• V.Taki Russia, Ottoman Muslims and the Creation of Bulgaria: Population Politics and Nation-State Making during and after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878
• V. Taki Konstantin Leontiev and the Social Critique of Tanzimat Turkey

V. Taki. Russia, Ottoman Muslims and the Creation of Bulgaria: Population Politics and Nation-State Making during and after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878

The population of the European Turkey played an important role in all Russian-Ottoman wars, beginning with the ill-fortuned Pruth campaign of Peter the Great in 1711. The idea of using the Ottoman Christians for the struggle against the sultan constituted a major legacy of the tsar-reformer to which his successors remained faithful by fostering anti-Ottoman uprisings¹ or by creating detachments of Christian volunteers². For their part, the Ottomans would enlist the support of the runaway Don and Ukrainian Cossacks who settled in the Danubian Bulgaria and would drive the Bulgarian peasants into the interior of the empire in order to deprive the advancing Russian army of food and forage. As a result, the Russian-Turkish wars left the Ottoman Christians no chance to stay neutral even when they wanted to.
Apart from the peculiarities of the Ottoman warfare and the climatic conditions of the war theatre, the military uses of the local population constituted a major difference of Russia's 'Turkish campaigns' from the European wars of the eighteenth century, into which the civilians remained largely uninvolved³. In their persistent attempts to enlist the co-religionists, the Russian commanders on the Danube from Munnich to Paskievich revealed the same perception of the population as fundamentally non-neutral that by the late nineteenth century came to characterize military statistics and the science of population in general⁴. One is therefore tempted to look at the Russian-Ottoman wars of the 1700s and 1800s in the European Turkey as an important yet underexplored root of modern population politics.
In an attempt to do it, this paper addresses the war of 1877-1878, declared by Russia in the wake of the Herzegovinian and Bulgarian uprisings and rapidly christened as the war for the 'liberation of Bulgaria' ⁵.With the Russian Pan-Slavic sentiment at its peak, the tsar's commanders accorded to the enlistment of the local Christian volunteers an even greater importance than their eighteenth and early nineteenth century predecessors. At the same time they were soon forced to face the consequences that a war for the co-religionists and by the co-religionists bore for both Christian and Muslim population of the region. In what follows, I explore the dilemmas that confronted the Russian policy makers during the one year period between the formulation of the basic plan of actions in October 1876 and the temporary stalemate on the front that followed the failure of the Russian attacks on the Plevna in July and August 1877.
The experience of the previous 'Turkish campaigns' and the distribution confessional and ethnic groups in Danubian Bulgaria and Rumelia deeply influenced the strategic plan of the war composed by the lieutenant-general N. N. Obruchev in October 1876. In previous wars, the Russian commanders would cross the Danube in the lower course and besiege the powerful fortresses of Russa, Silistria, Varna and Shumla. Only in 1829, I. I. Diebitch managed to get beyond this quadrangle of the Ottoman strongholds, cross the Balkans and occupy Adrianople. However, his army kept close to the Black Sea littoral and was supported by the Russian fleet, which was no longer there in the 1870s. The insecurity of the littoral apart, Eastern Bulgaria, argued Obruchev, was to be avoided because of the preponderance here of the Turkish and emigre Circassian population 'capable of stubborn resistance.' Instead, the Russian strategist suggested crossing the Danube further upstream and promptly getting into the trans-Balkan Bulgaria by the Hankoi or Shipka pass. In this way, the Russian army, argued Obruchev, would be able to render prompt assistance to the Bulgarian population east, west or south⁶.
Having chosen to place the main operational line across the areas of recent Bulgarian uprising, the Russian command clearly counted on the active support of the co-religionist Slavic population. However, there was no agreement as to how exactly one could use this support. In a memorandum submitted to the head of General Staff Geiden, major-general R. A. Fadeev assigned to the Bulgarian volunteers the central role in the future war. The famous Pan-Slavist believed it possible to enlist some 15 000 Bessarabian and Romanian Bulgarians, arm them with the rifles that were at the disposal of the Slav Benevolent Committee and place them under the command of the Bulgarian officers in Russian service. According to Fadeev's plan, this militia had to liberate the territory between the Danube and the Balkans and secure the passages through the mountains while the Russian army blockaded the Ottoman fortresses. Doubled or even quadrupled by the Danubian Bulgarian volunteers, the militia would then have to cross the Balkans, and occupy the centers of the recent Bulgarian uprising⁷.
The ministry of war responded to Fadeev's memo with the document called 'Principles of the Formation of the Bulgarian Army.' The ministry retained Fadeev's proposed mode of organization of the militia as well as his vision of this force as the pillar of Russia's influence in Bulgaria after the war. At the same time, the ministry re-defined the war-time role of the militia from that of a big vanguard combat force to that of a much smaller military police agency, which would have to combat brigands, provide military intelligence and liaise between the Russian army and the local population⁸. In this form the project of the militia received the approval of the tsar who entrusted its implementation to major-general N. I. Stoletov, a veteran of the wars in the Caucasus and Central Asia⁹. After the declaration of war in April 1877, the tsar's proclamation to the Bulgarian population defined the militia as 'the nucleus of the local Bulgarian force charged with the preservation of the general order and peace' ¹⁰.
According to the proclamation, Russia's goal was to 'reconcile and pacify all the ethnicities ('narody') in those parts of Bulgaria that are inhabited by the people of different origin and faith.' In order to reassure the Bulgarians, Alexander II guaranteed 'life, freedom, honor and property of every Christian regardless of confession.' The tsar promised not to carry vengeance on the Bulgarian Muslims for the 'atrocities and crimes' committed recently by their co-religionists against Christians. The proclamation called the Muslim population to obey the provisional authorities that were to be established following the entry of the Russian army and admonished them to 'become peaceful citizens of a society ready to offer you all the benefits of a correctly organized civic life.' 'Your faith will remain intact, declared the tsar; 'your life and property, the life and honour of your families will be religiously protected' ¹¹.
Tsar's proclamation was the work of prince V. A. Cherkasskii, the head of the prospective Russian administration in Bulgaria appointed in November 1876 on the recommendation of the War Minister D. A. Miliutin. Having played an important role in the peasant emancipation reform of 1861, Cherkasskii later directed the Commission of Internal Affairs in the Kingdom of Poland, which in the wake of the Polish uprising of 1863 used the peasant reform in order to draw the local peasantry to the Russian tsar by liberating them from the tutelage of the rebellious Polish landlords. Alexander II recalled this page in Cherkasskii's biography when he expressly told him to 'do in Bulgaria something similar to what he had done in Poland.' Cherkasskii's duties on his new post included assistance in the formation of the Bulgarian militia' and 'the protection of the freedom of religion of foreigners, including Muslims, from the manifestations of local fanaticism' ¹².
Cherkasskii concurred with the war ministry's vision of the role of the Bulgarian militia and hoped to find in it an agency that would implement the policies of the civil administration that he headed. However, the head of the militia Stoletov from the very beginning viewed it as a combat force and he soon found support in the Russian commander-in-chief Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, who assigned the first Bulgarian brigade to the vanguard of the army. With the departure of Stoletov and his militiamen, Cherkasskii's civil administration became limited to a dozen of collaborators who lacked even a skeleton of district or provincial representatives until the arrival of some 80 officers from Russia specially invited to serve in this capacity. Deprived for the time being of any effective means to carry out his policies, Cherkasskii busied himself collecting statistical materials on Bulgaria and counseling the military authorities.
In a report submitted to Miliutin on the eve of the Russian passage of the Danube, the prince argued that the difficulties of reorganization of the country were proportionate to a greater or small share of the Turkish population in a given region and suggested to tailor the length of the Russian post-war occupation accordingly. ¹³. Similarly to Obruchev, Cherkasskii pointed to the heavily Muslim Eastern part of the Danubian Bulgaria and the Slivno sanjack to the south of it as potentially the most troublesome territories. The commissioner was much less concerned with a small, predominantly urban, Muslim minority in the rest of the Danubian Bulgaria and in trans-Balkania. Nor did Cherkasskii expect many problems in the Rodopian Mountains and Macedonia, whose relatively numerous Muslims were of Bulgarian, Albanian or Serbian origin¹⁴.
