THE DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF THE EASTERN QUESTION CRISIS_ BRITAIN AND

							                               New Bulgarian University 2005




THE DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF THE EASTERN QUESTION CRISIS, BRITAIN
                 AND THE BULGARIANS, 1875-76

                                Roumen L. Genov

        The impressive showmanship at the Congress of Berlin in the summer of
1878, preceded by aggressive gestures towards the “Russian bear”, and his
pacific achievement, the “peace with honour” were the crowning moment in
Benjamin Disraeli’s long political career. The same very achievements made him
a hate figure in Bulgaria (and may be to not a lesser degree in Russia).
        As political leader and prime-minister of the 19th-century super-power
Benjamin Disraeli had left his impact not only on Victorian Britain but in Europe
generally, including faraway Bulgaria. His career, impossible by all standards of
the time, and his views, were most extraordinary, and quite naturally he had
attracted the attention of innumerable scholars, fiction writers, dramatists, film-
makers, British, American, French, Canadian, even Czech and Bulgarian. That is
especially true of the recent decades, when at least half a dozen books on Disraeli
were being published every decade, and least one large authoritative or “thick”
biographies (like those of Lord Blake or Stanley Weintraub) in every one score
years. To say nothing of innumerable scholarly articles on various aspects of his
career and policies. In the course of time new and different views on Disraeli’s
personality and policies, revisions and reappraisals, regarding his imperialism,
ideology or domestic policies, etc., are being advanced. The following is a modest
contribution to the vast Disraeliana, namely a Bulgarian view of one of the
episodes of the career of the Victorian titan, namely, an appraisal of his attitudes
and policies during the great Eastern Question crisis of 1875-78, and in particular
to the ‘Bulgarian atrocities,’ that had stuck firmly to his image, and the ensuing
campaign in Britain, known as “Bulgarian atrocities agitation”, or simply
“Bulgarian agitation”.
        Disraeli’s name and historical role are popular across the world, the United
States to Russia, and Cyprus and Malta to Japan and Australia. He is also one of
the most popular British statesman in the South-Eastern Europe, and in Bulgaria,
in particular. His popularity or rather notoriety, is, however, of most negative
nature. He is largely known in Bulgaria as the Western European statesman who
was principally responsible for destroying ‘Great Bulgaria’ at the Berlin Congress,
and respectively for all the misfortunes and national catastrophes that folollowed.
Even more, Disraeli’s name became synonymous with “Bulgar hater”,
comparablre probably in that respect only with the Byzantine emperor Basil II the
‘Bulgar slayer’, and had become a common noun to denote anti-Bulgarian
feelings, policies and acts. They used to speak of “Beaconsfieldism” or
“Beaconsfield spirit” in British diplomacy or in European politics, inimical to the
Bulgarian nation and its aspirations.
        Contemporary Bulgarian writers, leading ones as well less prominent
contributed greatly in creating, by their penmanship, to creating and perpetuating
the negative image of Disraeli. The author who wrote most strongly against
Disraeli and was largely responsible for making him a hate figure was Ivan Vazov
(1850-1921). Vazov was the central figure in modern Bulgarian literature, his
works (poems, novels, dramas) are regarded as forming the canon of Bulgarian
literature, and he is most often styled as the “patriarch” of the Bulgarian
literature. In his first book “The Sorrows of Bulgaria” (1877), Vazov included a
number of poems - direct comment of Disraeli’s pro-Turkish policies. The British
prime-minister was characterized as one the one of the “greatest villains of the
19th century”, a “soulless Jew”, a “genius of evil” (alongside with other British
figures, the ambassador Sir Henry Eliot, the consul Charles Blunt, the 15th Earl of
Derby, allegedly inspired by hatred of the Bulgarian nation and the cause of
freedom). In 1881 Vazov wrote an epitaph on the death of Disraeli reading like
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this: “Lord Beaconsfield is dead / Eternal darkness swallowed him, / And every
honest man has heartily laughed, / From London to Batak”. Vazov found it
necessary to explain in an accompanying note his rather un-Christian attitude to
Disraeli, comparing the deceased lord with Caligula and Nero applauding to
horrible catastrophe. For Vazov Disraeli was the politician responsible for the
devastation of Bulgaria, who left two million people under the sway of tyranical
sultan.
        A prolific but now completely forgotten Bulgarian playwright by the name
of Todor Hadjistanchev, published in 1878, a rude farce “Disraeli”, in which the
protagonist was shown as an enemy to Bulgarian freedom, instigating the sultan
to send the bashibozooks and Circassians to exterminate all the Bulgarians, in
order to secure complete peace in his dominions, and respectively, repayment of
the multimillion British loans.
