About the book: 2010 / About the Crimean War 1853–1856. A lot has been written, but it still remains for us an “unknown war.” The fighting took place not only in the Crimea, they took place in the Caucasus, in the Danube principalities, in the Baltic, Black, White and Barents Seas, and even in Petropavlovka-Kamchatsky, besieged by the Anglo-French squadron. In essence, it was a world war in which Russia alone opposed the coalition of Great Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary supporting them. “The causes of the Crimean War, the strangest and most unnecessary in world history, are so confused and intertwined that they do not allow a simple definition “,” writes Prince Alexis Troubetzkoy, who was born in 1934 into a family of Russian emigrants in Paris and became a professor in Canada. The author makes extensive use of materials from European archives that are inaccessible to Russian historians. He not only tries to understand what led to the bloodbath, but also gives an objective picture of the era that made the Crimean War possible.