‘Unreliable Muslims’ out and ‘Loyal Subjects of the Tsar’ in?: Two Different Forms of Migration Envisaged by the Russian Authorities in the Southwestern Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia in World War I

Abstract

The Russo-Ottoman War in WWI became the setting for two different migration projects in the Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia envisaged by high-ranking Russian military and civilian authorities, both of which are relatively unknown and understudied, especially when compared to the Ottoman Empire’s forced population movement of Anatolian Armenians, which was extremely massive and destructive in comparison. The first form of migration in question was a radical but premature project of forced displacement of Muslim Georgians, Turks, and Kurds from the Southwestern Caucasusto the inner regions of the Russian Empire in 1915. The second one envisioned a partial and gradual resettlement and colonization of the Eastern Anatolian provinces invaded by the Russian army in 1915 and 1916 with Slavic settlers, at the eventual expense of the native Muslim and Armenian populations. This contribution aims to answer the following questions. What were the dynamics of Russia’s war aims vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire, and what impact did they have on Russian policy for the administrative, demographic, and economic future of Eastern Anatolia? How well-conceived, uniform, coherent, and constant was this policy among Russian state authorities? How did the policies of Russian state officials and institutions towards the administration and colonization of the Southwestern Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia differ and evolve during the war? How far did these proposals and policies reach? To what extent were these two resettlement projects carried out?