        Zachary Stoyanov, Bulgarian writer and historian, himself one of the
leader of the revolts of 1875 and 1876 (his account of them was the first work by
modern Bulgarian author translated in English more than a century ago as “Diary
of a Bulgarian Rebel”), compared the “European luminaries”, Disraeli and
Bismarck with the notorious Tossoun Bey, governor of Karlovo, whose
Bashibozook hordes burnt down the town of Klissoura and other places in the
valley of Stryama River, killing, looting and raping helpless populace. The
difference between them was only that Tossoun “was fighting in cavalier way with
a knife in his hand”, while “the European bashibozooks were acting by means of
pen, but a pen dipped in red blood”. 1
        Even Bulgarian national leaders and politician who were accused of
compromising the “national ideal”, that is “Bulgaria of San Stefano” or “Great
Bulgaria”, were called “Bulgarian Beaconsfields”. There is another side in
Disraeli’s еxtremely bad reputation in Bulgaria, he was perceived not only as a
British statesman but as a Jew, and respectively his alleged role in Bulgarian
history was used to foster if not anti-Semitism, which in its modern racist form
was not known in this country, than traditional and more primitive Judaeophobia.
Its exponents often recoursed to Disraeli’s name and alleged anti-Bulgarian
deeds. The Defence of the Nation Act of 1941, introduced in Bulgarian parliament
by the then pro-German government, dealing with the “secret and international
organizations”, like the Masonic lodges, Rotarians, Boyscouts, YMCA, etc., but
thrusting mostly at the civic and political rights of the Jews, and imitating the
Nazi Nuremberg Laws, with certain local modifications, was supported with
historical arguments, like “the evil done to the Bulgarian nation by the Jews such
as Disraeli”. 2
        In communist Bulgaria, for decades after World War II, the respective
units on the international repercussions of the national rising of April 1876 in the
secondary school history textbook were invariably illustrated with the cartoon by
the famous caricaturist of the Punch, John Tenniel, “The Neutrality in Difficulty”
(with Disraeli telling to indignant allegorical Britannia pointing to him the horrible
scenes in the background, with maidens dragged by Turkish soldiery, babies
spiked on bayonets, etc., that he did not see that in the Blue Books.)
        As to the Bulgarians’ feelings towards Britain it should be noted that
Disraeli’s bad name was more than amply counterbalanced in the eyes of the
Bulgarians by the enormous popularity of his great opponent William Gladstone
who was proclaimed a “great friend” and “benefactor” of the Bulgarian nation.
        How did Disraeli become such a hate figure in Bulgaria? In fact his career
in that respect started with the climax of the Eastern Question crisis of the 1870s.
It was signalled by a Serb rising in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1875, but it
evolved from a local Balkan one into an all-European the next year after the
brutal suppression of the April rising in Bulgaria. The number of victims of the
massacres were given between 12,000 (as in the report of the British
commissioner Walter Baring sent by the Foreign Office to investigate the matter
in South Bulgaria) and 30,000 (as in Bulgarian publications ). 3 The question of
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the actual number is important, of course, but I do not intend to dwell on this
object of controversies. There are recent authors, by the way, who dismiss the
massacres as a Christian myth, or claiming that the tendency of massacring
Christian population in the Ottoman Empire was showing a clear tendency of
decline, contrary to the evidence to the opposite. 4 There were massacres of
Christian or other subjects of the Sultan, before and after that date, of even
larger scale. Western European visitors of the Balkans in the 19th century, for
instance, were startled by the pyramid near the town of Nish made of skulls the
insurgents in 1816 (such as the French commissioner Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui
sent by the Quai d’Orsay to investigate the reasons and effects of the revolt of
the peasants in North-Western Bulgaria in the early 1840s, who called that
structure a “cannibal arc de de triomphe”, 5 or the Austro-Hungarian traveler,
ethnologist and artist, Felix Kanitz, who recorded his impressions in words and
graphics, in his “Travels in the Danubian Bulgaria”. More important in this case
was that the impact of the events in Bulgaria was much greater than any other
case and all subsequent development (the diplomatic crisis, the Russo-Turkish
War and the Berlin Congress).
