World War I on the Eastern Front

Eileen Kane

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 15, Number1, Winter 2014 (New Series), pp. 207-216 (Article)

Published by Slavica PublishersDOI: 10.1353/kri.2014.0002

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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, 1 (Winter 2014): 207–16.

Articles

World War I on the Eastern Front

EilEEn KanE

Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918. 340 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0521195539. $98.00.

Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922. 248 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0801448638. $39.95.

Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. 464 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0195393743. $34.95.

The vast historiography of World War I in Europe can be divided in two. Much better documented is the history of the Western Front, involving huge armies bogged down in trench warfare; unprecedented carnage that disproportionately eliminated men from the upper classes, left millions dead, and transformed the human landscape by sending home millions more wounded and disfigured veterans; and a flu pandemic that killed more than half a million people in France and Britain alone. Less studied by historians, the Eastern Front was very different. Here war contributed to the collapse of empires and set off mass waves of human migration, both forced and voluntary. It also resulted in the creation of new nation-states, the transformation of 25–30 million people from imperial subjects to national minorities, and genocide.

Recent studies of the experiences and effects of World War I in the East, many of them by historians of Russia, are helping to right this imbalance in

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the historiography.1 The three books under review here further this work, using new sources, methodologies, and conceptual frameworks to explore how war and imperial collapse transformed the lives of people living in German, Ottoman, and Russian imperial lands before, during, and just after World War I. Overlapping in chronology and geography, these three books offer new insights into the role of nationalism in wartime conflicts and postwar nation building, causes of ethnic conflict in imperial borderlands, and reasons for genocide. They also offer models for reframing the history of these regions in ways that better get at wartime and postwar human mobility, overlapping populations, and imperial entanglements.

Of the three books, The Impossible Border directly tackles the subject of wartime and postwar migrations, specifically the various migratory waves moving across Germany’s open eastern border between 1914 and 1922 (the year that its eastern border with Poland was finally set). During this period, millions of Europeans were uprooted from their homes due to war, postwar settlements, and revolution. Germany, Sammartino reminds us in this book, lay at the center of these migrations. Between 1914 and 1922, Germany received some one million German citizens from France and Poland, tens of thousands of ethnic Germans and Jews from the east, and hundreds of thousands of Russians (2).

By focusing on migration—each of the book’s eight chapters focuses on a particular wave moving into or out of Germany—Sammartino seeks to do two things. First, to put human migrations, and anxieties about Germany’s “impossible border” in the east, at the center of the “crisis of sovereignty” that Germany experienced in this period; she describes this crisis as a result of the collapse of multinational empires and characterized by widespread German anxiety and questioning about the relationship among nation, state, and territory (1–5). Her second goal is to interrogate Hannah Arendt’s charge, made in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that “the failure of postwar states” to protect migrants contributed to the rise of totalitarianism.2 Sammartino asks, 1 See, e.g., select essays in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Sanborn, “Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 77, 2 (2005): 290–324; and Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (New York: Penguin, 1976, 2004). 2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).

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“Does the totalitarianism of the 1930s have its origins in the migration crisis of the war and postwar decade?” (2).

This framing is unsatisfying for three reasons. First, Sammartino does not situate her study within broader debates about continuities between Weimar and Nazi Germany, or the historiography of totalitarianism, nor does she explain the continued relevance of Arendt’s 40-year-old book in pursuing these questions. Second, the eight chapters of the book do not fit the framework: collectively they explore diverse waves of migration flowing in and out of Germany and their various cultural and political implications, but only once, in passing, are connections between migration and Nazism addressed (68–69). The book does not answer the question it poses at the start.

Conceptual problems aside, the strength of Sammartino’s book lies in its ability to capture, through the lens of migration, a complex, ground-level picture of the lived experience of war and imperial collapse in former German and Russian imperial lands. Several prominent themes deserve mention here. One is the novelty of human encounters and demographic issues that faced newly formed governments as a result of wartime imperial collapse and migrations. Sammartino discusses, for instance, how the outbreak of war allowed Germans from Germany to “discover” their “German brothers” living in the Baltics (the descendants of 13th-century Teutonic knights). She notes that prior to 1914, European migration had been mostly labor migration; that Weimar had “no clear framework” for how to deal with the diverse migrant groups it received during and after the war; and that migrants thus complicated the Weimar government’s postwar task of forging a coherent nation-state (9, 13).

