Social Science Research Council

Abstract

In education, language reform, and publishing Ottoman and Russian Muslim intellectuals were engaged in parallel struggles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, there was a consistent dialogue between Turkic-language reformers on both sides of the Russo-Ottoman border. Newspapers shared reports and journalists would often submit articles to publications in both countries. A growing sense of common cause and common experience was slowly developing through the medium of these reform-minded journals was developing among speakers of Turkic languages from the Balkans to the Fergana Valley. This growing awareness and sense of community did not, however, translate into a single “imagined community.” Indeed, up until the end of the First World War, relatively few intellectuals in either the Ottoman or the Russian Empire advocated a specifically Turkic state, whether unified or not.

It was specifically among the Turkic émigrés in the Ottoman Empire that we find formulations of a state based in Turkish ethnicity, cut loose from the basis of Ottoman legitimacy that had defined the state previously. The fluid position of these émigré intellectuals, familiar with both the Russian and Ottoman contexts but less tied to the political restrictions of either, gave them a unique position to formulate a specifically political Turkism. Turkic immigrant intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire brought a new set of political values to intellectual debates and, particularly after the outbreak of hostilities between Russian and the Ottoman Empire during World War I, they played a key role in developing a language of explicit and self-conscious Turkish nationalism.

This landscape changed radically after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the successful foundation of the Turkish Republic was in many ways a more welcoming harbor than the Ottoman Empire had ever been. Devoted to the concept of a unitary identity based on metaphors of ethnicity, language, and culture, Turkism moved from the periphery of political discourse to its very center. Russian Muslim intellectuals, who already been working for several decades on the elaboration of such an identity were, in many respects, even better suited for the elaboration of the Republic’s new official nationalism than “natives” were. The very qualities which had made the Turkic intellectuals peripheral in the late Ottoman period, their insistence on ethnic and linguistic tropes of self, their antagonism to the necessary diversity of the Ottoman state, helped assure them of a favored role in the new Republic.

This period of relative freedom was short-lived, however, and from 1925 onward, there was increasing pressure on these immigrant intellectuals to limit their activities and concentrate their efforts on the promotion of the state’s own initiatives. As Turkish nationalism was refined to meet the new state’s needs, the range of possible variation became more limited. One the one hand, Turkic refugee activism had the potential to endanger the Republic’s otherwise strong relations with the Soviet Union. Just as importantly, Turkist theorists had to be careful to frame their arguments in ways that would not threaten Turkey’s assimilationist policies regarding non-Turkic speaking Muslim populations.

Turkic émigrés intellectuals, with their lack of ties to the CUP and well-developed framework for describing and discussing a specifically Turkic identity, had been ideally placed to help the new state develop a national identity for its citizens. Their position, however, was predicated on recognizing that state needs were the primary criteria for creating this new identity. As “Turkism” moved from the cultural realm to the political, as it became the basis of a specific state’s legitimacy, the range of meanings that could be publicly expressed became narrower. Turkic immigrants in the Ottoman Empire had been uniquely placed to develop a Turkish nationalism that was free from the exigencies of state that marked most Ottoman-born Turkists. This very distance from the corridors of power in the late Ottoman period allowed them to play a key role in the formulation and elaboration of the new Republic’s ideology. No longer at the periphery of cultural production, they moved to the very center, obtaining high posts in government and academia. Nevertheless, this power came at a cost; Turkism was no longer an abstract ideal, but the ideological prop of the state. Only by recognizing this new political reality could Turkic émigrés maintain their place in the new order. Those who did not were faced with marginalization, repression, and exile.