Insurrections, Wars, and the Eastern Crisis in the 1870s. Edited by Bela K. Kiraly and Gale Stokes. Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1985. xxii, 421 pp. $45.00. Distributed by Columbia University Press.

These thirty essays were initially read at the September 1983 XIII Brooklyn College Conference on Society in Change hosted by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Varna, Bulgaria. This volume, the seventeenth in its series, concentrates upon the 1870s Balkan insurrections and wars of national liberation in which the political and military activities of nation- building were manifoldly intertwined. Let the reader beware; for, as editor Kiraly "cheerfully" notes, the volume is a "sampling of the schools of thought and the standards of scholarship in the many countries to which our contributors belong." The book's six sections present an overview and reassessment of the multi-faceted 1875-78 Great Eastern Crisis stressing a) its international repercussions and the roles of the European Great Powers and b) informative, if extremely detailed, analyses of the military affairs of individual Balkan countries. Maps, a biographical index of historical per- sonalities, and a list of contributing authors supplement the text. Parts I and II discuss the common features, international dimensions, and role of East Central European public opinion during the Balkan crisis. Collectively, these essays emphasize that the 1870s witnessed the expansion of bourgeois-capitalistic activities and the importation of European military technology into Balkan agrarian and peasant societies. The complexities of post-1867 domestic dualism and the parsimony of its two parliaments re- garding the military budget motivated Austria-Hungary's vacillating Balkan policies. (In Part V Robert Donia further clarifies the Habsburg mili- tary's occupation and "pacification" of Bosnia-Hercegovina under severe fiscal restraints.) Overall Austria-Hungary was an obstacle to Balkan na- tional liberation. In contrast, Imperial Russia, whose officials wished to avoid another Crimean War situation when the Western Great Powers op- Posed Russian activities in Southeastern Europe, found war "thrust" upon the tsarist government in 1877-78 by an aroused Pan-Slavic public. Despite military and diplomatic complications, Russia played the leading role throughout the entire Eastern Crisis ultimately following a "positive" Balkan Slavic liberation policy. Three brief articles illustrate how the 1875- 76 Bosnian and Bulgarian insurrections refocused Romanian, Czech, and Polish popular sympathies on the "heroism" of the Balkan insurrectionaries and prompted numerous volunteers to flow south of the Danube. Part III consists of fourteen essays on military affairs during the 1875-78 Balkan wars and insurrections. All detail the finer points of martial arma- ments, campaigns, logistics, numbers, operations, and strategy. They ana- lyze the conflicts of interest among the Balkan peoples, the pivotal role of the Russian army, and the military resiliency of the Ottoman Turks. The crisis offered the first opportunity to test the post-1874 reformed Russian army, which despite the unforeseen delay at Plevna, worked "fairly well." Several essays laud the generalship of Osman Pasha and emphasize the surprisingly well-equiped, modernized Turkish army, and especially its ef- fective resistance to the Russians at Plevna. In 1877-78 defensive tactics proved superior to offensive bravado, lessons again forgotten by 1904-05. Strasimir Dimitrov informatively highlights how the events of 1875-78 proved to be a "powerful catalyst" for the hitherto retarded, religiously di- vided, and increasingly anti-Slavic emerging Albanian national con- sciousness. Articles on Bulgaria emphasize the role of Bulgarian volunteers in the 1876 Serbo-Turkish and 1877-78 Russo-Turkish wars. "Made up of economic and political emigres" rather than peasants, these volunteer forces contributed to the "genesis" of the Bulgarian national movement since they linked together Bulgarians from all parts of the country. Six chauvinistic articles glorify the preparedness, performance, and heroism of the Romanian military-in vivid contrast with Russian, Serbian, Greek, Bulgarian, and Austro-Hungarian martial weaknesses-in Romania's 1877-78 "War of Independence." ("The decisive moment of the entire war was the Romanian army's entrance into the struggle," writes Mihail Ionescu on page 234.) In fairness, a Romanian detachment did break the siege of Plevna, a fact which inspired several authors patriotically to cite 1877 international commentary that the Romanians' martial valor made them "deserve to be acknowledged as a nation." Hence Romania's April 1877 proclamation of state sovereignty was "sanctified" on the battlefield because its army proved to be a "modern and successful military instru- ment." Since the events of 1877-78 electrified "progressive" Romanians "under foreign rule" from Transylvania to Bessarabia to the Dobruja, the reader senses the authors regret that Romania was "heard but not listened to" at the Congress of Berlin. If Romania had a glorious patriotic war in 1877-78, Serbia failed badly in 1876. Three excellent articles by Gale Stokes, Milorad Ekme�ié, and Dimitrije Djordjevic insightfully analyze the disappointing performance of Serbia's "immature" army and locally-oriented peasantry during the 1876 Serbo-Turkish war. Aristocratic Russian volunteers and Pan-Slavic offi- cers, who diverted the Serbian army from a Bosnian to a Bulgarian cam- paign in 1876, ensured that Serbia's 1876 efforts were "not a genuine na- tional enterprise." Military failure spawned "mutual mistrust" between St. Petersburg and Belgrade as well as between Serbia's "bellicose" city and its "passive" villages. Unprepared diplomatically, militarily, and economically for conflict, the the Serbian 1875-78 experiences caused government to abandon its romantic faith in a national militia and spontaneous peasant uprisings and to embrace the modern ideals of professional military training and conscription, policies which transformed the Serbian army and state from 1878 to 1883. This reviewer might also note that Djordjevics prescient and lively analysis of the Serbian peasantry is the most dramatic as well as the most memorable essay in the entire volume.