This paper explores Cengiz Dağcı’s and Abdullah Kadiri’s portrayal of the experiences of Muslim Turks in lands annexed by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. At first glance, Cengiz Dağcı’s Onlar Da İnsandı, which depicts the bewildering changes in the lives of a group of rural Crimean Tatar villagers in the year leading up to their forced departure from the author’s own village and its fertile lands overlooking the Black Sea, and Abdullah Kadiri’s Ötgen Künler, which foregrounds the love story of Atabek and Gümüş while also portraying the civil strife between the rulers and the people of Tashkent in the early 1800’s, do not appear to have much in common. Yet, I will argue that both novelists articulate a localized Muslim literary response to what they regarded as an “inhumane” colonization of land, infrastructure, and culture on the part of the Russians. Through comparative textual analysis I will demonstrate how the ambivalent ideological discourse of both novels regarding the “most appropriate” response to the uninvited Russian presence not only reflects the authors’ desire to understand exactly how and why the Crimean Tatars/Uzbeks succumbed to the Russians, but also expresses their analysis of the ways in which the ideals held by the Turkic Muslim Jadid reformers and the Russian Communists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when actually implemented, might converge or clash. The novels’ exploration of Tatars/Uzbek’s culpability in their own political victimization, in particular, is framed in a manner that complicates Islam’s traditional call to welcome the guest and refrain from judging “the Other” while still pointing a critical finger at oneself. Likewise, the question of whether to damn the Russian himself along with his bad behavior is framed in moral terms (and goes unanswered). As such, Cengiz Dağcı’s and Abdullah Kadiri’s literary works offer a unique vantage point from which to view the particular dynamics of their peoples’ geo-political loss and cultural recovery.