Soviet power prevented Turkish slavery in the Caucasus and Central Asia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The main reason for the outbreak of the First World War is the desire of the leading powers, primarily Germany, England, France and Austria-Hungary, to redistribute the world. The leading European countries, which for years prospered through the exploitation of colonies, now could not get resources just like that, taking them away from the Indians, Africans and South Americans. Now resources could only be won back from each other. The overseas territories of Germany - Ethiopia, Somalia, although they provided raw materials, but transportation through the Suez Canal, cost 10 francs per ton of cargo. The contradictions increased, the priorities were outlined in the official historiography:

Between England and Germany. England sought to prevent the strengthening of Germany's influence in the Balkans. Germany sought to gain a foothold in the Balkans and the Middle East, and also sought to deprive England of naval domination.

Between Germany and France. France dreamed of regaining the lands of Alsace and Lorraine, which it had lost in the war of 1870-71. France also sought to seize the German Saar coal basin.

Between Germany and Russia. Germany sought to take Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states away from Russia.

Between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The contradictions arose because of the desire of both countries to influence the Balkans, as well as the desire of Russia to subjugate the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.

But the question of Germany's plans to colonize the Central Asian region and the Caucasus is not being considered at all. The ambitious plans of the Germans to conquer the East had as their first goal the plan of the Berlin-Baghdad railway. When the British successes cut off this plan and southern Russia fell victim to German influence, Berlin-Baghdad was postponed in favor of a plan to revive the ancient route through the highlands of Central Asia: Berlin-Bukhara-Beijing. Whatever the ultimate fate of German activity in the East, it, at least, helped to activate the British in Persia, against the so-called "Panturan question".

The Panturan movement, supported by the most aggressive part of Turkish and German public opinion, is a diplomatic activity, the purpose of which is to subjugate the Ottoman Turks directly, and indirectly to the Germans all those countries in which various Turkic languages are spoken. Although its goal is probably strategic and economic - the acquisition of the cotton of Turkestan, the gold of Altai and the wealth of Central Asia in general - it is hidden under the cover of the alleged aspirations of various peoples between Thrace and Mongolia for racial and national unity. The attached map in the title vividly illustrates the territorial ambitions of both Germany and Turkey.

July 8, 1916 The Russian consul in Isfahan got hold of documents of extreme importance: the text of instructions from Berlin to German and Turkish agents of July 1915, set out in Persian on 30 pages. (Appendix A). At the same time, boxes with secret documents of secret German agents Vasmus and Puzhen were detained in Shiraz. The documents expose the activities of the German-Turkish adventure in Persia, and illuminate all the consistent and persistent work of Germany and Turkey in Central Asia. Germany promises Turkey a quarter of the indemnity from France and from all Muslim countries united under the rule of the Turkish caliph.

According to the Russian Statistical Committee, there are about 250,000,000 rubles of German capital in the banks of Russia, and they use this capital to turn over 4 billion rubles. The Germans have one percent of this capital 160,000,000 a year. Because of German capital, the entire Russian industry is under the yoke of the Germans. It was the industrialists who provoked the Edition of the Tsar's Decree on June 25, 1916, on the involvement of the inhabitants of the Caucasus and Turkestan in rear work, instead of workers from enterprises. This decree caused massive discontent among the indigenous people, including armed clashes in the above-mentioned areas. The secret "goal" of the Decree is to free Central Asia from the dependence of Russia by the hands of the natives themselves and to give it to the "tender paws" of the Turkish janissaries.

The coming February revolution cancels all tsarist decrees in relation to the indigenous inhabitants of Turkestan, allowing them to return to their homes. The disintegration of the central power of Russia, caused movements to numerous autonomies, left open the way for the activities of the Panturan propagandists, who, it seems, were successfully restrained by the revolution at its first stage. The Turkic population of Russia is no more uniform in political opinion than the Slavic or other peoples, and thus the reactionary part of them was directed by the mullahs, and less and less influenced by the Russian and more Central Asian culture, which formed opposition to the Mohammedan federalists.

Meanwhile, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which ceded the territories of Ardahan, Batum and Kars (belonging to Russia only since 1877) to Turkey, was the first step towards the realization of the Panturan dream. The population of the region - Armenians (two million), Georgians (two million), Azerbaijan (two million) and Russians (one million) - refused to accept the treaty (see New Europe, July 25, 1918). However, the Caucasian Tatars soon abandoned the cause of the "Transcaucasian republic" for the sake of the upcoming Panturan alliance. The Georgian-Armenian troops were defeated, and the country was divided into "independent" Georgia (May 26, 1918) with its capital in Tiflis, "independent" Armenia, consisting of the Armenian lands around Erivan, and "independent" North Azerbaijan, whose capital, Tabriz, was occupied by the Turks.

