(which our enemies desire and are working to arrange) … (
With the Slavs as enemies, Russia would become a ‘second-rate power’, argued Pogodin, whose final sentences were three times underlined by Nicholas:
The greatest moment in Russia’s history has arrived – greater perhaps even than the days of Poltavan and Borodino. If Russia does not advance it will fall back – that is the law of history. But can Russia really fall? Would God allow that? No! He is guiding the great Russian soul, and we see that in the glorious pages we have dedicated to Him in the History of our Fatherland. Surely He would not allow it to be said: Peter founded the dominion of Russia in the East, Catherine consolidated it, Alexander expanded it, and Nicholas betrayed it to the Latins.
No, that cannot be, and will not be. With God on our side, we cannot go back.10
To get him to embrace his pan-Slav ideology Pogodin had cleverly appealed to the Tsar’s belief in his divine mission to defend the Orthodox as well as to his growing alienation from the West. In his November memorandum to his ministers, Nicholas had declared that Russia had no option but to turn towards the Slavs, because the Western powers, and Britain in particular, had sided with the Turks against Russia’s ‘holy cause’.
We call on all the Christians to join us in the struggle for their liberation from centuries of Ottoman oppression. We declare our support for the independence of the Moldavian-Wallachians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Bosnians and Greeks … . I see no other way to bring an end to the hostility of the British, because it is unlikely that after such a declaration they would continue to ally with the Turks and fight with them against Christians.11
Nicholas continued to have doubts about the pan-Slav cause: he did not share Pogodin’s illusions about the number of Slav troops it was possible to mobilize in the Balkans; and ideologically he remained opposed to the idea of stirring revolutionary uprisings, preferring instead to proclaim his support for the liberation of the Slavs on religious principles. But the more the West expressed its opposition to Russia’s occupation of the principalities, the more he was inclined to gamble everything on a grand alliance of the Orthodox, even threatening to support Slav revolts against the Austrians, if they should join the West against Russia. Religious conviction made the old Tsar rash and reckless, risking all the gains Russia had made in the Near East over many decades of diplomacy and fighting on a gamble with the Slavs.12
Hopeful of a Serb uprising, the Tsar favoured marching south-west from Bucharest towards Ruscuk, so that his troops would be close enough to aid the Serbs if they rose up, instead of concentrating on the Turkish fortress of Silistria, further to the east on the Danube, as preferred by Paskevich. As Nicholas explained in a letter to Paskevich, he wanted to subordinate his military strategy to the larger cause of the liberation of the Slavs, which a Serb uprising would begin:
Of course Silistria is an important point … but it seems to me that if we are to advance our cause through the Christians, and keep ourselves in reserve, it would make more sense to take Ruscuk, from which we can strike into the centre of Wallachia while remaining among the Bulgarians and close to the Serbs, on whom surely we need to depend. To advance further than Ruscuk will depend on a general uprising of the Christians, which should break out shortly after we have occupied Ruscuk; capturing Silistria, I suggest, would not have such an effect [on the Serbs], for it is far away from them.13
But Paskevich was more cautious. He was nervous that a Serb uprising would force the Austrians to intervene in order to prevent it from spreading to Habsburg lands. In December he advised the Tsar to keep reserves in Poland in case of an Austrian attack, and to march south-east from Bucharest towards Silistria, where the Russians could rely on the support of the Bulgarians without fear of Austria. Paskevich thought Silistria could be taken in three weeks, allowing the Tsar to launch a spring attack on Adrianople and bring Turkey to its knees before the Western powers had time to intervene, and on this basis Nicholas deferred to the plan of his commander.14
However, as the Russian troops advanced towards Silistria there was no mass uprising by the Bulgarians, nor by any other Slavs, although the Bulgarians were generally pro-Russian and had taken part in large-scale revolts against Muslim rule in Vidin, Nish and other towns during recent years. The Bulgarians welcomed the Russian troops as liberators from the Turks, they joined them in attacks on Turkish positions, but few signed up as volunteers, and there were only small, sporadic uprisings, nearly all of them put down with brutal violence by Omer Pasha’s men. In Stara Zagora, where the largest Bulgarian revolt took place, dozens of women and young girls were raped by Turkish troops.15