Also effective is Sammartino’s discussion of how war and wartime migrations reshaped German nationalism. In chapter 1, she argues that World War I broke open the question of what “German” and “Germany” meant, due largely to Germans’ “discovery” of “foreign Germans” living in former Russian imperial lands, an event that “awakened many Germans to the potential for eastward expansion” and “became an increasingly visible symbol of the German historical claim to territory in Eastern Europe” (28–30, 204). A clear example of this was the continued fighting of some 20,000–40,000 German Freikorps troops (paramilitary fighters organized in 1919 to fight Bolshevism in Germany) in the Baltics after Germany’s defeat and revolution in November 1918, in part out of a desire to create a German state there (45–70). Having failed at this, Sammartino argues, Freikorps troops left the Baltics in late 1919, returning to Germany as “embittered men” who “framed

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the end of their campaign as another case in which a victorious and strong German army had been stabbed in the back” (68).

These interconnected themes of nationalism and cross-border contacts are also central to Shattering Empires, Michael Reynolds’s study of Kurdish and Armenian populations divided between the Russian and Ottoman empires in the early 20th century. Reynolds is a rare breed of historian who can read both Russian- and Ottoman-language sources, and he does this to outstanding effect in this book. Drawing on Russian consular reports from cities in eastern Anatolia and internal Ottoman state correspondence, he narrates a trans-imperial history of the Russo-Ottoman struggle for control over populations straddling the eastern Anatolia–Caucasus border, a region he describes as “a double borderland,” in which “the two empires blurred into each other in a zone distinct from the centers of both,” and Russo-Ottoman “imperial rivalries and insecurities interacted in a particularly complex way” (46).

Reynolds’s book is conceptually innovative in two ways. First, while historians of the Russian and Ottoman empires often frame and write about their subjects in relation to Europe, they almost never consider them in relation to each other, despite good reasons for doing so.3 This has to do with linguistic challenges (picking up French or German is not the same as mastering Ottoman Turkish), but also with rigid area studies boundaries that continue to separate the study of Russia from the Middle East/Near East. Reynolds’s book is a pioneering attempt to bridge these two fields. As such, it contains within it some of the tensions involved in this enterprise, above all how to refer to the geographic area under scrutiny. Is it Eurasia, the Middle East, the Near East, or “Europe’s periphery”? Reynolds shifts among all these terms in the book, a situation that may confuse nonspecialists but is helped somewhat by the five excellent maps he provides. This shifting terminology is not Reynolds’s fault: it is a symptom of the larger problem of scholars in two overlapping fields working for so long in isolation from one another and still having no agreed-upon geographic nomenclature. Reynolds’s book is an important step toward moving the fields of Russian and Ottoman history closer together. This leads to my second conceptual point: this book is original also in that it looks at how the Russian and Ottoman empires evolved and functioned interdependently. This sets it apart from other recent and important works that look at the Russian and Ottoman empires comparatively, exploring, among other things, how they used similar strategies of governance and borrowed models of rule from each other.4 By 3 See, e.g., Andreas Kappeler, “Spaces of Entanglement,” Kritika 12, 2 (2011): 477–87. 4 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected

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contrast, Reynolds’s study fits within an emerging body of work that looks at how the histories of empires were “entangled.”5

A revisionist work, Shattering Empires argues that the Russo-Ottoman struggle over eastern Anatolia in the years before and during World War I (1908–18) was not a national struggle but an “interstate competition” driven by security concerns on both sides. Reynolds rejects the conventional “national perspective that sees the late Ottoman and Russian empires as mere preludes to the establishment of their successor states,” and instead seeks to portray the Russian and Ottoman empires as “state actors” operating within a “European-driven new global order organized around the national idea” (5–6, 266). Using a transimperial framework and methodology, he seeks to show that nationalism was “a byproduct of interstate competition, not a stimulus of that competition” (18); and that while both state and nonstate actors (Kurdish and Armenian leaders in particular) adopted the popular national idiom to legitimize and frame their politics, the “real issues were not national,” and the conflict was ultimately not national but about security (18, 47).