Cherkasskii believed that disarmament of the Muslim population was necessary in order to 'avoid in future bloody clashes between different ethnic groups of the Balkan peninsula.' The commissioner found support for such measure in the protocols of the Constantinople conference of December 1876 - January 1877 as well as in the practice of the Russian administration in the Caucasus and parts of Asia Minor that were being occupied by the Russian troops¹⁵. Cherkasskii advised against the house searches that could provoke the Muslims. Instead, he suggested introducing a system of fines for the non-delivery of a specified number of weapons determined for each locale on the basis of the number of Muslim houses and the testimonies of the 'worthiest local Christians.' At the same time, he argued that there was no need to disarm the Bulgarian population for, 'having been already disarmed by the Turks themselves, they had only a very small number of weapons, which they needed badly in order to protect themselves from possible attacks of the Muslims' ¹⁶.
The events soon demonstrated that the Christian population was thinking not only about self-protection. According to Cherkasskii's aid, D. S. Anuchin, as soon as the Russians crossed the Danube at Sistova, all local Muslims fled, while the Bulgarians entered 'some kind of intoxication' and began plundering their properties with 'elemental anger.' Having fraternized with the Bulgarians the Russian soldiers joined in the pogrom that soon ceased to be 'an expression of popular hatred' and came to be animated by 'the basest inclinations.' The chaos also spread to the surrounding countryside where fugitive Bulgarian militiamen, 'various local riffraff' and even occasional Orthodox priests formed the real bands of robbers¹⁷.
In view of the expected arrival of the tsar to the front, these outbreaks of violence greatly embarrassed the Russian command. Having arrested some 140 soldiers for 'various disorders (bezobrazia),' Nikolai Nikolaevich threatened to punish further breakdowns of discipline 'with all the severity of the martial law' ¹⁸. The commander-in-chief also placed within the jurisdiction of the martial courts the cases of murder, rape, banditry, robbery and arson¹⁹. However, it was easier to restore the discipline in the army than to maintain order in the occupied region. The minister of war Miliutin, who arrived in Bulgaria together with Alexander II, immediately pointed to the glaring contradiction between the spirit and letter of the tsar's proclamation on the one hand and the actual situation of the Muslims since the appearance of the Russian army on the other.
Under this criticism, Nepokoichitskii and Cherkasskii first tried to blame each other, ²⁰ yet the arguments that each of them offered in self-defence ultimately complemented rather than contradicted one another. The head of staff pointed to 'much hatred had built up' between Christians and Muslims and claimed that 'the Turks did well to go away.' He argued that 'lapses are inevitable in wartime,' yet assured that those Muslims who remained in the region suffered no offences' ²¹. For his part, Cherkasskii declared his helplessness to do anything without a policing force and, like Nepokoichitskii, asserted that the departure of Muslims was a good thing. 'Given our exposed communications, he wrote to Miliutin, our only salvation is the absence of the Turks between the Danube and Tirnovo. If they come back we will be much worse. Believe me and do not encourage them to return' ²².
However, Miliutin could not reconcile himself with the sight of hundreds of Turkish families with their cattle and properties that had been rounded up by the Bulgarians and the Russian troops and cordoned off in the open field near the army headquarters at Bela. The proposal of Cherkasskii to send the POWs to Russia, argued Miliutin, could not be possibly applied to the Muslim civilians arrested in this way, for their numbers were likely to increase to 'thousands and hundreds of thousands of families' inasmuch as the Russian army moved into the Ottoman interior. The minister of war suggested calling the population to moderation and creating a strong Bulgarian police to restore order²³. In response, Cherkasskii once again attributed the 'the internal strife among the local population to the mutual irritation and hatred of the: Bulgarians and the Turks.' According to him, the Bulgarian police itself was likely to 'outrage the Muslims' which made it imperative to place at his disposal an 'impartial Russian military force' ²⁴. Convinced, Miliutin suggested to the commander-in-chief to place two reserve battalions under Cherkasskii's command, ²⁵, yet these were formed only in October. Until that happened, the civil administration was practically unable to influence the situation in the districts and thus could not do much for the Muslims even if it wanted to. The governors and vice-governors appointed to Sistova, Tirnovo, Tulcea and the Russa sanjak did not investigate cases of attacks on the Muslims 'for the lack of means to do so.' Even Cherkasskii's meetings with the Muslim deputations caused resentment among the Bulgarians who believed that the commissioner had to arrest them on the spot.
The capture of the Hankioi pass and the passage of Gurko's detachment into the trans-Balkan Bulgaria led to the pogroms of the local Muslim population on a still larger scale than was the case of the Danubian Bulgaria. As they saw their masters retreat, the Bulgarians attacked those Turks who did not manage to leave with the Ottoman troops. According to Anuchin, 'the Muslim homes were plundered, mosques destroyed and many Turks killed in the most merciless way' ²⁶. However, the Ottomans soon regained Lovca and Grabovo on the northern side of the Balkans each time severely reprising the local Christians. Moreover, the first reversal that the Russian army suffered at Plevna on July 8, 1877 made it necessary to recall Gurko's forces from beyond the Balkans, whereupon the trans-Balkan Bulgarians suffered the full extent of the Ottoman revenge²⁷.
At this point many Russian military men and civilians questioned the wisdom of organizing Gurko's expedition from both the military and the moral-political point of view. Cherkasskii wrote to Miliutin that it was wrong to 'compromise the population and undermine its attachment to us' and predicted that the Bulgarians would reproach the Russians for what happened in Grabovo, Lovca, Eni-Zagra and Eski-Zagra²⁸. The hero of the Sevastopol defence general E. I. Totleben, who did not join the Russian army until September 1877, noted in his diary the terrible ambiguity of the Russian-Bulgarian relations after Gurko's retreat: 'The Turks massacred the Bulgarians in the territories that we abandoned. We came to save the Bulgarians and yet they were dying because of our aid' ²⁹. On the eve of the retreat, Gurko himself '[shuddered] to think that our temporary presence in these territories' would lead to 'the annihilation of the entire Bulgarian population of the town of Eski-Zagra and Kazanlyk and the villages of the valley of Tundja' ³⁰.
The number of Bulgarian fugitives from beyond the Balkans, Lovcha, Bebrovo and the valley of Lom to the areas more firmly occupied by the Russians reached 100 000³¹. Cherkasskii responded by forming a special commission under colonel Dometti that placed the fugitives in the abandoned Turkish houses in villages and towns and allowed them to collect the harvest from the Turkish fields³². The news of the atrocities of which the trans-Balkan Bulgarians became victims after the retreat of Gurko³³ led to new attacks of the Danbian Bulgarians on the remaining Muslim population in the occupied territories. Bulgarian military bands (chetas) killed the Muslims in three villages in the vicinity of Grabovo on July 28, while Bulgarian villagers themselves burned down a big Turkish village of Trembesh near Tyrnovo on July 30³⁴. In order to prevent large-scale massacres of the Danubian Muslims, the Russian regimental and corps commanders would dispatch pickets to every Muslim settlement³⁵.
This overview of the formulation of the Russian war-time policies in Bulgaria and their immediate consequences reveal the peculiarity of the last Russian-Ottoman confrontation in Europe. The territories to the south of the Danube served as the battle ground for the Russian and Ottoman troops no less than five times prior to the war of 1877-1878 and each of these confrontations involved the formation of Christian volunteer detachments. And yet, the war for the 'liberation for Bulgaria' was unprecedented for the scale of dislocation of both the Christian and the Muslim population. This is all the more striking in view of the fact that these dislocations constituted a great embarrassment for the Russian military and civilian authorities amidst a campaign at least notionally conducted in accordance with the principles of the international law of war, in the formation of which Russia actively participated.
This paper showed that Russian military and civilian policy makers expected the Muslims to be a 'problem' both during and after the war. The Russians did not have tender feelings towards the Ottoman Muslims. They did not try to prevent the Muslim flight from the occupied territories and were manifestly more concerned with the fate of the Christian refugees. At the same time, wholesale expulsion of the Muslim population and its replacement with the Christian Bulgarians was not their goal. Russian authorities were concerned with the predominantly Muslim Eastern part of the Danubian Bulgaria, and yet the very decision to relocate the main line of operations from this traditional Russian-Ottoman battleground to the predominantly Christian territories further West suggests the desire to avoid a war with the Muslim population as such.
