How the rivalry between Russians and Turks shaped the world

The rulers of both empires saw themselves as standard bearers of civilizations — the Ottomans as the seat of Islam, the Russians as the champions of the Orthodox Church and the redeemers, even, of the legacy of the ancient Byzantines. The czars in Moscow coveted Istanbul, and saw in its conquest a pathway to the warm waters of the Mediterranean and suzerainty over the Holy Lands.

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That never came to pass, but a lot else did. Russian campaigns in the Caucasus and lands around the Black Sea saw the massacre and mass deportations of populations of Turkic Muslims. In 1864, for example, Russian forces carried out what some have deemed “the first modern genocide on European soil” after they seized the lands of the Circassians — which include the area around Sochi where Russia staged last year’s Winter Olympics.

Tens of thousands of Circassians were systematically butchered; countless others died of starvation or cold as they trekked into exile. Some accounts suggest as many as a million — half of the ethnic group’s total population — died at the time. Now, up to 5 million Turks claim some form of Circassian or other Caucasian heritage.

It worked in the other direction, as well. Most infamously, as World War I raged, the Ottomans carried out mass deportations and killings of the empire’s Armenians, the vast majority of whom lived in what is now central and eastern Turkey. Fearing this community of Christians to be a potential Russian fifth column, Ottoman leaders gave orders for their removal from their homelands.

WorldViews documented the scale of the tragedy that took place beginning in 1915, which saw countless Armenians executed, raped and forced into grim death marches into the desert. Scholars, international organizations and a host of Western governments all believe the atrocities amount to genocide. Anestimated 5 million Ottoman civilians perished between 1914 and 1922, casualties of the upheavals that surrounded the empire’s implosion.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually escaped to Russian lands, some settling in what is now modern-day Armenia — once a part of the Ottoman Empire that, until the 19th century, was largely Muslim.

The birth of nations

In the 19th century, Russia played a prominent role in fomenting nationalism in parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans once lorded over by the Muslim Ottomans. Russia had a hand in a number of prominent 19th century liberation movements — from Greece to Serbia to Bulgaria. That was a role that led it into a geopolitical competition with the Austro-Hungarian empire, tensions that would eventually flare into World War I.

The wars that flared in the late 19th century, including the seismic Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 and the later Balkan wars that preceded World War I, made clearer the borders of Eastern Europe’s future nation-states. It also saw massive population displacements, the exodus of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim refugees in various directions, and the collapse of the fragile cosmopolitanism that once characterized parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially its port cities.