Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 reshaped an entire continent in less than two years. At its end, four nations had declared or secured independence, a war that had begun over the fate of Christians in the Balkans would plant the seeds of the modern Armenian political movement, and a symbol used by medical workers in conflict zones to this day would split permanently into two competing emblems. How did a rebellion in Herzegovina and a massacre in Bulgaria put Russian troops at the gates of Constantinople? And how did the great powers of Europe manage to claw back what Russia had won on the battlefield before the ink on the peace treaties was dry?

• 2. A Continent Out of Balance

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  Article 9 of the 1856 Paris Peace Treaty obliged the Ottoman Empire to grant Christians equal rights with Muslims. The Ottomans issued the Edict of Gülhane before signing, abolishing the jizya tax on non-Muslims and opening the army to them. Yet the gaps between promise and reality widened with each passing decade.

  The Concert of Europe, established in 1814 to keep the great powers in rough equilibrium, fractured completely during the wars of German Unification. Prussia under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck defeated Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, replacing Austria as the dominant power in Central Europe. To manage the resulting tensions, Bismarck joined Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Three Emperors' League, partly to keep France isolated.

  Russia entered this rearranged Europe nursing deep grievances from the Crimean War of 1853-1856. It had been forced to destroy its Black Sea Fleet and dismantle the fortifications at Sevastopol. For many years, recovering what was lost in the Crimea became the central aim of Russian foreign policy. In March 1871, exploiting Prussia's crushing defeat of France, Russia won international recognition that it could rebuild the Black Sea Fleet. Other guarantees protecting Ottoman territorial integrity remained in force, however, leaving Russia to wait for the right moment.

  The Ottoman Empire was weakening on multiple fronts simultaneously. The financial strain of the Crimean War drove the government into steep foreign loans. Accommodating more than 600,000 Muslim Circassians expelled by Russia from the Caucasus added to the costs. A severe drought in Anatolia in 1873 and flooding in 1874 caused famine, and in October 1875 the Ottoman government declared bankruptcy and raised taxes in the Balkans, stoking further unrest.

• 3. Uprisings and Atrocities

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  In July 1875, Serbs in Herzegovina rose against Ottoman rule. By August, almost all of Herzegovina had been seized and the revolt had spread into Bosnia. The uprising took its informal name from a town: "Nevesinjska puška", the rifle of Nevesinje.

  Bulgarian revolutionaries based in Bucharest moved to take advantage of Ottoman preoccupation. An initial uprising in 1875 fizzled before it started. A second erupted in the spring of 1876 in the south-central Bulgarian lands. A special Turkish military committee was established to suppress it, directing both regular Nizam troops and irregular Bashi-bazouk fighters between the 11th of May and the 9th of June 1876. The irregulars were drawn largely from the Muslim population of the Bulgarian region, including Circassians from the Caucasus and Crimean Tatars displaced by earlier wars. The Ottoman army suppressed the revolt by massacring up to 30,000 people. Five thousand of the seven thousand villagers of Batak were put to death. Many of the perpetrators were later decorated by the Ottoman high command.

  Word of these atrocities reached the outside world partly through the American-run Robert College in Constantinople, where Bulgarian students received news from their families. The Liberal opposition newspaper The Daily News hired American journalist Januarius A. MacGahan to report first-hand. His dispatches, spread across the paper's front pages, turned British public opinion against the government's pro-Ottoman stance. In September of that year, opposition leader William Ewart Gladstone published "Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East", calling on Britain to withdraw its support for Turkey. Prominent figures including Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, and Giuseppe Garibaldi publicly condemned the Ottoman actions.

  In Russia the reaction was intense. Slavophiles, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, saw the impending war as a chance to unite all Orthodox nations under Russian leadership. Their opponents, the westernizers inspired by Ivan Turgenev, argued the goal should be the liberation of Bulgaria rather than the defense of Orthodoxy. Whatever the motivation, public sympathy for the Bulgarian cause drove a surge in patriotism that drew comparisons to the mood during the Patriotic War of 1812.

• 4. Armies and Arms

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  Peabody-Martini rifles, accurate to 1,800 yards, equipped 75% of Ottoman troops; 300,000 had been purchased before the war began. The remaining regular soldiers carried Snider rifles, irregulars used Winchester repeating rifles, and Egyptian troops used Remington rifles. Ottoman artillery relied on Krupp guns of the 8 cm and 9 cm types for field use, with heavier 12 cm and 15 cm guns in reserve.

  On paper, the Ottoman army drew on a layered conscription system. The standing Nizam served four years; the first reserve Ithiat served an additional two; veterans fed into the Redif; and all men who completed their Redif service entered the Moustafiz for a further six years, theoretically adding around 300,000 troops. The annual draft conscripted 37,500 men, and after full mobilization of the Nizam and Ithiat the combined force reached approximately 210,000. A total of 378,000 troops were counted across all fronts at the outbreak of war, plus an additional 90,000 irregulars and Egyptian troops. Of the 20,000 regular officers, only 1,600 were academy-trained; just 132 academy-trained generals were available for the entire army.

  The Russian army had undergone sweeping reforms in the decade before the war under Minister of War Dmitry Milyutin. The Field Army was organized into 48 infantry divisions, 8 rifle brigades, 19 cavalry divisions, and 49 field gun brigades. By the 1st of January 1878, total Russian manpower had grown to over 1.5 million men. Yet the Russians carried a significant handicap: their primary rifle, the Krnka, was accurate only to 600 yards compared to the Turkish Peabody's 1,800. The better Berdan rifle equipped the guard and line formations but the army doctrine still emphasized the bayonet charge over firepower. Russian soldiers also lacked adequate entrenching tools, a gap that would cost them dearly at Plevna.

• 5. The Siege That Stalled an Army

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  On the night of 27-the 28th of June 1877, under the command of Major-General Mikhail Ivanovich Dragomirov, Russian forces constructed a pontoon bridge across the Danube at Svishtov. After fighting that left 812 Russians killed and wounded, they drove off the Ottoman brigade defending the opposite bank and divided their force into three detachments. The Advance Detachment under Count Joseph Vladimirovich Gourko was ordered to push quickly through the Balkan Mountains toward Constantinople.

  Osman Nuri Pasha, initially ordered east to occupy the fortress of Nikopol, learned en route that the Russians had already captured it. He pivoted to the crossroads town of Plevna, arriving with approximately 15,000 troops on the 19th of July. A Russian force of about 9,000 under General Schilder-Schuldner reached the town shortly after. Thus began the Siege of Plevna, which would last 145 days until the 10th of December.

  Osman Pasha repelled two Russian attacks with enormous casualties on the Russian side. Crucially, he had orders to remain fortified and did not counter-attack, which might have allowed the Ottomans to destroy the Russian bridge over the Danube. The siege stalled the entire campaign for roughly two months. On the 9th of August, Suleiman Pasha attempted to relieve Osman Pasha with 30,000 troops, but Bulgarian fighters stopped him at the Battle of Shipka Pass. After three days of fighting, a Russian force under General Fyodor Radetsky relieved the defenders and the Ottomans withdrew. Romanian forces then crossed the Danube and joined the siege; on the 16th of August, at Gorni-Studen, the combined armies were placed under the command of Romanian Prince Carol I.

  On the 9th of December, in the middle of the night, the Ottomans threw bridges over the Vit river and attacked on a two-mile front, breaking through the first Russian trench line. Outnumbering the Ottomans nearly five to one, the Russians eventually drove them back, inflicting around 5,000 Ottoman casualties to their own 2,000. Osman Pasha was wounded in the leg by a bullet that killed his horse. The following day he surrendered the city, the garrison, and his sword to Romanian colonel Mihail Cerchez, and was treated with honor. His troops died by the thousands in the snow as they marched into captivity.

• 6. After the Cannons Stopped

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  Under British pressure, Russia accepted a truce on the 31st of January 1878 but kept moving toward Constantinople. A British fleet of battleships was dispatched to discourage Russian entry into the city, and Russian forces halted at San Stefano. On the 3rd of March, Russia and the Ottomans signed the Treaty of San Stefano, under which the Ottoman Empire recognized the independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro and accepted the autonomy of Bulgaria.

  The great powers, alarmed by Bulgaria's new proximity to the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, forced modifications at the Congress of Berlin in June 1878. Bulgaria was split: the northern part became a principality, the south an autonomous province called Eastern Rumelia, and the Macedonian region returned to direct Ottoman administration. Russia kept the Caucasian territories of Batum, Ardahan, Kars, Olti, and Sarikamish, which were reconstituted into the Kars Oblast.

  The Armenian question moved onto the international stage at the same time. Many Armenians in the eastern provinces had welcomed the advancing Russians as liberators. In January 1878, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople Nerses II Varzhapetian approached Russian leadership seeking treaty provisions for self-administration. Article 16 of the Treaty of San Stefano contained a pledge for reform and security in Armenian-inhabited provinces. At the Congress of Berlin, an Armenian delegation led by prelate Mkrtich Khrimian traveled to present the Armenian case but was excluded from the actual negotiations. The article was watered down into Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin, which removed all mention of Russian forces remaining in the provinces as a guarantee. Khrimian returned to Constantinople and delivered a speech likening the peace conference to a cauldron of "Liberty Stew" into which the great nations dipped their "iron ladles" while the Armenians had only a "Paper Ladle". The failure to secure meaningful protections led Armenian intellectuals in Europe and Russia in the 1880s and 1890s to form the political parties and revolutionary societies that would define the next generation of Armenian political life.

  The war also produced an unexpected and lasting legacy in humanitarian law. Both Russia and the Ottoman Empire had signed the First Geneva Convention of 1864, which established the Red Cross as the sole emblem of protection for military medical personnel. During the conflict, Ottoman forces found the cross too evocative of the Crusades and substituted the Red Crescent. The change was ratified as a protected emblem by the Geneva Conventions in 1929 and again in 1949, and the Red Crescent remains in use as the emblem of the movement's national societies across most Muslim countries to this day.