All this made the further existence of the Bulgarian people (with the exception of an insignificant top crust) under Ottoman domination unendurable and gave a powerful impetus to the Bulgarian national revolution. Two trends became manifest in the Bulgarian national-liberation movement during the second half of the 19th century: an evolutionary and a revolutionary one. The adherents to the evolutionary trend were representatives of the nascent Bulgarian big bourgeoisie, while those adhering to the revolutionary trend were mainly peasants and petty ar-tisans, i. e. the majority of the people.

The evolutionaries preached that Bulgaria's liberation would come about by peaceful means, through education, struggles for reforms, or through help from outside. Quoting the experience of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, some of them even upheld the idea of establishing a Turko-Bulgaria with the Sultan at its head. The Bulgarian people, however, were hostile to these ideas and regarded the revolutionary struggle as the only way to their salvation.

Georgi Stoikov Rakovski

The initiator of the organized Bulgarian national revolutionary movement was Georgi Stoikov Rakovski. He was born in 1821 in the town of Kotel and was nephew of the ardent Bulgarian patriot Georgi Mamarchev. His parents were rich people and Rakovski received one of the best educations of that time at the Greek school in Constantinople. In 1842 he made an abortive attempt to enter Bulgaria via Romania at the head of an armed detachment. Then he lived in Russia, Serbia and Romania and everywhere he developed energetic journalistic, literary and political activities in favour of the Bulgarian liberation cause. He published the newspapers Danubian Swan which came out in French in Belgrade, and BuduslitnosJ (The Future) which was published in Bucharest.

The failure of the attempted uprising during the Cri-mean War had convinced Rakovski that the Bulgarian people had to rely, above all, on themselves. He did not change the strategic plan of the preceding uprisings – namely, the connection between the uprisings and the entry of hostile armed forces into the Empire – but introduced a new content into it: the backbone of the uprising were no longer expected to be the hostile foreign forces, but Bulgarian military detachments, organized and trained abroad.

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