well, especially if you were French. A French prisoner in Russia was in great demand to teach French to the children, to practice uh French with the ladies of the house, and uh he could also teach the children swordsmanship and shooting. The French prisoners in Siberia, if they could put up with the climate, did quite well. So that was an example of humane treatment, uh surprisingly enough, by by the Russians. Going

The Bomasund Captures And Mistakes

SPEAKER_00 14:16

back to the Crimean War, when did the Allies first find themselves with really large numbers of uh of prisoners on their hands? Well, it began, if you mean large numbers, with hundreds. They found themselves at when when they had one successful um expedition in the Baltic. They went up to the Orland Islands. The people who lived there are now Finnish, and they always were Finnish ethnically, but in 1854, they were part of the Russian Empire. So the big fortress, the Bomasund, had Russian officers, Russian police and and so on, but most of the soldiers, conscripts, were Finns. This wasn't very well defended because the Russians were sure that it was impossible to for sailing ships to attack them. What they didn't anticipate was the British did have steamers, and steamboats much more maneuverable, and the steamboat uh actually demolished the fortifications and arrested everyone they found. And the problem was that in Russia, civil servants, uh virtually anyone employed by the government, even students, all wore uniform. Oh dear. And so they rounded everyone up, not just the soldiers and the officers, but also the local civil servants and even some Estonian fishermen, and brought them all back to Shearness. And they then discovered they had other things to worry about. They had wives. In the Russian army, it was often a tradition that officers could take their wives with them on campaign, even mothers, sisters, and in one or two cases governesses. So um, so hang on, say hang on. Let me just understand. When they when they captured the fortress and they and they bundle all their prisoners on board, did they take the duty? They took the wives, yes. So they left the children behind, and the children had to find their if they had grandparents, that was fine. If they didn't, they had to be looked after by the local orphanages. So they they had this incredible m uh confusion, and it ended up with uh some of the wives going to uh being uh imprisoned by the French on the west coast on an island off the River Charente, and uh the husbands would be in China, and vice versa. So for some months uh the British and French tried to sort this out, and they brought some wives back to Britain and sent some husbands back over to France. They weren't used to this. I mean the British did have an enormous number of prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars, and they did quite well because they decided to send them as far away from the coast as they could. A lot of went to Scotland, and they were given plots of land on which they could grow vegetables, they could go fishing, and they were pretty well left to their own devices. And just for the listeners, you say the the the prisoners were taken to Sheerness. So where is Sheerness? Shearness is at the mouth of Medway, uh near uh near Chatham and uh Rochester. It's a very Dickensian country, Rochester and so on. And that's quite near to London, right? Aaron Ross Powell Very near to London, yes. Uh well connected by train even then. And uh they at first they put them in hulks, the uh the way that the British used to put convicts in Hulks before shipping them to Australia for transportation. And hulks were just decommissioned ships that had lost their masts and were rather damp and unhealthy, and they realized this. And the Russians uh officers and the Finnish soldiers made a fuss about this. Uh first of all, they said that the bread ration was inadequate, that they were used to about uh a kilo of bread per head per day. The British replied that that was Russian black bread, and British white bread was much more nutritious, so they didn't need nearly as much. But in the end they gave in and they provided ovens and flour and said you can bake it yourself on the dockyard. And then uh the Brit uh the Russians complained, and the Finns complained, that tobacco in Britain was exorbitantly expensive, very cheap in Russia. That took some negotiation before the Admiralty decided to supply tobacco. And then they the money that they were promised, and the British paid the same rates to an officer as he would have got in the British Army. So sort of picturing that we've got one Russian soldier, we've got any number of Poles and governesses and and whatnot. But anyway,

