Abstract

This article examines the presence in Smolensk province of prisoners of war from the Ottoman army during the Crimean War (1853–1856). The episode is analyzed through the lens of the implementation of Russian legislation on prisoners of war and the mobilization of local resources and administrative practices for their material provisioning. The argument and conclusions rest chiefly on a comparative analysis of Russian legal norms governing prisoners of war and the office documentation produced by the provincial administrative institutions in Smolensk responsible for prisoners of war affairs. Where scholarship on prisoners of war has typically foregrounded foreign-policy considerations or the legal status of foreigners in the Russian Empire, this article instead focuses on prisoners’ material provision and their relations with the local population, examined through the prism of everyday interactions. The provisioning of prisoners of war coincided with the organization of the Smolensk state mobile militia, a conjunction that exacerbated the economic strain in an interior province on the eve of the abolition of serfdom. Ottoman prisoners were quartered only in two towns — Smolensk and Roslavl’ — yet, the author argues, even this limited provincial experience exposes systemic shortcomings in the captivity regime across the empire as a whole. That regime, drawing simultaneously on norms of military law and criminal-correctional legislation, nonetheless rested on an acknowledged principle of humanitarian treatment toward captives. Difficulties of material support for prisoners further illuminate mid-nineteenth-century fiscal relations between central and local organs of state authority and the mechanisms by which in-kind obligations were deployed to meet both local and state needs. Wartime pressures complicated these fiscal relations and effectively shifted responsibility for provisioning onto local resources. The material conditions of captivity, in turn, occasioned a number of quotidian conflicts between Ottoman prisoners and inhabitants of Smolensk province, even though relations overall remained largely peaceable.