Cherniaev and Ignat′ev became leading figures in the pan-Slav movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Along with Russia’s turn towards the East, pan-Slavism was the other main reaction by the Russians to their defeat in the Crimean War, as their feelings of resentment against Europe led to an explosion of nationalist sentiment. With censorship relaxed by the liberal reforms of the new Tsar, a new slew of pan-Slav journals forcefully criticized Russia’s foreign policy before the Crimean War. In particular, they attacked the legitimist policies of Nicholas I for having sacrificed the Balkan Christians to Muslim rule in the interests of the Concert of Europe. ‘For the sake of the balance of Europe,’ Pogodin wrote in the first number of the pan-Slav journal Parus in January 1859, ‘ten million Slavs are forced to groan, suffer, and agonize under the yoke of the most savage despotism, the most unbridled fanaticism, and the most desperate ignorance.’45 With Gorchakov’s abandonment of these legitimist principles, the pan-Slavs renewed their calls on the government to support the liberation of the Balkan Slavs from Turkish rule. Some went so far as to claim that Russia should protect itself against a hostile West by uniting all the Slavs of Europe under Russian leadership – an idea first put forward by Pogodin during the Crimean War and repeated with even more insistence in his writings afterwards.
As pan-Slav ideas gained influence in Russian intellectual and government circles, there was a proliferation of philanthropic organizations to promote the pan-Slav cause by sending money to the Balkan Slavs for schools and churches, or by bringing students to Russia. The Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee was established in 1858, with separate branches opening in St Petersburg and Kiev in the 1860s. Funded by private benefactors and the Ministry of Education, it brought together officials and miltary men (many of them veterans of the Crimean War who had fought in the Balkans) with academics and writers (including Dostoevsky and Tiutchev, who both belonged to the St Petersburg Committee).
During the first post-war years the pan-Slavs were cautious not to discuss openly their more radical ideas of Slavic political unification, nor to criticize too severely the foreign policy of the government (the views expressed by Pogodin led to Parus being banned). But by the early 1860s, when Ignat′ev emerged as a pan-Slav supporter and became a leading figure in the government, they became more vocal in their views. Ignat′ev’s growing influence in foreign affairs was based largely on his highly successful negotiation of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing, in November 1860, which gave Russia possession of the Amur and Ussuri regions as well as Vladivostok in the Far East. In 1861 Ignat′ev became Director of the Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry, the office responsible for Russia’s policy in the Balkans. Three years later he was appointed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople – a post he held until the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. Throughout these years Ignat′ev pushed for a military solution to the Eastern Question in the Balkans: Russian-sponsored Slav uprisings against Turkish rule and the intervention of the tsarist army, leading to the liberation of the Slavs and the creation of a Slavic Union under Russian leadership.
Pan-Slav ambitions for the Balkans focused first on Serbia, where the restoration of the Europeanized but autocratic Prince Mihailo to the throne in 1860 was seen as a victory for Russian influence and yet another defeat 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 troops. This was enough to force the Turks to end hostilities against the Serbs, who duly made their peace with them. Abandoning the Serbs, the Russians shifted their support to the Bulgarians and demanded autonomy for them, which the Turks would not accept. With Austria’s neutrality assured through promises of gains in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in April 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey once again.
From the start, the Russian offensive in the Balkans assumed the character of a religious war. It was overwhelmingly redolent of the opening Russo-Turkish phase of the Crimean War. As the Russians crossed the Danube under the command of the Grand Duke Nikolai, they were joined by Slav irregulars, Bulgarians and Serbs, some of them demanding money to fight, but most fighting for their national cause against the Turks. This was the sort of Christian war that Nicholas had wanted when his troops had crossed the Danube in 1853–4. Encouraged by the rising of the Slavs, Alexander considered pushing on to seize Constantinople and impose a Russian settlement on the Balkans. He was urged to do so not only by the pan-Slav press but by his own brother, the Grand Duke Nikolai, who wrote to him after his armies had captured Adrianople, a short march from Constantinople, in January 1878: ‘We must go to the centre, to Tsargrad, and there finish the holy cause you have assumed.’ Pan-Slav hopes were at their height. ‘Constantinople must be ours,’ wrote Dostoevsky, who saw its conquest by the Russian armies as nothing less than God’s own resolution of the Eastern Question and as the fulfilment of Russia’s destiny to liberate Orthodox Christianity.