Central to Reynolds’s analysis is his idea that the Russian and Ottoman empires were “interpenetrating” through their diverse ethnic and religious populations, many of which were “overlapping.” Each empire, he argues, sought to project its influence and power into the other’s territory through heterogeneous subject populations, whose “identities, loyalties, and aspirations … pointed in multiple directions, offering rich opportunities to exploit and creating vulnerabilities to shield” (46). This point may seem obvious, especially given all the attention scholars have paid over the past 20 years to Russia’s ethnic and religious diversity, yet there is very little scholarship on the multiple and diverse networks that connected the Russian and Ottoman empires or state efforts to co-opt and control them.6 We know that Russia intervened at times in Ottoman Orthodox communities, and the Ottomans in Russia’s Muslim populations. But the picture of mutual imperial meddling

Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999); Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 5 Kappeler, “Spaces of Entanglement.” For a study that frames British imperial history as entangled with the history of the French Empire, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). 6 Historians of Russia tend to take a regional approach to Russia’s ethnic and religious diversity and have overlooked the important issue of Russia’s transimperial ethnic and religious networks. Islamicists have recently produced a number of good works on Muslim networks connecting the Russian and the Ottoman empires, but there is very little cross-fertilization between these groups of scholars. On transimperial Muslim networks, see Alexandre Papas, Thomas Welsford, and Thierry Zarcone, eds., Central Asian Pilgrims: Hajj Routes and Pious Visits between Central Asia and the Hijaz (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2012).

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Reynolds sketches in this book involves multiple subject populations and brings into focus some of the strategic implications of having many different ethnic and religious populations divided between two contiguous land empires. It also makes clear that ethnic and religious identity did not predetermine imperial loyalty: Muslims from Russia are seen here working as Russian spies in Ottoman lands, while Armenian Christians conspire with the Ottomans to infiltrate the Russian Caucasus (94–99). Reynolds notes that not just Kurds and Armenians but also Circassians, Greeks, Tatars, and Caucasian Turks “inhabited both empires and moved back and forth between them” (46); and the Ottomans tried to undermine Russia’s control of its southern borderlands by working alternately through its Armenian, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Jewish communities (130).

As the “two primary communities in eastern Anatolia,” Kurds and Armenians were targeted by both Russia and the Ottoman Empire in their competition to control the region from the late 19th century through World War I. Seeking to unify the Kurds and make them a base of Russian influence in eastern Anatolia, Reynolds argues, Russia by 1912 had created a “covert support network” for Kurds, funneling arms and money to the various tribes through its consulates there (69–70). The Ottomans, for their part, sent Ottoman Circassians into the North Caucasus to conduct “pro-Ottoman propaganda” and allowed Russian Armenians to transfer their revolutionary base of operations to Ottoman lands after a Russian government crackdown in 1908 (87, 99). Reynolds argues that this mutual meddling among and efforts to control Kurds and Armenians exacerbated existing conflicts between these groups, caused largely by late Ottoman policies of arming Kurdish tribes (who robbed and terrorized Armenians) and resettling Balkan Muslim migrants in historically Armenian lands—which, in turn, prompted the growth of an Armenian revolutionary movement—and Kurdish fears of Armenians forming a state and pushing them off their land (50).