Lewes Prison Luxury And Public Anger

SPEAKER_00 18:29

but so what happens to them after Well they they'd refurbished Lewis jail, uh near Brighton, and it was warm, well heated, had a good ja governor in charge, and they had three beds to a room. They lived in luxury. They were given a workshop, and the Finns turned out to be extraordinarily good wood carvers, and they were allowed to carve wooden toys, beautiful things, um maybe some in the antique shops in Brighton today. And they made a lot of money selling them. So visitors to the prison would come and buy toys, and um they were making something like um in today's money, some of the prisoners went home with several thousand pounds. And there were complaints, uh, a letter to the Times. I don't know how many letters the Times actually got, but they printed one, complaining that uh orphans and widows of soldiers fighting in the Crimea were were uh had very little money to live on, was starving and living in the cold, while their men folk were suffering uh and dying of disease, and yet these prisoners were living a life of luxury. This is often a complaint, in fact, when um British officers were in Russian hands uh and uh living in hotels and going to the opera and mixing with ballet dancers. They were told when they got back to the Crimea that you better not ask for back pay because your fellow officers are so furious at the life of luxury you've been having in Russia. Well, it did I mean it did sound rather fun if you were uh I mean, it sounds like you could maybe make a decent uh living if you were if you were, you know, a Finnish soldier and and you know skilled at carving toys. But but the officers seemed to do even better. They did even better, yes. Well, they were very look well looked after.

Parole, Plymouth And Friendly Supervision

SPEAKER_00 20:10

There was uh another peculiar thing about the Crimean War, and I think about other wars in the 19th century, that embassies were certainly uh of your enemy embassies were closed down, but the chaplain was left there, and the chaplain's job was to look after prisoners of war. And in England there was a Reverend Evgeny Papov. And Yevgeny Papov was very highly placed. He'd been a personal chaplain to the Tsar's sister, who was Queen of the Netherlands. He spoke French and English. Uh he belonged to a London club. And the other this is the other extraordinary thing. London clubs continued taking Russian newspapers throughout the war and used to take newspapers for the Russian officers to read. He was subsidized, not just by the Rush uh Russian embassy, but by a um a Russian prince, uh, who we might want to talk about later, who who was extraordinary in in what he did. He did for Russian prisoners of war, what Florence Nightingale did for the wounded and the sick. So one thing I wasn't quite clear about is are Russian officers kept locked up? Are they released sometimes? Are they out on some sort of parole system? How are they treated? Generally speaking, there was a parole system. Uh the ones in Lewis were told they could go anywhere they liked, as long as they didn't go more than ten miles from Lewis. And they were invited by all the local gentry to shooting parties. In the newspapers you find that we had uh there was a hair coursing and the Russian officers were all invited. Sometimes there's one report which shows that some of the ordinary local population weren't so happy about that. I think if you had a brother fighting in the Crimea and you saw a Russian officer striding down the street, because there's one case where a Russian was abused in the street by a man, the man was brought up to the magistrate. magistrates and fined, and he was told by the magistrate these Russians are not here of their own free will, they must be treated with respect. Hmm. So that was the attitude. Then most Russians ended up in Plymouth, because Plymouth had a naval prison. They were kept up, but they were taken for walks. Country walks at schoolboys in the hills round round Plymouth. They had a very kind governor, Lieutenant Harry Vetch. He used to turn up at their concerts and their church services too, Reverend Popov would come down there and he'd hold services and bring papers and so on. And um on the Tsar's birthday they were given a a dinner at the one of the great hotels in Exeter and the amount of money per head was in those days ten shillings, which in today's money is about fifty pounds. And they had port, they had sherry, they had brandy, and the prison governor turned up too and was present doing the toasts to the Tsar. So it was very liberal and was a local lord and lady who had a castle and they invited the Russian officers there. So in Plymouth it wasn't bad either, and Lieutenant Vetch used to send desserts from his own kitchen to any soldiers who was who were feeling a bit ill. When the when the war ended and so uh all the prisoners were repatriated, um there were letters of thanks from the officers to to the prison governor for his kindness and condolences on the death of his wife and the same at Lewis. There was an interview with a with a a a journalist Russian speaking journalist who came over from Australia I think and he uh he asked the prisoners what they how how they were getting on, how they felt and one Russian uh soldier said I don't feel that I'm a prisoner. I feel I am the guest of a charitable and generous nation. Well good and the Russian officer who was supervising his conversation was clearly very annoyed. Well well good for us British but you know but I suppose also good for the Russians because because as you said earlier they uh they behaved uh extremely well there yes yes I mean I was interested on two questions which I suppose are slightly related.

