Tsar and Sultan: Eurasia Between Russians and Turks - Michael Reynolds

you [Music] by coincidence our first speaker Steve Kotkin as was said was a teaching assistant to the chairman of our history Institute Walter mcdougal by another coincidence our second speaker who received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton was a student of our first speaker so there's a little bit of intellectual heritage going on here Mike Reynolds is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a an associate professor in Princeton's Department of Near Eastern Studies but he's actually a student both of Near Eastern Studies and in particularly the Ottoman Empire and Russian studies his award-winning book was shattering empires The Clash and collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empire is 1908 to 1918 from Cambridge University Press and in addition to his work on historical issues in the two empires he works on contemporary issues related to Turkey the Kurds Azerbaijan and and the North Caucasus and he's here to talk about I guess the interaction between the Russian and Turkey and Ottoman empires and Russia and Turkey today and so please welcome Mike Reynolds Thank You Alan several months ago Alan and asked me if I'd like to take part in this workshop I happily said yes and then it was several weeks later when so here we've got the program and I looked at it and saw that he's got me coming right after Steve Kotkin and both Steve being a former teacher but also more generally it is Steve goth Ken and I sat down how could you do this to me they this is a this is a very tough act to follow and if I recall Alan just simply said to me something like well it's what you signed up for I had no response for that I had signed up for it so that's the way things are fortunately Steve did touch on the number of themes that I will address in a fortunate slide there no major disagreements between us on those things the first one the very first one I just want me to one that start off with with this map a map of Eurasia is as Professor Costigan said earlier there are no clear geographic boundaries it's one big space now as Alan mentioned I got my start original as an undergraduate I was essentially back then I guess so a budding Soviet ologist to Russian estai was studying political science in the Russian language I then went to study in what was then the Soviet Union worked there for several years and it was while living there that really opened my eye not just my eyes but all my being to both Eurasia and to the Middle East it was a trip to with friends that I'd made from the caucuses and the trip to a place called Dagestan where I became interested in the Middle East in particular I remember being in the mountain village and seeing where my friend was from and seeing fig trees in the fig leaves and of course that was something to me you know fig leaves that's biblical and I said okay I'm not in Russia the people around me weren't speaking Russian they were speaking actually a number of languages that weren't Russian and I said this is fact it really fascinated me and that led me ultimately today graduate studies and to study Turkish and become a student of Ottoman history and the professor of Near Eastern or Middle Eastern history and so these regions for me have always been intervene that is Russia with Eurasia and Eurasia with the Middle East but when I first came to Princeton I think 12 years ago and they're offered the course which I still offer for graduate students called comparative transformations of the Near Eastern Eurasia where I take the historiographies of the Middle East in the Ottoman history and put it alongside the historiography of Russian Eurasia you know in the reach I did that both because I see these regions as being interwove and yet the way the histories of these regions have been written they've been largely because they've been seen from Western Europe they're essentially seen as spokes coming from a hub that is when people think about Eurasia Russia that's one region and the Middle East is another and they don't see the interaction so I wanted to change that and one one year when I was teaching that of course one of my students told me that most of my students without that come from either Middle Eastern Studies or Russian Eurasian there were there weren't many who worked on both though now I do have some who do but they remember he told me that he ran into some of the new it was at the Woodrow Wilson School who's sort of a mid-career diplomat with experience in Russia Eurasia who told them well this is he told about the course I'm taking this course on comparing you're in the Near East and Eurasia and the response was that's absurd there's just nothing between these two regions not enough that they have in common to kind of compare them you know it's just a silly idea obviously I didn't agree with that and part of and today I'll try to show how these regions are very much in Turin in fact so interwoven you really can't separate them so I'm going to be bouncing I mean focusing on Slavs and Turks but I'm going to be bouncing back and forth between them and although my specialty is really the late 19th century early 20th century and I've been comfortable working on very small periods of time such in my first book covers ten years ten very tumultuous years but today I'm going to be speaking in much broader geographic expanse and particularly expansive time but I've my goal is to sort of give you a big picture of how Turks and Slavs and Russia Eurasia in the Middle East have all been interwoven so be prepared for a little bit of whiplash and a lot of acceleration but I again I think at the end my my hope is that you'll have learned some new things so actually the first thing I thought maybe I should start with is not in Eurasia but I thought let me just start with the Middle East and the Arab conquests so this is where Islam begins in Arabia under the Prophet Mohammed this darker sort of purple here shows the territory that Muhammad had brought under his rule before his death this sort of lighter purple shows the expansion under the first four caliphs to 661 these are the were remembered by Muslims as the four rightly guided caliphs and it's sort of regarded by the majority of Muslims particularly Sunni Muslims as a golden age of Islam and you'll see that it's an amazing geographic expansion if we go from 622 to 661 they have all this territory here what I wanted to point out if you look right here they go as far as up into the North caucuses to a place called der bent in fact that was the the place I visited that convinced me to become interested in the Middle East and if we think of so early in the by the mid 7th century Islam is already part of what is today the Russian Republic the Russian Republic's border comes right down here to the North Caucasus and so that's something a lot of the people tend not to understand that you're Russia's history has been in the history of the Russian Republic not only has been that you're twined with Islam for centuries but arguably Islam well Islam had reached this territory that we I'm part of the Russian Republic before Russia even existed now speaking of Russia Russia in the Russians trace their beginning of their history generally to a entity known as Kevin Roose as do the Bell Russians and Ukrainians the East Slavs the Slavs know we don't know exactly where they came from most sort of experts believe they came from the Carpathians and mountains and moved up northeast and settle these areas here cabin grouse was essentially existed nine 13th centuries sort of a loose confederation of Slavic tribes and [Music] it's where the cultural genesis of the again I mentioned they the Russians Ukrainians and BHEL Russians trace their lineage back to them it was Moscow claims to be the successor to kab that's later a charge or a claim that was challenged by some Ukrainians beginning in the 19th century and I mentioned this there's this is something that is still I think a lot of Americans don't quite understand in the conflict with Ukraine currently between Russia and Ukraine why it is so emotionally charged because so many Russians to give as the birthplace of their civilization and so when Americans sort of why are the Russians mucking around in the country that's sovereign and independent it's very quite difficult for Russians to see it as Americans do because of a well this is really where we have our beginnings now the rush another point I wanted to mention is if the Russian story is often told is one of failure when we look at it from the standpoint of Western Europe Russia is a poorer country as less appealing has had a less appealing political system and you know technologically is tended to lag the West and in many ways his Zoe is always seen as failing to really measure up to the standards of Western Europe in fact you got some of that from Professor Calkins presentation earlier to that one thing I think is again worthwhile for Americans perhaps to remember is that when you look at the settlement of this region this is also this is very much a story of success it wasn't only the Russians who wanted to hold on or the Slavs that were came into this territory and we're competing for it the Slavs out competed the finno-ugric peoples the Tatars Germanic peoples other peoples of from from the Baltics and it's just one can see it very much as the stories of success and well it's not an easy area to live in it's the soil is by and large very poor you have a very short growing season because it's so far north of course it's also very cold and very open terrain so it's not easily there are no easily defensible borders in the Slavs it turned out were the peoples who had not adapted to that those conditions the best and they out can now competed the other populations they're so sort of in Eurasia you'll measure it against Europe maybe Russia falls short measure the against the standards of Eurasia Russia's come out on top and there are reasons for that I wanted to switch now let me just talk about the well going back and forth coming to the turkey peoples this is a bit of rather fuzzy but the big points of what you see here which is that where the Turkic peoples have their origins the earliest evidence we have of the existence of Turkic peoples come from the 7th century in the area of Lake Baikal where there are found Turkic runes excuse me right in fact right here are the or Hana croons as they're known here are examples of some of them currently in Mongolia these are alphabet written in Turkic language Turkic is the language that is not really it's not indo-european it's not Semitic so it's not related to Arabic there's a lot of Arabic words contemporary Turkish but it comes it's its own language family according to some linguists it's related to two Mongolian to Japanese and Korean others dispute that well there's definitely clearly some grammatical similarities but it's it's its own thing they had their own alphabet well before they adopted this today the Turks and Turkey used a Latin alphabet some of the other Turks in central asia still use a Cyrillic and then prior to that many of them used Arabic alphabet but back in the seventh century we know they had their own Turkish runes now that those long-ago cease to be of any fell out of use particularly as they adopted Islam however today one does fine this has not been forgotten by the Turks of Turkey today and in fact you'll find in the Turkish military recently it was pointed out that a number of members of special Turkish special forces have been wearing patches with Turkic runes this comes from an image created by a Turkish nationalist showing a Turkish soldier and these Turkic ruins and this is significant is in Turkey today in its fight with the Kurdish Kurdistan Workers Party and it's fight with Isis fight with Isis this is sort of expended standing in the remembering our origins as a people who are pre-islamic and non-western as well and so this is this memory of coming out of essentially Central Asia near the area of Lake Baikal is still very much part of the the memory or the plebeians the political discourse of Turkey today so these it's not just for historians one of the things in the last 15 years as a novelist it's been an amazing thing to see this the interest in history in particular Ottoman history in Turkey explode there have been new multiple talk shows dedicated to history on Turkish television and again that's very exciting and gratifying as someone who studies the history professionally but I can't tell you when there is a certain level of interest in public interest in history is great but when it gets to an obsession with history it becomes very worrisome particular oftentimes the history of course that's remembered in public isn't exactly the most accurate now so again this is so this is where the Turkic peoples came from you'll see that a number of them came down here these are the ones that came into Anatolia others went across Eurasia this way I wanted just the point that those who came into the Middle East came through an area you'll see here Iran and this is very this area here very is a Persian eight cultural zone and it's largely from the Persians and Persians its speakers that the Turks originally learned is Islam and one sees that in the most basic vocabulary the Turks used for Islam for example so Islam was came out of Arabia the language of Islam the language of Quran is Arabic nonetheless the Turks for some of the most basic concept based basic concepts in Islam use Persian words for example the Arabic word for prayer is sulla Turks Satan Amma's the word for fasting another so-called pillar of Islam in Arabic asam the Turks say or ooch another Persian word that simply tells you when the extent of the influence that the Persians have upon the Turks as they came into the Middle East and very much they created a blend of cultures and when civilization the Turco Arabic Persian civilization now as they came into through Iran towards Anatolia usually most historians regard in the battle that was fought in 1071 between the Seljuk Turks and the Byzantine Empire the Turks won that battle and this is garden is the beginning of the Turkish ocation of Anatolia so after that victory that opened up Anatolia for the Turkic tribesmen to come and to settle it and gradually over a course of centuries this area of Anatolia was populated by Turks and was converted ultimately into what we today know as the Republic of Turkey again this is something that's not at all forgotten by Turks to the contrary it's remembered the battle of man's occurred and our malice Gert in Turkish is still something the church today take a great deal of pride in and they celebrate this is early as in a an advertisement for a celebration earlier this year the 26th of August where the president of Turkey type Arin WOM appeared and you can see here he has a bow sort of iconic image of the Turks they were famous for their bows and this is celebrating our victory in 1071 and opening up Anatolia our current home Amman to conquest by us that's it was sort of a non maybe be like if there was a minh if they were celebrated 1066 and got the public out to celebrate that now I talked about Turks mentioned that they were converted to Islam as they came into the middlee as they were coming through Central Asia this Persian it's fear and were converted to Islam so both most many of the Turkic people's going both this way and coming into the Middle East but I wanted to just mention a rather curious entity known as the hussar kingdom and this is the rough borders this shows as if the borders were very clearly delineate if they weren't so this gives you an idea of where it was there north of the Caspian in parts of the North Caucasus and existed for roughly three centuries or so now that says Turkish Jewish cognate that is not science fiction we do know there was in fact a they were Turks and they espoused Judaism and lasted for about again you know three centuries or so they were famous for battling the the Arab Muslims armies invading coming up from the from the south and they stopped them as I mentioned before they're bent eventually however it's dissipated and so I wanted to switch again the focus coming back to Kevin Roose because when we think of Russia today we think of in the Orthodox Eastern Orthodox Christian country and this is the conversion of Russia is usually given the date is 1988 where a prince vladimer of Kiev and Roose decided to convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity now there is 30 our sources on how that conversion occurred so the story goes that he was looking into all to the faiths of Islam Judaism Latin Christianity Roman Catholicism and then Eastern Orthodoxy and the story goes that he got reports about the Muslims of the Volga and he was told there's no gladness among them there's only sorrow in the great stench moreover there's no pork or alcohol and the story goes that you know and the lady murdered this that there's no alcohol he said well drinking is the joy of old ruse we cannot exist without that pleasure so Islam was excluded now their Jews came to Vladimir and tried to convert them to Judaism perhaps they were 'has ours we don't know but he listened to what they had to say it found much of it appealing but then decides well but you guys lost Jerusalem so that must mean he lost the divine favor so decided Judaism is not the right choice he got reports back from those who had traveled to the Germans and looked at their churches his Latin Christianity Roman Catholicism and they said there's no beauty in their churches however he did get some of his emissaries went on to Constantinople the capital of the Byzantine Empire and they visited this building here known as the Hagia Sophia which is built-in 5:37 if you can imagine that these were these minarets here or added later by the Turks after they conquered it it's a remarkable this picture really doesn't quite do do it justice it does do just as you can see the Bosphorus in the back the setting is magnificent but the building itself is stunning particularly for something when you remember it was built in 537 here is a dome of over a hundred feet and dynamic there it was