Vasily A. Kudrin, Russia in the Decade of Reaction (Moscow: Bolshoi, 1965)
… After the defeat in the War of the Balkan Alliance, the Russian court turned hard to the right. The Tsar and his officials, both civil and military, united behind a single goal: to avenge the national humiliation, to make Russia strong, and to conquer its enemies both foreign and domestic. The cautious openness that followed the end of serfdom had already been ebbing before the war, but now it gave way entirely, to be replaced by a militant, state-sponsored nationalism in which, at least in theory, the entire population was mobilized.
Not all of this was bad. The army was remade into a professional institution, with commissions and promotions given on merit; many of the abuses suffered by the common soldiers were eliminated, and sergeants of exceptional promise were given the opportunity to qualify as officers. The government embarked on an intensive program of industrial development to supply the new military; between 1880 and 1890, Russian industrial output would almost triple. Infrastructure investment would also double during this period.
But at the same time, official Russia became fiercely repressive and xenophobic. The new nationalism demanded the total commitment of the citizenry, and even mild dissenters became targets for police harassment and mob violence. And it was an article of faith that, before Russia could get its revenge on the Ottoman Empire, it would first have to vanquish the enemies within: the rebellious peasants who had forced the country out of the war; the Muslims who had sided with the enemy; and liberals, especially Jews.
The months after the war saw harsh reprisals in the districts where rebellions had occurred, leaving more than 50,000 dead. In the aftermath, the army broke up hundreds of villages and deported their residents to other parts of the empire, and the secret police, which had previously been a largely urban institution, became a growing presence in the countryside. The repression continued with punitive taxation, labor conscription and arbitrary detentions, designed to cow the peasantry and drive any thought of rebellion from their minds.
The Russian Empire also experienced an upsurge in anti-Semitic violence, fueled by nationalist paramilitary groups and tolerated or even tacitly encouraged by the state. A wave of pogroms hit the Pale of Settlement in 1880, with another outbreak in 1882 and a third the following year. Many Jews responded by fleeing the country; between 1880 and the outbreak of the Great War, 1.6 million would do so. Half a million would find their way to the United States and Canada; 100,000 to Argentina; like numbers to the Cape Colony and western Europe; and others to the four corners of the earth; but the largest number, 800,000 in all, would go to the Ottoman Empire and the free port of Salonika. Those that remained, mostly in the large cities, would drift increasingly toward revolutionary politics.
Muslims, too, suffered pogroms. The hardest hit were the Crimean Tatars who lived north of the cease-fire line; by 1881, nearly all of them had been driven into the Khanate at gunpoint and their lands resettled with Russians. The remaining Muslims in the Caucasus, regarded as agents of the Sultan, faced violence and confiscation; by 1885, most of them had also filtered into Anatolia or the new state of Shirvan, with others seeking the anonymity of the large cities and being swept into the industrial workforce. Curiously, the Muslim minorities in Armenia and Georgia were left alone; although both kingdoms were in personal union with the Tsar, they had their own feudal parliaments, and their nobles (a few of whom, including a branch of the Abashidze family, were Muslim themselves) honored their bonds of vassalage with their Muslim subjects.
The Kazan Tatars and the Central Asian Muslims got off lighter: they hadn’t been involved in the fighting, and they were far enough from the Ottoman border not to be considered an immediate threat. For the most part, they didn’t face deportation or pogroms. Nevertheless, the opportunities available to them in civil and military life were sharply diminished, and those who had gone to study in the Ottoman Empire were closely watched by the police. By the mid-1880s, Russia had become a very intolerant place toward non-Orthodox minorities.
But there was another Russia just under the surface: the revolutionary Russia, the Russia that would ultimately create the country we know now. The center of this Russia, as with official Russia, was the cities, where a labor movement was gaining strength among the workers in the growing industries. In the 1880s, Moscow and St. Petersburg were home to a bewildering variety of revolutionary movements and underground political clubs: orthodox Marxists, social democrats, anarchists, and the unionists [1] who sought to replace the state with federations of labor unions and neighborhood workers’ councils. The last of these included an increasing number of the displaced Caucasian underclass: many of those who had studied in the Ottoman Empire had learned of Labor Belloism, and saw many of its features in the unionists’ emphasis on small-scale communal solidarity and rejection of state structures.
The revolutionary Russia also sought to extend its reach to the countryside, where the
narodniki attempted to organize the peasants and promote agrarian socialism. Most of the narodniks were romantics from the cities, who idealized rural culture and who saw the 1877 peasant rebellion as the first step in the creation of the new Russia. In this, they were wrong. The 1877 revolt was a Jacquerie, not a revolution; the peasants had no social demands beyond not being fed into the Balkan bloodbath. Their reaction to the narodniks’ preaching ranged from amusement to violent rejection, and many of the would-be revolutionaries went home.
Others, though, did not. A core of the narodnik movement adapted its goals, learning to listen to the peasants rather than trying to remold them. They recast revolution as a long-term goal, and began organizing villages and districts around specific local grievances. While the peasants had no taste for grand social visions and were too intimidated to support them in any event, they were grateful for the help in resisting tangible injustice, and slowly, the remaining narodniks gained a foothold. In the process, their own ideas were changed: they would become a conduit between rural culture and the urban revolutionary movements, and their participation in peasant folk-Orthodoxy would lead some to explore a more syncretic and pantheistic spirituality. Tolstoy, in particular, would show signs of Buddhist and Islamic influence in his later works, while ironically becoming more firmly Christian and insisting that all the world’s religions could be synthesized into the Orthodox faith.
The ferment also spread to Tatarstan and Central Asia. Kazan had been a center of Islamic reformism for some time, with many of its intellectuals being exposed to the Young Ottomans’ philosophies while studying in Stamboul. Some continued to do so even into the 1880s, but with study in the Ottoman Empire becoming more perilous, others looked elsewhere for inspiration. Şinasi’s liberal meritocratic-elitism would remain dominant among the older generation of Kazan Tatars, but copies of Paulo Abacar’s works also circulated clandestinely by 1885, and were gaining currency among younger people who sympathized with the socialist revolutionaries.
Abay Qunanbaiuli
And on the steppes of Central Asia, a fourth variety of Islamic liberalism was emerging. Its architect was Ibrahim Qunanbaiuli, better known by his childhood nickname of “Abay,” or “careful.” Abay was a great Kazakh poet who had gone to both Islamic and Russian schools, and who had developed an admiration for Russian language and culture. He was among the first to write in the Kazakh language, and his works emphasized Kazakh national aspirations, but he also argued that his countrymen should learn Russian and embrace Western education, both as a ticket to modernity and because the world’s cultural heritage was desirable in his own right.
The same considerations informed his approach to religion and politics. Through correspondence and study, he knew of Abacarism, Belloism and the reformism of the Young Ottomans. He found much worth in all three, but unlike their founders, he lived in a country where Muslims were a minority, and much of his work focused on how Muslims should live in non-Muslim nations.
His conclusion, expressed in several poems of his
Book of Words, was that Muslims had an obligation to improve the world, which in turn required them to participate in the political, cultural and scientific life of their countries. In doing so, they should rightly insist on complete equality, but in order to avoid hypocrisy, they must also accept other faiths as equal to their own. This was not unprecedented - Şinasi had previously written that Christians should be accepted as full citizens of an Islamic state [2] – but in a non-Muslim polity, this would require more reaching out and risk-taking on the Muslim citizens’ part. Abay made no secret of his wish that Islam be at home in Russia and that Russia consider Islam as part of its own heritage, and his works would be enormously influential on Muslim diasporas during the twentieth century. But in 1886, in a country that was in the grip of official xenophobia, the court viewed his doctrines as both revolutionary and threatening…
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Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
The early part of the Decade of Reaction played out much differently in Turkey than in Russia. The conservatives were in power, and had the support of a Sultan whose enthusiasm for constitutional monarchy had dimmed, but in contrast to the inward-turning Russian court, the Porte was full of confidence from the victory in the War of the Balkan Alliance, and this confidence gave it an openness and a willingness to take risks that was absent in St. Petersburg.
Also, the liberals were not without power: they remained a strong minority in parliament and, more importantly, they still controlled the central bank. Due to the long tenures of the bank's governors and their staggered terms, Midhat Pasha's and Şinasi's appointees were guaranteed a majority on its board until at least 1886. This gave the liberal faction an iron grip on tax collection, monetary policy and management of the public debt, meaning that the conservatives had to bargain with them in order to get military and industrial credits. In fact, given the central bank's importance in maintaining relations with the empire's creditors, the Constitutionalist Party had a say in foreign policy as well.
