From "the great storyteller of modern Russian historians" (Financial Times) comes the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age.
The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale—these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853–1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empires—the British, French, Turkish, and Russian—in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come.

In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is the definitive account of the war that mapped the terrain for today's world.