This easy success ignited the conquests of the Turkic militarists. The popular newspaper of the Committee for Union and Progress, Tasvir-e-Efkiar, dated April 15, contained an excerpt (quoted in the Cambridge Journal of August 24, 1918):

“To penetrate in one direction into Egypt and open the way to our fellow believers, on the other side - the offensive on Kars and Tiflis, the liberation of the Caucasus from Russian barbarism, the occupation of Tabriz and Tehran, the opening of the road to Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and India - this is the task which we took upon ourselves. We will complete this task, with the help of Allah, with the help of our Prophet and thanks to the union imposed on us by our religion. … …

It is noteworthy that Turkey's desire for expansion to the East was supported in the press by opposing political views. Thus, Tasvir-e-Efkiar, Sabah and the government body Tanin supported him as well as opposition newspapers Ikdani and Zeman, although the latest press was not so picky about whether they would use Central Powers or Allied support for the implementation of their plans (see "New Europe", August 15, 1918). The German-Russian supplementary treaty exacerbated the clash between Ottoman and German Eastern politics (The Times, September 10, 1918). Germany realizes that its political and commercial interests in the East to some extent depend on the goodwill of non-Turkic residents of Transcaucasia, Persia and Turkestan, whom the Osmanli tend to ignore. In addition, it contradicted her goals to divert the Ottoman armies from the re-conquest of Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine.

This explains Berlin's warm patronage of the new Georgian Republic (The Times of June 19, 1918) and the outrage of the German press at the "growing demands of Pan-Turkism" "(Meinchener Post, June 19, 1918); Deutsche Tageszeitung, June 5, 1918; and Kreuzzeitung, July 16, 1918). The Frankfurter Zeitung (May 2, 1918; cited by the Cambridge Journal of July 27, 1918) states that “The Baghdad Railway is of infinitesimal value compared to the traffic that needs to be organized from the Black Sea to the interior of Asia. These routes are designed to revolutionize the world's brand.”

There is no doubt that the presence of British troops in Near Asia was the only obstacle to the German plan to connect Berlin with Baghdad or even Simla. But while German newspapers played with schemes such as Berlin-Baghdad and Hamburg-Herat - schemes that sound the most fantastic under the circumstances - their commercial agents were fully aware of the opportunities presented to them by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

The Peace of Brest-Litovsk was followed by the distribution of the tsarist, landlord and German lands (in the cities it was accompanied by the June 1918 decree on the complete nationalization of large industrial enterprises), and from the point of view of the peasantry, the entire foreign policy of Soviet power was henceforth to focus on the defense of peasant gains. This was a foreign policy task, not just an internal one. It was to be realized, firstly, in the struggle against external forces, the forces of intervention, and, secondly, in the struggle against counter-revolutionary forces.

What does the Soviet government promise to the peoples of the East? “It would be a mistake,” Radek said and wrote, “to see in the revolution developing in the east as a bourgeois revolution. It will eliminate feudalism, create in the beginning a class of small landowners, and the European proletariat will help make the transition from petty-bourgeois conditions of existence to higher collectivist ones, avoiding the period of capitalist exploitation."

But the immediate danger of Panturanism, to stop the expansion of Turkey into Central Asia, to prevent it from gaining a foothold on the borders, the Soviet government concluded treaties with Afghanistan and Persia. Clause VI of the treaty with Persia stipulated that in the event that any third power pursues a policy of annexation on the territory of Persia by military methods or makes Persia a base for military operations against the RSFSR, the latter, after warning, has the right to send its troops into Persian territory. This military alliance is the main element of the treaty.

Military operations to liberate the Caucasus from Turkish troops and from bandit formations in Central Asia under the leadership of Turkish instructors have already been described in detail in historiography, therefore, they are not considered in this article, so there is still a great need to clarify the true ethnological facts of this problem.

