Modern English-Language Historiography on Challenges to Russian Autocracy During the Crimean War

Abstract

The article analyzes noted books written by leading contemporary English-language researchers who offered non-trivial solutions to the scientific and historiographical re-actualization of the most important events of the Crimean War of 1853–1856. The studied array of historiographical sources indicates that the history of the Crimean War, which plays an important role in the collective memory of the Anglo-Saxon world, has evolved by the second decade of the 21 century into a renewed ideology. It focused on the differences between British/European and Russian imperial identities viewed from a hybrid perspective (acculturation, multivariate analysis, ethnopsychology, etc.) in chronicling the military campaign of 1853–1856. This article aims to systematize the latest English-language historiographical sources on the Crimean War, to determine the scientific effectiveness of the research approaches used by scholars, and to outline the direction of possible further research. The examination of the results of studies conducted by English-language scholars on the participation of the Russian Empire in the Crimean War allows us to state that, while different in quality, they are mainly dominated by viewpoints oriented towards advocacy by the authors of the historical interests of their countries with few attempts to reach the level of non-aligned research discourse of “ours and theirs.” These historiographical tendencies are to a greater extent predetermined by the belief well-established in foreign Russian studies that research should conform to the current political trend. This approach sometimes generates the effect of tunnel vision for the complex totality of the Russian imperial archetype that underwent a multifactorial national, subnational and global impact during the Crimean War.