amazing engineering achievement and this gives a view of it from the inside again this is later the Turks added the calligraphy from Mohammed Allah and the other some of the the caliphs the righteously guided caliphs but that gives you a sense of the interior the acoustics are also extraordinary now he got the report back from his emissaries who wrote to them after being in this place value Sophia in seeing the Eastern Orthodox liturgy that he said we no longer know we will no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth nor such beauty and we know not how to tell of it so they are really stunned by and this the story goes is well convinced of a demur to adopt Orthodox Christianity in 988 and so that's generally when we date the conversion of the Eastern Slavs now so you have this entity Kiev in ruse in existence you had I mentioned the Seljuks briefly a one that certainly wanted the biggest moments not just in Eurasian history but in world history is the emergence of the Mongol Empire so the is founded in the the 13th century and it's an amazing expanse you virtually United the unites the best bulk of Eurasia they overrun Eurasia they may introduce a new idea political idea to Eurasia that is the idea that divine dispensation was given to Ginga and into his dynasty and this later becomes for several centuries a key factor if you want to be a ruler in Eurasia you want to be able to trace some of your lineage back to chingus on its one that way they're both bazaars and then even the Ottoman Sultans see themselves is they make reference their claims to having some lineage frenchie Kazan now the Mongols pres of Koski mentioned there they have a very bad reputation they're seen as did a lot of destruction and when you read the sources even in translation one thing is amazing all different sources in Arabic and Slavic and other languages you can feel the fear that comes out of those sources they describe what it's like to hear news that the Mongols are on their way and what are we going to do because you surrender to the Mongols you're going to be living on under them if you try to resist them you're almost certainly going to fail and then you're will be put to death so you have a very unhappy choice to make and yes just reading those sources you get this sense of fear and then they give me the Mongol reputation for destructiveness preceded them but there were some things about the Mongols that are quite in touch with contemporary or who seems to be in touch with contemporary sensibilities you know one isn't performing that they they created a open trading space they promoted exchange among people's and in other words sometimes cited is that they were also religiously quite tolerant and there is indeed actually some good deal of truth to that but there was this very kind of special tolerance so in in 1258 a mongol by the name of oahu han mate siq makes it down to baghdad no baghdad was the seat of the last calif and the mongols knew something about islam they knew something about the calif that this is some descendant of Muhammad Muhammad was his great prophet and the Calif has some kind of special attachment to the heavens and therefore the Mongols thought well it's not someone that we we don't want to shed his blood now I was thinking Feuer perhaps the calif and you heard that the mongol so you're sitting there baghdad no the mongols are outside your gates you might think ok they understand that I'm a man of God and they respect that so it wouldn't be so great to be someone under me because the Mongols might you know will probably stick it to them but at least the Calif could think my future doesn't look terrible and in fact the Mongols when they captured Baghdad had no intention of shedding the Calif blood what they did instead was they rolled him up into carpets and then trampled him to death the idea being that they that way they wouldn't shed his blood because he shed his blood that would alienate alienate the heavens so you know they're the Mongols had this kind of sense of religious tolerance and open this respect for other but it was a very specific kind of religious sensitivity one other it's a point I want to make you know again briefly about the Mongols and so they come out of Eurasia and they've United the Middle East with the territories of Russia China and Eurasia as a whole they meet their defeats in the Middle East one of the very few defeats the head and the battle of angelou roughly here in the territory is covered by the greater Syria and they were defeated by a group called the Mamluks now who are the Mamluks the Lord ma'am Luke is an Arabic word essentially means slave these were peoples that were brought from from Eurasia from Crimea and across the black scene from the Caucasus taken as the men taken his young boys and then raised to be soldiers and administrators who would then serve the the Sultan living in Egypt that is this is an idea that you have this way you have a an elite that's loyal only to the state and loyal to the Sultana as you take young boys from their families so they're formerly their slaves they aren't free people but then they are trained to be the elite the military elite that politically and the administrators and the point I wanted to just make here again the interaction between the two regions these are people who are you were Turks Turkic people's captured again in the Crimea in the northern Black Sea coast and then Circosta in people's Abkhazians these are the peoples living in the caucuses and they were the ma'am Bullock's so you had this area Sultanate in Egypt that's not run by an Egyptian elite but it's run by an elite that comes from Eurasia and they were in fact the ones also who stopped the Mongols in the Middle East again taking another jump I wanted to come now to the Ottomans after the Mongols when they came to the Middle East the Mongols didn't just take Baghdad they also smashed up the Seljuk Empire and Anatolia was essentially a wrong or area where there were all the feuding small principalities what was called Turkish bailiwicks so a lot of petty princes and you have all sorts of feuding raiding parties going on and there is no and you know there's nothing like any centralized administration now I'm not going to I don't have time to go through the description of the rise of the Ottoman Empire but I'd wanted to take advantage of this map to bring out some basic points and again a lot of Americans are probably not aware that they're important to understand Ottoman history in Turkey today when I started Ottoman history I sort of assumed well probably the Ottoman Empire you know began somewhere in the middle of Anatolia in the middle of what we know as today's Turkey then they probably conquered the Middle East and then I know that they had laid siege to Vienna and you know had held territory in Europe and I thought so they probably conquered the Middle East United it and then they go into Europe and try to go on to Vienna in fact actually the story is quite different if you know if you look here the Ottoman Turks the the dynasty the Ottoman dynasty the Ottoman is a corruption of the name Oman who is the founder of the Dinan dynasty which Amman is the Turkish pronunciation of Arabic with Mon who was one of the I mentioned these four rightly guided caliphs he was one of those caliphs so saman is the Turkish word for that and then through the Italians we got the word Ottoman 1299 is when the dynasty is finally those small has a dream the story goes the legend goes where he sees he's told you're going to have he sees a huge tree and is told this is your family you're going to have give rise to a great dynasty an empire so they begin here which is Western Anatolia and if you'll see already by in the 14th century 15th century where is the Ottoman Empire it's Western Anatolia in the Balkans that is the Ottoman Empire is very much from its beginnings a Balkan Empire and it's only much later that the ottomans then move into the Middle East and conquered so when we think of the Ottomans as being a Middle Eastern power that's true but they were well before that a Balkan power in you know one could say a European power now they were heirs to in 1453 is when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and that's really when they become a world power when you contribute a Cassity as important because it's Constantinople both historically and strategically you know you've come come along ways this is the Conqueror of a constant constant opal mammoths actually it should say the second not the first mehmed ii was his name he was at age 21 conquered Constantinople converted to Istanbul he was again age 21 he was a great warrior very well respected and this is an image of him and you notice this image does not convey the image of a warrior or a conquering man and this is the what is he doing he's smelling a rose this is also the ottomans way of saying we are not simply conquerors and fighters we also understand the find their things in life he's taking the time to smell the roses here is a lay their image of the conquest of this tumble is the ottomans break through the famous walls