        All the Great Powers became involved in the crisis, which became more
intense with the ensuing war of Serbia and Montenegro on Turkey. Russia, which
traditionally assumed the role of the Balkan Christians, intensified its pressure on
the Ottoman government for reforms in their favor. Disraeli’s government
pursued the traditional policy of the British cabinets after the Crimean War of
guarantor of the integrity of the empire of the Sultan, and maintaining the status
quo in the Balkans. There are differing views among British and American
historians regarding Disraeli’s imperialism (as to when his commitment with the
empire started, or how consistent it was throughout his career, or whether his
policies in the 1870s marked the beginning of “new imperialism”, or whether he
was really concerned with imperial expansion for its own sake). 6 There are
doubts, however, that his foreign and European policies were motivated by
imperial considerations, whether meaning reflecting back into Europe the strength
Britain drew from India and other far flung colonies, or of empire as “visible
expression of the power of England in the affairs of the world”. 7 For him ‘empire’
was a means of social integration, minimization of class conflict, of uniting of the
aims and ideas of the “two nations”, and a cause’ that can unite them behind the
Conservative Party.
        Disraeli’s programmatic speeches of 1872, putting forward the ideology of
the Conservative Party and its three main objectives, “to maintain our
institutions, to uphold the Empire, and elevate the conditions of the people”, 8
were overshadowed by earlier pronouncements on the empire in 1866-68. There
is evidence that Disraeli was concerned with the preservation of the empire
throughout his career. 9 Maintaining the Ottoman Empire as bulwark against the
traditional Russian expansion to the “warm seas” (the Mediterranean) was an
integral part was an integral part of the British imperial strategy, not only under
Disraeli, but throughout the 19th century.
        The political climate in the 1870s, however, differed in many ways
compared with the other crises of the Eastern Question, and one of the reasons
was the rise of the mass press. The first alarm about the massacres was sounded
by Edwin Pears, a lawyer and part time journalist in Constantinople. He sent a
number of letters to the Daily News of London (June 16 and 23) giving
information about the suppression of the insurrection in South Bulgaria he
received from American Protestant missionaries (Dr. Albert Long and Dr. George
Washburn) in June 1876. The Times’ correspondent at Istanbul Antonio Galenga
reported 25,000 Bulgarians massacred, over 100 villages destroyed, thousands
sold as slaves, and about 10,000 arrested and tortured. Then they had sent from
the London Daily News as special correspondent Januarius MacGahan, an Irish-
American journalist of great experience, who made his name reporting the Paris
Commune, the Russian conquest of Turkestan, an Arctic expedition, and was a
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representative of the new dynamic journalism, which exerted enormous influence
on the public opinion. He accompanied the American consul-general Eugene
Schuyler in who was sent to carry out an inquiry in South Bulgaria. MacGahan
vivid reports (10 in all) from the places of massacres had shocking effect on the
British and European public. The name of the little town Batak, the “vale of
death”, where most of the 9,000 inhabitants were massacred by Moslem
irregulars, became known to the world. 10
        The revelations of the massacres provoked an outburst of moral
indignation in Britain. After the publication of the preliminary report of the
American consul Schuyler on August 10, the Queen wrote in her diary of the
“immense excitement and indignation”, she felt and of her amazement of the
sympathy of Disraeli with the Turkish government. Obviously those revelations
were a serious blow on the idea of the Victorians of unhindered, incontrovertible
social progress, and moral rectitude. Liberal peer, George Douglas, the 8th Duke
of Argyle exclaimed in the House that he was appalled by the “horrors of an
African war in the heart of Christianity, … horrors worth of Genghis Khan in the
era of Queen Victoria”. 11
        Bulgarian massacres were debated in the House of Commons on several
occasion. Disraeli took part in the debates on July 10, and again 26th, his last
appearances on the floor of the House of Commons before his elevation to
peerage. The prime minister tried to belittle the scale of the massacres and
reprisals. He doubted that great number of Bulgarians were tortured and
imprisoned, and drawing on his own experience gained during the tour in the
Orient 45 years ago, claimed that torture was rarely practiced by the people there
“who generally terminate their relations with the culprits in a more expeditious
manner.” 12 News about the massacres Disraeli said, were merely “coffee-house
babble”. His light manner of speaking on the subject irritated members on both
sides of the House, as well as people in the country, in Europe, and in Bulgaria
particularly. There is an explanation of those phrases which cost Disraeli dearly.