The unprecedented population dislocations were, among other things, a consequence of the particular importance that the Russian military and civilian authorities attributed to the Bulgarian Christians. Despite the significant role of the Christian volunteers in previous 'Turkish campaigns,' only in 1877-1878 the geographical distribution of the co-religionist Slavic population had a direct bearing on the actual plan of war adopted by the Russian command. The decisions to create a specifically Bulgarian militia, to place it in the vanguard of the army and to seek a prompt occupation of the predominantly Bulgarian territories on both sides of the Balkans were all indicative of the efforts of the Russian military authorities to render the war a popular (narodnyi) character. However, in practice this strategy augmented the inter-confessional violence. For the numerically overwhelming Bulgarians the appearance of the Russian troops functioned as a signal for attacks on the Muslims and/or their properties, which would be difficult to imagine in territories where the Bulgarian population was in the minority. The plight of the Muslims in the first month following the Russian passage of the Danube made severe anti-Christian reprisals almost inevitable after the overextended Russian forces had to evacuate some of the previously occupied areas. In its turn, the plight of the trans-Balkan Bulgarians after the retreat of Gurko hardened the anti-Muslim sentiment among both their co-nationals in the Danubian Bulgaria and the Russian troops. It paved the way to new attacks on the Muslim population that accompanied the final Russian advance to Adrianople in January 1878.

¹E. B. Smilianskaia, I. M. Smilianskiaia, M. B. Velizhev, Rossia v Sredizemnomorie: Arkhipelagskaia ekspeditsia Ekateriny II (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 74-79, 114-129.
²On the use of the Moldavian volunteers in the eighteenth century, see E. B. Shul'man, Russko-moldavskoie boievoie sodruzhestvo, 1735-1739 (Kishinev : 1962) ; I. A. Kotenko, 'Iz istorii osvoboditel'nogo dvizhenia Moldavii v period russko-turetskoi voiny, 1768-1774,' Uchenyie zapiski Tiraspol'skogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, no. 3 (1957):38-39; Vladimir Tcaci, 'Considera?iii privind pozi?ia popula?iei Moldovei fa?a de razboiul ruso-turc din 1768-1774,' Analele Asocia?iei Na?ionale a Tinerilor Istorici din Moldova, no. 10 (2012):117-118; I. V. Semenova, Russko-moldavskoie boievoie sodruzhestvo, 1787-1971 (Kishinev : 1968); Eadem, Rossia i natsional'no sovoboditel'naia bor'ba moldavskoo naroda protive osmanskoo iga v XVIII v. (Kishinev, 1976); On the Russian use of the Bulgarian volunteers, see Eadem, 'Uchastie bolgar v russko-turetskikh voinakh XVIII v.,' Balkanskii istoricheskii sbornik, no. 2 (1970): 319-351; V. D. Konobeev, 'National'no-osvoboditel'noie dvizhenie v Bolgarii,' Uchenyie zapiski Instituta Slavianovedenia, no. 20 (1960): 221-274; N. I. Kazakov, 'Iz istorii russko-bolgarsakikh sviazei v period voiny Rossii s Turtsiei (1806-1812),' Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1955): 42-55; V. D. Konobeev, 'Russko-bolgarskie otnoshenia v 1806-1812 gg.,' Iz istorii russko-bolgarskikh otnoshenii (Moscow, 1958), 219-223; Alexander Bitis, 'Russian Army's Use of Balkan Irregulars during the 1828-1829 Russo-Turkish War,' Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, 50, no.. 4 (2002):537-557.
³Danel A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton: Mifflin Co., 2007).
⁴Peter Holquist, 'To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,' Terry Martin and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, UK, and New York, NJ: Oxford University Press, 2001).
⁵A. A. Ulunian, Bolgarskii narod i russko-turetskaia voina 1877-1878 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1971); I. I. Rostunov (ed.), Russko-turetskaia voina 1877-1878 (Moscow: Voienizdat, 1977); G. L. Arsh, et al. eds. Russko-Turetskaia voina 1877-1878 gg. i Balkany (Moscow: Nauka,1978); V. I. Vinogradov, Russko-turetskaia voina 1877-1878 gg. i osvobozhdenie Bolgarii (Moscow: Mysl', 1978); V. A. Zolotarev, Rossia i Turtsia. Voina 1877-1878 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1983); A. A. Ulunian, Rossia i osvobozhdenie Bolgarii ot turetskogo iga (Moscow: Institut Slavianovedenia i Balkanistiki, 1994).
⁶N. N. Obruchev, 'Sobstvennoruchnaia dokladnaia zapiska,' October 1, 1876, D. A. Miliutin, Dnevnik. 1876-1878 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), Prilozhenie 1, 609-613.
⁷R. F. Fadeev, 'Bolgarskoie delo v Turetskoi voine,' summarized in D. S. Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii i grazhdanskoie upravlenie v Bolgarii. 1877-1878 gg,' Russkaia Starina 83, no. 3 (1895):22; N. R. Ovsianyi, Bolgarskoie opolchenie i zemskoie voisko. K istorii grazhdanskogo upravlenia i okkupatsii Bolgarii, v 1877-78-19 gg. (St. Petersburg: 'Khudozhestvennaia pol'za,' 1904).
⁸Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' 23-24.
⁹See I. S. Ivanov, Bolgarskoie opolchenie i ego sformirovanie v 1875-1879 gg. (St. Petersburg: Balashev, 1889). The author was a Bulgarian from Bessarabia who collaborated with Stoletov in the organization of the Bulgarian militia first in Chisinau and later in Ploesti (Romania) after the outbreak of the war.
¹⁰N. R. Ovsianyi (ed.), Sbornik materialov po grazhdanskomu upravleniiu i okkupatsii Bolgarii v 1877-78-79 gg. vyp. 1 (St. Petersburg: Khudozhestvennaia pol'za, 1903), 3-6. Also published in Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' Russkaia starina 84, no. no. 8 (1895):54-56, and V. N. Krestovskii, Dvadsat' mesiatsev v deistvuiuschei armii (St. Petersburg,1879).
¹¹Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' 55.
¹²This formula was suggested by Cherkasskii himself. See Cherkasskii, to D. A. Miliutin (Dokladnaia zapiska), November 1, 1876, It was incorporated into the official instructions to Cherkasskii issued at the moment of his appointment on November 16, 1876, Ovsianyi (ed.) Russkoie upravlenie v Bolgarii. vol. 1, 157 and 162 respectively. On Cherkasskii, see D. G. Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii i grazhdanskoie upravlenie v Bolgarii, 1877-1878,' Russkaia starina 83, no. 2 (1895):1-34; no. 2 (1895): 1-27.
¹³Dokladnaia zapiska V. A. Cherkasskogo voiennomu ministru. Ploesti, Ovsyanyi (ed.) Russkoie upravlenie, vol. 1, 181.
¹⁴Ibid., 182.
¹⁵Cherkasskii to Nepokoichitskii, May 30, 1877, Ibid., 184-185.
¹⁶Ibid., 185-6. Cherkasskii excluded the searches in the houses of the Muslims as a means of requisition for it would be tantamount to an attempt at their sancta sanctorum. Instead, he suggested fining those who would refuse to turn in arms in two or three days as well as introducing the principle of collective responsibility. The approximate number of weapons would be assessed on the basis of a number of Muslim houses in each locale as well as the indications of the local Christians.
¹⁷Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' See also 'Otchet V. A. Cherkasskogo o vvedenii grazhdanskogo upravlenia v Bolgarii za 1877 g.,' Ovsianyi (ed.), Russkoie upravlenie, vol. 1, 253.
¹⁸See A. A. Nepokochitskii's order of June 24, 1877, published in Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' Russkaia starina 83, no. 9 (1895):80.
¹⁹See the proclamation of the Commander-in-Chief of July 1, 1877, Ovsianyi (ed.), Sobornik materialov, vyp. 1, 6-7.
