The Treaty of San Stefano

The signing of the Treaty of San Stefano

William Morris would demand that I post something to mark the occasion. It was, after all, a cause near and dear to his radical heart, moved as he was by the plight of the Bulgarians in the nineteenth century. As would the great Ivan Vazov, whose book Under the Yoke I’m currently reading – a ‘Romance of the Bulgarian Revolt’ of 1876.

Anyway, the third of March (or 19 February on the Julian Calendar) is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano which ended the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, and which the Bulgarian nation still celebrates today as the beginning of their independence. It is also remembered fondly by the Serbian and Romanian peoples, who likewise gained independence from the Ottomans under the terms of the treaty. An unfortunate oversight of the treaty, at first, was the Armenian population, which – being Christian and therefore suspect, though they had remained loyal to the Ottomans – was ruthlessly suppressed and in some cases massacred by Kurdish cavalry. A sinister omen of worse Turkish atrocities still to come. The Russians were able to secure, at least in the formal language of the agreement, some protections for the Armenian population in Asia Minor – however, they lacked any kind of enforcement mechanism.

Unfortunately, the treaty was only a preliminary, and was vastly ‘watered down’ at the insistence of the Western powers – particularly Britain and Austria-Hungary – who demanded a revision on the grounds that it violated the earlier Treaty of Paris. A subsequent agreement, hammered out in Berlin, drastically reduced the size of the newly-created independent Bulgaria and left the Ottomans in control of Macedonia, Greece, Albania and Kosovo. The Treaty of Berlin splintered the Balkans in several different ways and fostered ethnic rivalries between Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Romanians and Turks in a way which would not be undone until the inevitable eruption of the Great War.

What is worse, the British and the Austrians, who – apart from a handful of noble souls like Morris – supported the Turks in despite of their ham-handed atrocities against civilian populations in Bulgaria, perfectly understood that the Treaty of Berlin was nothing more than a stopgap and that there was very little the Ottoman Empire could do to keep itself afloat much longer. They understood perfectly well that a greater, more massive conflict was coming – but did not exercise any sort of political will or foresight to stem the injustices that would ultimately give rise to it. The interference of the British and the Austrians in the peace of San Stefano was unjust, and there they sowed some of the bad seed that would return to be reaped in the whirlwind thirty-five years after.

The Treaty of San Stefano is still somewhat important, as it marks one ‘small victory’ in a broader ‘long defeat’ throughout the nineteenth century. The four great nations of the Balkans, who up until now had been (unwilling) subject peoples of the Ottoman Turks, were suddenly finding themselves carved up by the great powers on every side and even further abroad, subject to new forms of beggary by capitalist finance and colonial depredation under the guise of ‘infrastructure’. Hard winters were coming, but at the very least, in March of 1878, though, the peasants of the European Southeast could feel a warm spring gust of liberation. For a great many of them, that wasn’t nothing. The farthest thing from it.

Честит празник, българи!