The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Similar changes were at work in terms of state administration. The sea had long lain at the periphery of different imperial systems, and the major empires on the northern and southern coasts were content to rule some areas only indirectly, leaving local elites largely to their own devices. By the time of the Crimean war, that had already begun to change. Imperial modernization programs were under way in both Russia and the Ottoman empire. The old periphery was being absorbed into centralizing empires or allowed to go its own way as independent countries. By the end of the First World War, the imperial option was gone. Now, most of the sea was encircled by a new set of actors—modern states—that sought to appropriate the sea’s wealth for their own political, economic, and strategic goals. No longer was the sea just an object of imperial desire. It was now part of competing state-building projects: first Romanian and Bulgarian, soon Soviet and Turkish, and by the end of the twentieth century, Georgian and Ukrainian as well. The coastline, the water, the land under it, and the fish in it were all claimed as the domain of new states—as well as the sacred patrimony of the historical nations that they represented. Poets and historians soon set about the task of discovering, or inventing, the nautical vocations of one or another national group.

  In the latter half of the twentieth century, this proprietary vision of the sea was enhanced by the ideology of development, whether in the form of Soviet-style communism or state-building nationalism. The sea became a resource to be exploited using all the available technology of the state. Industrial concerns grew up along the coasts. Port cities expanded in both area and population. Commercial fishing fleets were dispatched to reap the harvest of the sea. Development transformed the coastline and brought genuinely “revolutionary change”—in the language of both communists and nationalists—to areas that were still among the poorest sections of the littoral countries, even after the Second World War. But there were also certain costs. In only a few decades, the grand plans for bringing modernity to the coasts and consuming the products of the sea had resulted in a body of water on the edge of environmental disaster. Never before had the shape of political boundaries, human identities, and ecological systems changed as rapidly as in the period from the 1860s to the 1990s, a time when politicians and planners labored to unmake the Black Sea as a region. By the end of the twentieth century, the health of the sea itself demanded that they work equally hard to reconstruct it.

  Empires, States, and Treaties

  Political relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century in many ways replicated those of the first. The Russian empire continued to pursue a strategy of positioning itself to take advantage of the end of the Ottoman empire, whose slow death had been a source of concern for more than a century. The Ottomans, having progressively lost control of much of the littoral, sought to maintain their meager hold on the ports of the southern coast; even that, as the debacle at Sinop had shown, could be tenuous in times of conflict. The great difference after the Crimean war was that the status of the sea—open or closed, neutral or otherwise—was no longer a derivative of peace treaties signed between these two empires. It was now the subject of a growing body of international law, put in place at international conferences and guarded by the commitment and vested interests of the European great powers.

  Under the treaty of Paris, Russia was to give up the idea of a Black Sea fleet. Most Russian vessels already lay at the bottom of Sevastopol harbor, and with the empire’s defeat, recreating a naval presence in the south was now formally abjured. Under the energetic minister of foreign affairs A. M. Gorchakov, the empire attempted repeatedly to alter the terms of the treaty, but for more than a decade after the war, Russia was allowed to maintain no more than six gunboats on the sea, for the purposes of police operations in coastal waters.5 By the late 1860 s, however, Gorchakov had begun to float the idea of a full repudiation of the Paris terms.

  The timing was propitious. The previous decade had seen a revolution in naval technology. Major powers were rushing to scupper the remaining ships-of-the-line and build new iron-clad, coal-powered battleships, the ship design whose superiority had recently been proven in the American Civil War. Russia had joined in the race by launching a major modernization program of the fleet in the Baltic Sea, the first line of defense for St. Petersburg. Moreover, the old Allied powers that had imposed the neutralization of the Black Sea were now preoccupied with other pressing diplomatic concerns. France and Prussia were quickly sliding toward war, and the need to keep Russia satisfied and out of the brewing conflict was increasingly felt in European capitals. In this atmosphere, in 1870 Gorchakov announced Russia’s unilateral withdrawal from the neutrality provision of the Paris treaty; the change was formally recognized by the great powers the next year. Russia was now able to place warships on the sea and reconstruct its coastal defenses. The navy also put in place a construction plan designed not only to reinstate Russia’s naval presence in the south but also to take advantage of new technologies: All new ships built for the Black Sea service were to be armored.6