The liberals also influenced foreign relations through allies in key diplomatic posts. One of the most intriguing was Alexander Karatheodori Pasha, a Paris-educated Phanariot Greek who had pursued a career in the foreign service and who had been a key member of the Ottoman negotiating team at Rome. [3] After the war, he was appointed as the Ottoman commissioner in the newly-created Duchy of Thessaly. It was thought that he would be the best candidate to interact with the duchy's mostly-Greek legislature, and this turned out to be so: although he was loyal to the Ottoman Empire and took his role of protecting Thessaly's Muslim minority very seriously, he worked well with the Greek commissioner and built relationships with liberal Greek politicians and intellectuals. As a member of the Constitutionalist Party, he gave Midhat Pasha a private connection to both the government of Thessaly and the royal court in Athens itself, and by the early 1880s, Midhat Pasha had begun to make clandestine peace overtures.
Alexander Karatheodori Pasha
The Constitutionalists were not entirely dissatisfied with this arrangement; in fact, Şinasi considered it virtually ideal. Ruling through the civil service and the central bank suited his ideas of professional elite governance much better than parliamentary horse-trading, which he considered a necessary evil at best. But he realized that the Constitutionalists would need to rebuild their electoral coalition in order to retain control of the bureaucracy in the long term, and that he was facing an increasing challenge not only from conservatives but from rival liberals, like the successors of Mustafa Fazil Pasha, who believed that the empire's democratization had not gone far enough.
One place the liberals looked to rebuild support was the new immigrants from Russia. Most of the 600,000 Jews who moved in during the 1880s (another 200,000 would settle in Salonika, making them more than four fifths of the free port's population) were liberally inclined; Midhat Pasha, acting through the central bank, offered them generous incentives to settle in Stamboul, in the growing industrial towns of the Balkans, and in the ports of the Levant. He and Şinasi were wary of too many Jews - or any minority, for that matter - becoming concentrated in one place, fearing a repetition of the sectarian conflict that had rocked Lebanon, so they quietly steered the immigrants away from Palestine. Close to a hundred thousand would move there anyway, most of them urban merchants and tradesmen, but also several thousand followers of the agrarian socialist Moses Hess. [4]
The Caucasian Muslims, and the Crimean Tatars who couldn't find a place in the now-overcrowded khanate, were another source of clientage. Most of them preferred to settle in eastern Anatolia, but some came to the capital, and others - especially the Crimeans - accepted the central bank's incentives to move to the Balkans. Midhat Pasha, who by now had mastered electoral propaganda, made sure the new immigrants knew who had arranged the subsidies, and cultivated them both as a loyal Ottoman population in the Balkans and a counterbalance to the conservatives' rural electoral power.
In the meantime, both liberals and conservatives were challenged by the Arab population's growing demands. Since the revolt of 1834, the Arabs, particularly those in the Levant, had begun to develop a national consciousness. This did not yet amount to separatism - the Bedouins' tribal Belloism, which accepted the Sultan as a religious but not a political leader, was a fringe ideology - but nor were they satisfied with any of the empire's existing political alignments. Many Arab intellectuals sympathized with the liberals, and some had joined the Constitutionalist party, but they disliked the way that many of Şinasi's associates (although not Şinasi himself) meant "Arab" when they talked about the "backward" parts of the empire that would have to be civilized. And although the village headmen and landlords, who were the proxy voters for rural Arabs, were thoroughly in the conservatives' pocket, the intellectuals and the growing urban middle class didn't feel that Hussein Avni Pasha's party spoke for them.
Some gravitated to various autonomist factions, others to the competing liberal party founded by Mustafa Fazil Pasha. The latter had to date been a minor party because of its creator’s avowed secularism, but after his death in 1875, his successors downplayed the secular program in favor of industrial development, universal suffrage and local self-government. By the 1882 election, it was still primarily an urban party, but since it was more sympathetic to regional autonomists than the Constitutionalists, it also began to gain ground among the minorities, and a growing number of Arabs who favored a federal (or at least decentralized) empire found a home there.