²⁰Immediately after the Sistova pogroms, the military authorities tried to pretend that the outbreaks were Cherkasskii's fault. The latter fought back pointing to the failure of the military authorities to distribute timely some 20 000 printed copies of the tsar's proclamation as well as the refusal of the Commander-in-Chief to place at his disposal a number of officers and troops for the exercise of the administrative and police functions.
²¹Nepokoichitskii to Miliutin, July 12, 1877, Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' Russkaia starina 83, no. 10 (1895):26.
²²Cherkasskii to Miliutin, July 13, 1877, Ovsianyi (ed.), Russkoie upravlenie, vol. 1, 211.
²³Miliutin to Cherkasskii, July Anuchin, 'Kniaz' Cherkasskii,' 30.
²⁴Cherkasskii to Miliutin, July 20, 1877, summarized in Anuchin, 'Kniaz' Cherkasskii,' 31.
²⁵Miliutin to Cherkasskii, July 23, 1877, Anuchin, 'Kniaz' Cherkasskii,' 32.
²⁶Anichin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' Ruskaia starina 84, no. 12 (1895):4.
²⁷At the moment of the Russian evacuation of Kazanlyk, its military governor major Popov took ten amanats from the local Turkish population in an attempt to make sure that the Turkish inhabitants of the town protect the local Bulgarians after the arrival of the Ottoman troops. However, the Bulgarian population preferred to leave with the retreating Russians. Anichin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' Ruskaia starina 84, no. 12 (1895):13.
²⁸Cherkasskii to Miliutin, July20, 1877, cited in Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' Ruskaia starina 84, no. 10 (1895):31-32.
²⁹Cited in N. K. Shilder, 'Plevnenskoie sidenie. 1877 g.,' Russkaia starina 50, no. 6 (1886):217. For the criticism of Gurko's expedition from the military point of view, see P. D. Zotov, 'Voina 1877 g.,' Russkiai starina 49, no. 2 (1886).
³⁰Ovsianyi, vol. 1, 54, note.
³¹Ovsianyi, vol 1, 56. In October 1877 Cherkasskii to Nepokoichitskii evaluated the number of fugitives at 100 000, Ovsianyi, vol 1, 189. Anuchin writes about 'many tens of thousands' of refugees. Anuchin, 'Kniaz' V. A. Cherkasskii,' Ruskaia starina 84, no. 12 (1895):21.
³²See Dometti, 'Kratkaia zapiska o polozhenii zabalkanskikh bolgar-begletsov,' September 13, 1877, Ovsianyi, Russkoie upravlenie v Bolgarii, vol. 1, 317 and Cherkasskii's report to the Commander-in-Chief of Septermber 14, 177, Ovsianyi (ed.) Sbornik materialov, vyp. 1, 67-71.
³³And they were cruel indeed! See Anuchin, 'Kniaz' Cherkasskii,' Russkaia Starina 84, no. 12 (1895):31-32. ³⁴Ovsianyi, Russkoie upravlenie v Bolgarii, vol. 1, 62.
³⁵Anuchin, 'Kniaz' Cherkasskii,' Russkaia Starina 84, no. 12 (1895):32.

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V. Taki. Konstantin Leontiev and the Social Critique of Tanzimat Turkey

On January 6, 1872, the bishops Panaret of Plovdiv, Hilarion of Macariopolis and Hilarion of Lovech celebrated the Epiphany liturgy at the Bulgarian church of St. Stephen in Constantinople. After the service, the prelates read the prayer for the 'Sultan-liberator' Abdul-Aziz I and called on him to establish a Bulgarian Exarchate that would be independent from the canonical jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople¹. The actions of the three hierarchs precipitated the famous Greek-Bulgarian church schism that was, without exaggeration, the most important political event in South-Eastern Europe between the Crimean War and the outbreak of the Eastern Crisis in 1875². The schism represented the first open political conflict between Russia's Orthodox coreligionists in European Turkey and thus played a significant role in St. Petersburg's Eastern policy. Moreover, the Orthodox Church schism revealed the contradiction between principles of confessional and racial or national allegiance which educated 19th century Russians tended to perceive as complementary. It summoned Russian diplomacy, the Holy Synod and Russian society at large to take sides in what proved to be an irreconcilable conflict between the Greek Orthodox Church and Bulgarian national interests³ . Whereas the former traditionally benefited from the tsars' protection, the latter enjoyed the sympathy of Russia's increasingly Panslavist educated classes ⁴..
A predicament for Russian foreign policy and a subject of heated polemics in the Russian press .⁵, the Greek-Bulgarian church schism of 1872 also constituted the political conjuncture that motivated the Russian consul in Saloniki, Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev (1831-1891), to formulate his highly original views on Ottoman Turkey and its Orthodox subject peoples. A physician-turned-diplomat, Leontiev was known to the Russian public of the 1850s and 1860s as the author of several literary works. Two articles on Pan-Slavism in Ottoman Turkey and a longer essay called 'Byzantinism and Slavdom' ⁶ all written in the aftermath of the Greek-Bulgarian schism of 1872 positioned Leontiev as Russia's major commentator on the affairs of the Orthodox East, as well as a political thinker and religious philosopher ⁷.
In contrast to contemporary Panslavists and increasingly numerous Slavic sympathizers, Leontiev asserted that relations with Bulgarians were, in fact, pregnant with great danger for Russia. Regarding the Bulgarian church schism, he asserted that 'for the first time since the beginning of Russian history the two formative forces of Russian statehood, Orthodoxy and Slavdom, entered into contradiction with one another' ⁸. In these conditions, it was wrong for Russia to support Bulgarians. According to Leontiev, Bulgarian leaders quite consciously provoked the schism which effectively put an end to any Greek designs of maintaining their traditional cultural influence over the Bulgarian population. Bulgarian anti-Greek rhetoric accompanied professions of loyalty towards the Sultan whom they did not hesitate to call 'the Bulgarian tsar' while Bulgarian intellectuals envisioned projects creating a Turkish-Bulgarian dualism similar to the Austrian-Hungarian compromise of 1867.
Leontiev anticipated by more than a decade the eventual Russian-Bulgarian 'parting of the ways' which occurred soon after the establishment, of the autonomous principality of Bulgaria in 1878-1879⁹. However, for Leontiev, the problem lay less in the 'infidelity' of Bulgarian leaders towards Russia or in their political opportunism but in the very character of the Bulgarian and, by extension, of the South Slavic intelligentsia¹⁰. According to Leontiev, their fervent nationalism notwithstanding, Bulgarian teachers and lawyers lacked cultural authenticity and originality. For the Russian conservative philosopher, the Bulgarian intelligentsia embodied 'the most philistine and usual contemporary bourgeoisie' which by subverting traditional hierarchy and authority personified the overall tendency towards general social fusion, homogenization, and simplification¹¹ .
In the final account, Leontiev's dislike of the Bulgarian intelligentsia had its roots in his aesthetic attitude towards reality in general and social relations in particular¹².. During his service in Adrianople in the mid-1860s, the Russian consul 'suffered' when he saw ascendant Bulgarian lawyers and professors, wearing uniform European frock-coats which, according to Leontiev, threatened to obliterate the difference between West and East. Along with many other conservative critics of modernity, Leontiev relished the sight of 'something Asiatic': 'a dark Bulgarian plowing the land in his blue turban or some Turkish horsemen in light blue pants and crimson vests with wide sleeves flying in the wind'¹³. It did not really matter to Leontiev 'that the horseman was a tyrant and the plowman a victim,' for such contradictions constituted the 'blooming complexity' of Oriental society. Thus what troubled him was neither the political agenda of the Bulgarian leaders nor the means they employed to achieve it, but rather the character of the society that would emerge as a result of their political victory.