  The change in the neutrality provision was also to the advantage of the Ottomans, who could now begin their own building program. One of the ironies of the Paris treaty was that, even though the Ottomans had been a victor power, the sultan had actually given up as much as the tsar, perhaps more. The prohibition on warships and coastal arsenals applied to Ottoman vessels as much as to Russian ones. Ottoman ports were formally declared open to all merchant ships, with the only permissible restrictions being for customs, policing, and quarantine. A new Danube Commission, established to ensure free navigation on the river, included all riparian states plus the Allied powers; Ottoman representatives were, therefore, only one of a number of delegates, even though almost all the river’s lower course lay within the empire. In exchange for these concessions, the Ottoman empire was at last recognized as a full player in the affairs of Europe, and its territorial integrity was guaranteed. (Even the latter provision came with an asterisk, however. The sultan agreed not to intervene militarily in the affairs of Moldova, Wallachia, and Serbia without the consent of the Allies.)

  Russia’s pressing for a change in the terms of the treaty thus also suited the interests of strategists in Istanbul. But whereas the Russians were able to capitalize relatively quickly on the chance to rebuild their naval forces, the Ottomans failed to do so. The process of naval modernization in the Ottoman empire had gone in fits and starts since the eighteenth century. Foreign advisers, mainly British, played a significant role, but the talents of these consultants were sometimes less than adequate. Finding seaworthy recruits was also a perennial problem. Sailors from the Aegean had long formed a significant component of Ottoman crews, but the independence of Greece in 1830 reduced that source. A series of stunning naval defeats not only destroyed parts of the Ottoman fleet in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, but also delivered a huge psychological blow to the naval establishment. During the Greek war of independence, the Ottoman Mediterranean fleet was annihilated at the battle of Navarino in 1827; that was followed less than three decades later by Sinop. Steam technology came only gradually. Successive sultans remained unconvinced that steamships were anything more than toys for tooling up the Bosphorus. Even when the decision was at last taken, in the 1840s, to begin the large-scale construction and purchase of steam warships, the Ottomans faced yet another difficulty: The main source of fuel—the coal mines along the Anatolian Black Sea coast—was controlled by British companies.7

  The two modernized navies at last had the chance to confront each other in the late 1870 s, but the encounter was not much more memorable than it had been in the conflict of the 1820 s, when there was virtually no engagement at all on the Black Sea.8 The Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8 began with Russian concerns for Christian populations in the Ottoman empire—partly a reflection of Russia’s view of itself as a guarantor of eastern Christendom, partly a convenient mask for imperial expansion. The Ottomans had ruthlessly suppressed an insurrection in Bulgaria,
and European capitals were filled with news of the atrocities committed by Ottoman troops and irregulars. Serbia, still nominally an Ottoman vassal, joined in to support the Bulgarians, and in April 1877 the tsar declared war as well.

  Conflict on the sea was limited. Despite the grand designs of the 1860 s and early 1870 s, the Russian Black Sea fleet was still unimpressive: only two new armored ships and several older corvettes.9 Most of the Russian navy was located in the Baltic, and the British, again supporting the Ottomans, made it clear that any attempt to transfer Russian forces to the Mediterranean would be blocked. There was little reason for the Russians to challenge that state of affairs. The Ottoman naval presence in the Black Sea theater amounted to a squadron on the Danube and at Istanbul. The rest of the fleet sat out the war in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.10