The Levant also became home to the controversial religious leader Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri, known as Baha’u’llah. Born in Persia, he became a follower of a messianic prophet known as the Báb, and was exiled after the Báb’s 1850 execution. He journeyed to Baghdad and then to Stamboul, arriving sometime in the late 1850s; he is known to have made the hajj in 1862, but aside from that, Stamboul would be his home for twenty years.
Throughout his life, Baha’u’llah considered himself a Muslim, but many of his teachings were heterodox, most notably that Mohammed was not the last prophet and that others, including the Báb and himself, were also bearers of divine revelation. To be sure, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Tippu Tip also claimed to be prophets, but both were careful to state that they were not law-bearing; Baha’u’llah, in contrast, argued that continuing prophecy could lead to changes in the law. Other doctrines of his, including the equality of men and women as well as the unity of religion and the human race, were only slightly less radical.
Scholars have often debated the role that Belloism and Salafism played in Baha’u’llah’s writings. Certainly, doctrines such as abstention from politics and human unity have their echoes in Belloism, while his emphasis on the individual search for truth has Salafi counterparts. Baha’u’llah did not consider either Ali bin Bello or Abd-al-Wahhab to be prophets, nor did he mention their names in his writing, but he certainly heard of them, and they may have played a part in his teachings’ eclectic Shi’a-Sufi foundations. [5]
During the liberal renaissance of the 1870s, Baha’u’llah lived and wrote in the capital, although members of the government were careful to avoid contact with him for fear of being tainted with his heterodoxy. The conservative victory of 1878, however, brought about a crackdown on religious dissent in Stamboul, and Baha’u’llah thought it the better part of valor to move to a provincial city out of sight of the sultan and vizier. In 1879, he settled in Akka, with many of the Bábis in the capital following him, and his wisdom and skill as a mediator of disputes gained him the respect of Arabs, Jews and many local officials.
In the meantime, the nation continued on an uncertain course, its changes not entirely under the control of any one party. Much would come to a head in 1886, which was the year that the Ottoman Empire's fifth election produced a hung parliament and a crisis over central bank appointments, and the year that the Jewish immigrant David Leontyevich Bronshtein met Baha'u'llah... [6]
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Ismet Yücel: Belloism: The History of an Idea (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2001)
... Egypt between 1875 and 1885 was the scene of a clash between two forms of Belloism. In the capital, Khedive Ismail and Riyad Pasha – the latter now in his second decade as vizier – continued with their partly-Belloist-inspired program of industrial development, education, and professionalization of government. By the early 1880s, almost half of Egyptian civil servants had been educated in Riyad Pasha’s administrative academies, where they were taught to be apolitical technocrats and then given posts in the ministries or as district administrators. As yet, most of them were in the lower echelons of the civil service, but the first few were breaking through to senior positions, including one provincial governor.
This resulted in a more even-handed government, but was also a top-down one, in which many bureaucrats had little connection with the people they ruled, and some – especially those posted to the Sudan – thought of themselves almost as colonial overlords. Deliberate oppression was rare, but what Elgendy has described as “accidental tyranny” was more common: repression not out of malice, but out of high-handed disregard for local sensibilities and a belief that they needed to be forced into new living patterns for their own good.
This irresistible force ran into the immovable object of Muhammad Ahmad’s peasant Belloism, which interpreted the doctrine of withdrawal from politics to include complete non-cooperation with oppressive authorities. His successful peasant strike of 1873, which brought down a provincial governor [7], had elevated him to messianic status in the eyes of many rural Sudanese and Upper Egyptians, and by the 1880s, several other leaders who supported his teachings had led similar strikes at the village and district level. Withdrawal – including not only nonpayment of taxes but refusal to perform work or till the fields – was now a widespread peasant response to local injustice, and although Ahmad had been forced underground, he was still a political leader to be reckoned with.