Throughout his political career, Leontiev consistently opposed tribal politics for its own sake ¹⁴. Therefore, he always expressed an ambiguous attitude towards the idea of a Slavic union led by Russia. In contrast to the fashionable Panslavists who were his contemporaries ¹⁵, Leontiev did not consider unification of the Slavs a goal in and of itself, but rather viewed it as a source of change in the character of contemporary Russian society. In this respect, he shared the approach of the Slavophiles who 'hoped that a rapprochement with the Southern Slavs would contribute to the preservation of the remnants of ancient Muscovite Russia on the one hand, while enhancing Russian national creativity whether in the political, artistic or economic sense on the other'¹⁶. Writing two decades after the Slavophiles, Leontiev could see that their hopes had been largely unfounded because in the absence of conservative values, Southern Slavic societies were unable to withstand tendencies towards social homogenization and democratization. In these conditions, 'fusion' with them would contribute to greater 'uniformity' which had to be avoided at all costs, because, according to Leontiev, it was tantamount to ruin ¹⁷. Leontiev favored a rapprochement with the Southern Slavs only on condition of preservation of diversity and elaboration of a special form of statehood based on hierarchy. In other words, instead of seeking to become fused with the rest of the Slavs, Russia had to 'artfully maintain a respectful distance' from them benefiting all parties concerned ¹⁸.
'Maintaining a respectful distance' involved careful relations with the non-Slavic peoples of European Turkey. Leontiev stressed the necessity of cooperating above all with the Constantinople Greeks, for they, not Serbs or Bulgarians, were most closely attached to Orthodoxy. Because of the Ottoman conquest, the church had become more central to the everyday life of both Greek notables and common people ¹⁹. Leontiev challenged the traditional stereotype of the 'flattering Greek' (l'stivyi grek) that existed among the Eastern Slavs since the twelfth-century chronicler Nestor²⁰. Moreover, Leontiev disagreed with the more recent tendency of his compatriots to perceive the Phanariot servitors of the Ottoman sultans as corrupt, exploitative and treacherous ²¹. Instead, the former Russian consul identified in the remnants of the Greek aristocracy of Constantinople the vestiges of social and political hierarchy that the democratic societies of peninsular Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria lacked. According to Leontiev, the Phanariots were Turkophile because they found the Ottoman Empire 'useful to the interests of Orthodoxy' and saw it as a shield not only against Pan-Slavism, but also against an Athenian liberalism incompatible with their ideal of an aristocratic neo-Byzantine empire. The Aristarchis, Photiades, and Vogorides families were, according to the former Russian consul, all 'people of monarchist, churchly and aristocratic spirit' who had to be viewed as Russia's best allies in the East along with the high Orthodox clergy²². Leontiev essentially argued that Russia had to learn to be Turcophile from the Phanariots because secular nationalism endangered the Ottoman Empire just as much as it did the Orthodox Church, whose protection was Russia's traditional policy.
To illustrate his point, Leontiev pointed to Mount Athos, an Orthodox monastic community on the Aegean littoral, which traditionally enjoyed wide autonomy under the rule of the Ottoman sultans and which in recent times had come under threat by competing Bulgarian and Greek nationalizing agendas ²³. According to Leontiev, the Ottoman government wanted neither the complete Hellenization of Mount Athos, which opened the prospect of its absorption by the Greek kingdom, nor its Bulgarianization, which would place it under the influence of the Bulgarian national intelligentsia²⁴. In light of the complications that the Greek-Bulgarian church schism created for the Russia's policy in Turkey, Russian interest consisted in making sure that Mount Athos stayed Orthodox rather than 'Greek' or 'Bulgarian,' yet such a result could best be achieved if Mount Athos remained under Ottoman authority²⁵. Therefore, Leontieve concluded that '[t]he purest interests of Orthodoxy, are at present closely linked with the dominance of the Muslim ruler' ²⁶.
In his early writings, Leontiev repeatedly stressed that neither Russia nor its Balkan co-religionists sought to destroy Turkey. Greeks viewed the Ottoman Empire as a guarantee against the abhorrent prospect of the emergence of a large Slavic state in the Balkans. The Turks could prevent the unification of Serbs and Bulgarians, and, under Greek guidance could diminish the Russian influence upon the latter²⁷. Bulgarian leaders were interested in making the sultan a Bulgarian tsar to protect their still weak national identity against assimilation by Greeks or Serbs ²⁸. Russian interests, according to Leontiev, consisted in a 'slow and gradual development of Greeks and southern Slavs under the rule of the Sultan' to protect them from a Western social revolution²⁹.
Like other nineteenth-century European critics of mainstream modernity whether conservative or socialist, Leontiev viewed the Orient as an alternative to the democratizing and industrializing west. In his early writings Leontiev attributed to the Ottoman Empire the ability to perform this conservative role³⁰. 'As long as the West has its dynasties and still preserves a semblance of order, Europe is not dangerous to us and in fact is worthy of friendship and respect.' However, if 'the remnants of the once great and noble Christian and classical Europe give way to rude and atheist worker republic,' the East, on condition of undertaking timely conservative reforms (okhranitel'nye reform), could become 'a rampart against godlessness, anarchy and general coarsening' ³¹. Whereas the majority of educated Russians of his epoch viewed the Ottoman Empire as moribund, Leontiev argued that 'the sick man is not necessarily a dying man.' Trained as a physician, he knew well that 'the sick recover and even incurable afflicting human and political bodies have their remissions which sometimes last for so long that the organism lives its normal life span and dies sometimes: of an entirely different cause' ³².
Convinced that 'Turkey has to be preserved' as a 'known evil that we can handle,' Leontiev grounded his thesis regarding the Ottoman Empire's conservative role by studying how provincial Muslims reacted to the Westernizing reforms of the Tanzimat period (1839-1876). In the words of Manolache Sakkelarios, dragoman of the Russian consulate in Adrianople and one of Leontiev's several alter egos, Roumelian Muslims 'were discontented with Tanzimat government and its policies, waxed nostalgic for the times of the janissaries, and hated the French and the British whom they considered more pernicious to Islam than Russians.' On the other hand, they heard from Ottomans who had returned from Russian captivity as well as from recent Crimean Tatar emigres that 'Muslims have rights in Russia, that mullahs are rewarded and that muezzins chant from high minarets just as they do in Turkey.' Finally, the Roumelian Muslims could compare the 1829 Russian occupation of Adrianople to the passage of allied French troops through it in 1854; the comparison, that, according to Leontiev's alter ego, did not favor the French³³.
Leontiev claimed that as Ottomans became more familiar with Russia as well as with the West, they 'liked Russians better than Western Europeans despite our old historical antagonism.' According to the Russian consul, the 'churchly character' of the Russian Empire accorded well with the religiousness of the Ottoman Turks who also admired Russian discipline, deference and obeisance. To illustrate his point, Leontiev recalled his conversation with a western educated pasha about Gogol, whom the latter read in French translation. However laughable the pasha found Gogol's characters, he still appreciated their deference to superior rank and authority. The pasha concluded that the Russian state must be very powerful for, if Chichikov behaved the way Gogol portrayed him, Russia's clever and honest people should be even better³⁴. The Ottoman pasha who read Gogol may have been purely fictional, yet the perceptions of Russia that Leontiev attributed to the Ottoman Turks do in fact illustrate the social characteristics the Russian consul valued and looked for either in Russia or in the Orient³⁵.
With the beginning of the Eastern Crisis and the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War, 1877-1878, Leontiev's perception of the Ottoman Empire changed. He found it impossible to argue that Russian interests lay in the continued preservation of Turkey in Europe. Nevertheless, in contrast to many contemporary commentators, the former consul never shared the jingoist rhetoric presenting Ottomans as an 'Asiatic horde.' According to Leontiev, if Turkey could no longer exist on the European side of the Bosphorus, 'it was not because the Turks are monsters and beasts while the Christians are all nice, honest and well-educated,' but because 'millions of Christians who became aware of their rights can no longer be ruled on the basis of Quran' ³⁶. Even after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, which came to an end with Russia on the verge of occupying Constantinople, Leontiev was reluctant to support 'chasing the Turks from Europe,' a concept popular among the Russian educated public at the time. Although the project of driving the Ottomans back to Asia by replacing them with Russians on the Bosphorus contradicted the principle of the European balance of power, Leontiev labelled the plan an 'anti-Asian,' 'emancipatory' and 'liberal' idea more European than Russian in spirit³⁷. According to Leontiev, an emancipatory process was always 'destructive' because it was 'hostile to state, ecclesiastical and estate (soslovnaia) discipline.' From Leontiev's conservative perspective, 'one had to remove the sultan from the Bosphorus not because he was an autocratic Asian monarch (this is good), but because his empire has become weak and can no longer oppose liberal Europeanism.' Accordingly, Russian policy had to focus less on the liberation of Christians, but on their 'organization.' In order to achieve this goal, Russian society itself had to forget 'all liberal-egalitarian ideas, habits and tastes.' In Leontiev's opinion, only in this manner could Russia have the moral right to replace the Sultan on the Bosphorus³⁸.
