@MisterBadger
If you are a tourist guide you can tell them about Tolstoy and also say if he was in the artillery, or just that he was in the War, as you please. Whoever commanded that artillery piece might not have survived the war, and if they had survived, they would have either retreated or been taken POW. I don't know that any of those descriptions apply to Tolstoy.
As a US tourist, just being in Crimea myself, going to the panorama, the war felt like other past Western interventions where they fought Russian forces in Russia, like Napoleon's invasion, Entente involvement in the Russian Civil War. There was also an Anglo-French attack in Kamchatka in 1854. It felt like Western European colonialist-imperialist interventions in the rest of the world, like Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Since there were outspoken English Christian opponents to the Crimean War, I don't see why one would feel compelled to support it. Personally, I tend to be an antiwar person, probably indirectly because of my Quaker heritage (they came from 17th-18th century England).
Sure, the US didn't intervene in the Crimean War because it didn't have much ability to.
Sure, the song's author was trying to compose his song in the style of the Cossack songs of the Russian empire.
Here's the Black Raven song that I think you will like:
It was published in 1831 and has very much the cossack theme style, and it has a cool fort in the video like in the Crimean War theme that you like.
Here's an article in English:
"Чёрный ворон" (Под ракитою). Old sad song very well known in Russia in all its variations. Many people think it is of an unknown author, but in reality the words have an author: the song was composed by a corps poet, non-commissioned officer of the Nevskoy Infantry Regiment, Nikolai Fyodorovich
sites.google.com
Here's the song with English subtitles:
As far as the type of Turkish leaf- I mentioned it to some people on a Russian history forum, and they reacted by saying, Now you know what a famous 19th century Russian poem by Tyutchev meant when it says, "Even the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and pleasant." The forum users contrasted "bitter" Turkish tobacco with the "sweet" smoke of the Russian fatherland. That makes sense, because probably Russia in terms of homeland is just called Birth-Land, rather than "fatherland", whereas "fatherland" brings a fatherly image, and pipe-smoking can be part of a fatherly image. The literal meaning of the line from the poem is that the fatherland (Russia) has smoke, like from a campfire or forest fire that is sweet and pleasant from the burning logs. But by referring to the fatherly image and to smoke, it brings to mind fathers smoking pipes with sweet, pleasant tobacco. And this contrasts with the image of Turkish "bitter" tobacco in the poem.
License apart, generally Russian cossacks would not be fighting in the service of the Ottomans or Turks, although I guess in the 15th-17th centuries or something like that, Ukrainian Cossacks might be. But the Russian composer would be more likely to see his song through the eyes of Russian Cossacks who would tend to be fighting Turkey, and hence as a historical issue wouldn't seem especially likely be getting Turkish-made tobacco as part of war rations. Of course, I could be wrong about that. The Russian army fought the Ottomans and Turkey all the way from Ukraine and the Caucasus to Bulgaria from the 18th to early 20th centuries. So at some point their soldiers would end up smoking some Turkish-grown blend.
By comparison, Russians in the mid-20th century were aware that "Turkish" coffee referred to a special method of coffee preparation, and not specifically to coffee grown in Turkey. I'm thinking that something is similar with regards to "Turkish" blends, whereby the tobacco could be grown outside Turkey and still count as "Turkish" in name because of its leaf variety or preparation method. So my guess is that this is what the Russian author, living actually in the 1990's, would be thinking of. He might or might not have more knowledge of 19th century pipe tobacco from Turkey than you or I do. Turkish tobacco as a preparation style tends to be prepared at length, rather than underproduced/underprepared. I could be wrong about that too, since Katerini seemed pretty delicate to me. It seems that Latakia as a dark style has a pretty old pedigree going back to the 19th century, because Walnut blend has Latakia and Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain, in one legend, had a talk that touched on Latakia.
Another example: The lyrics say that the cossack smoked his "little pipe" with a "light blue little smoke". It feels like more poetic license. I don't know that Cossack pipes were usually little or that pipe smoke is "light blue". At most it seems that the smoke is either white, grey, or black.
