What Was the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca?
On 21 July 1774, in a wooden house in the village of Küçük Kaynarca in northeastern Bulgaria (modern Kaynardzha), the Russian and Ottoman plenipotentiaries signed the peace that ended the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. The Russian delegation was led by Field Marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev’s trusted aide Alexander Obreskov; the Ottoman by Grand Vizier Muhsinzade Mehmed Pasha and Reis ül-Küttab Abdülhamid Han. The signature, at three in the morning after a series of all-night negotiations, gave Russia its first secure access to the Black Sea and made the Crimean Khanate independent of the Porte — a prelude, within nine years, to direct Russian annexation of the Crimea (see Figes, The Crimean War, 2010; Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 5th ed., 1993).
The war and the negotiations
The war began in October 1768 over a Russian incursion into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which the Porte claimed to be protecting. The Russian armies of Rumyantsev defeated Ottoman forces at Kagul and Larga in 1770, and the Russian Baltic fleet under Aleksei Orlov, joined by the Greek volunteers of the Orlov brothers’ Orlov Rising, destroyed the Ottoman navy at Çeşme on 5-7 July 1770. Suvorov’s 1773 storming of the Turkish fortress of Turtukai (Turtop) demonstrated the new aggressive Russian doctrine. By 1774 Russian forces were in Bulgaria and the strategic situation was such that the Porte had to negotiate.
The negotiations were held at the village of Küçük Kaynarca, close to the front, between July 10 and 21. They were interrupted by a Russian dragoon attack on the grand vizier’s baggage train, which almost produced a breakdown, and were eventually concluded by a final all-night session on 20-21 July.
The provisions
The treaty was made up of 28 articles and two separate conventions. The principal articles did four things:
- They ceded to Russia the interfluve between the Dnieper and the Southern Bug, including the fortress of Kinburn at the mouth of the Dnieper, the town of Azov, the fortress of Yenikale, and the town of Kerch.
- They opened the Black Sea to Russian merchant vessels and gave Russian ships free passage through the Ottoman Straits in peacetime.
- They recognised the independence of the Crimean Khanate, with the deposed Khan Sahin Giray to be returned and Shagin Giray elevated — a settlement that lasted barely five years before Catherine absorbed the khanate in 1783-1784.
- They placed the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire under the protection of the Russian state, and gave Russia the right to build a church of the Russian rite in Constantinople.
The “protection of Orthodox Christians” clause (Article 7) would be the single most-cited article of the treaty in nineteenth-century Russian diplomacy. A separate convention gave Russia a war indemnity of 4.5 million rubles and the Kabardine lands on the Kuban.
The impact
The treaty transformed the strategic position of the Russian state. For the first time, Russia was a sea power on the Black Sea; the new Russian Black Sea fleet was built at Kherson and then Sevastopol, and Catherine’s favourite Grigory Potemkin organised the annexation of the Crimea in 1783-1784, the construction of Kherson, the founding of the city of Odessa in 1794, and the expansion of the Russian position into the Caucasus.
The treaty’s diplomatic consequences reached further. The Article 7 right of protection became the standard Russian justification for intervention in the Ottoman Balkans through the 1820s, 1870s, and 1910s. The opening of the Black Sea to Russian merchant shipping tied the South Russian wheat economy to the Mediterranean grain trade and made the Black Sea a Russian lake for the next century.
The legacy
The treaty was widely read at the time as a vindication of Catherine’s “Greek Project” — the scheme, of which her lover Potemkin was the executor, of replacing the Ottoman presence in southeastern Europe with a Russian-led constellation of Greek and Slavic states. The project never quite worked, but the Russian position in the Black Sea that the treaty inaugurated lasted until the destruction of the Black Sea Fleet’s main base at Sevastopol in 1854-1855 and the partial neutralisation of the Black Sea in the 1856 Treaty of Paris.