ABSTRACT
By the middle of the 19th century, Russian-Ottoman wars and Russian occupations of the vassal Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia had become routine. At the same time, the strategies of the Russian command kept changing as did the role of the Balkan Christian population in these strategies. Thus, in the Russian-Ottoman war of 1828–1829, Nicholas I adopted a remarkably conservative approach seeking to minimize the involvement of the Christian co-religionists as much as possible. By contrast, in 1853–1854, diplomatic isolation and the prospect of fighting against and the Anglo-Franco-Ottoman coalition forced the tsar to consider a more radical strategy. The occupation of principalities was now a step towards a large-scale mobilization of the Balkan Christians that could let the mass of the Russian army confront the adversaries at other sensitive directions. These plans failed because of the conservative tsar's evident uneasiness about the politically subversive character of such a strategy as well as his overestimation of the readiness of the Balkan Christians to rebel. However, the Danubian campaign of the Russian army of 1853–1854 constituted the first testing of the elements of a “people's war” that would be implemented with greater effectiveness in the Russian-Ottoman war of 1877–1878.
