Who Won the Crimean War?
According to official Russian sources, on June 10 a Ukrainian drone attack in occupied Sevastopol caused a fire in the building housing the panorama depicting the siege of the city during the Crimean War of 1854–1855.
The fire at the museum triggered a wave of propaganda hysteria in Russia and a comparatively muted response in Ukraine. Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-appointed governor of Sevastopol, claimed that the Ukrainian strike was deliberate and specifically targeted the museum. He stated: “Last night, a fixed-wing drone deliberately struck the building of the Panorama ‘Defense of Sevastopol, 1854–1855.’ The attack hit a cultural heritage monument and one of the foremost symbols of the heroic city of Sevastopol.”
Despite the absence of independent verification that the museum was directly targeted and the lack of any publicly available information, photographs, or video evidence of drone debris at the site, the fire quickly became one of the leading news stories in Russia. Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, set the tone for the ensuing propaganda campaign, declaring: “We can see that the Kyiv regime has begun attacking history itself. But history cannot be defeated, just as it cannot be erased from memory.”
Manifestations of this historical memory assumed quite peculiar forms. Maria Zakharova, the notorious spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, went somewhat too far in her effort at historical revisionism. She stated that the attack on the Panorama was secretly supported by foreign powers which, she said, had lost the Crimean War and now wished to conceal this shameful fact. She commented: “This is yet more evidence of the fact that Western countries use the Kiev regime in their own interests: They want to destroy evidence of their crimes and defeats. They have already gained substantial experience in destroying historical monuments and landmarks on their territory. They now want to destroy them on former Soviet territory. They tried to destroy these monuments and landmarks with our own hands by spreading pseudo-academic materials or pseudo-historical textbooks and by trying to influence our policy. They failed. And now, they are trying to destroy these memorials and landmarks with the help of the Kiev regime, using drones, explosives and artillery, and they do not bother to conceal their involvement.”
Zakharova did not pause to consider that Western countries might not be the only ones harboring an evil design to conceal from the public the true outcome of the Crimean War of 1853–1856. One can readily imagine France, Great Britain, and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont—today represented by the government of Giorgia Meloni—wishing to revise historical memory in the “former Soviet space.” But what about Turkey?
The war began after the Sublime Porte rejected Tsar Nicholas I’s demand that the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire be placed under his protection. There can be little doubt that a leader such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, widely known for his neo-Ottoman aspirations, might have an interest in safeguarding the reputation of Sultan Abdülmecid I, under whose rule the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. If one follows the logic of Russian official rhetoric to its conclusion, Ankara, no less than London or Paris, could be suspected of having a vested interest in shaping public memory of the Crimean War.
It appears that the spokesperson of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is unaware that Sevastopol fell in September 1855, has never heard of the Treaty of Paris signed on March 30, 1856—which deprived Russia of its Black Sea fleet—and perhaps never learned in school about the consequences of pursuing expansionist policies with a state that was militarily weak, technologically backward, and administratively inefficient.
No less surreal was a statement made on June 11 by Dmitry Polyanskiy, the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The English version of his remarks was published on the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the note: “courtesy AI translation.” The Ministry did not specify which AI model was used, but it is evident that no human editor made any effort to review the text.
Even the name of Franz Roubaud, the creator of the Panorama, was misspelled as “Rubo.” More remarkably, Mr. Polyanskiy advanced the bizarre claim—whether generated by artificial intelligence or by his own imagination is difficult to determine—that the damaged Panorama “is a UNESCO cultural heritage site.” According to Polyanskiy, “UNESCO has expressed serious concern about this. There is no doubt that this was a deliberate, calculated direct strike against a world-class cultural object using an incendiary drone.”
The Panorama of the Defense of Sevastopol is, of course, not a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nor could it realistically be included on the World Heritage List for reasons that will be discussed later. Polyanskiy’s statement therefore combined historical ignorance with factual inaccuracies, while simultaneously invoking the authority of UNESCO in a manner unsupported by the actual status of the monument.
