This article will concentrate on the interactions between White Russian émigrés and the local population of Istanbul and how the White Russian immigration influenced Turkish nationalist rhetoric in the 1920s. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, approximately 150.000 people left the Russian Empire and found a new home in Istanbul. These immigrants included a large number of aristocrats, artists, and anti-Bolshevik intellectuals fleeing from the Russian Civil War that continued into the mid-1920s. For most of these Russian émigrés, Istanbul was a transit point before they finally reached major European or American cities. Only a small number of Russian émigrés stayed in Turkey for more than a few years. Despite their relatively short stay, “the White Russians,” as they were known, left a lasting imprint especially in the cultural life of Istanbul in the 1920s. On the other side of the coin, for the people of Istanbul, the 1920s was a transitory period from empire to nation-state, and the White Russians often appeared in nationalist texts as objects of pity or of suspicion, and their situation was regarded as a warning that the remaining population of the collapsed Ottoman Empire should draw lessons from. The sources for this research will be derived from Turkish newspapers of the mentioned period and memoirs of Russian émigrés. By doing this, the article aims to examine Turkish perceptions and treatment of Russian émigrés from both perspectives. The article hopes to shed light on the formative years of the Republic of Turkey from a different and little studied angle.

The aim of my paper is to examine how the Turkish resistance movement emerged in Istanbul, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, which came under Allied occupation following the First World War. The formation of this movement will be analyzed in the broader context of Turco-Soviet relations after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. More specifically, I will examine the development of a rapprochement between the Bolsheviks and the Unionists, i.e. the members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) that had ruled the Ottoman Empire in an authoritarian manner during the First World War. Although the CUP was formally abolished in November 1918, the Unionists maintained the integrity of the organization while laying the foundations of a national resistance against the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile they saw the Bolshevik Russia as a potential ally. There is a considerable literature on the rise of a Bolshevik-Unionist alliance and its strategic results for the Greek-Turkish military confrontation in Anatolia (1919-1922). Yet the consequences of this process for the occupied Istanbul form a subject that has not been thoroughly researched. My paper will address this topic by focusing on the efforts of the Unionist leaders in Istanbul to draw on the support of the Bolsheviks in their struggle against the British, French, and Italian occupation. One of the most important findings of my research is that the development of the Bolshevik-Unionist relations enabled the nascent Turkish communist movement to take initiative in the formation of an underground resistance in Istanbul soon after the Allied powers established military control over the city in March 1920. Most active in this process were the agents dispatched by the Turkish Communist Organization (TCO) to the Ottoman capital. The TCO had been founded in Russia under the patronage of the Bolshevik Party and its headquarters had been moved from Odessa to Baku in May 1920.

“The East’s Eastern Front: the Ottoman-Russian Clash in the Great War and Its Legacy” Abstract: This article provides an overview of the Ottoman-Russian struggle on the Caucasian front in WWI from 1914 to 1918 and its significance. It discusses the motives and objectives of the two states going into the war, summarizes the fighting, and evaluates the impact of the war upon Anatolia, the Caucasus, and the globe more generally. Although largely ignored as a secondary or even tertiary front by historians, the Caucasus front profoundly influenced the outcome of World War I and its aftermath. With the Entente and Central Powers evenly matched and bogged down in stalemate in Europe, the Caucasus front took on an unexpected significance. The Ottomans’ entry into the war not only forced Russia to fight on another front and thereby prolonged the conflict for all, but their closure of the Black Sea Straits also subjected the Russian Empire to intense economic strain, helping push Russia into revolution in 1917 and opening the way to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power later that year. The collapse of Russian might in 1918 was a geopolitical watershed. It, combined with the Ottomans’ earlier wholesale destruction of the Armenians, allowed the Ottomans and then Turkish nationalists to redraw the map of the Caucasus and Anatolia, first to create the new states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and later to establish the Turkish Republic. Similarly, it allowed Iran in the same period to regain its independence. The article will draw upon primary and secondary sources from the Ottoman and Russian empires and their successor states as well as the most recent scholarship on World War I.

The relations between the Bolshevik Russian government and the Turkish national liberation movement headed by Mustafa Kemal constitute a well-studied aspect of history. When the fate of the Turkish liberation movement seemed bleak in 1920, the leaders of the movement tried hard to establish links with the Bolshevik government, which had barely consolidated its power in Russia after a devastating civil war and was looking for allies to secure its existence. The Bolshevik government, however, was not the only Russian power that the Turkish nationalists had to consider in those years. While the Civil War in Russia was continuing, the Turkish nationalists contacted the anti-Bolshevik forces in Southern Russia under the command of Baron Piotr Nikolaevich Vrangel in order to gain support and when these forces were evacuated to Turkey they tried to prevent the use of these large and battle-hardened forces against the nascent Turkish resistance movement. Using the intelligence reports submitted to the Ankara government, this paper analyzes how the Turkish nationalists interacted with different parties involved in the Russian Civil War and how it adjusted its policies according to the fast-changing political events in the world and on Anatolian lands. While the stay of Russian soldiers as refugees in Turkey was only mentioned in the memoirs of the Russian émigrés, their presence in the occupied territories of Turkey had been an important issue for the Allied, Turkish Nationalist and Soviet authorities at the time. The documents analyzed in this paper provide new insight into this utterly neglected event and also into the development of the relations between the Turkish nationalists and the Bolsheviks in the decisive period of 1920 – 1921.