Seeing the Russian Empire through an Ottoman Prism

The Petrine and post-Petrine eras are most strongly associated with the Russian Empire's pursuit of Westernization and the attempt to position itself among the European Great Powers. Peter I's preoccupation with West European technologies and culture has immortalized him as mythic reformer. The cliché of his newly founded capital, St. Petersburg, as a "window to Europe" is set in granite, and the city likewise served as stage for his successors' self-fashioning. From the Winter Palace, Empress Catherine II would correspond with Voltaire, inscribing herself into the circle of enlightened autocrats while pursuing ambivalent reform policies at home. The well-worn familiarity of these images demonstrates both the preoccupation of Russian contemporaries with their role in the European political landscape as well as the interest of later scholars in analyzing historical perceptions of Russia.¹ We have—if often reluctantly—grown accustomed to slipping into Europe-Russia binaries.

Thus one is caught by surprise and intrigued when Victor Taki discloses to his reader that "post-Petrine Russians devoted a greater number of publications to the Ottoman Empire than they did to France or Germany" (4). This contemporary preoccupation could be attributed to the numerous military confrontations with the Ottoman Empire. With four wars waged in the 18th century alone, it was Russia's most frequent adversary and the yardstick against which to measure its military and, by extension, modernizational success.² Taki suggests going beyond a bilateral reading and triangulating the Russian-Ottoman encounter as another instance of Russia's positioning against Western Europe's Great Powers. Echoing Maria Todorova's observation that Balkan self-identity is shaped against an oriental Other, he regards the Russian Empire's self-identity through the prism of its Ottoman encounters.³

Similarly, Denis Vovchenko's Containing Balkan Nationalism: Imperial Russia and Ottoman Christians, 1856–1914 is an exercise in polyphony, telling a complex story of perception, positionality, and agency. In closely analyzing the Bulgarian church movement, he has as much to say about Russian meddling in the Ottoman Empire as about Russia's self-conception and self-positioning in relation to the many parties involved. His book contests familiar narratives of Russia as the inciter of destructive nationalism in Southeast Europe and joins a recent trend emphasizing the perseverance of multiethnic empires. Rather than repeating the story of inevitable imperial collapse, often postulated ex post facto by young nation-states, his meticulous study emphasizes efforts made to contain disintegration along nationalist lines.⁴

Both books under review are set in times of significant reform and transformation in the two empires, which saw dynastic and theocratic principles challenged by secularization and nationalism. Rather than drawing straightforward comparisons between the time-shifted reform efforts in the Russian and Ottoman empires, the books demonstrate how their encounters forced policy makers to position themselves against these new challenges, carving out a new understanding of their empire.⁵ By going beyond the Europe-Russia binarism, they provide us with a deeper understanding of this very relationship. Particularly the renegotiation of confessional principles, nascent nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, and Russia's role as Orthodox protector became a stress test for both empires' traditional structures and ability to adapt. These developments were closely watched and influenced by Western Europe's Great Powers, and thus Constantinople's cosmopolitan district of Pera, populated by diplomats and clergymen, became as much a "window to Europe" as did St. Petersburg.

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Taki's book opens with a detailed account of Prince Aleksandr Men´shikov's provocative landing in Pera in 1853, an incident notorious for contributing to the outbreak of the Crimean War. The scene sets the general tone for his work. Rather than focusing on the well-studied "factual aspects" of Russian-Ottoman relations, he concentrates on the "largely bypassed … cultural contexts...