of Constantinople and that's a Mehmet the Conqueror again this isn't historically accurate in any way but has him on on the horse the sort of regarded traditionally classically in the peak of autumn in the Ottoman Empire now them in Civilization comes under the reign of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent who reigned from 1520 to 1566 this is a portrait of him it was quite an impressive turban he's also known in Turkish acts that was the Europeans who preferred to call him the magnificent he's known as khan oniy in turkish which is incidentally the same means the lawgiver inconnue and there's the same word that we know is canon coming from greek that we sometimes use in english canonical continuity the lawgiver so he was seen as the one who really gave institutional shape to the ottoman empire again i don't have much time to cover the ottomans but i did want to point out that in addition to conquering this territory giving laws to the people to live there and setting up with local institutions the ottomans also looking boast of some significant cultural achievements among them I mean one the Maya I think when the most impressive is our current architecture this is a mosque in other name in the balkans called the selenium it was completed in 1575 it was designed and built by the most famous ottoman architect by the name of sinon and this picture here really doesn't do justice to it to how magnificent it is the picture and the inside is I think it gives you a better sense of the beauty of this mosque now throughout you his career sinon started out building bridges and then started building mosques and progressively began to build bigger and more impressive ones and this was his crowning achievement in the particular the dome when he was competing with was aya Sophia that Churchill he saw originally the obviously that this is something they were immensely proud that they captured it in seen on no however it wanted to outdo it and this was his final in there's some debate that he actually is his the dome bigger or not it's one point they thought it was now they say maybe it's not but it's certainly in its grandeur and Majesty it's a stunning achievement and it's a much more graceful looking building than the Hagia Sophia and built roughly a thousand years later now to switch coming back again towards Russia so this is a map showing Europe in 1648 you'll see you have the Ottoman Empire is something called the polish-lithuanian Commonwealth the competitor with the Russians and you'll see it here you have this han native Crimea which was nominally tied to the to the Ottoman Empire the Han of Crimea recognized the Sultan as his superior but largely ran things on his own among the things that they collaborated with the Ottomans was in slave trade I mentioned before he had the the Mamluks he had this a flow of people's from the cara mia' and then from the caucasus being sent down to egypt that continued for multiple cents for many centuries the slave trade in this part of the world is was on the same scale scholars say as I've across the Atlantic a different sort of slavery not generally the chattel slavery from Africa to North and South America but there was a lot of trafficking in human beings now the beginnings of Russia I mentioned you had this Kevin Roose then he had the Mongols came in smashed everything United it but shortly after the Mongol Peyer was established and then began to break down into various sub sub parts among them was this thing called the Golden Horde which is shown here in purple and subjected to the Golden Horde where these territories up here including this one known as Moscow now in Tsar Ivan the Terrible professor Kafka mentioned earlier essentially revolted against the Mongols and then in fact didn't just simply reject their rule but went in and conquered their principal cities of Kazan and Oscar Han and to celebrate that he built this st. Basil's Cathedral they this is the iconic image of Russia again another stunning building nothing it was completely unprecedented there's no I there was no building before this that sort of resembled st. Basil's Cathedral sort of virtually out of nowhere it was created no one knows for certain who the architect was this being Eurasia his fate so the legend goes was after building the building this this amazing structure what was his reward the legend goes he was blinded by Ivan the Terrible so that he would never again create anything so beautiful I don't know we knowing no one knows for sure is that really true or not but certainly it's it is a an amazing building but I wanted to you know the one of the things I want to underscore is how this was created so this was built to celebrate Russia's victory a Muscovy victory over the tatars the Harris I should mention are a turkic peoples that came in with the Mongols so I we speak of the Mongols with coming along with the Mongols where they swept up a number of tribes turkic tribes that came along with them and in Russian usually never first simply to the Mongols but rather to the Mongol talk to our yoke I mean we often refer to the Mongol hordes the word cord is the same word as the word army in Turkish today so this Turks speak about their armies a jerk or dosoo or do if you might have heard of a language in spoken in the Indian subcontinent called air do that gospel came comes from the same word as horde or or do an army again showing the the way these regions are linked together so this map you saw how the expansion the Ottoman Empire the Russian Empire of the Ottoman piracy found in 1299 and hits its peak in the 16th century see Russia is beginning somewhat a bit later and it starts here under Muscovy and takes off from there and it's particularly some of my the name is Peter the Great who ruled from 1670 to the 1775 you see the that takes place Peter's reign happens to coincide with what we know it's the rise of Europe when you see the rise in Europe of or a your number of European powers who thanks to advances in technology economic rapid economic growth which they're able to convert both the technology and economic growth into military power and are on the way to dominating the world Peter as a young boy when he's growing up in Moscow lives among these foreigners the Europeans and is impressed by what they can do with technology and either sides that look if I'm going to be successful in ruling this area around Moscow what I need to do is I need to imitate and to borrow from the Europeans and that starts a process by which Russia consciously begins to reach out to Europe and to borrow as Professor Kafka mentioned not so much the political institutions but rather the technology and the forms of military organization that the Europeans were pioneering so among other things that Peter does is he destroys the old military elite of Muscovy group knows this throughout sea destroys them establishes a new army that's functions along European lines symbolically he forces the nobles and Russia to alter shave their beards ultimate the point that they are now to shift their cultural orientation and he's able to put this these reforms and the implements he achieves quite a lot in particular he defeats the Swedes we never think of Sweden today as being a military power it was back then the Swedes were quite were like Peter fought long and hard war against the against the Swedes ultimately successful he had some successes some failures against the Ottomans but it's under Peter he's a nice guy he builds a new city st. Petersburg which enables him then gives them out to the Baltic it's under Peter that Russia becomes truly a world power and formally becomes an empire now the word you'd say that we know if that's the word that comes same where the skies are the same where in the Caesar and that's points to the influence of Rome which I also want to rapture the mention with the ottomans also at times would make the claims to their subject populations that we are in fact the inheritors of Rome of course they conquered Constantinople which was the capital of the Eastern or Byzantine the Eastern Roman Empire also as we often refer to it is the Byzantine Empire but it's important to remember it was part of the Roman Empire and so he had the Ottoman Sultans much like the Russian Czars the Romanov dynasty both tracing making claims to having some ties to the Mongols and also to Rome they really are Eurasian at the unite the political Heritage's of both these regions now one thing is kind of in the ambivalence that again professor Kafka mentioned earlier that Russians have about the relation to Europe and that really emerges under Peter because he forces them to adopt so many things from Europe again both technologically institutionally and also culturally is that they there was a high human cost to Peter's reforms just take one example the established the building of a city here essentially in the swamp very very far north was not an easy task and it's one that a lot of people it was built through forced labor so there's often time in Russian memory those who are not so keen on Russia's European orientation see the other the