It is not only the magnificent port, not only the access to the seas and oceans, that binds Russia so closely to the resolution … of this fateful question, nor is it even the unification and regeneration of the Slavs. Our goal is more profound, immeasurably more profound. We, Russia, are truly essential and unavoidable both for the whole of Eastern Christendom and for the whole fate of future Orthodoxy on the earth, for its unity. This is what our people and their rulers have always understood. In short, this terrible Eastern Question is virtually our entire fate for years to come. It contains, as it were, all our goals and, mainly, our only way to move out into the fullness of history.51
Alarmed by the advance of the Russian troops to Adrianople, the British ordered their Mediterranean fleet to enter the Dardanelles and agreed in Parliament to raise £6 million for military purposes. It was a repeat of the movements that had led to the Crimean War. Under pressure from the British, the Russians agreed to an armistice with the Ottomans but continued advancing towards Constantinople, halting only under threat from the Royal Navy at San Stefano, a village just outside the Turkish capital, where on 3 March they signed a treaty with the Turks. By the Treaty of San Stefano, the Porte agreed to recognize the full independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as the autonomy of a large Bulgarian state (to include Macedonia and part of Thrace). In exchange for a narrow strip of land to the south of the Danube, Romania ceded back to Russia southern Bessarabia, the territory taken from the Russians by the Treaty of Paris. With the restoration of her Black Sea status completed seven years before, Russia had succeeded in reversing all the losses she had suffered after the Crimean War.
The Treaty of San Stefano was mainly Ignat′ev’s doing. It was the realization of most of his pan-Slav dreams. But it was totally unacceptable to the Western powers, which had not gone to war to stop the Russians bullying the Turks in 1854 only to allow them to do so again twenty-four years afterwards. In Britain, the old warlike feelings against Russia were expressed in ‘jingoism’, a new aggressive mood of can-do foreign policy summed up by the current hit song of pubs and music halls:
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.
Afraid of British intervention and a possible repeat of the Crimean War, the Tsar ordered the Grand Duke to withdraw his troops to the Danube. As they did so they took part in revenge attacks against the Muslims of Bulgaria which were joined and sometimes instigated by Christian volunteers: several hundred thousand Muslims fled Bulgaria for the Ottoma
n Empire at the end of the Russo-Turkish war.
Determined to halt the extension of Russian power into the Balkans, the great powers met at the Congress of Berlin to revise the Treaty of San Stefano. The main objection of the British and the French was the establishment of a greater Bulgaria, which they viewed as a Russian Trojan horse threatening the Ottoman Empire in Europe. With direct access to the Aegean Sea in Macedonia, this enlarged Bulgarian state could easily be used by the Russians to attack the Turkish Straits. The British forced the Russians to agree to the division of Bulgaria, returning Macedonia and Thrace to direct Ottoman control. A week before the Berlin congress, Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, had concluded a secret alliance with the Ottomans against Russia, whereby Britain was allowed to occupy the strategic island of Cyprus and bring in troops from India. The revelation of this alliance, along with Disraeli’s threats of war, forced the Russians to concede to his demands.
The Congress of Berlin ended Russia’s pan-Slav hopes. Ignat’ev was dismissed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople and went into retirement. Arriving back in London to a hero’s welcome, Disraeli claimed that he had brought back ‘Peace with honour’ from Berlin. He told the House of Commons that the Treaty of Berlin and the Cyprus Convention would protect Britain and its route to India against Russian aggression for years to come. But tensions in the Balkans would remain. In many ways the congress sowed the seeds of the future Balkan wars and the First World War by leaving so many border disputes unresolved. Above all, the fundamental problem of the Eastern Question, the ‘sick man of Europe’, Turkey, remained without a cure. As the British Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Salisbury, acknowledged on his return from Berlin, ‘We shall set up a rickety sort of Turkish rule south of the Balkans once again. But it is a mere respite. There is no vitality left in it.’52
The Crimean War Page 55