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Russo-Turkish War
(1877–1878)
DAVID SCHIMMELPENNINCK VAN DER OYE
The nineteenth century’s last major
European war and the fourth clash between
Russia and the Ottomans. The campaign
focused on Bulgaria, while the Caucasus
served as a secondary theater. Russia even-
tually prevailed on the battlefield, but many
TE
of its gains were lost at the bargaining table
after the other European powers intervened
at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.
The immediate casus belli was the
EC
Ottoman refusal to yield to St. Petersburg’s
demands for reforms to ease the plight of
Turkey’s Orthodox Christian subjects in
the Balkans. Nascent nationalist sentiments
R
in recent years had made these Slavs
increasingly restive, leading to revolts in
R
Herzegovina in 1875 and Bulgaria the
following year. Brutal repression of the
O
latter by its Ottoman overlords led to con-
siderable European outrage against the
C
“Bulgarian horrors.” Russians felt these
sentiments particularly keenly at a time
N
of growing Pan-Slav solidarity with their
co-religionists in southeastern Europe.
Indeed, when Serbia and Montenegro
U
launched a short but disastrous war against
Turkey in 1876, some five thousand Russian
volunteers joined them. Other factors
included Russia’s long-standing ambitions
for the straits separating the Black Sea from
the Mediterranean and a burning desire to
The Encyclopedia of War, edited by Gordon Martel
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
F
O
expunge the humiliation of defeat in 1855
during the Crimean War.
O
Russia’s plan, as drawn up by Major
General Nikolai Obruchev, was to strike
rapidly south from Romania through the
PR
Balkan mountains toward the Ottoman
capital of Constantinople (Istanbul). Mean-
while, a smaller force in the Caucasus would
launch a diversionary strike on eastern
D
Anatolia. Because the Russian Black Sea
Fleet had been emasculated by the Crimean
War’s peace terms, Turkey controlled the
waters. As a result, Obruchev set a course
well inland to avoid any interference by
ship-borne troops. He would thereby
also bypass the Quadrilateral to the east,
a complex of four strong fortresses at
Ruschuk (Ruse), Silistra, Shumla, and
Varna. This tactic had worked well for the
great Prussian strategist Count Helmuth
von Moltke the Elder during the German
Wars of Unification, when he had preached
a bold thrust deep into enemy territory
to decisively defeat the foe’s main force
without troubling fully to secure the
rear. Diplomacy also dictated speed.
The leading continental powers, Germany,
Austria–Hungary, and France, had all
assured St. Petersburg of their neutrality.
However, Britain was distinctly nervous
about any tsarist presence on the straits,
which would threaten the Royal Navy’s
access to the Suez Canal and, ultimately,
India. Obruchev therefore hoped for
a swift advance to deny London any chance
to craft another anti-Russian coalition.
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2 RUSSO - TURKISH WAR (1877–1878)
Turkey’s strategy, such as it was, relied on
a passive defense, with the mountainous
terrain and its fortresses guarding the capi-
tal. The Ottomans were also hobbled by
often-anarchic command as a result of
Sultan Abdülhamid II’s inability to invest
his generals in the field with adequate
authority. Yet Frederick the Great’s quip
a century earlier about any contest involving
Russia and Turkey being nothing more than
a one-eyed man fighting the blind no longer
seemed entirely apropos. The Ottoman
army was just completing a major reform
on the Prussian model, and its troops
were well equipped with American-made
Martini-Peabody breech-loading rifles and
steel Krupp guns. Meanwhile, its modern
navy, which was commanded by a former
British captain, Hobart Pasha, easily con-
trolled the Black Sea’s waters. As for the
TE
Russians, their military had also undergone
substantial modernization after the Crimean
debacle, most notably the introduction of
universal conscription in 1874.
