Intelligentsia in exile. Bulgarian revolutionary emigration in the second half of the 19th century and the projects for a Balkan federation. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Fakultät für Philosophie, Kunst-, Geschichts- und Gesellschaftswissenschaften der Universität Regensburg vorgelegt von Ana-Teodora Kurkina Regensburg, 2019. 1 1. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Ulf Brunnbauer 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Klaus Buchenau. The research was conducted with the support of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, University of Regensburg, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. 2 Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 5 Research frames ......................................................................................................................... 5 State of art .................................................................................................................................. 8 Challenges ................................................................................................................................ 12 Plan .......................................................................................................................................... 16 Chapter I. Building blocks: terms, methodology and approaches .................................... 19 Starting point: terms and notions ............................................................................................. 20 Pre and post-1878 Bulgaria: Changes in the minds and on the maps ...................................... 29 Action Figures: the choice of the protagonists ........................................................................ 41 Associated sources ................................................................................................................... 53 ‘Intelligentsias’ abroad and in Bulgaria: the importance of ‘cohort experiences’ ................... 59 Chapter II. The temptation of federalism............................................................................ 61 What is federalism?.................................................................................................................. 61 The experience of European federalism. Enlightenment and Romanticism ............................ 67 A European federalist club of nationalists ............................................................................... 72 The Bulgarian story: Federalists, nationalists, or mobile thinkers? ......................................... 83 Before 1878 .............................................................................................................................. 85 After 1878. State-builders and outcasts ................................................................................... 93 Chapter III. The power of connections ................................................................................ 99 Approaching a network ............................................................................................................ 99 Imperial education and revolutionary connections ................................................................ 103 Imperial identification and revolutionary connections .......................................................... 114 Imperial and anti-Imperial press and revolutionary connections ........................................... 125 Organizations and Imperial support ....................................................................................... 136 Imperial connections? ............................................................................................................ 145 Chapter IV. Lost in interpretation. How long does a network last? ............................... 148 Changes in politics: the post-1878 Bulgaria .......................................................................... 148 Changes in ideology: Federalism and federalisms? ............................................................... 157 Personal changes: the different lives of the post-1878 Bulgarian intellectuals ..................... 167 Different networks and different nationalists ........................................................................ 180 Chapter V. What they left behind. National heroes and national ideals ........................ 182 Memory politics and national heroes ..................................................................................... 182 The paths of the non-core group public actors: what’s the difference? ................................. 195 3 People, who knew each other: primal nods, conduits and regulars ....................................... 206 A path to immortality? ........................................................................................................... 221 Conclusions. Legacies, Statuses, Individuals and the ever-changing political Landscape ................................................................................................................................................ 223 Archival Sources .................................................................................................................. 234 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 236 Acronyms and abbreviations .............................................................................................. 277 4 Introduction Research frames In 1867 a Bulgarian revolutionary, historian and publicist named Georgi Rakovski died in Bucharest shortly after finishing his work The Bulgarian hajduks, dedicated to the Bulgarian national struggle against the Ottomans.1 Rakovski, one of the most prominent representatives of the forming Bulgarian intelligentsia, spent the last years of his life in exile, laying the foundations for numerous state-building projects. Those plans were later adopted and developed by the Bulgarian Revolutionary Committee established in 1869 - two years after Rakovski’s death. The head of the committee, publicist Ljuben Karavelov, exploited and expanded the ideas of the “political liberation of the Bulgarian nation”, “democratic rule over an independent Bulgarian state” and the “creation of a “Danubian federation” that could include Bulgaria and its neighbors in one political unit, enabling the Balkan nations to solve their disputes over contested borders and populations.2 These Bulgarian intellectuals were born in the Ottoman Empire. Yet, they mostly lived, proclaimed their ideas and published their works abroad: in the newly established Romania or Serbia, in the Russian Empire or Germany. These individuals became minority elites, who originated in an Empire and started negotiating the rights of their group with the Ottoman authorities and, subsequently, their neighbors and Greater Powers. The dissertation analyzes the correlation between the shifting status of minority elites and their political views using the example of the Bulgarian revolutionary intellectuals in the mid-19th century and their political projects with a focus on federalism. Unlike other state-building schemes, a federalist project is based on cooperation and allows a researcher to follow the compromises elites had to make and highlights the connections between different public actors. Thus, the shifting status of an individual and his/her political perceptions can be seen not only as personal choices, but as patterns of cooperation that remain valid for most intellectuals in European Empires. 1 Rakovski, Georgi: Bulgarskite hajduti. Bucharest: Pechatnica C. Radulescu, 1867. 2 Nikolov, Ivan: Bulgarite i susednite narodi v publicistikata na Rakovski, Karavelov, Botev, Javorov. Sofia: Makedonija Press, 1996: 20-23. 5 The dissertation investigates the social connections of the Bulgarian public actors from the mid-19th century to the formation of an independent Bulgarian state (1908). A boom of Balkan federalist projects started in the 1870s and saw periods of rise and decline afterwards.3 The wider timeframe of the research, thus, allows to trace the impact and evolution of these political plans and the social ties behind them. These projects lay the foundation for the ideas of Balkan unity shared by Balkan socialists after the Balkan wars4, and communists after the Second World War.5 Thus, many political blueprints produced by minority elites left long-lasting traces in regional politics. A ‘Balkan federation’ was not the only existing project harbored by the Bulgarian intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire, Romania, Serbia or Russia. It coexisted with and often supplemented the Romanticist vision of a nation-state. Many Bulgarian intellectuals and their Balkan peers viewed a federative state as a suitable solution to the regional problems of consolidation.6 However, while all Bulgarian 19-th-century intellectuals were nationalists, not all were federalists. The research connects the rise of grand-scale political projects among the Bulgarian revolutionaries and their status of non-core group elites. This status is defined by extended social networking, political involvement and scarce material resources. The connection between the status of a public actor and his/her political thinking is often ignored, but it can allow to predict certain ideological turns and explain political motivations. Introducing federalism as one of the easily identifiable examples of the agents’ ideologies, the