Unspeakable Turkish Barbarity and Brutality

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 10 pages

A letter to the editor of The World in New York, dated August 1877, and unlike almost everything else in the library it is journalism rather than doctrine. The Russo-Turkish War was three months old, the Ottoman government had appealed to American opinion against Russian conduct, and Blavatsky wrote to answer it — with the memories of Bulgaria and Servia still fresh, she calls the appeal the climax of daring hypocrisy, referring to the reports of Eugene Schuyler and other observers on the atrocities of the Bashi-Bazouks.

What gives the letter its standing is her sources. She had daily papers from St Petersburg, Moscow, Tiflis and Odessa, and an uncle, a cousin and a nephew in active service — General Rostislav de Fadeyev, her mother's brother, among them — with nearly every steamer bringing eyewitness accounts. Her cousin and nephew had fought in the Armenian campaign up to the siege and capture of Ardahan. Newspapers, she writes, may suppress, colour or exaggerate facts; the private letters of brave soldiers to their families rarely do. It is a rare view of Blavatsky as a Russian writing about a Russian war, and the partisanship is open rather than concealed.

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