What can the story of Russian evacuees in interwar Turkey tell us about changing attitudes toward refugees, belonging, and the nation-state after WWI? The arrival of so-called “White Russian” refugees in Turkey after the war is often remembered as a moment of “broad tolerance and historical hospitality.” In fact, Ankara’s policymaking toward incoming refugees from Russia was far more complicated than the “hospitality” narrative allows. Drawing upon materials from the Ottoman and Turkish Republican archives, as well as the archive of the League of Nations, this paper looks at Turkish and League policymaking toward Russian refugees after WWI. It begins with the arrival of more than 150,000 refugees from Russia in 1920, and ends in 1935 with the signing of a final agreement between Ankara and the League of Nations regarding the fates of the last remaining Russian refugees in Turkey. The term “White Russians” was more than just shorthand for Russian refugees. Rather, these words held considerable administrative and legal weight. In practice, the term “White Russians” was used almost exclusively in reference to Christians and Jews, while Muslim immigrants from Russia were provided with a clear path to Turkish citizenship. From the very beginning, the presence of Russian refugees on Turkish territory was a major bone of contention between the Ankara government and the allies during the negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Lausanne. From the mid-1920s onward, the Turkish government took an increasingly hostile stance toward the refugees, periodically threatening them with deportation to the Soviet Union. League of Nations officials, meanwhile, sought to “solve” what they often described as the Russian refugee “problem” through the contracts they signed with various countries seeking cheap labor. These agreements obliged repatriated refugees to work in a specific industrial or agricultural enterprise until their debt to the League, i.e. the cost of their re-settlement, had been repaid. Particularly after the onset of the Great Depression in October of 1929, it became increasingly difficult to find homes for the remaining refugees, who were often living in dire poverty in Istanbul. Following the apparent triumph of the idea of national self-determination and the nation-state, how were these stateless White Russians supposed to fit in internationally? Comparing the approaches of Turkish officials and League of Nations commissioners, I discuss what they tell us more broadly about changing views regarding refugees and belonging during the early years of post-empire.

The study of North Caucasians has long been limited to the field of Russian and Soviet studies, and is usually perceived through the lens of genocide, displacement, and the mythology surrounding Imam Shamil’s anticolonial struggle against the brutalities of the Russian Imperial Army. However, scholars have recently begun to give greater attention to the role of North Caucasians after their arrival to Ottoman lands. This paper will follow three North Caucasian soldiers who defected or fled from the Russian Imperial Army and served in the Ottoman military, ultimately achieving senior positions in the Ottoman imperial command structure. The first figure, Ghazi Muhammad, was the son of Imam Shamil, the famed pan-Islamic anticolonial hero, holy warrior, and Sufi sheikh of the early nineteenth century. Following his father's surrender to the Russians in 1859, Ghazi Muhammad left for the Ottoman Empire, where he became the leader of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s Dağıstan Alayı (“Dagestani Regiment”), an elite guard corps responsible for the direct protection of the Sultan. During the Russo–Ottoman War of 1877–1878, Ghazi Muhammad fought in opposition to his own brother, Muhammad Shafi, who continued as a Colonel in the Russian Army. The second figure, Muhammad Fazil, is also a descendant of Imam Shamil. After serving as an imperial guard in St. Petersburg, he resigned from the Russian Army in 1877. He then served in the Ottoman Army as a cavalry lieutenant and joined Ghazi Muhammad as a commander in the Dağıstan Alayı. Both were later exiled to Iraq by an increasingly paranoid Abdülhamid II, after which Muhammad Fazil became Mayor of Mosul in 1909. The third, Musa Kundukhov, was a Russian general who himself oversaw the deportation of North Caucasians, actively putting down Shamil’s resistance. In 1865 he resigned from the Russian Army and defected to the Ottomans. There, he oversaw a special unit composed exclusively of North Caucasians, known as the Asâkir-i Muâvine-i Çerâkise, which led the Ottoman Army’s 1877–78 Caucasus campaign. His son, diplomat Bekir Sami Kunduh, became Turkey’s first Foreign Minister in 1920. This paper will rely on a close reading of recently published Russian, Turkish, and Arabic academic scholarship on these figures. By unifying this scattered historiography, this paper aims to trace the little-known aftermath of Imam Shamil’s surrender as it played out within Ottoman domains.

Armenians and Jews experienced the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of successor nation states, and the violence inherent to this process, alongside one another. Their shared experiences of this transformation were concentrated in Istanbul, particularly in the districts of Balat, Ortaköy, and Galata, as this paper will demonstrate. Examining Armenian life and Jewish in these three districts elucidates the varied paths of the transformation enacted by the modernizing empire: Balat witnessed the effects of industrialization on workers, Ortaköy the interaction between imperial governance and missionary influence, and Galata the devastating transformations experienced amidst the concentration of capital. Using a digital map of Armenian and Jewish churches, synagogues, schools, cemeteries, hospitals and orphanages, this paper explores how these groups experienced, to different extents, the violence of massacre, war, genocide, and nation-state formation alongside one another, while also persisting in the activities that sustain everyday life such as selling bread, attending school, and celebrating holy days. This paper places Istanbul’s built environment that has survived the past century, historical maps, and memoirs of childhoods spent in these neighborhoods in conversation with one another in order to draw out everyday movements--market transactions, transportation routes, school commutes, bathing rituals, youth competitions, neighborly visits... These movements and observations in turn reveal the fluid identities inhabiting these neighborhoods during this period. Understanding these groups in relation to one another and tracing how they experienced everyday interaction, wartime precarity, and state violence alongside one another in the same time and place reveals the multiplicity of identities of people inhabiting the imperial center; the contradictory ways in which they were targeted by and implicated in regimes of violence; and the competing memories that emerged in the aftermath of this transition.

The story of the Arab Nahḍa (“Renaissance”) is dominated by the intellectual elite (Hourani 1962; Hill 2020). This paper, therefore, offers a microhistory of a relative nobody to shed light on the ordinary human experience and to illustrate how the commoner lived and learned, worked and worshiped during the long nineteenth century in late Ottoman Beirut. ʿAbdallah b. Qāsim Witwat was the oldest son of the first Druze convert to Protestantism. He received a missionary education, worked as a teacher and caster, expanded his intellectual horizons at learned societies, and practiced his Protestant faith until death. As a member of the American Protestant missionary circle and longtime congregant of the Syrian Ottoman Protestant community, Witwat was both a beneficiary of and contributor to the Arab Nahḍa. His life story echoes the experience of many men and women who navigated the transformational changes unfolding in Beirut. Religion, education, civil society, and culture are prevailing themes of the Nahḍa, and this deep history of an ordinary Protestant man illuminates how the prolonged moment of cultural revival, social reforms, and religious realignments played out at the ground level. This paper builds on recent scholarship of the early modern Middle East History that examines overlooked thinkers, the literate lives of the lower classes, and the foundational contributions of women to civil society (Zachs 2011; Lindner 2014; Sajdi 2013). Given then imbricated nature of socioeconomic and political relations during the Nahḍa between American Protestant missionaries and Ottoman Syrians (Lindner 2009; Womack 2019), it would be inaccurate to separate ʿAbdallah Witwat from the Protestant social and congregational landscape in Beirut. Missionary and church records constitute the extant archive and consequently inform this paper.