Unlike so many of his Russian contemporaries, Leontiev did not regret that in 1878 the Russian army stopped short of taking Constantinople. He asserted, 'At that moment, we were not yet ready for that,' pointing to liberal and 'emancipatory' attitudes predominant in Russian society during the period of the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s³⁹. With the assassination Alexander II in March 1881, the situation changed as Alexander III's government reversed previous policy into a conservative direction. Reassured of Russia's conservative potential, in the last decade of his life Leontiev grew much more enthusiastic about capturing Constantinople portraying its conquest as a capstone for a conservative Russia built on Orthodoxy and Byzantine principles of hierarchy. However, this anti-Ottoman design should not be regarded as evidence of Leontiev's anti-Muslim feelings. If anything, his diplomatic service in European Turkey made him more sensitive to the predicament of local Muslims living under the conditions of the Porte's Christian subject peoples' national-liberation movements. . During the mid-1870s, the former consul reasoned, that were the Ottomans were to evacuate Constantinople, the remaining Turkish population of Europe 'would always pin its hopes on us Russians as protectors against the inevitable harassments and insults from their erstwhile slaves, the Greeks and Southern Slavs, who are, in general, rather rude' ⁴⁰. Leontiev was thus rather sympathetic towards Bulgarian Muslims, even though Russia's actual role in their travails of 1877-1878 proved to be very different from the one he advocated.
Later in life, Leontiev no longer assumed that the Ottoman Empire could serve as 'a rampart against the godlessness, anarchy and general coarsening' supposedly characterizing contemporary Europe. From his vantage point in the late 1880s, the former Russian consul attributed this condition to the absence of social estates in Turkey. Despite the fundamental inequality between the Muslim and the Christian subjects of the Porte, social differentiation within these two groups was lacking. The absence of 'a legally defined nobility' opened the way to the predominance of the Greek and Slavic bourgeoisie and intelligentsia⁴¹. In the early 1870s, Leontiev observed that '[if] one mentally subtracted Turks as privileged subjects of the empire, it would result in a pure Christian democracy' ⁴². This arithmetic explains Leontiev's heterodox and ambiguous perspective on the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, during the course of which his 'mental subtraction' became a reality. The end of Ottoman dominance brought about a further simplification of the local social structure which soon manifested itself in the equalization of political rights, the weakening of religious sentiment and clerical influence, as well as the triumph of universal European democratic fashions and practices over local customs, i. e. all those things the Russian conservative thinker found abhorrent⁴³.
When, at the end of his life, Leontiev cast a retrospective glance at Russia's relations with Ottoman Turkey, he found their confrontation profoundly tragic. Both were conservative powers: Russia by virtue of the age old estate principle of its social organization and Turkey by virtue of the fundamental inequality that characterized relations between its Muslim and Christian subjects. As a result of the Crimean war, both empires lost confidence in themselves and embarked on new style European internal emancipatory reforms. Leontiev was particularly dismayed by the fact that, autocratic and noble Russia together with illiberal and inegalitarian Turkey were pushed towards democratization by imperial France, aristocratic England as well as absolutist and Catholic Austria⁴⁴. While the Russian defeat in the Crimean War and the resulting 'Great Reforms' made the tsarist empire's future uncertain, Leontiev had little doubt regarding the deadly outcome of the Tanzimat reforms for Russia's traditional rival. From the perspective of the late 1880s, the Eastern crisis of the preceding decade appeared to Leontiev as the inevitable outcome of legal equality between Muslims and Christians forced upon the Ottoman Empire by the 1856 Peace of Paris. The Ottoman Empire's disintegration in Europe made Leontiev nostalgic:

Another one of the great and inegalitarian powers that emerged in the monarchical and aristocratic Europe of the Renaissance leaves the scene. This is the disappearance of a familiar evil, or rather half-evil half-good, for this Turkish world, although inimical to Christendom, was itself built upon a rather ideal foundation and constituted a considerable obstacle to the progress of a much greater evil, i. e. the spread of the utilitarian and godless universal European lifestyle⁴⁵.

Leontiev's attitude towards Ottoman Turkey helps to bring into sharper focus 19th century Russian perceptions of this rival empire. His deliberately provocative style revealed many ambiguities contained within the rhetorical cliches educated Russians used to portray their southern neighbor. The trope of the 'sick man' was one of them. Leontiev's discussion of Tanzimat Turkey falls within the broader theme of Ottoman decline that provided the leitmotif of Russian descriptions of the sultan's realm. Educated Russians initially attributed this decline to Ottoman neglect of European 'arts and sciences' so successfully imitated by post-Petrine Russia. After the sultans tried to emulate the tsar-reformer, educated Russians portrayed the fruits of their Europeanization policies as lacking authenticity and solid ground in Muslim society⁴⁶. The negative assessment of Ottoman Westernization fed upon the critical perspectives that mid-century Russian thinkers developed regarding contemporary European society. Under the influence of the Slavophiles⁴⁷and Alexander Herzen⁴⁸, who reinterpreted Europe's material progress as spiritual decline⁴⁹, Russian observers of Tanzimat Turkey saw no contradiction in using the phrase 'sick man' to describe a polity that consciously adopted modern European institutions and practices. The basic association between material development and moral decay was present in Russian portrayals of Ottoman Turkey already prior to Leontiev, who differed from his contemporaries only in his greater consistency in the application of this perspective. Whereas others connected Europeanization to decay only with reference to the Ottoman regime and its policies, Leontiev used the same terms in order to describe Orthodox Christian national movements in Turkey and their social results. According to Leontiev, both Ottoman westernizing reforms and the actions of the Balkan intelligentsia advocated for the bourgeois social ideal, the 'average European,' who for him was synonymous with 'universal destruction' ⁵⁰.
The theme of religious struggle that Orthodox Russia waged with Muslim Turkey was another rhetorical cliche Leontiev re-considered in an original way. It may be surprising that this advocate of Orthodoxy as the foundation of Russian state and society adopted a conciliatory perspective towards Turkey and its Muslim population. It is important to stress, however, that the period of the most intense Russo-Ottoman confrontation in the late eighteenth- early nineteenth century coincided with a relatively tolerant policy towards Islam adopted by Catherine II and continued by her immediate successors⁵¹. In order to legitimize the 'Turkish wars' to their subjects, Russian rulers in this period evoked principles of international law and classicist imagery rather than the defence of co-religionist rights. When, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian government and educated public became concerned with the situation of the Orthodox Church in Turkey, their preoccupation resulted not from Muslim-Christian tensions, but from Catholic and Protestant proselytism⁵². After the Orthodox-Catholic conflict over the Holy Places transformed into a new Russo-Turkish War, the rhetoric of holy war indeed served to mobilize military and civilians during the confrontation with the British and French armies in the Crimea⁵³. Following a reappraisal of Russia's Muslim policies in the wake of the Crimean war, the theme of the liberation of Russia's co-religionists form Muslim rule became a major element of Panslavic discourse in the 1850s and 1860s reaching its peak during the Eastern crisis of 1877-1878⁵⁴. Yet even during this period, a leading Russian Panslavist, N. Ia. Danilevskii, recognized that the 'Ottoman yoke' shielded Russia's co-religionists from 'pernicious' Western influences that their liberation was likely to intensify⁵⁵. Leontiev picked up on this idea, yet, in contrast to the Panslavists, he addressed Ottoman Turkey's conservative potential as a value in itself, apart from any role that Muslim rule might have played in the history of Southern Slavs. His originality also consisted in drawing attention to the possible political role of the Muslim population of European Turkey following the collapse of Ottoman rule. Leontiev was virtually alone among his contemporaries to argue that provincial Muslims with their traditionalist outlook could, in fact, be Russian allies after the likely parting of the ways between Russia and the increasingly Western-oriented Southern Slavs.