It is not difficult to imagine the kind of coverage the incident received in the Russian state-controlled media. Limiting ourselves to a single example, it is worth noting that during Evening with Vladimir Solovyov—the notorious propaganda program broadcast on June 11 by the television channel Russia 24—the official narrative was supplemented by a casual discussion among the guests about the desirability of bombing the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra in retaliation.
Three days later, the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra was damaged during a Russian attack on Kyiv. While there is no evidence of any connection between the televised discussion and the subsequent strike, the timeline is nevertheless striking.
The independent Russian television channel TV Rain reported that the recording of Solovyov’s program was subsequently removed from the internet. If this report is accurate, one may reasonably wonder whether the disappearance of the broadcast was related to the controversial nature of the statements made on air.
The question raised by the fire at the Panorama is not only who attacked the museum, but whether contemporary Russian officialdom still remembers who won the Crimean War.
What Russia Has to Do to Be Expelled from ICOM, or in Defense of Count Leo Tolstoy
The Russian Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) did not remain silent. Discussing the causes of the fire, the Committee’s statement implied that “This tragic incident cannot be ascribed to chance. The remoteness of neighboring buildings, the absence of state or military facilities in the immediate vicinity, and the distance from combat areas all suggest that the drone strike on the building was deliberate and targeted.”
The opposition Crimean Telegram channel Krymskiy Veter (“Crimean Wind”), however, presented a very different picture. On June 10 it reported that “located in the immediate vicinity of the Panorama are several Russian military installations, including South Bay with its naval vessels, support craft, and storage facilities, as well as the command post of an air-defense division, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet’s aviation arm, and a special communications center.”
According to the same source, “on the hill between the railway station and the Panorama, just beyond the Historical Boulevard, two anti-aircraft machine-gun spots are positioned to defend the railway station and South Bay. These guns have repeatedly engaged incoming drones, with bullets and shrapnel falling onto the ‘Railway Station’ bus stop at the foot of the hill.”
Both claims are difficult to verify, particularly because UNESCO representatives, who have repeatedly requested access to cultural heritage sites in Crimea, have thus far been met with a flat refusal from the Russian occupation authorities.
Leaving aside the details of the incident, it is worth examining the ideological assumptions underlying the statement issued by the Russian Committee of ICOM:
“The museum is dedicated to the events of the Crimean War, but like any museum, it did not serve war, but peace. The diorama itself was created on the basis of Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches and built on the site of a bastion where the world-famous Russian writer and great preacher of peace personally participated in the fighting. The scenes of war reveal the true content of a military museum—not a glorification of violence and enmity, but a presentation of inspiring and uplifting examples of courage, resilience, self-sacrifice, and heroism.”
The statement referred to Roubaud’s Panorama as a “diorama,” suggesting that historical accuracy was not its main concern.
Without dwelling on the long history of museums that have served not only war but some of the most bloodthirsty ideologies of the 20th Century, it should first be noted that Franz Roubaud’s Panorama had very little in common with Tolstoy’s oeuvre beyond its subject matter. It is not known whether Roubaud ever read the Sevastopol Stories; if he did, he most likely encountered them in French or German, as his command of Russian was limited.
What is known is that the Panorama, inaugurated in 1905, was an ideological project of a crumbling monarchy seeking to stimulate patriotic fervor at a moment when the Russo-Japanese War was being lost and revolutionary unrest was spreading throughout the empire. Tolstoy’s Sevastopol is a city of hospitals, trenches, and shattered illusions; Roubaud’s Sevastopol is a stage for collective heroism. Where Tolstoy sought to reveal the truth of war, Roubaud created one of the most powerful patriotic myths of Imperial Russia.
It is therefore hardly surprising that Tolstoy neither attended the jubilee celebrations in Sevastopol nor, so far as we know, uttered a single word about either the festivities or the Panorama. In 1904, only a year before its opening, he published Come to Your Senses!, one of the most powerful anti-war pamphlets of the era, urging his readers to reject militarism, nationalism, and blind obedience to the state.