Reynolds argues that the Kurdish and Armenian communities were “shattered” by the Russo-Ottoman struggle over eastern Anatolia. Both, he claims, were “far worse off” after the war and collapse of empires than they had been before (264–65). Kurds suddenly found themselves divided among five states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, the USSR, and Iran) and living under national regimes that were “more intrusive and repressive” than the former imperial ones (265). The Armenians fared much worse: the Ottoman government targeted them, along with the Assyrians, for “destruction” during the war. In chapter 5, Reynolds describes how, in the aftermath of an Armenian rising in 1915 in the eastern Anatolian city of Van—and with British, French,

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and Russian troops pushing into Ottoman lands from all sides—Ottoman interior minister Talât Pasha ordered mass deportations of Armenians from the region. Thus began the Ottoman government’s forced deportations of Armenians, accompanied by large-scale massacres and atrocities, which resulted in the wholesale removal of Armenians from their ancestral lands in eastern Anatolia. According to records kept by Talât Pasha, a total of 924,158 Ottoman Armenians were forcibly relocated at this time, 800,000 of them from the eastern provinces (147–48, 152, 155).

The treatment of Armenians during World War I was exceptional. Donald Bloxham makes this point in his contribution to the third book under review here, A Question of Genocide, an edited volume of 15 essays about the Armenian massacres of 1915. Bloxham notes that the Ottoman government deported other subject peoples during the war, but “none were so comprehensively dislocated as the Armenians, and none subject to the same near-total murder” (262). Indeed, Bloxham writes, “Nowhere else during World War I was nationalist activism met with total murder” (272). Estimates of the death toll range from 664,000 (about 45 percent of prewar Anatolia’s Armenian population) to a million (Shattering Empires, 155). Only the Assyrians, a smaller Christian group also concentrated in eastern Anatolia, suffered a similar fate: as David Gaunt explains in his essay, they too were deemed disloyal and “targeted for eradication and ethnic cleansing” by the Ottoman government during the war, and an estimated 250,000 perished (A Question of Genocide, 245, 259).

A major event of World War I, the history of the Armenian deportations and massacres has long been controversial, difficult to research, and distorted by competing Turkish and Armenian nationalist agendas. A Question of Genocide—the product of a series of scholarly workshops on the Armenian massacres held since 2000, which brought together many Turkish and Armenian scholars for the first time—is an attempt to rescue the subject from mutually antagonistic Turkish and Armenian “nationalist master narratives” and reconstruct a more accurate historical narrative of what happened. Unlike most other recent studies of the Armenian massacres, this book is not polemical.7 As the editors explain in their introduction, the book’s ambiguous

7 Examples include Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Vahakn N. Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).

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title reflects the lack of consensus among scholars involved that the mass killings of Armenians constituted “genocide” (10).

Together, Shattering Empires (especially chapter 5) and A Question of Genocide challenge a number of accepted truths about how and why the Armenian massacres happened. To begin with, against those who cite long-standing Turkish–Armenian hostilities or an ideological commitment to Turkism as causal factors, Reynolds argues that the real reasons for the deportations and massacres were security concerns exacerbated by the war.8 Reynolds describes the Unionist government that ordered and carried out the massacres as “cunning, resolute, and desperate men,” who were “grimly determined to preserve Ottoman sovereignty” in eastern Anatolia and saw all of Anatolia as “vulnerable to subversion and partition” as long as it remained ethnically diverse. War, Reynolds argues, gave them the chance to “remaster Anatolia’s demographics” to prevent future partition, and they did this throughout the region by deporting Christians and resettling non-Turkish Muslim refugees among Turkish populations to speed their “linguistic and cultural assimilation.” Within this schema, Reynolds argues, the Armenians in eastern Anatolia presented a special problem to the Unionist government: as a Christian population that both Britain and Russia had intermittently supported in the past, they “provided a readymade pretext for intervention” by a foreign power. He portrays the Unionist government’s wartime decision to deport the Armenians en masse as ultimately pragmatic and in keeping with their understanding of how the international system worked: it aimed to “neutralize” the “immediate threat of partisans and saboteurs” and the “long-term threat of foreign intervention and partition” (150–51).

