Azat Bilalutdinov

My dissertation examines the plurality of means of Russian imperial expansion in the Black Sea region from its heyday when Russia was close to have installed a client state of Bulgaria to the collapse of the empire in war and revolution. I focus on the imperial practices of politics of war atrocities, military occupation of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia after the 1877-78 Russian-Ottoman War and the Petersburg-directed state-building in independent Bulgarian Kingdom and the turn of the century expansion of the Black Sea trade.

By looking into practices rather than grand imperial schemes, I problematize the myopic narrative of Pan-Slavism and designs to seize the Black Sea Straits as the main principles of the Romanov Empire’s policy in the region. Rather, I argue, Russian Black Sea imperialism was not a monolithic phenomenon and that apart from conservative advocates of aggressive policies, there were influential groups of liberally minded diplomats, scholars of international law and economists who clearly realized the constraints of the rising liberal internationalism and European Powers’ massive economic expansion in the region and developed their designs accordingly. My narrative ends with the “Russia’s” civil wars as I aim investigate how the White Russian imperialists and their contenders imagined the political and economic future of the region in the face of its fragmentation and challenges of the Wilsonian moment and Bolshevism. By using sources in Russian, Ottoman Turkish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and French and I seek to contribute to the historiography that de-centers the Russian-Ottoman encounter and explores horizontal connections between non-dominant groups of the two empires.