The Crimean War

for the Austrians. Gorchakov supported the Serb movement for liberation from the Turks, fearing otherwise that, if they gained independence on their own, the Serbs would fall under Austrian or Western influence. Writing to the Russian consul in Bucharest, the Foreign Minister underlined that ‘our policy in the East is directed mainly toward strengthening Serbia materially and morally and giving her the opportunity to stand at the head of the movement in the Balkans’. Ignat’ev went further, advocating an immediate solution to the Eastern Question by military means. Taking up a proposal by Mihailo, he urged the Russian government to support the Serbs in a war against the Turks and help them form a confederation with the Bulgarians, to which Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro could be joined.

Under pan-Slav pressure, the Russian Foreign Ministry increased its support for the Serb movement. After a Turkish bombardment of Belgrade in 1862, the Russians called a special conference of the signatories of the Paris Treaty at Kanlidze near Constantinople and eventually succeeded in getting the removal of the final Turkish garrisons from Serbia in 1867. It was their first major diplomatic victory since the end of the Crimean War. Encouraged by their success, the Russians gave their backing to the Serbian attempt to create a Balkan League. Serbia formed a military alliance with Montenegro and Greece and a pact of friendship with the Romanian leadership, and established closer ties with Croatian and Bulgarian nationalists. The Russians subsidized the Serb army, though a mission sent by Miliutin to inspect it found it in a chronic state. Then in the autumn of 1867 Prince Mihailo backed away from war against the Turks, prompting Russia to suspend its war credits. The assassination of Mihailo the following June confirmed the end of Russian-Serb cooperation and the collapse of the Balkan League.⁴⁶

The next seven years were a period of relative calm in the Balkans. The imperial monarchies of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany (the Three Emperors’ League of 1873) guaranteed the preservation of the status quo in the Balkans. Official Russian policy in these years was based on a firm commitment to the European balance of power, and on that basis Gorchakov secured a major diplomatic victory with the annulment of the Paris Treaty’s Black Sea clauses at a conference of the European powers in London in 1871. But unofficially the policy of Russia remained the encouragement of the pan-Slav movement in the Balkans – a policy coordinated by Ignat?ev from the Russian embassy in Constantinople through its consulates in the Balkan capitals. In his memoirs, written at the end of his long life in the 1900s, Ignat?ev explained that his aim in the Balkans in the 1860s and 1870s had been to destroy the Treaty of Paris, to recover southern Bessarabia, and to control the Turkish Straits, either directly through military conquest or indirectly through a treaty with a dependent Turkey, of the kind Russia had enjoyed before the Crimean War. ‘All my activities in Turkey and among the Slavs’, he wrote, ‘were inspired by … the view that Russia alone could rule in the Balkan peninsula and Black Sea … Austria-Hungary’s expansion would be halted and the Balkan peoples, especially the Slavs, would direct their gaze exclusively to Russia and make their future dependent on her.’⁴⁷

In the summer of 1875 revolts by Christians against Turkish rule in Herzegovina spread north into Bosnia, and then into Montenegro and Bulgaria. The revolts had been sparked by a sharp increase in taxes levied by the Turkish government on the Christian peasants after harvest failures had left the Porte in a financial crisis. But they soon took on the character of a religious war. The leaders of the uprisings looked to Serbia and Russia for support. Encouraged by Ignat?ev, Serbian nationalists in Belgrade called on their government to send in troops to defend the Slavs against the Turks and unite them in a Greater Serbia.