Finally, Leontiev provided a new twist to the theme of the Russian conquest of Constantinople that had constituted another traditional element of Russian representations of the Ottoman Empire ever since Catherine II's 'Greek project.' The empress, it shall be remembered, concluded an alliance with the Habsburg Monarchy with the goal of partitioning Turkey and restoring the Greek Orthodox Empire on the shores of the Bosphorus.. Nineteenth-century Russians enthusiastically adopted the old Muslim and Balkan Christian prophecy about a 'white people' that would put an end to Ottoman dominance in Europe. In the second half of the century, Danilevskii and other Panslavists viewed Constantinople as the natural center of a prospective Slavic union under Russia's aegis. Later still, possession of the Bosphorus developed into one of the strategic objectives that tsarist diplomacy doggedly pursued until the fall of the Russian autocracy in February 1917⁵⁶. In parallel, the capture of Constantinople became a veritable obsession for some segments of Russian educated society⁵⁷.By pointing to Byzantium as the origin of Russian religion, political organization and culture, Leontiev valorized the importance of the former Byzantine capital in Russian public discourse. However, he attributed to this political project a very specific social significance that none of his contemporaries and few of the later-day Panslavists came to appreciate. Dislodging the Ottomans from Europe had little meaning for Leontiev unless it strengthened traditionalism in Russia and the Orthodox East. If this condition could not be fulfilled, the critic of modernity and nationalism preferred that the sultan remain on the Bosphorus.

¹Thomas A. Meininger, Ignatiev and the Establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, 1864-1872 (Madison, Wisconsin: The Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1970), 174-175.
²On the Greek-Bugarian Schism, see James Lindsay Hopkins, The Bulgarian Orthodox Church: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Evolving Relationship Between Church, nation and State in Bulgaria (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2009), 105-141. V. Veriuzhskii, 'Proiskhozhdenie greko-bolgarskogo tserkovnogo voprosa i tserkovnoi skhizmy [The Origins of the Greek-Bulgarian Church Question and Church Schism],' Zhurnal moskovskoi patrairkhii [The Journal of the Moscow Patrairchate], no. 7 (July 1948):23-34, no. 11 (November 1948):47-59, no. 12 (December 1948):31-44.
³On the Russian attitudes towards the schism, see Meininger, Ignatiev and the Establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate; L. A. Gerd, Konstantinopol i Sankt-Peterburg: Tserkovnaia politika Rossii na Pravoslavnom Vostoke, 1878-1898 [Constantinople and St. Petersburg: Russian Church Politics in the Orthodox East, 1878-1898] (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 225-308.
⁴On Russian Pan-Slavism, see H. B. Sumner, 'Pan-Slavism,' in his Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880 (London: Achron Books, 1960 [1938]), 56-80. Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1953); Michael B. Petrovich, The Emergence of Russian Pan-Slavism, 1856-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Frank L. Fadner, Seventy Years of Pan-Slavism in Russia: Karazin to Danilevskii, 1804-1870 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1962).
⁵On this see, S. A. Nikitin, 'Natsional'no-osvoboditel'noie dvizhenie na Balkanakh v 60-e gg XIX veka v osveshchenii otechestvennoi pechati [Russian Press Coverage of the National-Liberation Movements in the Balkans during the 1860s],' Ocherki po istorii iuzhnykh slavian i russko-balkanskikh sviazei v 50-e - 70-e gg. XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 183-203; Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation Through Cultural Mythology, 1855-1870 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 177-182; Denis Vovchenko, 'Modernizing Orthodoxy: Russia and the Christian East (1856-1914),' Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 2 (2012):301-304.
⁶K. N. Leontiev, 'Vizantinizm i slavianstvo [Byzantinism and Slavdom],' N. K. Leontiev, Polnoie sobranie sochinenii [Complete Collected Works], vol. 7, part 1 (St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dal',' 2005), 300-444.
⁷On Leontiev as a writer and religious philosopher, see Iurii Ivask, Konstantin Leontiev: Zhizn' i tvorchestvo [Konstantin Leontiev: Life and Creation] (Frankfut: Peter Lang, 1974); Stephen Lukashevich, Konstantin Leontiev, 1831-1891: A Study of Russian Heroic Vitalism (New York: Pageant Press, 1967). On Leontiev's attitudes towards the peoples of South-Eastern Europe and his relation to Pan-Slavism, see Dale Nelson, Konstantin Leontiev and the Orthodox East (Ph. D. Thesis: University of Minnesota, 1977), 152-216; V I. Kosik, Konstantin Leontiev: razmyshlenia na slavianskuiu temu [Reflections on the Slavic Theme] (Moscow: Zertsalo, 1997); K. A. Zhukov, Vostochnyi vopros v istoriosofskoi kontseptsii K. N. Leontieva [The Eastern Question in the Historiosophic Theory of K. N. Leontiev] (St. Petersburg: Aleteya, 2005). For a discussion of Leontiev's views during the period of his diplomatic service in the Ottoman Empire, see S. V. Khatuntsev, Konstantin Leontiev. Intellektual'naia biografia, 1850-1874 [Konstantin Leontiev. An Intellectual Biography, 1850-1874] (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2007), 117-136.
⁸'Vizantinizm i slavianstvo,' 443. For Leontiev's critique of Russian 'Bulgaromania,' see idem, 'Pis'ma otshel'nika [Letters of a Hermit],' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, part. 1, 539-545.
⁹C. E. Black, The Establishment of Constitutional Government in Bulgaria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943); Karel Durman, Lost Illusions: Russian Policies Towards Bulgaria in 1877-1887 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1988).
¹⁰On Bulgarian intelligentsia, see Thomas A. Meiniger, The Formation of a Nationalist Bulgarian Intelligentsia, 1835-1878 (New York and London: Garland Publishers, 1987).
¹¹ Leontiev, 'Dopolnenie k dvum statiam o Pan-Slavisme (1884) [An Addendum to the Two Articles on Pan-Slavism],' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, 269.
¹²On this subject, see Nelson, 9-67. Lukashevich, 82-90; Khatuntsev, 72-74, 100-114.See also A. Obolensky, 'Essai critique sur l'esthetique de K. N. Leontiev [The Aesthetics of K. N. Leontiev: A Critical Examination],' Canadian Slavonic Papers, no. 4, vol. 15 (1973):540-555.
¹³Leontiev, 'Moi vospominania o Frakii[My Recollections of Thrace],' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, part 1 (St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dal',' 2003), 188-189.
¹⁴Unlike Rostislav Fadeev and Nikolai Danilevskii, Leontiev never thought in terms of the confrontation between Romano-Germanic Europe and a Slavic coalition led by Russia. His critique of political Pan-Slavism was rooted in his social philosophy which was predicated on the opposition between the conservative principles of order and hierarchy on the one hand and democratizing spirit of modernity which he saw as ruinous. It would indeed be a great mistake to define him as an anti-Western thinker, unless of course one puts a sign of equality between 'conservative' and 'anti-Western.' As many other Russian and European conservatives he liked England or at least English aristocracy and was realistic enough to recognize that, despite the democratizing tendencies, the conservative spirit (dukh okhranenia) amidst the Western upper classes has always been more powerful than was the case of Russia.
¹⁵R. A. Fadeev, Mnenie o vostochnom voprose [An Opinion on the Eastern Question] (St. Petersburg: Tipografia Departamenta Udelov, 1870); N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossia i Evropa [Russia and Europe] (Moscow: Blagoslavlenie. Institut Russkoi Tsivilizatsii, 2011 [1869]).
¹⁶Leontiev, 'Russkie, greki i iugo-slaviane [Russians, Greeks and Southern Slavs],' Leontiev, Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, part 1, , 444. See also idem, 'Pis'ma otshel'nika,' ibid., 545. On the Slavophiles and Southern Slavs, see Janko Lavrin, 'Khomyakov and the Slavs,' Russian Review 23, no. 1(1964):35-48.
¹⁷Leontiev, 'Vizantinism i slavianstvo,' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, part. 1, 438-439.
¹⁸Ibid., 440.
¹⁹Leontiev, 'Russkie, greki i iugo-slaviane,', 461.
²⁰Leontiev, 'Pisma otshel'nika,' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, part.1, 557.
