April Uprising of 1876

a national-liberation and antifeudal uprising in Bulgaria from Apr. 18 to May 23, 1876. Preparations for it were made by the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee, located at Giurgiu in Rumania, and by revolutionary committees in Bulgaria. It began before the appointed date, May 1, 1876, because of the danger that the leaders might be arrested as a result of betrayal. It attained its broadest scope in southern Bulgaria, where the main centers of the uprising, headed by T. Kableshkov, G. Benkovski, and others, were the cities of Panagyurishte and Koprivshtitsa and the villages of Batak and Perushtitsa. However, the poorly armed units of the rebels were smashed by the Turkish troops and bashi-bazouks. In other parts of the country the uprising was limited to scattered actions by small units, which were also smashed. The concluding event in the April uprising was the landing on May 17 near the village of Kozlodui of the rebel unit (cheta) of Kh. Botev, which had been organized in Rumania. The rebel troop marched as far as the town of Vrattsa, and near there it, too, was annihilated by the Turkish authorities. During the April uprising the upper bourgeoisie of Bulgaria took a hostile attitude toward it. There are two points of view in contemporary historical science about the role of other social groups in the uprising. Some historians, such as A. Burmov, Kh. Gandev, and D. Kosev, regard the April uprising as the culmination of a peasant movement whose leadership was in the hands of the intelligentsia. Others, such as S. A. Nikitin and N. Todorov, see the moving forces of the April uprising as the peasantry and the artisans, with the leadership in the hands of representatives of the petite and middle bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. In spite of the defeat, the April uprising shook the Turkish feudal domination in Bulgaria, and the savage way in which the uprising was suppressed sharply increased tensions in international relations and served as one of the causes for the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, as a result of which Bulgaria was liberated from Turkish rule.