As for the Turkish people or the Ottoman Turks, they are considered in several publications during the First World War, namely in the book by Sir William Ramsay "Mixing Races in Asia Minor" (Oxford University Press, 1916), Professor H. A. Gibbon " Founding of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 1916), Lord Eversley's The Turkish Empire: Its Rise and Decline (Fischer Unwin, 1917) and Le Probleme Turc by Count Lion Ostrog. Although these books do not primarily deal with the issue of race, they provide a vivid picture of the diversity of races living under Ottoman (Ottoman) rule and the artificiality of the bonds that unite them. Sir William Ramsay goes on to tell us how the Osmanli government tried to develop feelings of unity and patriotism among its subjects through a shared participation in the Islamic religion. But pan-Islamism - Islam, which is not exclusively the property of the Turks - by itself would hardly have contributed to the strengthening of the positions of the Turkic elements of the empire against the Arab and other Turanian peoples. It is not so easy to single out the Turanian element in modern Turks, given that a thousand-year filtration with other peoples of Asia Minor and five centuries of stay in Europe had such an impact on the ruling Osmanl classes that they completely lost contact with the Turkic masses, subject to their domination, and those, again, having mixed and come into contact with the races of Asia Minor and Southeast Europe, have lost the Asiatic character that they once possessed. However, the upper classes of the Ottoman Empire did not become fully Europeanized, as the Hungarians did in similar conditions, and, therefore, their chances of assimilating the lands and peoples they conquered in Europe almost did not exist even before the Balkan War. After this war, the Ottomans had no choice but to turn to Asia, which they see as a country of expansion and compensation for what they lost in Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, according to statistics, the Turks were only 16%, the rest of the element in the Ottoman Empire is the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor and many other nationalities. Consequently, a justification for such a change in policy was necessary, and it was easily found in the so-called principle of self-determination of nationalities. The Osmanli proclaimed themselves one nationality with the peoples of the Far Eastern lands of Turkestan, Dzungaria and the Siberian steppes, and this artificiality is fueled only by Islam, when the Turkish sultans were the spiritual leaders of the Mohammedans for three centuries. In many cases, this propaganda takes a naive form.

It can be argued that there is something in the political atmosphere of our century that makes people seem to return to past centuries. Everyone who has a relationship with both Europe and Asia, it seems, is now ready to lay claim to their Asian blood, as the Bulgarians, Hungarians and Siberian Russians do.

But in the case of the Ottomans, the sincerity of such a movement becomes questionable when one considers that the Ottoman intelligentsia until now has never felt as one, even with its own Ottoman common people. Thus, they never passed, like the educated classes of European countries, going through the stage of "folklorization" and "nationalization" due to contact with the masses, who, due to their backwardness, are increasingly preserving their national traditions. Even the Young Turk revolution did not lead to the destruction of caste differences, and it was, in fact, like all other events in the political history of the Ottoman Empire, a simple imitation of Western nations, and not a spontaneous outburst of national sentiment against the imperialist government. There is no doubt that such a truly national movement began when, a few years before the Balkan War, a literary attempt was made under the leadership of Zia Bey, Ahmed Shinassi Bey and Namyk Kemal Bey to cleanse the Ottoman language from its Arabic and Persian admixtures.

It is noteworthy that two of these leaders, Zia Bey (later Pasha) and Kemal Bey, after being expelled from Turkey by Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz for their political ideas, found refuge in London. But before their brilliant work led to any literary renaissance or social revolution, the movement was halted by subsequent political action by the Young Turks, or, strictly speaking, by the Union and Progress Committee (Ittihad), after successfully eliminating the influence of a healthier a rival group, the Committee for Unity and Freedom (Ittilaf) - of Pan-Islamic propaganda - being associated with the Arabic language and culture - when this party was carried out in non-Turkic Islamic countries, it contradicted the attempts of literary reformers to free themselves from foreign culture. Meanwhile, the political and economic dependence on Germany, imposed by the ruling classes on the Ottoman country, did not contribute to the further development of language and other internal reforms.

And it so happened that even before Turkey managed to free itself from its obligations to Europe, Persia and Arabia, it fell victim to ambitions on which nothing depends except the outcome of the war and the fate of a peaceful settlement.

When various European institutions emerged in the Ottoman state after the Young Turkish Revolution, the Academy of Turkish Science ("Turk Bilji Dernayi") was established, which uses research from English, French, German, Russian and other European scholars to implement Osmanli's political plans. Thus, all attempts to find out what the culture of the Turks was in their original home and in pre-Mohammedan times, and what remnants of this culture and the old race exist, are interpreted by the Young Turks in such a way as to support the hypothesis of the racial identity of the Osmanls with the Eastern Turks. It seems almost cruel that the process of nationalization begun among the educated Osmanli classes must be stopped by a new "revival", which, by its very artificiality, disrupts the natural development of Osmanli. Just as the first movement led to the replacement of the name "Turks" with the name "Osmanli", so now, with the growth of political dreams centered on Central Asia, the name "Turks", in turn, was left for a name with a more Asian sound. namely. "Turan". Using this word, the Osmanli intend to emphasize their claim to descend in a straight line from the people who left behind ancient archaeological remains in Turan (Central Asia).