²¹Ibid., 553. Phanariots were culturally post-Byzantine as well as liguistically and often ethnically Greek Christian aristocracy, who served as interpretors (dragomans) at the Ottoman government and held a monopoly on the thrones of the vassal Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia between the early eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. The term 'Phanriot' comes from the Phanar district of Constantinople that contained the residence of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the houses of the most prominent members of the Greek community.
²²Leontiev, 'Pi'sma o vostochnykh delakh [Letters on the Eastern Affairs],' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8, part. 1 (St. Petersburg: 'Vladimir Dal',' 2008), 63-65. See also, Leontiev, 'Pisma otshel'nika,' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, part.1, 542-543. On the partial re-emergence of the Phanariots in the Ottoman government in the wake of the Greek crisis of the 1820s, see the later chapters of Christine May Philliou, Biography of Empire: Governing the Ottomans in the Age of Revolution (Berkley, LA: University of California Press, 2011). On the troubled relations between the ecumenical patriarchate and the Greek Kingdom after 1830, see Charles A. Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece, 1821-1852 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
²³Elizabeth A. Zachariadou, 'Mount Athos and the Ottomans c.1350-1550,' The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5. Eastern Christianity. Michael Angold ed. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 154-168.
²⁴'Panslavism na Afone [Pan-Slavism on Mount Athos],' Leontiev, Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, part 1, 257-258.
²⁵On the Russian links to the Mount Athos in the 19th century, see Lora Gerd, Russkii Afon, 1878-1914: Ocherki tserkovno-politicheskoi istorii [Russian Athos, 1878-1914; Essays on the History of Church Politics] (Moscow: Indrik, 2010); Eadem, Konstantinopl' i Peterburg: Tserkovnaia politika Rossii na pravoslavnom vostoke, 1878-1914 (Moscow: Indrik, 2006).
²⁶'Panslavism na Afone,' 266. Leontiev rearticulated this idea in 'Pis'ma otshel'nika,' Ibid., 546. Guided by this principle at the time of his service as the Russia consul in Salonica, Leontiev sought to constrain the Pan-Slavic tendencies among the Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Slavic minority on Mount Athos. Thus, in a conflict that erupted between the largely Greek self-governing council of Athos and the monks of the Ukrainian skit of St. Ilyia, he supported the former. 'Panslavism na Afone,' 242-243.
²⁷'Panslavism i greki [Pan-Slavism and the Greeks],' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, part 1, 197-198.
²⁸Ibid., 199.
²⁹Ibid., 204.
³⁰On the conservatives' appreciation of the Oriental and/or colonial hierarchy, order and authority that were diluted by the democratizing tendencies in the metropole, see David Canadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford [England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the leftists' use of the Orient as a laboratory of an alternative modernity or a source of spiritual values, see Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univesity Press, 2010) and Paola Ferruta, 'Constantinople and the Saint-Simonian Search for the Female Messiah: Theoretical Premises and Travel Account from 1833,' International Journal of the Humanities 6, no. 7 (2009):67-72.
³¹Leontiev, 'Panslavism i greki,' 208-209.
³²Ibid., 193.
³³Leontiev, 'Moi vospominania o Frakii,' 215.
³⁴Leontiev, 'Vizantinism i slavianstvo,' 329.
³⁵In his later writings, Leontiev developed the theme of affinity between the Russian and Turkish national character when he argued that many Russian national traits 'resemble those of the Turks, Tatars and other Asians: rather than Southern and Western Slavs. We are lazier, more fatalistic, much more obedient to authority, more dissolute, good-natured, insanely brave, inconstant and incomparably more prone to religious mysticism: than the Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs or Croats.' Leontiev, 'Pis'ma o vostochnykh delakh,' 49-50.
³⁶Leontiev, 'Russkie, greki i iugo-slaviane,' 448.
³⁷Leontiev, 'Pis'ma o vostochnykh delakh,' 45.
³⁸Ibid., 47-48.
³⁹Ibid., 71.
⁴⁰Leontiev, 'Vizantinizm i slavianstvo,' 328.
⁴¹Leontiev, 'Plody natsional'nykh dvizhenii na pravoslavnom Vostoke [The Fruits of National Movements on the Orthodox East],' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8, part 1, 559.
⁴²Leontiev, 'Vizantinism i Slavianstvo,' 438.
⁴³Leontiev, 'Plody natsional'nykh dvizhenii na pravoslavnom Vostoke,' 550.
⁴⁴Ibid., 590.
⁴⁵Ibid., 592.
⁴⁶On the representations of the Ottoman decline in the Russian press of the first half of the nineteenth century, see Victor Taki, 'Orientalism on the Margins: the Ottoman Empire Under Russian Eyes,' Kritika: Explorations in Russia and Eurasian History 12, no. 2 (2011):321-351.
⁴⁷The Slavophiles were Moscow gentry intellectuals who in the 1840s and 1850s formulated an original philosophy of Russian history and culture under the influence of the German Romantic philosophers, such as Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel. The Slavophiles viewed Orthodoxy, medieval Russian institutions of self-government and, later, Russian peasant commune, as the basic foundations of Russian life, which they contrasted to Western rationalism and material progress. This placed the Slavophiles in opposition to both the Russian autocracy and the Russian Westernizers, who criticized the tsarist regime in the name of Western civil and political freedoms.
⁴⁸Alexander Herzen (1811-1870) was radical writer and journalist, who founded Russian socialism. A representative of the Westernizers during the 1840s, Herzen became disappointed with outcomes of the European revolutions of 1848-1849 and came to appreciate the Russian peasant commune as the potential basis of reorganization of the Russian society on the socialist principles.
⁴⁹Andzhej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: A History of Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), 322, 337- 360; See also, Derek Offord, Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (Dordercht: Springer, 2005), 103-248.
⁵⁰Leontiev, 'Srednii Evropeets kak orudie vsemirnogo razrushenia [Average European as an Instrument of Universal Destruction],' Polnoie sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8, part 1, 159-234.
⁵¹Alan F. Fisher, 'Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II,' Slavic Review 27, no. 4 (1968):542-553; Elena Vishlenkova, Zabotias' o dushakh poddanykh: Religioznaia politika v Rossii pervoi chetverti XIX veka [Taking Care of the Souls of the Subjects: Religious Policy in Russia in the First Quarter of the Nineteenth Century] (Saratov: Izdatel'stvo Saratovskogo Universiteta, 2002), 200-209; Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 31-92.
⁵²These preoccupations led to the establishment of the Russian Spiritual Mission in the Holy Land in 1847. See, Derek Hopwood, Russian Presence in Syria and Palestine, 1843-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 33-45; N. N. Lisovoi, Russkoie dukhovnoie i politicheeskoie prisutstvie v Sviatoi Zemle i na Blizhnem Vostoke v XIX i nachale XX vv. [Russian Spiritual and Political Presence in the Holy Land and the Middle East in the Nineteenth - Early Twentieth Century] (Moscow: 'Indrik,' 2006), 85-97.
⁵³On the role of Orthodoxy in the war mobilization, see Mara Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping the Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 125-140.
⁵⁴See, in particular the speeches of Ivan Aksakov at the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee in 1876-1878, in I. S. Aksakov, Polnoie sobranie sochinenii. vol. 1 (Moscow: M. G. Volchaninov, 1886), 213-315.
⁵⁵Danilevskii, Rossia i Evropa, 376-383. For the Russian Slavophile/Panslavist concern with the Western influence upon the Southern Slavs, see 'K Serbam: Poslanie is Moskvy [To the Serbs: An Epistle from Moscow],' A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoie sobranie sochinenii. vol. 1 (Moscow: 1900), 377-408 and the discussion of it in Petrovich, Empergence of Russian Panslavism, 97-101.
⁵⁶Ronald Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straights (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006).
⁵⁷R. Strel'tsov's anthology Rossia, Tsar'grad i Prolivy [Russia, Constantinople and the Straights] (Petrograd, 1915), provides a characteristic illustration of this interest. See also L. A. Gerd, 'Eshche odin proekt 'Russkogo Konstantinopolia. Zapiska F. I. Uspenskogo 1915 g. [A Project of Russian Constantinople: The Memorandum of F. I. Uspenskii],' Vspomogatel'nye istoricheskie distsipliny30 (2007):424-433.