Escapes, Staying Put And French Rules

SPEAKER_00 24:09

I mean one is did anyone try to escape and and the other is did anyone say well it's lovely here I'm going to stay on. In Britain there were two escapes and the police refused to investigate. They said it is not a crime to in uh escape from a prisoner of war camp. It's not a prison uh if nothing's been stolen Nobody's quite sure what happened but uh two Russian prisoners of war turned up in Hamburg on a on a ship from Newcastle so it's probably them. In France uh uh things are uh rather stricter they were m better uh more supervised. I suppose it's easier to escape from France because Well um it wasn't easy if you were a soldier. The sol officers didn't want to escape because m they all spoke French. They were quite happy and after an initial point in air they were given a choice of anywhere they wanted to live except Paris or a military city or a border city. And most of them chose to live on the Loire. They had one general General Badisco, a Russian general and he had his wife, his cook, a couple of servants and um a whole entourage and so most of the other French officers decided they live in on the Loire and they they had enough money to so and they got extra money from Prince David from the Russian embassy in Vienna. But there was one extraordinary escape from France that was an ordinary soldier and he saved up his pay it wasn't very much but he bought second hand French workman's clothing and buried it under a tree and that at Easter when there was no roll call, no work he went and buried his uniform and put on this clothing, then he pretended to be a deaf mute, and decided that Russia must be east and he walked east. He was totally illiterate, he didn't speak a word of French. He begged, and in France when you were picked up for begging at least then, it was the custom in every department to put you on a cart and move you to the next department like the homeless in a British county so he could get you to the next county. He decided when he heard a different language spoken he would hand himself in and after a while he did hear a different language spoken so he handed himself in he found he was in Belgium and he said he was a Russian prisoner.

Davidoff And Saving Prisoners Abroad

SPEAKER_00 26:27

They took him to the Russian consulate and then he went to Brussels and he was given a train ticket to Warsaw and so he got back to Russia and was congratulated by the Tsar nice just talking a bit about the French then tell me about this is it Prince Demidoff I pronounced that right this is uh an extraordinary man Anatole Davidov he was against the Crimean War. The Tsar disliked him intensely for personal reasons because he was rather liberal in his attitudes but he was married to Napoleon's niece Matilda Matilda was fairly wild and Prince Davidov was fairly liberal in his attitudes to women so they didn't get on very well and Matilda had on her mother's side was related to the Tsar and David smoothed his way by contributing a million rubles which is a lot of money to the Crimean war but he spent much more than a million on maintaining prisons of war. And as a French citizen and a Russian citizen and married to Napoleon's third cousin he had pretty well free access to everywhere. He didn't come to Britain but he had an agent in Britain and he had constant reports on how people were and what they needed and what medicines, newspapers, tobacco all the problems were sorted out through him and his generosity. In the Ottoman Empire he had a he had a banker friend who sorted things out for him and he solved the problem for Russian prisoners in the Ottoman Empire was that the Ottoman Empire was the only place where there was real hostility to Russian prisoners. And they had to be kept locked up. They couldn't have them walking the streets in Istanbul because they'd be lynched. And Davidov organized the transfer of all the Russian prisoners in in the Ottoman Empire to the three islands in just off Istanbul, Buyukada and um Kinaliada and so on, which are now tourist places, but in those days they were virtually entirely Greek. Each one had a Greek monastery and the Greeks were very happy to look after their fellow Orthodox Russians. They nursed them they fed them so the prisoners of war were taken out of Ottoman hands, taken to these Greek islands and then they were shipped to France, to Toulon and they were taken care of. It is interesting this this man I gather she was quite violent to Matilda and he was certainly regularly unfaithful. Well I think she was regularly unfaithful and I think in all all these divorce cases I think you take um with a grain of salt uh each each side's complaints. I gather that in the end the Tsar uh intervened in the marriage and I don't know ended up paying Matilda a pension or something. She was quite yeah she was got a lot of money off Davido. She got a lot of money off the Tsar I think she you don't have to worry about much to be said on all sides as my father used to say when you look at Davido's own generosity the way that he left his entire fortune to support veterans from the Crimean War when he died in 1870, he was quite a good man really So I guess because France and Britain and the Ottomans were ultimately on the winning side I mean I guess they had fewer men taken prisoner but I but I think you mentioned this this guy who you know the captain of HMS Tiger. Well there were