West is not the story of political openness equality and Liberty in progress but rather one of the importation of tyranny and and the exploitation of human capital now we tend we see it very differently but the Russian experience worth keeping in mind that one reason why there is a skepticism of Europe their encounter with Europe is quite is not ambivalent on its own terms now you're in essentially at this time so Peter has established Russia as a great power one that can compete with the Europeans the Ottomans of this period are not quite so fortunate this is now the Ottomans in the Russians have become rivals they're competing for for influence so let me just come back to was it this far back I had I guess well right well yeah let's this will actually let me come back to this map here as perhaps shows it better this map right so you can see you know the Han dated Crimea so you have you know in other words you have the Ottomans extending into territories that you today we think of as Ukraine or even Russia with Crimea now being part of Russia the Russians begin to push them out and without you know again I don't have time to narrate the various Rousseau Ottoman wars but I did want to put this as a famous painting done by a Russian artist called ilya repin in the late 19th century and it's depicting Cossacks writing a letter to the ottoman it's really quite a colorful both in colorful painting both literally in terms of the colors of the the clothing etc but also if you look closely at the expressions of the the characters and as well as their facial hair something that put hipsters today can't quite compete with but they're also this this goes this painting was inspired by what was allegedly a correspondence from the Cossacks to the Ottoman Sultana and I just wanted to cite this too because I think it illustrates sort of this shift in the balance of power that is as Peter began to adopt things from Europe and made Russia into a power that can compete with the Europeans the Ottomans had not done that so the the the story goes this is the the Sultana wrote to the Cossacks as assault on some of muhammed brother of the sun and moon grandson and viceroy of God ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia bable bable on Jerusalem upper and lower egypt emperor of emperors sovereign of sovereigns extraordinary knight never defeated steadfast guardian of the tomb of jesus christ trusty chosen by god himself the hope and comfort of muslims confounder and great defender of christians i command you this operation cossacks to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance and to desist from troubling me with your attacks now I should actually give a trigger warning there's a rather salty reply that comes back I I won't repeat it in all its gory detail so the reply back and this so this is what the supposed to be depicting and in the picture than what there's replying back thou are the Turkish shrimp the damn Devils brother and friend and the Secretary to Lucifer himself what the devil kind of night art thou that cannot slay a hedgehog with your naked arse the devil defecates and your army eats thou a son of a will never make subjects of christian sons we have no fear of your army by land by sea we will battle with thee copulate with thy mother thou art the Babylonian Scullion Macedonian wheelwright Brewer of Jerusalem go copy later of Alexandria swineherd of a greater and lesser Egypt our meaning pig padule-- and villain catamite of tartar ii hangman of chania communits and full of all the world in underworld a fool before our God a grandson of the serpent and the creek in our stick pig snout mares arse slaughterhouse cur on christen brow screw thine own mother so those operations declare you lowlife that will not even be her than Christian pigs now we shall conclude for we don't know the date and then we and don't have a calendar the moons in the sky the year in the book the days the same he over here as it is over there for this kiss our arse now whether or not if there there's no evidence that there really was such a letter this is almost certainly an invention but it does give you a sense of it again the shift in power one of the key moments in Ottoman history is regarding this is in 1774 there's no oh well there's a war prior to that 1768 with the Russian Empire that concludes with the peace treaty in 1774 and this is the first time when the Ottoman Empire was decisively defeated and then it's clear it had to surrender territory to another power and then this they lose they give up all claims to Crimea and again there's some of this now Marx when Russia has become a power on the Black Sea as well how am i doing for time okay how much more okay so so the Ottomans sense there's something wrong they have been decisively defeated by by the Russians they're at and against the austro-hungarians they've also they're not faring so well and they know we've become very weak and they know we need to change now one of the and the Ottomans had a key institution that had enabled them to become a world conquering power had been the group called the Janissaries he's might heard a Janissaries English that comes from the Turkish word for Yanni cherry which means back then it meant for new forces I mentioned the Mameluke said they these were young boys taken from their families and then raised as a military and political elite the Janissaries were the same thing this is a pattern repeated throughout the Muslim world it is a great innovation great from the sense of stability of a political dynasty because whether it insurers is you have a comment if you take people from their families and raise them to be loyal to the palace they have no other competing sense of competing center of loyalty so it lends a strong component of political stability the Janissaries so the Janissaries were young boys taken generally non-muslims because you can't make muslims slaves so they'd be taken as non-muslims and then they would be conferred to islam and again they would then be schooled and trained to become the military and administrative elite and they were the shock troops of the ottoman empire the very best forces and their ability explains this much of this great Ottoman expansion now one of the things they weren't permitted to marry because if you start marrying then you want to pass on what you have to your children but eventually over time the Janissaries began to think well we are the ones running this Empire maybe we should get a little more out of it so they want for themselves the right to marry and at that point they became more interested in passing on their position to their descendants and hereditary descendants and became more interested sexually in doing business rather than fighting Ottoman Sultan by the name of sloth on sale in the third realized this is this can't go on what we need to do we need to start doing what the Europeans are doing and also what the Russians are doing there the Ottomans looked very closely they saw what Peter the Great had done then they began to they saw Peter the Great as a model for themselves and said you know if the Russians can do this maybe we can too so sillim the 3rd initially tried to set up his own army Janissaries didn't like that they saw what was going on maybe these guys are going to be used to replace so they overthrew that Sultana then you have this Sultana I think that came a couple of decades later uni by the name of mahmoud ii who understood look the some part is going to go down the tubes if we don't get rid of the Janissaries and we don't establish a contemporary european-style army so he began training it but kept it very quiet effectively under wraps and then he provoked the Janissaries one day to rebel against him they rebelled and now with the Janissaries and rebellion he rolled in his new artillery and this forces and blasted the Janissaries in there and their barracks in the center of Istanbul and essentially massacred them now that's a very bloody event but it's remembered by the Ottomans as valkia high area which means the auspicious incident so despite the fact that it was a horrible massacre the new regime was saying this is in fact a very auspicious incident and now sets us now that we've destroyed the Janissaries we can start reforming our empire first starting with the army and then the rest of the Empire along European lines so this is a portrait of mohammed ii and you'll know this this probably doesn't look that foreign to you okay he has something of a turban but you'll notice even what he's wearing is clothing but in particular being on the horse and the horse rearing this is not this is a new image for an ottoman sultan and it's very similar to European sovereign so right here in this portrait is sending a signal that we are becoming joining Europe in a sense now when you have you start out the ottomans did we want to have a european-style army we want to [Music] you borrowing European military technology then you realize if you have a european-style army you have to pay for it and whether you need for that you need people are they're gonna do better tax collecting so you