Censorship During the Crimean War

Date: October, 1853-April, 1856

Place: Crimea, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)

Significance: Wartime censorship prevailed in Russia, Turkey, France, and Sardinia, but new professional war correspondents for Great Britain’s free press influenced the war itself, and ultimately led to British military censorship

In 1853 Tsar Nicholas I demanded greater authority over Christians in Turkey’s autonomous Balkan provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, and a Russian protectorship over Bulgaria and Serbia. With British and French encouragement, Turkey resisted, whereupon Russia invaded Moldavia and Wallachia. In October, 1853, Turkey declared war on Russia. French emperor Napoleon III sought joint action with the British, who tried to negotiate a diplomatic solution. However, a Russian naval victory in the Black Sea on November 30 was sensationalized by London newspapers as “the massacre of Sinope.” Britain’s coalition cabinet, indecisively headed by George Hamilton Gordon, Lord Aberdeen, was swept along by press agitation; on March 28, 1854, Britain joined France in declaring war on Russia.

Newspaper expectations of a major war were disappointed when Baltic naval operations stalled, and when the Russians, threatened by Austrian intervention, left the Balkans. The London Times then urged an attack on Russia’s Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol, and in September, 1854, French, British, and Turkish troops invaded the western Crimea. After battles at the Alma River, Balaclava, and Inkerman, the Crimean War developed into a nearly year-long siege of Sebastapol.

Russia’s war journalism during this conflict was limited to official communiques, fairly accurate and up-to-date, thanks to telegraphic connections, but firmly under the control of the tsar’s already stringent censorship. Turkey’s fledgling and government-subsidized press was also “official,” apart from some items copied from foreign papers. The French press sent correspondents and illustrators to the Crimea, but even the opposition papers published no serious criticism of Napoleon III’s management of the war. Sardinian press coverage in 1855-1856 was by regulation limited to official sources, but the regulations were not strictly enforced on Italy’s reporters.

The British also issued official bulletins, but these complacent accounts were in glaring contrast to the charges of incompetent army administration published by the London press. Earlier “serving correspondents” had been under military authority, and newspapers had sometimes been harassed by “seditious libel” prosecutions, but the British press of 1854 was not subject to any army or government censorship, and had an important influence on middle-class voters and their political leaders. The Times, once a government supporter but since 1817 a “voice of the people,” was especially significant because its circulation was about ten times that of its competitors. Also, The Times covered the Crimean War with several able correspondents, including the war’s star reporter, William Howard Russell.

Russell was not the first war correspondent, but he became the exemplar for the profession. He supplied long eye-witness accounts, keenly observant and rich in descriptive detail, conveying the excitement of the charge of the Light Brigade, the discomforts and humor of camp life, and the human cost of casualty reports. That the British army was ill-prepared for the Crimean winter and a cholera epidemic was clear in all newspaper reports. Russell’s columns, however, made the rain, mud, flies, disease, hospital filth and army bureaucracy living and present realities for his readers.

Britain’s Crimean army commander, Fitzroy Somerset, Lord Raglan, naturally resented slurs on his military record by a civilian journalist. He did not ban correspondents from camp (as did the French), but by ignoring them he encouraged his staff to treat reporters with malign neglect, while he also complained to his government’s cabinet that press reports were aiding the enemy. London editors and Crimean reporters were asked to be self-censors, and Russell offered to submit his dispatches to army review, but in November and December of 1854 both the army situation and the news reports steadily worsened.

Wretched hospital conditions at Scutari, as described by Thomas Chenery of The Times, led the paper to propose sending out, and raising financial support for, the female nursing mission headed by Florence Nightingale. This in turn led to bruising conflicts over the scope of her authority at Scutari. On December 23, The Times editor John Delane opened an editorial attack on Lord Aberdeen’s government for mismanaging the war. The London papers were soon filled with letters from junior officers supporting the press criticism. Among several government responses, a commission on hospital care eventually exposed such army incompetence as hoarding medicine and equipment at Varna, Bulgaria, while sending sick and wounded soldiers to die of neglect at Scutari, about two hundred miles away. After Nightingale was vindicated, and given broader authority over the army’s hospital program, she became, for the press and the public, the most outstanding heroic figure of the war.

Aberdeen’s embattled coalition lost its parliamentary support early in 1855, and was succeeded on February 5 by a Whig administration under Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston. Military reforms already in progress, plus Sardinia’s participation, helped the allied cause. Lord Raglan’s illness, retirement, and death were widely blamed on Russell’s reporting. With the death of Tsar Nicholas in March, and the fall of Sebastopol in September, 1855, the conflict languished. The second winter in the Crimea was less difficult for the allied armies, but also less interesting for the correspondents and their readers. On February 25, 1856, General Sir William Codrington, as British commander-in-chief, belatedly issued regulations for censoring what little news remained. By the treaty of peace signed on March 30, 1856 in Paris, Russian demands were dropped, but most of her losses were restored. In their newspapers, both sides claimed to have won the war.

In the postwar decade, Russian censorship was slightly relaxed in 1855 and 1865, and Napoleon III liberalized French press laws in 1866. By contrast, the Ottoman Empire increased its censorship of “Young Turkey” literature in 1865 and 1869, and Sardinia’s free press again became “official” during the 1859-1860 war of Italian unification. In Britain the newspapers gave themselves credit for winning the war, but the politicians took a different view. They felt that The Times, in particular, had helped push the country into war, insisted on invading Russia, forced changes in army organization and command, and howled down a government with such headline charges as “Army Sacrificed,” “Last Chance Is Gone,” “Woe and Misery,” “Serbonian Bog of Despair,” “Catastrophe,” “Disaster,” “Doom.” The Whig politicians, determined to curb “the vile tyranny of The Times,” in March, 1855, repealed the penny tax on all newspapers weighing less than four ounces. This left only The Times subject to the tax, and opened the way for penny press competition that reduced “the Thunderer’s” relative influence. “Billy” Russell went on to other wars and an eventual knighthood. He always defended his Crimean despatches against the charge of aiding the enemy, but even he came to agree that in wartime even Britain’s free press needed some intelligent censorship.

Bibliography

For W. H. Russell, see Alan Hankinson’s Man of Wars (London: Heinemann, 1982), Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), and Russell’s own published accounts. On British journalism, The History of the Times, 6 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1935-1993), edited by Stanley Morison, is defensive; Alexander Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea, 8 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863-1887), is critical; and Olive Anderson’s A Liberal State at War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967) is objective. Charles A. Ruud’s Fighting Words (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982) covers Russian censorship. See also Ahmed Sureyya Emin, The Development of Modern Turkey as Measured by Its Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914).