«ТУРЦИЯ НАЧИНАЕТ И ВЫИГРЫВАЕТ?»: МЕЖДУНАРОДНАЯ ГЕОПОЛИТИКА И ОТНОШЕНИЕ К НЕЙ НАСЕЛЕНИЯ ТУРКЕСТАНА НА ПРИМЕРЕ ИТАЛО-ТУРЕЦКОЙ И ПЕРВОЙ БАЛКАНСКОЙ ВОЙН

Abstract

National and religious issues have always been uneasy and topical for the Russian state. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the religious affiliation question became one of the key factors in the contradictory attitude of the Russia peoples to the choice of the Empire’s foreign policy. That is proved by the materials stored in the National Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan. Most Russian Muslims felt like second-class citizens, only because they professed Islam, not Orthodox Christianity. Such a situation was a natural consequence of the ill-conceived and uncoordinated ethno-confessional policy in the Empire. On the eve of the First World War, Ottoman Turkey, as a long-time geopolitical rival of Russia, was interested in escalating the internal political tensions in the Russian Empire by all means. The most effective way was to speculate on existing religious and national intolerance. However, masses of ordinary Muslims, for a variety of reasons, were not always able to fully accept the Ottoman ideological and modernist attitudes that representatives of the national elites of Russian Muslims, acting as intermediaries, tried to introduce into their minds. On the other hand, the Russian Empire itself could not offer its Muslims an attractive modernisation project.