EC
Emperor Alexander II declared war on
Turkey on April 24, 1877. With 260,000
troops, the forces at his disposal were
roughly equivalent to the opponents’
R
270,000. The bulk of the former, some
185,000, comprised the Danubian Army
R
under the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke
Nikolai Nikolaevich the Elder, while the
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Caucasian Corps led by another brother,
Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich, assem-
C
bled south of Tiflis (Tbilisi). The first
phase of the Russian campaign went
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almost entirely according to plan. Although
Romania was still theoretically subject to
U
the Ottomans, its Orthodox prince permit-
ted Nikolai Nikolaevich to move his armies
through his lands right up to the Danube
River on the southern border. In what
Russians still consider a model river cross-
ing, on June 27 Major General Mikhail
Dragomirov secured the Danube’s southern
shore at Zimnicea. Within three weeks, on
July 19, Major General Iosif Gurko’s
advance guard had already captured the
Shipka Pass, the key to crossing the Balkan
mountains. Only some 250 km of Thrace’s
more gentle topography now separated
the Russians from Constantinople, and the
sultan began to contemplate evacuating his
court south to Brusa (Bursa).
F
Obruchev’s daring gamble might well
have paid off had it not been for Tsar
O
Alexander’s decision to join the spectacle
together with the tsarevich. While Grand
O
Duke Nikolai retained formal control of
the campaign, the presence of his august
PR
visitors inevitably complicated command.
At the same time, the lavish imperial suite’s
17 trains and 350 wagons hardly eased logis-
tics. One immediate result was the onset of
a more cautious course, as the grand duke
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began to worry about the large Turkish
garrisons still in his rear. Instead of concen-
trating the bulk of his army on the main
objective, he divided it into three, ordering
one eastward to neutralize Ruschuk and the
second to take the strategically important
fortress of Plevna (Pleven) in the west.
Plevna nearly proved to be the Russian
campaign’s undoing. Before General Baron
Nikolai Krüdener’s western detachment
could secure it, Field Marshal Osman
Pasha, one of the Ottomans’ ablest com-
manders, occupied the position with
some thirty thousand men on July 19. The
following day a much smaller Russian
force attacked Plevna. Without deigning to
conduct proper reconnaissance or adequate
artillery preparation, the overconfident
Russians hurled three regiments across
open ground, where withering fire from the
Turks’ Peabody-Martinis inflicted 50 percent
casualties. General Krüdener did not con-
sider what would come to be known as the
First Plevna to be a major setback, and
on July 30 he ordered an entire twenty-
thousand-man corps to seize the garrison.
Once again, ineffective reconnaissance and
artillery, as well as an improper appreciation
of the lethal power of rifles firing from
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protected positions, made the Second Plevna
another sanguinary debacle.
Plevna cost the Russians their momen-
tum and forced Grand Duke Nikolai to
undertake a more defensive course. His
next test came at Shipka, where Suleiman
Pasha’s newly formed Balkan Army began
a major counteroffensive to retake the vital
pass on August 21. For six days five thou-
sand poorly dug-in Russians held their
ground against dozens of ferocious assaults
by twenty-seven thousand Turks. On some
occasions ammunition shortages reduced
the Russians to hurling rocks at their adver-
saries. Nevertheless, the tenacious defense
kept Shipka in Russian hands.
September 11, Tsar Alexander’s name day,
seemed an auspicious date finally to reduce
Plevna. The arrival of twenty thousand
Romanians, whose Prince Carol had decided
TE
to join the war against the Turks on August
28, had boosted the Russian force to eighty-
four thousand men against Osman Pasha’s
garrison of thirty-six thousand. Unfortu-
EC
nately for the attackers, heavy rainfall
had rendered the terrain into thick mud,
while a steady drizzle and fog further com-
plicated their advance. Only the flamboyant
R
“White General,” Mikhail Skobelev, succee-
ded in temporarily penetrating the Turkish
R
redoubts, but poor coordination prevented
the allies from exploiting his success. As the
O
Russians and Romanians counted their casu-
alties the next morning, which exceeded fif-
C
teen thousand, they decided to call off the
attack. The only alternative was a siege, and
N
the aging hero of Sevastopol’s defense during
the Crimean War, Colonel Count Eduard
U
Todleben, was recalled from retirement to
engineer the operation. Entirely cut off, with
food and ammunition nearly exhausted, and
unable to break out of the Russian invest-
ment, Osman Pasha was forced to surrender
on December 10.
Plevna had deprived the Russians of
nearly half a year, but the way to Constan-
tinople now lay open. Meanwhile, on
RUSSO - TURKISH WAR (1877–1878) 3
December 1, Serbia had also declared war
against Turkey, bringing another 81,500
troops into the conflict. Conventional
military wisdom holds that a winter cross-
ing of a mountain range is foolhardy.