In 1885, Riyad Pasha responded to the peasant unrest by granting villages the right to elect their own councils and mayors, and establishing advisory councils to act as a sounding board for the district bureaucrats. This would not be the last retreat from his ideal of apolitical government, and would eventually grow into an Egyptian parliament. And in the meantime, as more Sudanese and sa’idis sought jobs in the industrial cities, peasant Belloism was no longer confined to the peasants…
… In Bornu, the rise of State Belloism had infused the people with an unprecedented solidarity, but in the 1870s and 1880s, that solidarity was severely tested. In the south, the country faced invasion from Adamawa, and although the initial incursions were beaten back, the conflict degenerated into a war of attrition. In the east, the trans-Saharan slave trade from southern Sudan to Libya - the last significant African slave trade, and the only one far enough from both the Malê and the Royal Navy to last into the 1880s - was finally being suppressed, but several of the slavers had turned warlord, and were raiding the eastern marches from their outposts in Darfur and Ouaddai. And to the northwest, conflict with France threatened. In 1882 and 1883, French expeditions responded to Tuareg raids into Algeria by counter-raiding the sultanate of Agadez, and on the second of these occasions, the French force crossed the indeterminate frontier and attacked villages on the Bornu side. The Sultan demanded and received an apology, but it was clear that France was interested in more than punishing raiders: it also wanted to extend its influence in the region in order to outflank the British possessions in the eastern Sahel.
The Sultan was faced with the task of meeting these threats while remaining independent of both Britain and France. That necessarily meant seeking the protection of the Ottoman Empire, which was the only regional power strong enough to provide shelter. But just as Bornu didn’t want to become a French protectorate, it also didn’t want to be a mere satellite of Stamboul, so the Sultan sent his foreign minister to gather as many of the neighboring clans and nations as possible into a regional alliance: the more territory and strength he could bring to the table, the better terms he would be able to negotiate with the Ottomans.
The foreign minister, Ibrahim Tandja, spent 1884 and the early months of 1885 visiting the Tuareg and Toubou tribes who ranged along Bornu’s borders as well as the nobles and provincial governors in Ouaddai who were holding out against the warlords. The Sultan of Agadez refused his offer of alliance, but by mid-1885, he had knit most of the others into a regional pact, and was able to persuade the Ottoman governor of Libya to establish garrisons along the northern and western frontier. The following year, Ottoman troops fought alongside Bornu soldiers to put down the Ouaddai and Darfur warlords.
To seal the alliance, Bornu bound itself to follow Ottoman foreign policy and reaffirmed its long-standing acknowledgment of the Ottoman Sultan’s religious supremacy, but otherwise retained its independence, and also maintained its dominance within the regional alliance. The alliance-building process would also have a profound effect on Tandja’s view of the world. During his tour of the Sahara, he had stayed two months with the Teda clans of Tibesti, a subgroup of the Toubou people who followed the teachings of the Senussi brotherhood. Unlike most Toubou clans, which acknowledged no higher authority, the Teda recognized a
derde, a supreme judge elected from their leading families. The
derde was neither governor nor king, and had no executive power, but because of his judicial and spiritual authority, had kept the peace among the clans for generations. [8]
To Tandja, this was a new frontier for Belloism. He saw the
derde’s authority – which he viewed in an idealized fashion – as an apolitical, communal leadership of the type that Belloism favored, but of a community of nations rather than people. It was this experience that would inspire his 1886 work
The Judge of Nations, in which he advocated an international religious court to guide states’ relationship with each other and assist them in resolving their disputes peacefully…
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[1] Not quite anarcho-syndicalism, not quite council communism.
[2] See post 426.
[3] This career path is similar to OTL.
[4] I'll tell you right now, to forestall speculation: there will not be an Israel in this timeline. Salonika is all the Jews will get in terms of an independent state (with the partial exception of… well, that would be telling), and most of the Jewish immigrants to the Ottoman Empire will settle in the capital or other large cities. Still, there will be a significant Labor Zionist community in Palestine, and there may be issues of autonomy or special administrative status down the line.
[5] Baha’u’llah’s teachings in TTL are
roughly similar to OTL, but unlike OTL, he does not consider himself the harbinger of a post-Islamic dispensation. He considers himself a Muslim (although many Muslims don’t) and teaches that, unless superseded by prophecy, Islamic law remains in effect. This has a number of causes, key among them being the existence of other reformist Muslim doctrines whose communalism and pacifism echoes his own. And with the earlier death of Abdülaziz, he is able to avoid a falling-out with the Ottoman authorities and stays in the capital longer, with his journey to Akka being more a voluntary exile than a departure.
[6] What, did you think the Jews would be immune from religious reformism and syncretism in this timeline? Reform Judaism – it’s not just for Germans anymore.
[7] See post 553.
[8] As in OTL. Of course they weren’t nearly as peaceful toward outsiders.
