**Today we have a guest writer for the Saturday Lecture Series, it is Rodan. I have ‘called for papers’ and this is the first of what i hope to be a long series of guest writers for the SLS.- Regards, Coldwarrior**
Russia, a land that was founded by Vikings, Slavic tribes and occupied Turko-Mongols, was a force to be reckoned with for 200 years. After being stymied by the British and French, who were propping up the Islam Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War, the final showdown was coming. In 1877 the Russian Empire had enough of the Ottomans. They launched a final offensive that liberated Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia.
The Russians fought a religious cause, that of the Orthodox Church. In 1877/1878 the Imperial Russian Army decided to help their coreligionist in the Balkans. Serbian peasants had revolted in Bosnia and Bulgaria revolted as well. In Bulgaria, Turkish irregulars committed atrocities.
The Ottomans, lacking adequate regular troops because of the problems in the northwest, were compelled to use irregular Bashi-bazouks to quell the Bulgarians. (May 11-June 9, 1876) Those irregulars mostly were drawn from Muslim inhabitants of the Bulgarian regions, many of whom were Circassian refugees expelled from the Caucasus or Crimean Tatar refugees expelled during the Crimean War. Both were either expelled by the Russians or had suffered at the rebels’ hands. Making little distinction between rebels and passive peasants, bashi-bazouks, true to their reputation, brutally suppressed the revolt, massacring between 4,000 and 15,000 people in the process, 15,000 or 12,000 being the mostly agreed upon number. Kinross stated, “Their orgy of slaughter and arson and rape culminated in the mountain village of Batak. Here a thousand Christians found refuge in a church, to which the irregular troops set fire with rags soaked in petrol, burning all to death but a single old woman. In all, more than five thousand out of the seven thousand villagers of Batak perished at their hands.”According to some sources, both Batak and Perushtitsa, where the majority of the population was also massacred, had not participated in the rebellion. Many of the perpetrators of those massacres were latter decorated by the Ottoman high command.
These massacres caused an uproar, however the British government of Benjamin Disraeli was still standing by the Ottomans. The shock waves of this massacre angered the British public, who began to hate the Turks. This put the UK government in a predicament. They could no longer support their Islamic ally. Seeing the international condemnation of the Turks, Serbia and Montenegro declare independence and go to war. The Serbs were under equipped and begin losing to the Turks.
In July–August, the ill-prepared and poorly equipped Serbian army helped by Russian volunteers failed to achieve offensive objectives but did manage to repulse the Ottoman offensive into Serbia, and on August 26, Serbia pleaded European powers to mediate in ending the war. A joint ultimatum by the European powers forced the Porte to give Serbia a one month truce and start peace negotiations. Turkish peace conditions however were refused by European powers as too harsh.
In early October, after the truce expired, the Turkish army resumed its offensive and the Serbian position quickly became desperate. As a result, on October 31, 1876 Russia issued an ultimatum requiring the Ottoman Empire to stop the hostilities and sign a new truce with Serbia within 48 hours. This was supported by the partial mobilization of the Russian army (up to 20 divisions). The Sultan accepted the conditions of the ultimatum.
The December 1876 Constantinople Conference decided it was time to end Turkish rule of the Balkans. The Ottomans disregarded this conference and the demands that the European powers were trying to impose. Russia now decided enough was enough and the time for liberation of Balkan Christians was at hand. Knowing that the British could not intervene due to public anger at the Turks, Russia declared war on the 24th of April 24th, 1877.
Russia declared war on the Ottomans on 24 April 1877 and its troops entered Romania through the newly built Eiffel Bridge. The Prussian king Frederick II had sarcastically remarked a century earlier that a war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia would be “a war between the one-eyed and the blind”. This, however, was all too common a problem for contemporaneous warfare, from the Crimean War to the Boer Wars.
On April 12, 1877, Romania gave permission to the Russian troops to pass through its territory to attack the Turks, resulting in Turkish bombardments of Romanian towns on the Danube. On May 10, 1877, the Principality of Romania, which was under formal Turkish rule, declared its independence.
At the beginning of the war, the outcome was far from obvious. The Russians could send a larger army into the Balkans: about 300,000 troops were within reach. The Ottomans had about 200,000 troops on the Balkan peninsula, of which about 100,000 were assigned to fortified garrisons, leaving about 100,000 for the army of operation. The Ottomans had the advantage of being fortified, complete command of the Black Sea, and patrol boats along the Danube river.[39] They also possessed superior arms, including new British and American-made rifles and German-made artillery.
In the event, however, the Ottomans usually resorted to passive defense, leaving the strategic initiative to the Russians who, after making some mistakes, found a winning strategy for the war.
[…]
Under pressure from the British, Russia accepted the truce offered by Ottoman Empire on January 31, 1878, but continued to move towards Constantinople.
The British sent a fleet of battleships to intimidate Russia from entering the city, and Russian forces stopped at San Stefano. Eventually Russia entered into a settlement under the Treaty of San Stefano on March 3, by which the Ottoman Empire would recognize the independence of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomy of Bulgaria.
Alarmed by the extension of Russian power into the Balkans, the Great Powers later forced modifications of the treaty in the Congress of Berlin. The main change here was that Bulgaria would be split, according to earlier agreements among the Great Powers that precluded the creation of a large new Slavic state: the northern and eastern parts to become principalities as before (Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia), though with different governors; and the Macedonian region, originally part of Bulgaria under San Stefano, would return to direct Ottoman administration.
Read it all: Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878)
That’s right, the British prevented Russia from liberating Constantinople. This would not be the 1st time Western powers would prevent an Islamic defeat at the hands of Christians. This is a case of Russia being the good guy and the British being wrong. Regardless of this intervention, Russia had freed the Balkans Christians after 400 years of Islamic occupation. For this Russia did a great historic deed and should be saluted.