In Bulgaria, the rebels were badly armed and organized, but their hatred of the Turks was intense. In the spring of 1876 the revolt spilled over into massacres against the Muslim population, which had increased massively since the Crimean War as a result of the immigration of about half a million Crimean Tatars and Circassians fleeing from the Russians to Bulgaria. Tensions with the Christians were intensified when the newcomers reverted to a semi- nomadic way of life, launching raids on the Christian settlements and stealing livestock in a way not experienced before by the peasants in the area. Lacking enough regular troops to quell the Bulgarians, the Ottoman authorities used the Bashi Bazouks, irregulars mostly drawn from the local Muslim population, who brutally suppressed their Christian neighbours, massacring around 12,000 people in the process. In the mountain village of Batak, where a thousand Christians had taken refuge in a church, the Bashi Bazouks set fire to the building, burning to death all but one old woman, who survived to tell the tale.⁴⁸

News of the Bulgarian atrocities spread throughout the world. The British press claimed that ‘tens of thousands’ of defenceless Christian villagers had been slaughtered by ‘fanatical Muslims’. British attitudes to Turkey changed dramatically. The old policy of promoting the Tanzimat reforms in the belief that the Turks were willing pupils of English liberal governance was seriously questioned, and for many Christians completely undermined, by the Bulgarian massacres. Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal opposition whose views on foreign policy were closely linked to his High Church Anglican moral principles, took the lead in a popular campaign for British intervention to protect the Balkan Christians against Turkish violence. Gladstone had only cautiously supported the Crimean War. He was hostile to the presence of the Turks in Europe on religious grounds, and had long wanted to use British influence to secure more autonomy for the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In 1856 he had even advanced the idea of a new Greek empire in the Balkans to protect the Christians, not just against the Muslims of Turkey, but against the Russians and the Pope.⁴⁹

The strongest reaction to the Bulgarian atrocities was in Russia. Sympathy for the Bulgarians engulfed the whole of educated society in a surge of patriotic feeling, intensified by a national desire for revenge against the Turks after the Crimean War. Calls for intervention to protect the Bulgarians were heard from all quarters: from Slavophiles, such as Dostoevsky, who saw in a war for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs the fulfilment of Russia’s historical destiny to unite the Orthodox; and from Westernizers, such as Turgenev, who thought it was the duty of the liberal world to liberate enslaved Bulgaria. Here was a golden opportunity for the pan-Slavs to realize their dreams.

Officially, the Russian government denounced the Christian revolts in the Balkans. It was on the defensive, having been accused by Western governments of instigating the revolts. But pan-Slav opinion, and in particular the journal Russkii mir (Russian World), owned and edited by Cherniaev, the former military governor of Turkestan, came out in support of the Balkan Christian cause and called on the government to support it. ‘Speak but one word, Russia,’ Russkii mir predicted, ‘and not only the entire Balkans … but all the Slav peoples … will rise in arms against their oppressors. In alliance with her 25 million fellow Orthodox, Russia will strike fear into all of Western Europe.’ Everything depended on the actions of Serbia, the ‘Piedmont of the Balkans’, in the phrase of Cherniaev. The Tsar and Gorchakov warned the Serbian leaders not to intervene in the uprisings, though privately they sympathized with the pan-Slavs (‘Do anything you like provided we do not know anything about it officially,’ Baron Jomini, the acting head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, told a member of the St Petersburg Committee). Encouraged by Ignat’ev and the Russian consul in Belgrade, as well as by the arrival of Cherniaev as a volunteer for the Slav cause in April, the Serb leaders declared war on Turkey in June 1876.⁵⁰

The Serbs were counting on the armed intervention of Russia. Cherniaev was in charge of their main army. Along with his presence, Ignat?ev’s promises had led them to believe that this would be a repetition of the Balkan war of 1853–4, when Nicholas I had sent his army into the Danubian principalities in the expectation – ultimately disappointed – that it would encourage a war of liberation by the Slavs. Public opinion in Russia was increasingly belligerent. The nationalist press called on the army to defend the Christians against the Turks. Pan-Slav groups sent volunteers to fight on their behalf – and about five thousand made their way to Serbia.^bj Subscriptions were organized to send money to the Slavs. Pro-Slav feeling swept across society. People talked about the war as a crusade – a repeat of the war against the Turks in 1854.

By the autumn of 1876 war fever had spread to the Russian court and government circles. Cherniaev’s army faced defeat. Responding to his desperate pleas for help, the Tsar sent an ultimatum to the Porte and mobilized his