The semi-legendary kings and leaders of the Turks in Asia were presented by the propagandists to the Turkish soldiers as ancestor heroes - not to mention such historical figures as Attila and Timur. On the other hand, the legend, found by European researchers among many Asian Turks, that they descended from a she-wolf, has now served as an excuse for abandoning the Turkish standards of the Mohammedan Crescent in favor of the Premagometan Turkish wolf. The legend, which has several versions common among the Turks and Mongols of Central Asia, tells that a white she-wolf - or possibly a woman named Xena (sometimes Bura), which means "she is a wolf" - found and raised an abandoned child - a man who became the ancestor of the Turks (or in the Mongolian version, the Mongols). This explains the appearance of this animal on the military standards of the imitated Osmanli during the current war. Although the Osmanlis took this legend as originally Asian, recent research seems to support de Guigne's theory that it was of European origin and was introduced to Asia by the Huns. Assuming that the Huns were of Turkic origin, de Guignes believes that when they were defeated in Europe and retreated across the Volga, Ural and Altai to Turan, they brought with them the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus and gave it a Turkic character, linking it to local Turkic traditions, so they could not help but know what it was. Subsequently, it was accepted as if it were of local origin.

This is the story of one of the "historical legacies" claimed by the Osmanli. But, in fact, a more modern version of the origin of the Turks is the one that deduces their tribes from Ogus-Khan, the son of Kara-Khan, the grandson of Dik-Bakui, the great-grandson of Abulji-Khan, who was a direct descendant of Noah. This, at least, is the version given in one of the first attempts to record Turkic myths associated with their origin. (?)

If from the field of mythology we turn to the physical or racial side of the issue, then we will be perplexed as to why the compilers of the Panturan propaganda completely ignore the fact that in the veins of the Ottomans there is now more Albanian, Slavic, Thracian and Circassian blood than Turanian the culture is more Arab, partly Persian and European than Central Asian, and that even in the language historically collected from the European peoples and peoples of Muslim countries, the divergence is no less wide than can be found among the languages of the German family. All differences are ignored, and linguistic similarities are amplified to linguistic identity.

It should be noted that the total number of Turks here is exaggerated by about twenty million and that the term "nation" is used somewhat vaguely. It is quite obvious that several Turkic peoples, with whom the author of "The Turks of Central Asia" M. A. Chaplitskaya had the opportunity to meet in Asia, would be surprised if someone proposed to unite them into one local group based on some distant tradition. … Thus, they would not understand any reason for a voluntary union, even with the Turks of European Russia, let alone even lesser known people. The local national awakening of the peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan cannot be ignored, but now there is no moral connection that would unite these groups.

Some conclusions.

From this review of archaeological, historical and ethnological evidence, it becomes apparent that the Asia Minor Turks can be considered a remnant of the ancient Turkic race, which went through various changes in Central Asia. The Iranians in Turkey are much closer to the Turanians than the Turks themselves. This applies even more to those Turks who have gone through several more "racial filtrations" and environmental influences, namely the Azerbaijani and Ottoman Turks. In fact, if it were not for their Turkic language, the Osmanly would have to be classified among the Europeans "by adoption" as Hungarians or Bulgarians.

The mythical or artificial nature of one of those pompous terms that begin with the words "Pan": it is one thing to desire conquest and expansion, quite another to claim land on the basis of ethnic and traditional succession. Linguistic relations were often used and misused as a call to subjugate a weaker race to a stronger one. However, the fact remains: if there is no community other than distant linguistic relations, then there should be no community of interests at all. Of course, the Turkic people of Central Asia, although numerous, but divided into small peoples, may be at the mercy of a stronger invader; and if the course of this war or the Russian revolution will lead to such a situation, then he can be subordinated to such power by political means. But to speak of Osmanlis and the Turanian Turks as a racial and cultural unity would mean with one stroke of the pen or a propaganda pamphlet to wipe out from the face of the earth all the invasions, resettlements, massacres and mergers that have ravaged this part of the world for twenty centuries.

Appendix A and literature on the site: