Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered ed. by Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky (review)

The book under review is unexpectedly timely. As the book was going to press, the protests on Kyiv’s Independence Square culminated in a series of dramatic and still poorly understood events: Ukraine’s security services fired on and killed dozens of protesters under unknown orders; the Supreme Council impeached the sitting president, Viktor Yanukovych; and the Russian Federation invaded and annexed Crimea. In the months since, the varied aspirations and experiences of the vast majority of the population go underreported. The annexation of Crimea and the subsequent outbreak of violence in Eastern Ukraine understandably shocked the world. But the welter of sanctimonious government and media cant from Washington to Moscow – with precious few exceptions – is crude, uninformed, and baldly politicized. As the editors of Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, Lucien Frary and Mara Kozelsky, muse, “it is hard not to see the imprint of nineteenth-century diplomatic behaviors” on them (P. 341).

Presentist considerations aside, this collection represents an impressive contribution to the literature on the imperial dimension of Russian history since Andreas Kappeler’s landmark 1992 synthesis, Russland als Vielvölkerreich. But the editors and contributors do not explicitly engage this work. Nor do they engage the literature of what Alfred Rieber calls “complex frontiers.” Complementing them, however, this volume shifts that literature’s geopolitical center of gravity from the metropole’s administration of ethnic and confessional minorities to the experience of peoples in the borderlands between the Ottoman and Russian empires themselves. Providing a coherent narrative to the history of this region presents the editors with an important historiographical problem laden with organizational, political, and moral concerns: how does one arrange a narrative of a region whose boundaries and peoples were often in flux and apparently dependent on great power whims.

Answering this problem, the editors chose to organize their volume’s contributions around the so-called Eastern Question in order to demonstrate that it was “a much more complex phenomenon” than the old-fashioned diplomatic history would have it (P. 6). The primary historiographical target of the volume’s contributors is M. S. Anderson’s admirable 1966 synthesis on the Eastern Question. That comprehensive but traditional diplomatic history of the Eastern Question related the story of great power negotiations over how to divide up the Ottoman “sick man of Europe” as codified in the treaties signed from Küçük Kainarca in 1774 to the treaty of Lausanne in 1923. In Anderson’s account – which V. A. Georgiev echoed in the standard Soviet version – the Ottoman Empire’s failure to enact effective social and political reforms justly provoked the great powers to intervene in Ottoman affairs to restore order and protect various ethnic and confessional groups.

The volume’s contribution to the neglected field of diplomatic history is to be welcomed and complements Oleg Airapetov’s recent synthesis.¹ Their principal aim is to complicate Anderson’s diplomatic history of the Eastern Question by looking at the social and cultural history of this fluid region. To do that, the contributors draw on a linguistically and geographically rich vein of government, voluntary association, and private materials from Russian, French, Turkish, Bulgarian, Crimean, Armenian, Austrian, Georgian, British, and Greek archival funds. These revelations alone are an impressive feat. To make sense of this wealth of material, the editors and contributors also draw inspiration from the Ottoman revisionist school of Kemal Karpat and Bernard Lewis, who recovered the vitality of Ottoman government and society. The thrust of that scholarship was directed against the standard assumption of diplomatic history that the Ottoman Empire was the main problem in great power relations because it was perceived to be decadent and degenerate by Soviet and non-Soviet historians alike.

Their analytical decision is conceptually justified as an organizing principle in such a historiographically undefined region; organizing principles for collected volumes are also notoriously difficult to find. But the editors overstate the historiographical...