have to now set up a more efficient tax collection service and that means you need to staff those tax collectors and likewise military officers and the modern area they need to be educated so you need to have schools and again you need to pay for that so it's a snowball effect this process for westernization that the Ottomans start on they enter into in the 19th century in 18 in 1839 this is 1826 is when the Janissaries are destroyed 1839 they begin this process called the tongs amant the Tanzimat is an Arabic Turkish word that is comes from Arabic word that the Turks used and it means restructuring reordering in rebuilding and this was a formal announcement by the Ottoman state by the Sultana in 1839 we're going to restructure our empire and that's when you have a really kicks into gear this process of westernization and centralization of the Empire now this map shows and that goes through the 19th century at least up to a point 1878 when they adopt the Constitution so they went they pushed their reforms so far that they actually did they it was a constitutional monarchy and they didn't do away with the the position of Sultan but that's after the Constitution sort of putting them on a level if you will well with with Great Britain and also it's interesting note a couple of decades ahead of Russia Russian only until 1905 it was only in 1905 that Russia adopted a constitution now this map is showing the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the 19th century you'll know this basically this match illustrates they didn't stop their process of territorial collapse and so for a lot of reasons well yeah for the fact that they weren't able to stop the territorial shrinkage of their empire the Tanzimat is often regarded as a failure which is not really quite correct in 1878 after having fought a war with with Russia in 1877 78 which the Ottomans lost so I should have mentioned 1876 is when they adopt the Constitution shortly after that they're engaged in the war with Russia they lose that war a new Sultan by the name the second who's now happens to be a hero of the current regime in in Turkey he says look we don't have time we don't having a constitution is a luxury it's essentially says we're in the Nationals in action we have a national security crisis we just lost this big war with Russia so the Constitution and the Parliament which has just been elected he essentially disbands the Parliament and essentially puts the Constitution in the drawer and there's a period of of reaction as those elements within the Ottoman society that aren't so keen on this westernization and centralization program and they have mixed motives for that some of them see it as a cultural threat religious scholars in particular see their the introduction of european-style laws say why should we have these kinds of laws when we have our own laws in conformity with Islam see themselves as also losing their personal Authority they're opposed to it the resent realization that Empire means as Professor Colin pointed out earlier empires work by empowering one set of local elites against another now when you come into the Ottomans say we're going to rejigger all this all these things we're going to establish a new different kind of state we have a lot of those local power brokers aren't so keen on that because they see they're going to be losers if we're going to change our political system and we're going to seed more power to the center and make it more rationalize have one set of the laws throughout the empire well what does that do to local power brokers you have tribal chiefs local notables others they aren't so happy about it so there's their whole constellation of interests that are opposed to these reforms at the same time there's another constituency namely military officers who want faster reform and more radical reform because they say we're engaged with the struggle with Europe maybe I should hear at this point I should just go back to this map and they say we're losing all these territories we're losing these aren't these wars we need not to slow down our reforms we need to accelerate them they plot against Abdul Hameed the second and these are a group known usual young turks also if they're formally known as the committee of Union in progress they have a revolution in 1908 they overthrow the Sultana and they reintroduce the Constitution and this is a depiction of of this event where there ain't reduce in the Constitution you'll see here the women being freed from the shackles of despotism and you have the the slogans of Liberty Brotherhood inequality we're sorry they want the the the slogans inspiring this revolution that's 1908 that Ford II I won't go into details for that right now that doesn't last so long basically five years you then have as a result of the war that the Ottomans lose from the Balkans this the this new The Young Turks who are running an empire say we don't have again we were in national security crisis we don't have a luxury of having a a constitutional rule and they establish a military dictatorship and that takes us into World War one this is just a map showing the Ottoman Empire on the eve in 1914 in World War one so I don't know how am i if I take questions now or so maybe I should it's just a final concluding note is he actually had these two dynasties the Ottoman sort of struggling to maintain itself doing everything he can under this new group The Young Turks to modernize itself remake itself among European lines they've been in competition with the Russian Empire which because it got a head start er than the Ottomans has done quite well but by the time of World War one the Russians have also sort of their political institutions have ossified that is you have a czar who is still trying to run this massive empire with a massive bureaucracy but has none of the [Music] mediating institutions if that would be the right term that would be comparable to a to let's say what the Germans had or the French had or the British so you have another sort of this very archaic old-style political regime that is a state that in many ways is quite modern with a massive army a massive bureaucratic establishment they both go into World War one and they both meet their ends and maybe I'll just conclude with that but they both have regimes that emerge at the end of World War one a new regimes in the republic of turkey and then the soviet union have very ambivalent attitudes towards europe on the one hand the Bolsheviks what could be of communism largely developed by a German Jew working in the libraries of London what could be more Western than that is that that is adopted and by the Russians and established so viens established so is that a Western entity or an anti Western one you know there's some ambivalence there certainly it sees itself as opposed to the West if the West is understood as liberal democracy likewise we have in the Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal I the Turk in many ways establishes himself or sees wants to remake Turkey along European lines but there remains even now the Turk himself tremendous suspicion towards the old European powers in particularly the British in the French also the Russians to some extent realizing these were the guys who came in and divided up our Empire and so with that maybe I'll conclude that the the and that note of the this process the one season both interchange in interaction between the Slavs Turkic peoples of Eurasia and particularly the admins and the Russians and their ambivalence in the relationship to Europe and in the parallel that their political development has followed and borrowing from Europe at the same time they've been competing with Europe thank you [Applause] Oh speak loud that's fine I can hear you turning away from ideas yeah I know I think absolutely yeah a lot of people use back what about two years ago or so in Russia and Turkey began collaborating more closely we're sort of study how could it be how can be the right in Turkey and Russia could never get along because people thinking they fought all these wars with each other that's true and they are sort of natural geopolitical rivals you know go back to the maps you know where was this you know didn't this map here well this is and the best way you can see or you know this these territories here they're they're competing with those and so there was a long history but there's also a history of collaboration at various times they're the Russians for example when sorry the one of the first big projects of military modernization the Middle East began not the center in Istanbul actually began in Egypt when after Napoleon's invasion as the French army withdrew an ottoman officer who happened to be in albanian MyHeritage oversaw the withdrawal of French troops from Egypt and you know this Jesus guys do things pretty well and then instituted many into instituting the kind of reforms the French had carried out inside the be gypped they began to create the modern style army there and build himself up a power base in the very effective military that ultimately he used he fought on behalf of the Sultana to try