Crimea in War and Transformation

Mara Kozelsky

First English-language book to examine the toll of the Crimean War on subjects of the Russian Empire
First book to consider the impact of the Crimean War on animals and the environment
Explores the aftermath of war, including failed reconstruction efforts and the mass exodus of Crimean Tatars
Shows how violence of war transformed state and society across the empire and provides crucial context for understanding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine
Draws upon previously unexplored archival sources such as secret police files, testimonies, official correspondence, and Tatar petitions

Crimea in War and Transformation

Mara Kozelsky

Description

Crimea in War and Transformation is the first book to examine the terrible toll of violence on Crimean civilians and landscapes from mobilization through reconstruction.

When war landed on Crimea's coast in September 1854, multiple armies instantly doubled the peninsula's population. Engineering brigades mowed down forests to build barracks. Ravenous men fell upon orchards like locusts and slaughtered Crimean livestock. Within a month, war had plunged the peninsula into a subsistence crisis. Soldiers and civilians starved as they waited for food to travel from the mainland by oxcart at a rate of ½ mile per hour. Every army conscripted Tatars as laborers, and fired upon civilian homes. Several cities and villages-Sevastopol, Kerch, Balaklava, Genichesk among them-burned to the ground. At the height of violence, hysterical officers accused Tatars of betrayal and deported large segments of the local population.

Peace did not bring relief to Crimea's homeless and hungry. Removal of dead bodies and human waste took months. Epidemics swept away young children and the elderly. Russian officials estimated the devastation wrought by Crimean War exceeded that of Napoleon's invasion. Recovery packages failed human need, and by 1859, the trickle of Tatar out-migration that had begun during the war turned into a flood. Nearly 200,000 Tatars left Crimea by 1864, adding a demographic crisis to the tally of war's destruction.

Drawing from a wide body of published and unpublished material, including untapped archives, testimonies, and secret police files from Russia, Ukraine and Crimea, Mara Kozelsky details in readable and vivid prose the toll of war on the Crimean people, and the Russian Empire as a whole, from mobilization through failed efforts at reconstruction.

Crimea in War and Transformation

Mara Kozelsky

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration

Introduction
1. Mobilizing the Home Front
2. Crimea under Attack
3. Tatars and Cossacks
4. Civilians in the Line of Fire
5. The Feeding Ground
6. People's War, or War against the People?
7. The Kerch Strait and the Azov Sea
8. Between War and Peace
9. Reconstruction
10. Transformation

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Crimea in War and Transformation

Mara Kozelsky

Author Information

Mara Kozelsky is Professor of History at the University of South Alabama. Her research examines the religious conflict and identities of Crimea, social and cultural aspects of the Eastern Question, and the role of religion in the Russia-Ukraine crisis. She is the author of Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (2009).

Crimea in War and Transformation

Mara Kozelsky

Reviews and Awards

Honorable Mention from the 2020 Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize

"Kozelsky's account of the traumatic and transformative impact of the Crimean War will attract historians of imperial Russia as well as all those interested in thesubject of war and society in the modern period." -- Victor Taki, Concordia University of Edmonton, American Historical Review

"Drawing upon a wide array of sources, including letters, reports, and documents culled from Ukrainian, Crimean, and Russian archives, Mara Kozelsky offers a tremendously well-researched and compelling account of the Crimean War from the perspective of the Crimean peninsula's inhabitants. Those interested in a traditional military history will appreciate the treatment of the major battles of the conflict." -- Jenifer Parks, Rocky Mountain College, H-Net Reviews

"This detailed and deeply researched study of the Crimean War's transformative impact will primarily interest specialists of nineteenth-century Russian military history. Scholars of the social and cultural effects of modern warfare, however, will find of much of interest and value in a timely examination of the destructiveness of industrialized warfare before the First World War, centered on a region that remains highly contested." -- Robert Dale, Newcastle University, The Journal of Military History

"Mara Kozelsky's book comes as a welcome reminder that Crimea was also the scene of a major conflict in the nineteenth century. Her book is a masterful and detailed account of one of the most significant European conflicts after the Napoleonic period ... this timely, erudite, and highly readable book deserves a place on the bookshelves of scholars both of Russia's past and present." -- Richard Arnold, The Russian Review