  The major Russian strategy in the early stages of the fighting was to secure the Danube, and that demanded little in the way of naval strength. Russian troops simply mined the lower section of the river. This had a doubly unfortunate effect on the Ottomans. It prevented Ottoman warships from getting upriver to resupply troops and keep the Russian land forces from pushing to the south, and it kept Ottoman river craft from escaping to the open sea. Ottoman ships and gunboats were soon picked off from the shore by Russian artillery. By late June 1877, the Russian army had crossed the river and advanced to the south, where it met up with troops from Balkan states now in full revolt against the sultan.11

  From that point, the war was an entirely land campaign, or two campaigns, in fact, one on either side of the sea. In the west, the Russian army and its Balkan allies pressed to the south, taking the key fortress at Plevna, one of the few decisive battles of the entire war, and marching across the Balkan mountains despite the onset of winter. Ottoman forces, widely dispersed and probably outnumbered by Russian, Romanian, Serbian, and Montenegrin troops, repeatedly failed in their efforts to retake lost ground. In the east, another Russian campaign pushed into Anatolia, taking the Ottoman fortress at Kars. In late January 1878, the Russian army controlled an offensive line all the way from the Black Sea to the Aegean and held several major fortresses in the south Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. The Ottomans sued for peace.

  The treaty of San Stefano, which formally ended the war, created a massive Bulgarian principality, a state that was still formally a dependency of the Ottomans but was, in practice, influenced by Russia. It also granted Russia possession of Kars and other fortresses in the east, including the important port at Batumi. As had happened earlier in the century, however, the European powers grew concerned about Russia’s rising influence in the Near East and held an international conference to revise the terms. The resulting treaty of Berlin whittled down the Bulgarian principality, but many of the other provisions of San Stefano remained in place. Some of the Ottomans’ strategic assets in the east, including Kars and Batumi, were again ceded to Russia. Serbia and Montenegro became independent, governed by their own royal houses. Romania, a state that had been formed from the voluntary union of Moldova and Wallachia already in 1859, was likewise recognized as sovereign; a German prince ruled as king. Russia’s holdings along the littoral now stretched all the way from the Danube delta, around the northern shore, to the last major port on the Caucasus coast, Batumi. Several significant territorial changes would come in the twentieth century—not least the creation of a larger independent Bulgaria early in the century and an independent Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia at the end—but for the most part the political shape of the modern Black Sea coast was created in 1878. Very quickly after that, Russians and others set about the task of fully integrating the littoral into the states and empires among which it was now divided.

  Steam, Wheat, Rail, and Oil

  If quarantine facilities were one of the chief determinants of a port’s success in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the coming of the railway was the equivalent from the mid-nineteenth century forward. Laying new rail was part of a broad project to modernize many of the coastal areas, in both the Russian and Ottoman lands.

  For Russia, the defeat in Crimea had been due in part to the inferior communication between the empire’s central regions and the coast, and a plan to improve both the ports and their connection to the hinterland was launched shortly after the war. Rail spurs and direct lines were built to inland cities, while new steamship lines, subsidized by the government, linked the ports with one another. The Ottomans, although on the winning side in Crimea, quickly came to understand that military victory was no guarantee of lasting power. Russian influence on the sea had been temporarily squelched, but Odessa and other northern cities remained centers of international commerce, in marked contrast to the generally underdeveloped Ottoman ports. Even Trabzon, revitalized by the overland trade with Persia in the early part of the century, was quickly falling behind the cities of southern Russia.

  The modernizing policies inaugurated by Sultan Abdülmecit I (reigned 1839–61)—which began the so-called Tanzimat (Reform) period in Ottoman history—were meant to change that situation. A new administrative province, or vilayet, was created along the Danube and the western coast in the 1860 s. A talented reformist administrator, Midhat Paşa (1822–84)—the equivalent of Richelieu and Vorontsov in New Russia—was appointed governor of the province and charged with building roads, bridges, and railways. The Tuna (Danube) vilayet soon became a model of Ottoman modernity, and its major port cities, Köstence and Varna, were meant to rival Odessa as international outlets for agricultural products from the western coast.12