In making this argument, Reynolds does not deny the Unionist government’s responsibility for the deportations and massacres; on the contrary, he makes clear that they were fully aware of what they were doing and argues that Talât Pasha, the interior minister who oversaw the plan, “understood the radically transgressive nature of his resolution of the Armenian Question” (153). At the same time, Reynolds’s analysis suggests that foreign powers also played a key role in this tragic event. Two other scholars, Peter Holquist and Eric Weitz, take up this theme explicitly in their essays in A Question of Genocide. Focusing on Russia’s wartime occupation of Armenia from 1915 to 1917, Holquist argues that the Russian Empire “played an important role in the dynamics leading up to the slaughter of the Armenian population” (151). Weitz argues that German military and civilian officials supported the Young Turk government, and although they did not initiate or organize the 8 See, e.g., Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide; Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011).

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event, they were complicit in the “Armenian Genocide.” He also suggests that German “accommodation of Ottoman atrocities” must be seen as related to German experience in dealing brutally with “troublesome” populations, both overseas in colonial settings and in Europe during World War I (196–97).

Were the Armenian massacres pre-planned or improvised by the Ottoman government?9 This question is central to essays by Aram Arkun and Donald Bloxham, which mine German, Ottoman, and Armenian archival sources for insights into the organization of the deportations and massacres. Arkun focuses on events in Zeytun, a predominantly Armenian town in Ottoman Cilicia at the start of the war and the site of one of the earliest deportations of an entire Armenian community (222). His fascinating analysis raises more questions than it answers: why is it, he asks, that government officials spread out around Anatolia all “knew to send Armenian deportees to Konya?” He suggests that this may indicate planning and an “organizational process” on the part of the government (242). Arkun’s tentativeness on this point no doubt stems from source issues (the Ottoman sources he cites all come from published collections of select archival documents); it would have been useful if he had included a discussion about the accessibility of Ottoman archives with regard to his topic.

Bloxham is more resolute: he argues that there was “no blueprint for genocide,” but that genocide instead resulted from a process of “cumulative policy radicalization” by 1915 (260). Like Stephen Astourian—whose essay argues that changing agrarian relations were central to the emergence of an “Armenian Question” in the Ottoman Empire—Bloxham sees a gradual “deterioration of Ottoman–Armenian relations” between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and situates it within the broader context of Ottoman decline. Specifically, both authors argue that the influx of millions of Muslim refugees into Anatolia from the Balkans and the Caucasus greatly shifted the region’s demographics toward a Muslim majority and produced tensions and competition over land between these refugees and indigenous Armenians (56, 261). By the early 20th century, as the Ottoman government increasingly stressed the Turkish and Muslim character of the empire and strove to “homogenize” its Anatolian “heartland,” the Armenians started to look like an “alien” element and an obstacle to these goals. But only in the summer of 1915, Bloxham argues, amid Ottoman fears of Entente military advances, did the government identify the Armenians as a threat and embrace a policy of “general murder and dislocation” (274).

9 Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006).

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As we approach the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, the books reviewed here make timely contributions to knowledge about the diverse, transformative effects of the war on the many ethnic and religious groups living in German, Russian, and Ottoman imperial lands. Collectively, these books make the case for reframing the wartime and postwar history of these places in non-national terms, as a way to capture the multiple trans-imperial and international factors that influenced state ethnic policies and emerging nationalisms. They also advance our understanding of how imperial legacies shaped the kinds of nations and national narratives that emerged in these places after the war. To cite one example, Erik Zurcher argues that the early Turkish republican government kept silent on the Armenian genocide so as not to alienate provincial elites who had benefited from the Armenian deportations, and whose support it needed to forge the new nation (316). Perhaps the greatest contribution made here is the opening up of the history of the Armenian massacres of 1915 to serious scholarly discussion and analysis, despite continued political polarization and serious penalties that still threaten those who deviate from official positions. This new research has implications not only for modern Turkish and Armenian history but also for broader historical questions about ethnic violence in relation to empires, borderlands, and nation building in the modern era.

Dept. of HistoryConnecticut College270 Mohegan AvenueNew London, CT 06320 USAekane2@conncoll.edu

When the publications of a Kritika staff member are reviewed, that person is excluded from all editorial decisions associated with the review.