In most histories of the Crimean War, Crimea itself is incidental. The trenches and steppes appear, the mountains of the southern coast, Sevastopol΄, but the focus runs to aspects of the war that might have happened anywhere: the politics of command and diplomacy, developments in weaponry, tactics, logistics, casualties and costs, battle plans, the experiences of soldiers and refugees, and public sentiment. Mara Kozelsky's great contribution is to shift the view to the territory itself, a Massachusetts-sized “diamond-shaped peninsula on the north shore of the Black Sea” (4) that had the misfortune of becoming a war theater for a year and a half and emerged by the end of it profoundly transformed. Kozelsky engages all the sides of the war one would expect to read about in any thorough history; she just does it with a subtle and careful attention to place.

The book is divided into ten thematic chapters that lay out the details of how the war gripped the region. The presence of armies doubled the peninsula's population, straining relations between Christian and Muslim communities, devastating the local economy (wine production, for example, fell by 75% over the war years) (7), putting food reserves under enormous pressure, and spreading disease, in particular cholera and typhus. Towns like Balaklava and Kerch-Enikale were completely ruined. By the time the Russians lowered the flag over Sevastopol΄ in the fall of 1855 after an eleven-month siege, the city's green spaces had been dug up to make room for 187 cemeteries. Only fourteen homes were intact. Three fourths of the Crimea's draft animals were lost (177–78). Indeed, one of the many revealing details of Kozelsky's book is the animal cost of the war. Oxen, horses, and camel sustained both the fighting and the resupply, requiring close to four hundred tons of hay per day to keep going and dying in the tens of thousands when the food ran out. Fodder was so precious that Russian commanders posted armed guards around their stores to keep soldiers from stealing hay for their own starving horses (101).

For me, Kozelsky's most valuable insights center on the imperial dynamics of the region. On the eve of the war, Crimean Tatars made up a majority of the peninsula, and Muslims and Orthodox (as well as small numbers of other Christian believers and Jews), while living separately according to their communal traditions, often mingled in everyday life, especially in the towns. The “imperial model” was alive and well. By war's end, however, the situation was completely different as some two hundred thousand Tatars emigrated from the empire, and the region embarked on a more obviously Orthodox and national turn. This transformation was not part of a well-laid nationalizing plan. As Kozelsky shows, while Tatars living under occupation in Evpatoria sided with the outsiders, other Tatars stood by the empire, including by serving in the Russian army even as anti-Muslim “holy war rhetoric” heated up around them. As the war started, Nogay Tatars on the mainland just north of the peninsula pledged so much grain to the Russian cause that the Ministry of State Domains had to talk them out of it (20).

The war thus accelerated imperial division, while in other ways underscoring habits of cross-communal solidarity and patriotism. For all the fears of a “Tatar mutiny” during the war and growing suspicion of the Tatar population on the part of the Russian government, which led to limited deportations of Tatars from areas closer to the fighting, tsarist officials were aghast at the massive postwar emigration, including war hero General Franz Eduard von Totleben, who blamed the Tatar exodus on heavy-handed Russian policies and abuses by Cossack forces during the war rather than a lack of Tatar allegiance (201–2).

Kozelsky's work offers an engaging, detailed portrait of an imperial microcosm during wartime. I found myself learning new things throughout and agreeing, by the end, with her argument that the war deserves to be seen as much more than the useful “humiliating defeat” we lazily refer to whenever we want to explain the origins of the Great Reforms. As Kozelsky shows, the Crimean conflict was itself a creative force, destroying old modi vivendi and giving rise to new ones, not least in the Crimea itself.