Winter gave way to summer, and Saint Petersburg had already left behind its bone-piercing days of cold wind. Pleasant sunlight spilled into every corner of the city, warming this land of ice and snow.
Reports from the Balkan Peninsula arrived. Reporting good news while concealing bad had always been a shortcut for bureaucrats seeking promotion, and the Tsarist government was naturally no exception.
In the first round of the Balkan campaign, the Russians had achieved a complete victory. Even though the Russian Army had suffered excessive losses in the Battle of Razgrad, adding a faint blemish to the campaign, it did nothing to dampen the officials' enthusiasm for claiming victory.
Naturally, the reports Nicholas I received contained no mention of the Russian Army suffering losses. The frontline officers glossed over the matter and added in the Ottoman Army's losses, making it look like a resounding triumph.
After receiving the news, Nicholas I held a victory banquet in the Winter Palace that very evening. Unfortunately, the heroes of the hour were all thousands of miles away and missed the glory that belonged to them.
The Russians had every reason to celebrate. In the first round of the Bulgarian campaign, they had won a great victory and pushed the front forward by more than a hundred kilometers.
Beginning with the capture of Ruse, the Russian Army had launched an offensive with a total force of 280,000 men, defeating nearly 500,000 Ottoman troops and 50,000 French troops.
At the cost of just over 45,000 casualties, they had wiped out more than 53,000 enemy soldiers and captured more than 38,000.
Using half their enemy's strength to defeat an enemy twice their size, exchanging 45,000 Russian casualties for 91,000 enemy losses—including more than ten thousand Frenchmen—no matter how one looked at it, it was a