  Between the 1860 s and the turn of the century, railways expanded rapidly. In Russia, lines were built first in the west, to Odessa, Nikolaev, and Kherson; connections in the east followed soon after. The Transcaucasus railway opened in 1885, linking Batumi with Baku on the Caspian Sea. By the early twentieth century, there was hardly a productive piece of territory in southern Russia that was more than 13 km from a railway.80 The Ottoman coasts were less well-endowed, but in the Tuna province, lines were laid from Köstence and Varna to towns on the Danube. (After 1878, with the emergence of independent Romania—which included part of the old Tuna vilayet—new foreign concessions were granted to expand the rail system pioneered by Midhat Paşa.)

  The coming of the railroad meant that port cities that had been backwaters before the Crimean war rapidly rose to prominence. Rostov, up the Don river from the site of the ancient Tanais, was no more than a village before the war, but it soon became an emporium for products from the steppe. Dredging allowed the navigation of large ships, and new loading facilities and quays made the city attractive to foreign businesses. Immigrants from other parts of Russia and from abroad flocked to the city. The seaport of Novorossiisk had been founded already in the 1830 s as a minor entrepôt for trade from the Kuban river region north of the Caucasus; but the completion of a railway line and harbor improvements in the 1880 s allowed the city to take off. By the end of the century, it was one of the leading export centers in the entire Russian south.

  Beyond the Caucasus mountains, the small port at Poti was designated the center of Russian trade along the borders with the Ottoman empire and Persia. In 1872 a rail line was completed between Poti and Tiflis, the seat of the Russian imperial viceroy in the Caucasus. Poti grew quickly, but it was soon outstripped by its neighbor just down the coast, Batumi. The building of a rail spur to the main Poti–Tiflis line allowed the city to become the most important port in the Russian Caucasus. What had been a small Ottoman town with little more than a few inns, coffee-houses, and a colorful bazaar before 1878 rapidly eclipsed Poti—and soon even Trabzon—as the major city on the southeastern sea. Even older towns that had long been dormant, such as Nikolaev and Kherson, were revived with the advent of rail. The growth in population in all the Russian ports, both old and new, was phenomenal. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Nikolaev’s population grew threefold, Odessa’s sixfold, Rostov’s tenfold.14

  On the water, the development of steam t
ransport, especially screw-driven ships that had begun to displace sailing vessels even before the Crimean war, meant that getting from one coastal city to another was easier than ever. Riverboats of the Austrian Steam Navigation Company ran down the Danube from Vienna, and ships of the Austrian Lloyd Company sailed from Trieste. By the early twentieth century, Italian, French, and German steam lines had established their own long-distance routes. In four weeks, one could travel from London to Odessa, with stops in Malta, Alexandria, Istanbul, and other Mediterranean ports.15 The Russian Steam Navigation Company, established with Tsar Alexander II’s imprimatur in 1857, ran routes that crisscrossed the sea. Regular circle lines took goods and passengers from Odessa as far east as Batumi, with calls at all the Crimean and Caucasus ports; river lines ran up the Dnepr. Once every two weeks, Russian ships docked at Trabzon and the other Ottoman ports.16

  The chief advantage of many of the Russian ports was their proximity to the fertile black-earth region, the heartland of the empire’s grain production. Already by the middle of the century, the Black Sea ports accounted for nearly two-thirds of Russia’s grain trade, including almost 90 percent of wheat exports.17 From the 1880 s to the First World War, Russia’s total output in cereals probably doubled, and the Black Sea ports became busy centers of commerce with Britain, France, Germany, and even farther afield.18 The opening of the Suez canal extended the Russian grain trade to the Far East—just as it undercut the importance of Trabzon as an overland route to Persia. In fact, given the ease of travel by sea and through the canal, the Black Sea ports also became Russia’s primary means of communicating with its own possessions in eastern Siberia and the Pacific littoral.