Summary: The aim of the study is to identify the peculiarities in the disclosure of the relationship between the head of the Principality of Bulgaria Ferdinand I Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and the Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov in Russian scholarly discourse. The main task is to identify the circumstances which influenced the interpretation of this problem by researchers. The novelty here consists in revealing the trends that characterised Russian historical studies on Bulgaria, by using the examination of the relationship between Ferdinand and Stefan Stambolov as an example, as well as the circumstances of the formation of certain evaluative approaches of the authors within the framework of this topic.
Russian scholars recognised the fact that the Bulgarian monarch was entirely dependent on the will of the Prime Minister until he gained control of the state’s armed forces. Practically all researchers who studied the political history of Bulgaria in the second half of the 1880s and early 1890s agreed that the removal of Stambolov had a positive influence on relations between St Petersburg and Sofia. They regarded the Prime Minister as a major barrier to the restoration of bilateral diplomatic relations between the states.
Keywords: Prince Ferdinand, Stefan Stambolov, Russian historiography, scholarly dis¬course
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