[1][2][3] According to the official Russian position, by signing the treaty, Russia had never intended anything more than a temporary rough draft, so as to enable a final settlement with the other Great Powers.

Turkey recognized the independence of Romania (Article 5) while the latter gained Northern Dobruja from Russia (to which it was transferred from the Ottoman Empire) and ceded Southern Bessarabia in a forced exchange.

In exchange for war reparations, the Sublime Porte ceded Armenian and Georgian territories in the Caucasus to Russia, including Ardahan, Artvin, Batum, Kars, Olti, Beyazit, and Alashkert.

The Albanians, dwelling in provinces controlled by the Ottoman Empire, objected to what they considered a significant loss of their territory to Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro and realized they would have to organize nationally to attract the assistance of foreign powers seeking to neutralize Russia's influence in the region.

[11] In the "Salisbury Circular" of 1 April 1878, the British Foreign Secretary Robert Cecil, made clear his and his government's objections to the Treaty of San Stefano and the favorable position in which it left Russia.

According to British historian A. J. P. Taylor, writing in 1954: "If the treaty of San Stefano had been maintained, both the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary might have survived to the present day.

[22][18][13][16][23] Indzhev, in particular, notes that by eliminating IRO's ideologue and leader, hellbent on liberation "by own means" and maligning the 19th-century Bulgarian bourgeoisie (e.g., Stoyan Chomakov), which favoured gaining autonomy by working together with the Ottoman authorities, Ignatyev's work blocked both Bulgaria's "revolutionary" and "evolutionary" path of development, which made "liberation by Russia", the scenario giving Russia direct control over Bulgarian affairs, the only option left.

[26][27][28] The Ottoman inability to restore social order was a direct cause of the Bulgarian April Uprising of 1876, whose bloody suppression generated widespread indignation and condemnation in Europe.

The Russian Empire, in turn, pledged not to create a large Slavic state but only two independent principalities or two autonomous Ottoman vilayets (the version varies depending on language) north and south of the Balkan Range.

After comparing the dates of signing of the Budapest Convention (15 January 1877) and Grand Vizier Midhat Pasha's refusal (18 January 1877) to accede to the Great Powers' proposal at the Constantinople Conference for the creation of two autonomous Bulgarian vilayets and taking into account Ignatyev's own memos in his 1875–1878 Diaries, among other things, his allegation that"The Ottoman Sultan trusts the Russian ambassador fully" (pp.

72–73), the insistence that "the Bulgarians... should be turned into an obedient tool of Russian policy and into our permanent allies by annihilating any option for them to cross to the enemy side" (pp.

"if the nations that rebelled against the Turks fall under Western rather than our influence, the situation on the Balkans will become far more untenable for Russia than it is now" (p. 58), etc.and after analysing the Great Power that would benefit most from sabotaging the Constantinople Conference, they conclude that the culprit must be The Russian Empire.

The inability to subjugate the Bulgarians to its long-term goals and policy and the desire to keep Western influence out of the Balkans are argued to be the very reasons for Russia's unwillingness to commit to the proposals of the Conference.

In particular, Aleksandar Tatsov, Yanko Gochev, Plamen Tzvetkov and Alexander Yordanov have referred to the Balkan Wars in which the false belief of several successive Russophile cabinets that "Russia will help Bulgaria because it did so in San Stefano" essentially made the country's entire future dependent on a foreign power that had anathemised the Unification of Bulgaria, invited the Ottoman Sultan to reconquer Eastern Rumelia and organised a coup against the Bulgarian Prince only three decades earlier.

[13] Finally, Tsvetkov bluntly states that unless Bulgarian society overcomes what he refers to as "its San Stefano inferiority complex" and "self-degrading Russophilia", he is not optimistic about the future of the country.

[32] In that connection, quite notably and despite being unaware of either the Reichstadt and Budapest Treaties or Count Ignatyev's Diaries, the Bulgarian statesman and long-standing Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov held similar beliefs as early as the 1880s.

Akunin in general sticks to known historical facts, though he attributes some acts to fictional characters such as his recurrent protaginist Erast Fandorin.