From partisan war to the ethnography of European Turkey: the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, 1790–1880. Issue 3 (2nd July 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Taki, Victor
• Is Part Of: Canadian Slavonic papers. Volume 58:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 257
• Page End: 285
• Publication Date: 2016-07-02
• Subjects: Russian–Ottoman wars -- the Balkans -- partisan warfare -- ethnography -- Ivan Liprandi; Slavic philology -- Periodicals; 891.8
• DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2016.1202428
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0008-5006

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Balkan entanglements of the Great Powers have long interested historians of war, diplomacy, and nation-building in South-Eastern Europe. Although tsarist officers played a central role in Russian policies in the region, historians have rarely treated their writings as expressions of specifically military concerns and preoccupations. The present article seeks to fill this gap by reconstructing the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, a Russian officer, partisan leader, and self-styled expert on the European part of the Ottoman Empire during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The article traces Liprandi's effort to turn his direct experience of partisan warfare into knowledge and place that knowledge at the disposal of the Russian military command. Liprandi's remarkable Balkan career testifies to the growing interest of the Imperial Russian military in the ethno-confessional profile and political attitudes of the local population as factors contributing to victory or defeat. Liprandi's statistical and ethnographic writings on the Balkans are also indicative of the nexus between the military and civilian forms of knowledge that emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.