To equate the Sevastopol Stories with the ideological spectacle of the Panorama—a work that Roubaud was compelled to revise in accordance with the wishes of Nicholas II—comes close to historical blasphemy. History itself demonstrated the limited effectiveness of the enterprise. Roubaud’s creation opened to the public on the very day the Battle of Tsushima began, heralding another “heroic” defeat for Imperial Russia. By November 1905, Sevastopol itself had become one of the centers of revolutionary unrest, culminating in the sailors’ uprising associated with the cruiser Ochakov. The patriotic spectacle had failed to halt either military defeat or political collapse.
One of the tropes of Russian propaganda repeated in the statement of the Russian Committee of ICOM is the comparison between the fate of the Panorama of the Defense of Sevastopol during the Second World War and the current events.
On 25 June 1942, the rotunda was hit by a German bomb. The painting was seriously damaged, and the surviving fragments were evacuated from the besieged city. After the war, the Panorama, which had already been reclaimed during the 1930s to serve the Stalinist model of Russian greatness, was “restored”—or rather reinvented—by a team of socialist realism artists.
This reinvention gave new lease of life to an antiquated genre of mass culture that had debuted at Victorian fairs and, by the end of the 19th Century, had turned into an instrument of patriotic commemoration. The Soviet passion for panoramas rose from the ashes of Roubaud’s canvas, leading first to the export of the genre to the People’s Republic of China and North Korea, and reaching its crescendo in the Panorama of the Battle of Stalingrad, inaugurated as late as 1982.
The eclectic ideology of Vladimir Putin has evolved into a mishmash of Russian imperial official patriotism, Stalinist Great-Russian chauvinism, and late Soviet attempts to construct a political religion around the “Great Victory” in the Second World War, all spiced with the weaponization and appropriation of Russian culture. The Russian Committee of ICOM’s “reinterpretation” of Count Tolstoy’s writings—by an organization that has increasingly transformed itself into a propaganda outlet—is fully reflected in its treatment of the Sevastopol Panorama.
Reaction
So far, ICOM has not reacted to the statement issued by its Russian Committee. Despite the chorus of reports in the Russian press about UNESCO’s alleged “condemnation” of the attack, the organization itself has not issued a dedicated statement on the Sevastopol Panorama.
Unlike the Russian authorities, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine does not appear to have issued a public statement specifically devoted to the fire at the Sevastopol Panorama, leaving it to the Ukrainian media to challenge the Russian narrative.
I believe that all three bodies—UNESCO, ICOM, and the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine—should respond, albeit for different reasons and within different legal and institutional frameworks.
According to international law, the Sevastopol Panorama and the other museums of Crimea remain Ukrainian cultural institutions located in territory under Russian occupation. Russia exercises de facto control over them, but it is not internationally recognized as having acquired legal title either to the territory or to the museum collections.
Under international humanitarian law, Russia’s responsibilities extend beyond condemning damage to the Panorama. As the occupying power in Crimea, it is also obliged to safeguard cultural property under its control. The 1954 Hague Convention requires parties to refrain from using cultural property and its immediate surroundings for purposes likely to expose it to damage in armed conflict. If military installations, air-defense positions, command facilities, or communications centers were indeed located in the immediate vicinity of the Panorama, then the legal question is not only who caused the fire, but also whether adequate measures were taken to protect the monument from the dangers of war.
If UNESCO fails to remind the Russian Federation of its responsibilities, if ICOM proves unable to tell its Russian Committee that the museum whose destruction it is mourning is, so to speak, “stolen property,” and if Ukraine does not succeed in drawing international attention to the fate of its cultural heritage in occupied Crimea, then the narrative surrounding the destruction of the Panorama will be shaped by people such as Mikhail Smorodkin, the director of the Museum of the Defense of Sevastopol appointed by the occupation authorities.
According to a Ukrainian investigation, Smorodkin participated in the looting of the Kherson Regional History Museum, personally selecting objects from the collection removed by Russian forces on the eve of the city’s liberation.
Art historian, exhibition curator, investigative journalist. Lives in Kyiv.