The Bosnian question

The subject of the monograph is the situation of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Austro-Hungarian occupation (1878-1908) and the formation of the position of the Russian Foreign Ministry on the political status of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The formation of the foreign policy course in the St. Petersburg cabinet's Balkan policy on the Bosnian question was based on an in-depth analysis of the situation on the ground. The attention of Russian diplomats and statesmen was drawn to an original and constructive model for the integration of the newly-annexed territories, which had previously been part of the Ottoman state-political system. The specificity of the Austro-Hungarian administration's task was that the dualist monarchy received provinces with Muslim population, a complex tangle of ethnic and religious problems and traditions of almost 400 years of Ottoman state administration. The conducted study reveals some aspects of the formation of Bosnian statehood in the last third of the 19th and early 20th centuries: the change of the state idea from autonomy to integration into the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire.