ABSTRACT
The Crimean War arose ostensibly as a result of dispute with France over privileges for Catholics at the expense of the Orthodox in the Holy Places in Jerusalem, and over Russian ambitions to establish a protectorate over the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless the war does represent a watershed in Russian intellectual history and the history of opposition to autocracy. In the freer atmosphere of the early years of Alexander's reign, cultural and intellectual life again began to flourish. A further sign of the cultural and intellectual renaissance of the post-Crimean period was the reinvigoration of certain journals and the appearance of new ones. Both Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, the two leaders of the radical intelligentsia in the five or six years after the Crimean War, belonged to this group. Of the radical thinkers who effected a revolution in Russian thought after the Crimean War, the first and most important was Chernyshevsky.
