Is Russia Underrated?

Somebody seems to not have been paying attention the last time, so I'll say it again: The war of 1877-78 was a Russian victory. They finished it with their army south of the Balkan Mountains and would have irreparably damaged Turkish power in Europe had the terms of San Stefano not been overturned.

Well, they did irreparably damage Turkish power in Europe, but they also irreparably damaged themselves in the process. The war was a terrible undermining of Russia's financial position, Russia's prestige, especially in the Slavic world (which led to later pan-Slavic blustering with some unfortunate consequences, like WWI), and various other negative effects.

It was definitely a victory, but a Pyrrhic one at best.

The Russians weren't halted at Pleven, they left a force behind to besiege it and sent the rest southward. Neither did they need to take Constantinople, that's setting the bar pretty damn high. And if the Russians were at a breaking point, why didn't the Turks just waited them out and let them break? Why were they willing to sign a Carthaginian peace if their enemy was doing so badly? This was possibly the most successful war the Russians ever thought against the Ottoman Empire, disparaging their performance in it serves only to get people wondering just what the Russian army can accomplish when it gets its shit together.

No, they were halted at Plevna. They had managed to take the Shipka Pass before Osman Pasha moved to Plevna. While that was useful later, in in the short term it accomplished little, since the Ottoman supply route was the rail line from Varna to the Danube.

Plevna lay directly across Russian communications, and it was impossible to move forward with the main army so long as a powerful force was located there.

The Russians were pretty much halted in their beachhead in N. Bulgaria until many more corps could be mobilized and sent to the front. Once the Ottomans at Plevna surrendered, the army was free to move forward, and even then it was opposed for some time by some impressive rear-guard actions - but eventually it was impossible to hold on due to sheer weight of numbers.

It wouldn't have been possible to take Istanbul, but you're right, it wasn't necessary to win the war - but it would have been necessary to take it if they wanted to annex it.

How does going from this to this count as a draw? Even discounting San Stefano, which required an opportunistic intervention from Britain, you still have the Ottoman border being pushed from north of the Danube to the outskirts of Adrianople, the single biggest Ottoman loss in all its wars with Russia. I cannot think of any other war ending as badly for one of the sides involved being called a draw, so what standards are we using?

It was a disaster for the Ottomans, but it was essentially a "draw" as far as Russian aims are concerned. They gained nothing from the war. There was no chance that San Stefano would hold under any circumstances. The Balkans were always a European question and no one power would have been left to dispose of the whole region as it pleased. If Russia had not been totally exhausted it could have told the British and everyone else to go to hell. The fleet was irrelevant - but even a small British land force in alliance with the Ottomans could have rolled up the Russian army.
 
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Telling me to 'read my post before' is condescending. I know enough Russian history not to need to get it from your post, and so does everyone else on this thread.

I read it anyway, and you didn't list any real disasters -- you just identified the Crimean War and the Turkish War as campaigns where Russia underachieved. Your conclusions are reasonable, but after the Crimean War, everybody went home and the Turkish War didn't do Russia any long term damage, either. Hence, a what-if-Russia-won-the Crimean-War ATL, for instance, wouldn't generate all that much interest, because the combatants would still go home at the end, anyway. [So, why fight the war at all is a fair question, but off-topic].

There have been some real disasters for Russia (the Mongol conquest; the Time of Troubles; the Russo-Japanese War; WWI), but Russia eventually bounced back after all of them. That's why there aren't all that many points of departure which ultimately lead to Russia doing massively better against its neighbors than it did in real life. [It's not impossible: you could hypothesize a cold war invasion of western Europe by Russia, but I think that Russia will be portrayed as the villain in that].

I haven't read all the UK/US threads, but aren't a lot of them based on the British empire surviving longer? That's the typical basis of an ATL -- something once powerful that's now gone forever.

I'm not sure the Russians really underperformed in the Crimean War, anyway. The Ottomans just performed better than expected.

In the actual Crimea, the Russians didn't really enjoy a home advantage, because they had no real communications with the interior, whereas the Allies had perfectly clear lines, leading back to a major center of power just a couple hundred miles away in Istanbul. Yet they still managed to put up an impressive fight against four enemy states with horrendously overwhelming seapower and material superiority, and really didn't lose anything anyway.

The 1877 War was not so much underperformance as underestimation of the enemy, and because they had to fight to exhaustion, they obtained no benefit from their victory, save the valuable port of Batum. Kars and Ardahan are sort of nice to have, as they are possible bases for invasions of Russia, but that wasn't going to happen any time soon, and they are useless for the defense of Anatolia.
 
Sigh. OTL is not a wank of any country. A wank is implausible; OTL is by definition plausible.
I vehemently disagree with that, lots of things have happened in history that were implausible. People often make decisions that even in the context of the times are irrational. Accidents and chance can kill or remove the pivotal man from the scene or enable him to be promoted.

A French Revolution? Completely plausible. Napoleon's meteoric rise and the subsequent events? Implausible.

German backlash to the treaty of Versailles? Plausible. The rise of the Nazi Party and Hitler? Implausible.
 
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I vehemently disagree with that, lots of things have happened in history that were implausible. People often make decisions that even in the context of the times are irrational. Accidents and chance can kill or remove the pivotal man from the scene or enable him to be promoted.

Humans being irrational? Accidents of chance? These things are perfectly plausible. They happen all the time. "Plausible" does not mean "predictable".

A French Revolution? Completely plausible. Napoleon's meteoric rise and the subsequent events? Implausible.

I know, who'd of thought a weak civilian administration that didn't enjoy much enthusiasm from the people and was living on the success of an army dominated by energetic small-town lower-middle-class officers could be overtaken by an energetic small-town lower-middle-class officer? Absurd, I say! :p

German backlash to the treaty of Versailles? Plausible. The rise of the Nazi Party and Hitler? Implausible.

They had consistent good luck. So did a lot of movements, causes, and things.
 
I know, who'd of thought a weak civilian administration that didn't enjoy much enthusiasm from the people and was living on the success of an army dominated by energetic small-town lower-middle-class officers could be overtaken by an energetic small-town lower-middle-class officer? Absurd, I say! :p

Yes, well, true enough there. His rise to power on the European scene and subsequent antics are quite another matter entirely.

They had consistent good luck. So did a lot of movements, causes, and things.

You're talking past each other.

Luck is not inevitable. The dice have no memory. Something that is very unlikely to happen occurring by chance is implausible by definition. Possible, but implausible. When it does happen, that's an implausible occurrence.

Of course, you're quite right in that it is perfectly plausible for something implausible to happen. According to the law of averages it's actually implausible for a TL to lack implausible events! Only one specific occurrence can be treated as implausible, or the occurrence of a vast number of implausible events in immediate sequence (the Draka, for example).
 
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