In January 1854 the British consul in Wallachia noted that the occupying force was ‘actively engaged in enrolling a corps of volunteers comprised principally of Greeks, Albanians, Serbs and Bulgarians’. They were incorporated into the Russian army as a ‘Greek-Slavonic Legion’. So far only a thousand volunteers had been recruited, the consul reported. Called up to fight a ‘holy war’ against the Turks, ‘they are to form a body of crusaders, to be equipped and armed at the expense of the Russian military authorities’, he noted. The volunteers were known as the ‘cross-carriers’, because they wore on their shakos a ‘red Orthodox cross on a white background’. According to a Russian officer, nearly all these volunteers had to be employed as police auxiliaries to maintain order in the rear, although they had received training for military purposes. The repressive nature of the Russian occupation, with public meetings closed, local councils taken over by the military, censorship tightened and food and transport requisitioned by the troops, bred widespread resentment. The Russians were despised by the Moldavians and Wallachians, the British consul reported, ‘and everybody laughs at them when it can be done with safety’. There were dozens of uprisings in the countryside against the requisitioning, some of them repressed by the Cossacks with ruthless violence, killing peasants and burning villages. Omer Pasha’s Turkish forces also carried out a war of terror against dozens of Bulgarian settlements – destroying churches, beheading priests, mutilating murder victims and raping girls – to deter others from rising up against them or sending volunteers to the Russians.16
Omer Pasha was even more concerned to prevent the Russians breaking through to Serbia, on the Turkish flank, where there was strong support for an uprising in favour of the Russians among the Serbian Orthodox clergy and some sections of the peasantry (suggesting that the Tsar’s assessment and preference for an attack towards Serbia had been right). The commander of the Turkish forces concentrated his defences in the strategic area around Vidin, the eastern gateway to Serb lands on the Danube, and in late December used 18,000 troops to drive 4,000 Russians from Cetatea on the other side of the river (in a foretaste of the sort of fighting yet to come in the Crimean War the Turks killed more than a thousand wounded Russians left behind on the battlefield).17
The urgency with which the Turks defended Serbia was dictated by the country’s instability. Prince Alexander, who ruled under licence from the Porte, had lost all authority, and pro-Russian elements in the Serbian Church and court were actively preparing for an uprising against his government timed to coincide with the anticipated arrival of Russian troops in Serbia. The leaders of the Serb army were resigned to and even colluding in a Russian takeover, according to the British consul in Belgrade. In January 1854 the commander-in-chief of the Serbian army told him that it was ‘pointless to resist a power as invincible as Russia, which would conquer the Balkans and turn Constantinople into the capital of Orthodox Slavdom’.18
If Serbia was lost, there was a real danger that the entire Balkans would rebel against the Ottomans. From Serbia it was not far to Thessaly and Epirus, where 40,000 Greeks were already organized in armed rebellion against the Turks and were supported by the government in Athens, which took the opportunity provided by the Russian occupation of the principalities to start a war with Turkey for the rebellious territories. Warned by the British not to intervene in Thessaly and Epirus, King Otto chose to ignore them. Gambling on a Russian victory, or at least a prolonged war on the Danube, Otto hoped to win support for his monarchical dictatorship by establishing a greater Greece. Nationalist feelings were running high in Greece in 1853, the 400th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and many Greeks were looking towards Russia to restore a new Greek empire on the ruins of Byzantium.19
Afraid of losing all their Balkan territories, the Turks decided to hold a defensive line on the Danube and attack the Russians in the Caucasus, where they could draw on the support of the Muslim tribes, to force them to withdraw some of their troops from the Danubian front. They could count on the support of the Muslim rebels against Russian rule in the Caucasus. In