Not only he had overestimated his еxpert knowledge of the Orient (which he
believed to know as a result of the tour he had made in his youth), but he was
misinformed by the British diplomats on the spot. In fact, the ambassador at
Stamboul Sir Henry Eliot, did not sent the report of the consul in Adrianople
Hutton Dupuy, a city close to the scenes of massacres, and Disraeli had to resort
to a dispatch of the consul Dalziel from Rousse, a city on the Danube. In his
dispatches Dalziel informed about conversations overheard in the coffee-houses
in town. 13
        Since early July 1876 Britain became a scene of an unprecedented mass
political campaign which became known as “Bulgarian atrocities agitation” or
simply “Bulgarian agitation”. It was spontaneous reaction which started with
meetings in the open air of agricultural labourers, sending working men
delegations headed by Liberal M.P John Bright, the trade union leaders George
Howell, Thomas Burt, George Potter, and Henry Richard of the Peace Society, to
the Foreign Office to protest against the Government’s support of the sultan and
the moral complicity of Britain in the outrages perpetrated in Bulgaria. 14
        According to the classical study of the subject of Richard T. Shannon, the
Bulgarian agitation was the most important “incursion of the public opinion” in the
sphere of foreign policy in Victorian era. Representatives of practically all social
strata became involved in the Bulgaria agitation, from agricultural labourers to
peers (including even some Tory ones). The campaign was especially impressive
in England, Wales and Scotland, where hundreds of public meetings were held,
and protest resolutions adopted and to the FO, demanding the revision of the
policy of unconditional support of the Sultan Turkey. Ireland remained aloof,
mostly because at a later stage the agitation was identified with Gladstone and
his anti-Vaticanism. The pro-Liberal press, Daily News, Manchester “Guardian”
Sheffield ”Independent” (edited by Robert Leader), “Darlington Echo” (editor
William T. Stead) became spokesmen of the movement. 15
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        Gladstone sensed the potency of the Bulgarian agitation as a focal point of
popular appeal. 16 Gladstone may has shown personally indifference to imperial
questions, but not his party and his governments. It was his government that
had, gave Livingston a state funeral in the Westminster Abbey, embarked on the
Ashanti War in 1866-68, sent an expedition to occupy Egypt in 1882, sent Sir
Bartle Frere mission to Zanzibar (annexed by Britain in 1890)
        After being urged (by the his former boss, Lord John Russell and others)
he took a decisive stand he wrote and published in early September the pamphlet
“Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East”, which became a bestseller (a
quarter of a million copies sold within a fortnight) and is generally regarded as
classics of the 19th century political rhetoric. Despite the fiery denunciation of the
sultan’s rule and its criminal functionaries, and tacitly, of their British protector
and accessory (Disraeli), and the famous “bag and baggage” phrase, a closer look
shows that the practical solution to the Balkan tangle offered by the Grand Old
Man, was quite moderate, namely, autonomy for the Balkan Christian provinces,
without bringing in question the principle of integrity of the Ottoman Empire. 17
        Gladstone made a number of speeches, the most notable at Blackheath
(before a crowd of 10,000 under torrential rain, on Sept. 9). At its later stages
the Bulgarian agitation became dominated by the Liberal element, and culminated
in the National Conference on the Eastern Question held in London on Dec. 8,
1876. The main speakers were Gladstone, the Bishop of Oxford, Henry Richard,
James Bryce, George Otto Trevelyan, Th.omas Falwell Buxton, Edward Freeman.
It was attended or supported morally by the cream of the Victorian intellectual
elite, among them Anthony J. Froude (a controversial historian and biographer of
Disraeli, by the way), Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William
Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Thomas Carlyle. The conference was intended to put
pressure on Disraeli’s government, esp. on its positions on the forthcoming
conference of the ambassadors of the Great Powers at Istanbul. 18
        British representatives at the conference were the Marques of Salisbury
and the ambassador Henry Eliot. The representatives of the Powers agreed at the
preparatory phase on a project prepared by the American consul-general Eugene
Schuyler and the Russian diplomat Prince Alexander Tseretelev. It provided for
the creation of two autonomous Bulgarian provinces comprising all the lands
inhabited primarily by Bulgarian – Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia. 19 A. J. P.
Taylor claimed in his “Struggle for Mastery” that at Istanbul Salisbury cheated his
boss, Disraeli, collaborating too closely with the Russian ambassador Count
Nikolay P. Ignatiev, an ardent Pan-Slavist. Indeed, Disraeli showed irritation with
Salisbury’s line, however there seems to have been little difference between
Salisbury and Disraeli on autonomy of the Balkan Slav provinces of the Sultan.
        Disraeli’s performance at the Berlin Congress was strong and impressive,
and made its president German chancellor Bismarck exclaim that “The old Jew
was a real man.” At all that the Congress in practical terms mostly stamped
decisions taken beforehand, including destroying “Great Bulgaria”, its divisions
into two parts, its status, its boundaries. Prince Alexander Gosrchakov, senile
Russian chancellor, who intended to turn the Congress in the crowning triumph of
his long career, spent most of the time in semi-slumber, made a number of
blunders, was overshadowed by no less old, but British prime-minister. It was,
however, not that important, for major decisions were based on secret treaties –
Austrian-British, British-Turkish, Russo-British (Shuvalov-Salisbury agreement of
May 30, 1878), and the Congress in most cases only stamped them.
        If we compare Disraeli and Gladstone, who are most often considered
antipodes, respectively, the high-minded, moral, anti-imperialist, idealistic
Gladstone, and the cynical, opportunistic, unscrupulous practioner of Realpolitik,
Disraeli, we can see that in practical terms their ideas, concepts, and actions
were not so diametrically opposite. Gladstone’s pamphlet “Bulgarian Horrors and
the Question of the East” is full of fiery rhetoric. He urged all the officials of the
Sultan to clear the Balkan provinces they had desolated and profaned, “bag
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baggage”. But his proposition to solve the Eastern crisis in practical terms was
limited to granting to these provinces certain degree of autonomy.
        On May 29, 1876, when the crisis still had not reached its climax Prime
Minister Disraeli wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Edward Stanley, the 15th Earl
Derby, and explained his concept regarding its solution. His scheme, he wrote,
was founded on the status-quo in the Ottoman Empire, but “that a liberal
interpretation should be placed on that phrase, so that we may create other
vassal states.” 20
        That amounted to the same, as Gladstone’s proposition, and in fact almost
all Balkan national states, prior to gaining independence, passed through a stage
of principalities vassal or tributary to the Ottoman Empire.
        The case comes to demonstrate once again the astounding continuity in
the actual conduct of Victorian foreign policy, despite all the party rhetoric and
ideological divergence.




1
   Stoyanov, Zachary. Notes on the Bulgarian Risings. Sofia, 1996, p. 308. [In
Bulgarian]
2
  National Assembly. Stenographic Report of the Proceedings of the XXV Ordinary
National Assembly. 2nd Regular Session, 1940-41. Sofia, 1941), pp. 204-207 [In
Bulgarian].
3
  Stambolov, Stefan. Political Journalism, 1875-95. Sofia, 1996, p. 218. [In
Bulgarian].
4
  Millman, Richard. Britain and the Eastern Crisis, 1875-78. Oxford, 1979; Saab,
Ann Pottinger. Reluctant Icon: Gladstone, Bulgaria and the Working Classes, 1856-
1878. Cambridge, Mass.-London, 1991.
5
  Blanqui, J.-A. Voyage en Bulgarie pendant l’anneée 1841. Paris, 1843, pp. 168-
169.
6
  See, for instance: Stembridge, Stanley R.. Disraeli and the Millstones. – The
Journal of British Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Nov. 1965), pp. 122-39; Harcourt, Freda.
Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866-68: A Question of Timing. – The Historical Journal,
Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan. 1980), pp. 87-109.
7
  Thornton, A. P. The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies. London, 1959, pp. XII-XIII.
8
  Bradford, Sarah. Disraeli. New York, 1982, pp. 295.
9
  Stembridge Stanley R. Op. cit., p. 126.
10
   Walker, Dale. Januarius MacGahan: The Life and Campaigns of an American War
Correspondent. Athens, Ohio, 1988, pp. 170-181.
11
   Daily News. September 13, 1876.
12
   Hansard. Vol. CCCXXX, July 10, 1876, cols. 1181-1182; Buckle, G. Life of
Disraeli. Vol. IV. Pp. 44-46.
13
    See Temperley, Harold. The Bulgarian and Other Atrocities in the Light of
Historical Criticism. Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XVII (1931).
14
   Genov, R. The English Working Men and the Eastern Crisis of 1876-1878. -
Bulgarian Historical Review, Vol. XX, Nos. 1-2, pp. 44-58.
15
   . Shannon, R. T. Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876. London, 1963, p.
49.
16
   Ramm, A. (Ed.) The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord
Granville. 1876-1886. Vol. I. Oxford, 1952, p. 3.
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17
     Gladstone, W. E. Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. London, 1876,
p.
18
    Eastern Question Association. Reprt of the Proceedings at the National
Conference at St. James’s Hall. London, 1876, p. 20; Shannon, R. T. Op. cit., p. 259.
19
   Panayotov, I. N. Towards the Diplomatic History of the Constantinople
Conference (December 1876-January 1877). Sofia, 1956, pp. 52-54 [In Bulgarian]
20
   Dep. Hughenden, 69/4, ff. 13-14. – Modern Western MSS, Bodleian Library,
Oxford University.