to suppress revolts in Greece and then also a religious revolts by though hobbies in what today we know Saudi Arabia and then decided well I've got this you know crackerjack army why should I be listening to Sultana and actually began to challenge Istanbul and the Russians bailed out the helped back the Istanbul and the Sultan in Istanbul against their their Egyptian rival there so that that's one episode another one is you is a closer one to our time is what happened after World War one with the establishment of the Turkish Republic so actually I do have a map for this so this was the project projected future of Turkey after World War one basically this is going to be left to the Turks and everything else is going to be divided one of the very first things that most of all Kemal did when he decided he was going to resist the the partition of Anatolia was this is 1919 he wrote volodymyr lenin and basically said look let's have an alliance you don't like the French and the British I don't like them either let's cooperate together and the Russians or she said I should say the Bolsheviks happily agreed to this and they sent a lot of gold and weapons to first across the Black Sea and then later across the caucuses that helped the Turkish nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal to then drive out their competitors and establish the Turkish Republic and when you go to Ankara extraction rather Istanbul in Taksim Square which one in the major squares this double there's a monument to the victory of the Turks and what they call the War of Independence and there are two Russians they're Bolsheviks that are part of part of the part a part of the monument and that is an acknowledgment of the aid that the Soviets gave to the Turks and winning their independence that had been threatened by the Europeans so there is a strain inside of Turkey that's been seized Russia as being more akin to us this is like us they have a shared animosity towards the West and they are useful allies against the West they're not I mean that's destroy there's a stronger history of rivalry between the two there's also a not insignificant history of collaboration against the West and you see that today people remembering that history let me just add one other footnote though I think one of the things that's driving the improving the relations between Russia and Turkey isn't so much with a planned or anything real kind of ideological you see sympathy or the idea that they're on this the same wavelength necessarily it's simply the fact that the Russians have outplayed the US and Syria and this is a major concern to Turkey and they basically decided look we've got to get along with the Russians because they're playing with fire right next to us and we can get burned and the US doesn't seem to know be able to decide what it's doing and that's that's not that as well as other concerns that the Turks have about the goodwill of the United States towards Turkey I mean a lot of the Turks believe that we're are engaged in undermining Turkey deliberately by backing Kurdish groups in Syria and others and I think it's that really it's it's the gee-pole conjuncture that we're in and that the Russians have proven themselves to be more nimble and effective actors in the Middle East that is LED light awkward to say all right we've got to talk to the Russians and stay on their good side son Jerry Lavin I from the Chicago area and I teach at Deerfield high school which is in a northern suburb of Chicago I'm curious your your view on why it is that the young Turkish Republic was arguably relatively successful in modernizing and more quickly using we'll call it Western principles then the Russians were when the Russians started long before these in an effort to do so just sort of curious from your perspective that's a good question so when you say mother modernizing do you mean politically sort of why is it that the Turkish Republic became sort of pro-western economically politically by but by any measure that we would consider relevant to modernization because I would say the Russian the Soviet is I mean there's no comparison being the Soviet in Turkey in terms of either technology economic power the Soviet news way way ahead and a much more modernized one kind of area I'd say where Turkey sort of caught up I would say with the end of the 1980s in the 1990s and in Turkey economically had a very rough time during that period but because they had opened themselves up to global markets they were able to adapt much better than Russia so from 2000 to 2010 Turkey ad was quite an economic success story and it was really something I remember for myself to watch and as I saw a turkey me in the country becoming much more wealthier and prosperous and became much more easier to live there and comparing that to what I saw happen in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union where it was an economic disaster but on in terms of modernization Russia I mean Turkey never had anything remotely compared to let's say there's a Soviet space program or its economies never was never as strong as the Soviet Union's Russia's economy is still you know larger than than turkeys so turkeys made a lot of strides recently over the past several years things are for a number of reasons in Turkey political instability among them we don't know where the economy's going to go likewise we don't know about Russia's isn't isn't exactly a booming economy but I would say you know modernisations Russia the Soviet Union I've been much ahead turkeys caught up in the past couple of decades but not it hasn't yet not yet at the same place even politically I would have said up until a few years ago that's one area where Turkey has made much better progress after 1950 Turkey has its first contested elections and they have a number of military coos after that but there was this process where turkey was becoming a more liberal and competitive openly politically open society and now for a number of reasons that seems to be going they're going backward on that scale good morning Jim Feldman lakeshore high school Michigan I recently it's been recently it's it's been one of the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis and I know part of the agreement was to remove missiles from Turkey how did the Turks feel about that that's a great question they felt that in this plays into Turkish American relations today I mean the Turks have never really been certain can we really trust the Americans and one of the incidents that tells him we can't trust the Americans was precisely that that we were moved over them to get where the Jupiter missiles right we removed them from from Turkey and that was part of the deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis that in exchange for hoosh of taking out Soviet missiles from Cuba we would remove our missiles from Turkey now Americans saw this is actually a good thing for Turkey because these missiles they were what liquid-fueled which meant that they had to be if you were going to use them you had to expose them and it would take several hours before they would be you could launch them meaning that if there was a crisis the Soviets might have been very tempted to have a first strike because turkey was in range of Soviet bombers and the Soviets might have been tempted we have to bomb these missiles in Turkey so American society actually getting these missiles out of Turkey we're not really losing and we're making because these missiles are just stabilizing so that's good for the US and it's good for turkey because Turkey won't be exposed to attack and they won't be we won't in other words the United States won't be putting turkey in the position where it is provoking the Soviet Union the Turks Alvers saw it very differently they saw is here the Americans put their missiles on their territory that's a sign that this season's allies they're going to stick with us and then they unilaterally decide we're going to take those missiles out it said the message to the Turks these guy when when push comes to shove the Americans might not they might not have our back I'm kind of I guess mixing those phrases and that yeah that that's one moment among others that Turks remember is a moment where in the United States seemed all too willing to use them but not to stand by them when they might be when when turkey might need it hi I'm Lindsay I teach at Hunter put it closer I'm teaching Hunter College High School in Manhattan in terms of the Armenian Genocide right turkey still denies it and my understanding of the events are that some of the sort of excuses or that the Armenians were potentially siding with the Russians I don't really know much about Russia's version of events could you speak I could go on for hours about that topic because I've written on it and it's a fascinating topic in that I mean I could put the plug in for my book shadowy empires The Clash and collapse of the Ottoman and Russian empires 1908 to 1918 ideal at some length of Matt on that topic and I've used both a lot of things from the Russian archives and from the Ottoman archives and the certainly in