Confident that their adversary would
never contemplate such a risky move, the
F
Turks did little to strengthen their defenses.
Nevertheless, on December 12 Grand Duke
O
Nikolai secured the tsar’s assent to order his
forces, now numbering 337,000, to advance.
O
Largely caught by surprise, the Ottomans
crumpled before the Russian onslaught.
PR
The last stand came at Philippopolis
(Plovdiv) on January 15, 1878, where it
took three days to rout Suleiman Pasha’s
army. Adrianople (Edirne) fell without
a fight on January 20. As the Russian
D
advance guard reached the gates of Constan-
tinople, Abdülhamid sued for peace and an
armistice was arranged on January 31. Only
the timely arrival of a British squadron in the
Sea of Marmara offshore kept the Russians
from occupying the Turkish capital.
The Caucasian campaign was a smaller
operation, essentially to divert Turkish
forces to the east. Its course mirrored that
of the Balkan. After initial successes, the
Russians were delayed by the stubborn
defense of Kars, a fortress some 50 km
across the border from Armenia. Several
counteroffensives under Muhtar Pasha’s
skillful command also slowed the tsarist
advance. Kars eventually fell on November
18, and Grand Duke Michael’s Caucasian
Corps proceeded to besiege Erzurum,
which surrendered at the end of the war.
The terms of the peace, which was signed
at San Stefano on March 3, 1878, granted
relatively modest territorial gains to the
Russians, including southern Bessarabia
and the Transcaucasian fortresses of Batum
and Kars. At the same time, it confirmed the
independence of Romania, Serbia, and
Montenegro and established a large auton-
omous Bulgarian principality dependent on
Russia. As a result, Turkey was virtually
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4 RUSSO - TURKISH WAR (1877–1878)
wiped off the European map. Alarmed at
this shift of power in the Balkans in
St. Petersburg’s favor, London intervened
at the Congress of Berlin hosted by the
German chancellor Prince Otto von
Bismarck that summer. In a major setback
for Russia, the signatories (not including
Turkey, which was not invited) agreed signif-
icantly to reduce Bulgaria and granted con-
cessions to Britain and Austria–Hungary.
“The sick man of Europe,” Turkey, retained
a presence on the continent, albeit at the
pleasure of the other powers. While
Bismarck was claiming to act as an impartial
“honest broker,” his role profoundly angered
Russians, fatally sowing the seeds of future
discord with their German ally.
Although Europeans paid much attention
to the war they did not grasp its implications.
Russia’s inability to storm Plevna, despite
TE
three attempts, pointed to profound changes
in the nature of combat, as rifle fire from
entrenched positions and breech-loading
artillery made infantry charges increasingly
EC
suicidal. According to William McElwee,
“the world’s general staffs, obsessed by
Moltke’s spectacular successes in 1866 and
1870, thus tended to ignore the lessons of
R
the [Russo-Turkish] war which, if properly
understood, might have saved countless lives
R
between 1914 and 1918” (1974: 193).
O
SEE ALSO: Crimean War (1854–1856);
Moltke, Field Marshal Helmuth von, the
C
Elder (1800–1891).
N
U
REFERENCES
McElwee, W. (1974) The Art of War: Waterloo to
Mons. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
FURTHER READING
F
Allen, W. E. D. and Muratoff, P. (1953) Caucasian
O
Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-
Caucasian Border 1828–1921. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
O
Erickson, E. (2003) Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman
Army in the Balkans, 1912–1913. Westport:
PR
Praeger.
Greene, F. (1996) Report on the Russian Army and Its
Campaigns in Turkey. Nashville: Battery Press.
Langer, W. L. (1931) European Alliances and
Entanglements 1871–1890. New York: Knopf.
D
Menning, B. W. (1992) Bayonets Before Bullets: The
Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Puzyrevskii, A. (1887) Desiat’ let nazad: Voina
1877–1878. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. S.
Balasheva.
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii
arkhiv (2004) The Russo-Turkish War, 1877–1878.
Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm, 120
reels.
Rostunov, I. I. (Ed.) (1977) Russko-Turetskaia voina
1877–1878. Moscow: Voenizdat.
Sumner, B. H. (1937) Russia and the Balkans
1870–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Uyar, M. and Erickson, E. J. (2009) A Military
History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Attaturk.
Santa Barbara: Praeger Security International.