Warriors or Civilians? The Russian Army and the Bulgarian Muslims in the Russo-Ottoman Wars of the Nineteenth Century

The Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 in the territories of contemporary Bulgaria caused death and exodus of many local Muslims and entered their memory as the synonym of a catastrophe. However, this was not the first time when the war took place in the Ottoman provinces with considerable Muslim population. Fifty years previously, another Russo-Ottoman war led to a Russian occupation of the same territories, and yet, nothing comparable to the 1877-1878 disaster had occurred. In order to explain this difference, the paper compares the Russian policies towards the Muslim population during the two Russian occupations of Bulgaria in 1828-1830 and 1877-1879. It attributes the differences in these policies and their outcomes to the changes in the Russian attitudes to Islam in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The paper also seeks to determine the ways, in which the experience of the war of 1828-1829 conditioned a re-thinking of the military-civilian relations, which in turn influenced the Russian policies towards the Ottoman Muslims in 1877-1879. It also addresses the mobilization of ethnicity in Bulgaria during the second part of the nineteenth century as factor of military-civilian and inter-confessional violence. Finally, the paper discusses alternative visions of the place of Muslims in the autonomous principality of Bulgaria, the creation of which was supervised by the Russian occupation authorities in 1878-1879. In particular, it will focus on the differences between the approaches of the Russian military and civil officials as well as between the Russian occupation authorities on the one hand and the Bulgarian political leaders on the other.