the popular knowledge of many most popular beliefs about history is badly flawed I don't want to go into it in great detail because it is it's quite complex other you know I guess to point out that's the interesting thing is this that yes there the Turkish one that Turkish arguments has been and an Armenian scholar actually kind of summarized the Turkish response to these charges of genocide as on the one hand the Turks have said nothing happened and then they said in besides the Armenians deserved it which is in there is that in other words event intent finally in Turkish historians to sort of say well you know some people were deported but not they were killed and this was this really there was there was no great loss of life and what what lives were lost was simply the the equivalent to what was elsewhere was being lost during the war that lots of Muslims also starved to death in the accelerating it was unfortunate but what can you do it's wartime and then the other argument being well actually the Armenians were collaborating with the Russians the irony of this is that absolutely the the the Ottomans believe that the our means were collaborating with the Russians the Armenians did get some weapons from the Russians but the real story is that the Russians I mean looking at the history leaving in a couple of decades two decades leading up to World War one the Russians were very much concerned about this territory eastern Anatolia which have a heavy Armenian population about 25% or so my pointer is stuck in my jacket I can use my hand so this territory here the fact is actually the Russians were more concerned saw the Armenians more as a threat to their own empire than they made now why was that that was because there are meanings of course they're also living in the Caucasus under Russian rule and Russia at this time was also dominating northern Iran where he also had a significant number of Armenians and they are many Armenians were socialists and were engaged in the revolution revolutionary underground that sought to overthrow Nizar system again kind of they're socialists they're getting ideas from the West they aren't so keen on this idea of having a a monarch of having his are they want to see him overthrown and so one of the Russian concerns because the Armenian revolutionaries who were based in the Ottoman Empire were engaged in what the Russians saw is destabilizing acts and the Russian concern was as the Ottoman Empire is falling apart what's going to happen to this region here either it's going to become something like a failed state the way we think of Afghanistan he used to use that term and what happens in failed states where there's no in the power terrorist groups take root so the Russians were concerned on the one hand if the Ottoman Empire falls apart you're going to have our meetings are going to have a car ponch and Vaughn in particular they're they have a large base there and they're going to be carrying out all kinds of subversion of our caucuses which they saw as a very unstable area and so the and and that would be one situation even worse they thought if the Empire falls apart you have the British the Germans the French were all involved in this area and they thought these areas of actually might come under German French or British influence and they would they would only eight give more aid to those terrorist groups and subversives so the Russians were concerned to get control of this region not so much because they wanted to expand their empire but they saw if we don't bring this under control our our control the caucus is going to be subverted so they began collaborating with Kurds and Kurds or the dominant area of this area we of that area of Anatolia probably they don't know that that figure is probably not 50 percent and it so happens that Kurds and Armenians live together for centuries history of symbiosis but also a lot of conflict Kurds were nomadic peoples their Armenians were settled and you know this something goes can enable the Bible conflicts between settled peoples and sedentary so you had this conflict between Armenians and courage that was growing getting worse at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century and that was influenced or who's made worse in part by well the fact that the Ottoman Empire falling apart you had the Balkan states emerging Greece Bulgaria so people out here particularly the Kurds began worrying what's to say that we're not going to lose if we lost the Balkans you remember that's where the Ottoman Empire began we lose if the Sultan loses that control of that territory what's to say we're not going to have an Armenian state establish here just who had something called Greece Bulgaria Serbia these Christian states that could happen where we live moreover if the penetration of Europeans traders diplomats etc schools missionary schools our meetings were sending their kids to those schools because they're you know they were they they saw no great problem with that their fellow Christians Kurds wouldn't do that so you had our meetings were making a lot of leap were improving their economic situation by leaps and bounds because they were more literate and the Kurds saw themselves as stagnating and basically saw we're going down the tubes so there was a lot of friction between Kurds and Turks excuse me Kurds and Armenians the Russians were actually feeding into this and that was one of the things really driving the instability in eastern Anatolia on the eve of World War one and so the story kind of the Russians backing the Armenians and using them as a cat's paw isn't accurate it's actually vastly more complex and the real problem was there Russians or stoking conflict between our meetings occurred and this is probably it's it's not an easy story let me just so what explains the deportations to mass killings of Armenians then in World War one is the oven decision the decision that as long as we have Armenians living in this territory we're never going there's never going to be any possibility of peace because they're just at loggerheads with the Kurds so we need to get them out of here and if a lot of them die on the way out then our problems kind of solved because once if they're no longer living in here no one can claim this territory for our meanings part of the problem with the clashes between Kurds and Armenians in early 1914 the Russians insisted that there be reformation of the administration of an area that would be put under European administrators so they got one form I think it was Norway and I can't remember it was Holland but from two small European states and they were gonna they were going to run this territory and the Russians were essentially overseeing this massive this territory right here these of Eastern Anatolia was essentially being taken out from the administration of of Istanbul so and that was on the eve of World War one so going into World War one the Istanbul was already thinking we've virtually have lost this territory just as we lost what happened in the Balkans and we lost it because they say we can't you can't maintain order and we can maintain order because the Russians are encouraging this Kurdish Armenians strife it's probably a much too long-winded explanation but again for details on this you find it in my book where I think it is explained fairly clearly hi what was the name of the last painting that you had showed the commemoration of the Constitution oh that's not I don't know if there's a actually here I did have pictures of Armenian revolutionaries this is a Greek I think it was a postcard originally so it's to celebrate the 1908 constitutional revolution where they brought back so they had you know the ovens adopted a constitution in 1876 but didn't last very long and in 1908 there was a basically a military coup against the Sultana that said we're gonna overthrow you and you unless you bring back the Constitution and part of the belief among the military officers and others who carried out this revolution was we once we get a constitution we bring democracy into our empire it's gonna solve our problems because it'd be towards the end of the empire you had the ethnic strife and other forms of strife everyone's at each other's throats and the belief was this is because we have a despotic the biggest problems we have a despot ruling us once we get rid of him and we bring in the Constitution in a democratic rule it's gonna solve our problems very similar in many ways to the Arab Spring kindness belief if you just bring in democracy it's gonna solve all these other conflicts are going to melt away and it didn't I don't want to say well in some sense it did exhaust exacerbate those conflicts and perhaps not unlike you saw in Egypt where he had the good military came to power that's what it ultimately happened in 1913 in the Ottoman case ok join me in thanking Mike Reynolds [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

Views: 63,884

Rating: 4.5792141 out of 5

Keywords: Turkey, Russia, Tsar, Eurasia, History, Sultan

Id: VG9evHIafx4

Length: 87min 1sec (5221 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017