British Captives In Odessa And Crimea

SPEAKER_00 29:52

quite a few the Russians had quite a few prisons to take care of the first one was an a naval British steamer which got stranded on the rocks as it was firing at the defenses around Odessa. And they got themselves so stuck they couldn't fire back when the Russians started attacking them. Unfortunately it was a time in which there was a plague epidemic and the Russians were a bit nervous about taking them prisoner. And so they had to exchange messages on sword tips to avoid physical contact. But after three weeks quarantine they decided the British were not carrying plague and suddenly things became extraordinarily friendly and the governor of Odessa spoke beautiful English and he took them to the opera and he made sure they all looked after, they had hospitality all round and they came to some agreements which were very important. One agreement was they would stop killing each other's wounded early days of uh the battles in the Crimea the wounded were bayoneted to death. Now when you say that happened do you mean that they were when you saw somebody wounded and and the battle was still going on or were they either that or when after the battle was over finished them off. Gosh so you didn't have the bother of looking after them. Well it was a bother because we had to get them either all the way back across the sea to to uh Scutari opposite Istanbul or you had to get them across roadless wastes of Crimea and the Ukraine. Right. And they came to an agreement that the the this would stop. And afterwards you find um uh memos of other officers uh uh one officer who's n who's uh uh nearly killed by by a shot and then he's wounded and um a Greek came and tried to bayonet him and a pole in the Russian army pulled the Greek off and said you're not allowed to do this anymore. The problem for prisoners or British prisoners and French prisoners taken by the Russians was uh the first month because there were no roads effectively. Russia has all suffered and to this day suffers from not only had they not built a railway further south than Moscow, they hadn't built any roads or many roads and so if you're an officer they put you on a Russian wagon where the only springing was a birch poles one end to the other and you lay on the hay and and hoped you could survive and if you're not an officer you walked. Your baggage went on a wagon. It was better in winter because then you could travel up the river on the ice, which is reasonably smooth, but in other seasons it's a nightmare. They found, however, the prisoners that at least they were often given offered a bed for the night by local gentry who knew built villas and estates there, and the local Crimean Tatars had this tradition of Muslim hospitality and they didn't care whether you were a prisoner or a Russian soldier they would come out give you food and and medicine and so on. And there was a peculiar fact in the Crimea that the nephew of the last Crimean Khan who'd been expelled by Russia and then executed by the Sultan of Turkey he'd been rescued by a missionary taken to Scotland brought up in Scotland to be a missionary and he'd married to the horror of her father a Scottish girl and brought her back to Crimea and he was the only Protestant as far as I know in the Crimea and so was she and he died but his widow continued and his son continued and they were protected by both sides. This Anne Nelson was protected by by the British and by the Russians so they had a free hand in in dealing with prisoners and with soldiers deserters even they were they were untouchable. So there was a sort of Tartar hospitality to the unfortunate. Well I gather Royer I mean the captain of the Tiger I don't know if you wrote a letter of the Times or what he did but he did a thing which was highly disapproved of he published a book about English officers in the Crimea and he dedicated to our barbarous allies and our civilized enemies which made him very unpopular with his fellow officers but very popular with the Russians and he finally got to to St. Petersburg and there and he was taken to meet members of the Tsar's family in St. Petersburg and they explained him that he couldn't really wear his sword i as a prisoner of war but uh they would post it back to his family and they did it was posted via Warsaw in Vienna and got to London. It's extraordinary because the the war itself is such a bloody affair and people dying both in the battles and horribly of disease and yet there's this sort of gentlemanly it is it is extraordinary that the being a prisoner of war is re-recuperation from the battle. Mind you when you look at the statistics um and the French lost they estimate about a hundred thousand men but only twenty five thousand in battle all the rest died of disease and the same proportion in Britain. One of the things that made the public more angry with their own side than with the enemy was the fact that their own side by failing logistics and medical services killed far more of the men than the enemy ever could.

Prisoners As Propaganda And Diplomacy

SPEAKER_00 35:12

There was one thing about the Russians' attitude to prisoners which I thought was highly intelligent and foresighted, which was the Russians realized that the Ottoman Empire was not purely Turkish. It was a mixture of various minorities obviously they were interested in in the Christian ones they'd supported Greek independence but they also captured some Egyptian officers. One of the first things they they captured was an I uh was a ferry ferrying arms from Anatolia to the Crimea it was captured by a Russian ferry ferrying arms from from a Russian port to the Crimea and um it had a British captain because it was a steam ferry needed an engineer in charge and it had Egyptian officers and the British engineer was taken to to Moscow and St. Petersburg and he was offered a job in the Russian Navy he politely said I won't decline but I must go back to London first and settle my family and they said okay and see you later and of course he never returned but the Egyptian officers were treated to everything. They were shown the palaces they were shown the train the nice new shiny train which the Americans had built to St. Petersburg they didn't like the picture galleries because there were women with bare shoulders there, but um they liked everything else. And they were repatriated. They weren't even asked not to fight again. And it might explain why Egypt was so fond of Russia for the next hundred years. Because when the British took Egypt over in 1882 because they wanted to control the Suez Canal, a group of Egyptian officers went to see the Russian consul and said if you're ever thinking of attacking London, the Egyptian Navy will be with you for much longer if the British have anything to do with it. Yes they wouldn't have expected that and the other nation which the Russians had took advantage of was the Kurds. Right. The Kurds in the army uh were uh captured by the Russians or a group of them a hundred or so and they were taken to a small town in western Russia they were put to work harvesting in the fields and they harvested the fields three times faster than Russian peasants could and so the landowners decided to pay them a big premium and they were extremely well paid and they used the money to go to the market and buy themselves some cloth and sewed themselves some magnificent uniforms with Kurdish feathers and Kurdish trousers and so on and they had were given a house in this little town of Roslav and when autumn came they w their labour wasn't required. They would parade up and down the town and they would help women uh carry their water uh buckets of water from the town pump to their houses. They would go to the market buy food and they distribute it to all the beggars and they said we never ever Kurds never refuse a beggar and they became really popular when the town caught fire. It was a wooden town and the Kurds took felt, soaked it in water and climbed all over the roofs of houses to stop and catch fire. When the cathedral started burning the Kurds took off their shoes, took off their feathers, went into the cathedral and saved all the icons, took them to safe place. The newspaper wrote about and said look at our prisoners of war. Look at the British for their arrogance and their drunkenness and their their self-assurance who they're supposed to be civilized. Compare them to the hard working Kurds who pray five times a day who do you think are the most civilized? So that was in one of the leading Russian newspapers. Gosh so the British are oh well British came in for a very bad press in in that particular news British hooliganism was alive and while even on the other hand there was an example where the British were very, very much appreciated and that was in the town of Varonish where a group of British sailors ended up and they were very pleased because they found the the money that they were given to buy food was enough to buy an entire sheep's pluck and all the bread and they could eat and all the vodka they could drink. And then they were asked in spring if they could organize a ferry service because the trouble of the city of Varonish was that to get from the prosperous suburbs to work in the city, you had to cross the river. In winter it was frozen, that was all right. In summer and autumn there was a pontoon bridge which you could walk across but in spring with the floods the bridge wouldn't hold and they didn't have any oarsmen strong enough to to run a ferry service. So these Britons uh ran uh uh British sailors ran a ferry service across the all spring, from April to June, and they were paid very highly and some of the civil senior civil servants gave them a silver ruble uh each time which is you know equivalent to about twenty pounds in today's money. Extraordinary

Kars, Starvation And A Deadly Meal

SPEAKER_00 39:59

stories so the last thing I wanted to ask you about a little bit was it very much surprised me because there was the fortress of Kars which was besieged and although you would think uh Kars is in is in Turkey or in Ottoman hands anyway, nonetheless, you know there were a huge number of British officers there. There were British advi uh senior officers and advisors and they were horrified at the way the Ottomans were conducting this war. It was utterly corrupt. The problem with uh the Turkish Ottoman army was the very top officers the Pashas received enormous sums of money and the men they they just spent all the money they were supposed to spend on food. So the Ottoman army was actually starving and even the British advisors ended up eating their own horses because there was no food. And Kars as I as I I found when I was in that area is in winter extremely cold much colder than Russia. Minus 40 and where exactly is Kars? Kars is is near the what is now the Georgian and Armenian borders high up near Mount Ararat. It's not a place anyone wants to be sent to eventually the the Ottoman army was on the brink of though they were dying of starvation and it surrendered and the Russian general Muravyov he was quite a generous man and so when the prisoners all surrendered he organized a great big dinner, a beef stew and if you know the story is what happened to prisoners in Auschwitz when they were suddenly fed, that was the fatal thing to do and it's thought that fifteen hundred people died with that dinner. Good God and the remainders then had to be transported of course they had to go through the lower Caucasus on foot. Officers provided with a with a with a carriage but the problem was the snow was too deep for a carriage but not deep enough for sledgers and sometimes the horses couldn't manage on the in the mountains they had to get oxen to pull the carriages absolute nightmare until they got to uh got across the Caucasus by the time they got across the Caucasus they found that the the peace treaty was being signed. So they couldn't go on into Central Russia. They had to turn left and go west towards um Edessa to be repatriated. And prisoners uh if you were caught in eastern Turkey you were in the hands of what were called the Bashi Buzoks who are bandits basically means rotten heads. And the Bashi Buzoks the only thing they could do see to think of doing with a prisoner was to sell him to anyone who'd buy him uh either to someone who wanted him as a slave or to the enemy who wanted him back. So it was not a good place to fight. And that was the biggest bunch of prisoners but if they didn't die on the march home their war was over at least they got repatriated to to Istanbul or in the case of the few British officers to Britain. But it was a traumatic experience and the people who wrote about their experience in Kares clearly never recovered from it. Got there. Okay so that's a slightly downbeat uh ending well I got one upbeat ending actually and th this is unique in history I don't think it ev it's even happened today.

Treaty Amnesty And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 43:12

It was at the Treaty of Paris they foresaw something which we didn't foresee in 1945 when an awful lot of prisoners of war had to be returned to their home countries. It's one thing awful being a prisoner of war during the war the other awful thing is to be returned to a home country that suspects you of being a traitor particularly Russia and ever since the seventeenth century returned prisoners of war to Russia have been suspected of being spies, traitors, enemy agents as on and they've often been killed right up to Stalin's and today in fact today if you come back from the Ukrainian as a returned Russian prisoner you often wish you hadn't been. And the declaration was issued by the uh by the powers extraordinary In the history of prisoners of war, I don't think we've ever done anything better. Their Majesties, the Queen of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain and Ireland, the Emperor of the French, the Emperor of all the Russians, the King of Sardinia, and the Sultan grant a full and entire amnesty to those of their subjects who may have been or compromised by any participation whatsoever in the events of the war in favor of the cause of the enemy. It is expressly understood such amnesty shall extend to the subjects of each of the belligerent parties who may have continued during the war to be employed in the service of one of the other belligerents. And this affected Poles. It even affected Cossacks, because there was a whole group of Cossacks, the Niklasovsky, who fled Russia a hundred years earlier and sought protection from the Ottomans because they were old believers and they were being religiously persecuted. And they were captured, some of them by the Russians, and they weren't punished. They were offered uh residence in Russia if they agreed to be re-baptized into the ch Reformed Church, and most of them refused, and they were sent back to to the Ottoman Empire. Now I don't think that happened. If you look at what happened in 1945, when prisoners of war for in the Russian army and even uh Russian speakers who were not citizens of the Soviet Union, but would have been citizens of the Russian Empire before, were sent back to Russia to be executed, sent to the Gulag, and never given the chance of a normal life. So that was something at the end of the Crimean War, which was more progressive than anything we have today. Okay, well, look, I think um I think we're gonna have to leave it there. Um so in the next episode, we're gonna be going back further in time into the history of the Crimea, and we're gonna, I think, start with the Mongols of the Golden Horde. But in the meantime, uh Professor Donald Rayfield, thank you very much indeed. My pleasure,