To the Victor, Go the Spoils (Redux): A Plausible Central Powers Victory

[Angmar]

I think that in case of a split of Austria-Hungary, the division will be made along the lines of Cisleithania and Transleithania. It is the easiest because for this purpose the political institutions and borders of the provinces are already drawn.
And small minorities have nothing to say in this time.

It will probably be that the Protestant German elite and perhaps also the normal Protestant population will be against it.
But we forget the Catholic population, which will be for it.

And I think the elite in military, economy and politics could be for an annexation because it gives Germany many advantages.


I agree that the disintegration of Austria-Hungary is a thing that appears in every history. But let's be honest. Does anyone here really believe that Austria was still really functional in 1919 to survive as an entity?
The minorities were in unrest, the Hungarians and Germans were resisting the elevation of the Czechs to the third pillar of the monarchy, and the population was simply fed up with everything.

Also how many nations with several large minorities are there which function decently without that not every few years a civil war appearance.

 

[boredviewer1234]

I agree that the disintegration of Austria-Hungary is a thing that appears in every history. But let's be honest. Does anyone here really believe that Austria was still really functional in 1919 to survive as an entity?

Unlike many people I do but I think it's going to be cruel limping along thing that utterly sours everyone's opinion of the project and turns less into a great power than a giant prison.

It's often forgotten but the AH military prepared to fight against their own people if need be for the war viewing them as almost entirely unreliable, a attitude seen where 30,000 Ruthenians where butchered as they fled the Russian advance out of fear traitors.

A weird analogy that might be fitting is Iraq as it devolves into a colonial minority imposing their will because of their patron and the fact they have a air force and most of the rebels don't with repeated confrontations with Hungarians. A civil war every few years can last till Germany is ready to absorb what it wants.

Possibly also a resurgent Ottomans, I imagine they would be quite interested in Bosnia and the Balkans in general both because they where only kicked out a fear years ago but how they can try exploit the situations.

 

[prester.john208]

30,000 Ruthenians where butchered as they fled the Russian advance out of fear traitors.

When did this happen?

 

[Athelstane]

I agree that the disintegration of Austria-Hungary is a thing that appears in every history. But let's be honest. Does anyone here really believe that Austria was still really functional in 1919 to survive as an entity?

In the 1919 of our timeline? No.

In a 1919 of a timeline where the Great War does not happen, or happens in way less destructive to Austria-Hungary? Possibly!

 

[boredviewer1234]

When did this happen?

During the Russian invasion and occupation of Galcia during the most panicked period August to November when they saw traitors in every shadow and they reacted.

For example on August 19 1914 you had orders like this given out to Army Group Kövess.


''
In our troops’ operations up to now, it has been repeatedly the case that they have been shot at by the population or also by Russian soldiers in male or female civilian clothing . . . It has also been ascertained that the Russophile population of various places in our own land is working in cooperation with the enemy and by informing the enemy (frequently through signals) is betraying its own troops.''

Such illegal conduct, stressed Kövess, demanded that officers and men respond ‘ most energetically ’. Any individual found carrying a weapon, or even keeping one at home, was to be immediately shot if on enemy territory or court-martialled and condemned if on Habsburg land. Villages and farms from where shots were fired were to be surrounded, set ablaze, and the guilty executed. When troops were to be quartered in a village inhabited by suspected ‘Russophile elements’, their advance guard should take the most influential inhabitants hostage and announce that ‘the slightest hostile act’ would result in them being ‘publicly and immediately executed’.

Ring of steel

Though it varied from unit to unit, Hungarians where noted the worst however virtually everyone treated them awfully out of perceived disloyalty, being told by their officers they are traitors and a degree of opportunity to take their fear and abuse them.

In the first few months as weird it is to sound the army almost broke over a 100,000 soldiers and officers had been killed, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 lost as prisoners and went berserk as they retreat from Galicia.

 

[thezerech]

What's even more insane is that the Ukrainians killed generally constituted one of the most loyal populations of the Empire, the "Tyroleans of the East."

The Austrians, in 1918, while occupying Ukraine were noted as basically just looting everything whereas the Germans expended a more significant amount of effort in state building the Skoropads'kyi regime. Not including the actions of battlegroup archduke Wilhelm.

Edit: A Mad Catastrophe is a good book on the AH war effort that specifically details some of these events.

 

[Linbot]

I wonder if the Germans will develop deep connections with a Chinese governemnt, it would be great to divert Japan's attention.

It depends on who is in power in China. The Anfu government is currently dependent on Japan, but if they continue to hold power, they will need Japanese backing less and less as their position improves and their rivals are suppressed. At this point, the Anfu government would owe a lot of money to Japan, but since they are less domestically vulnerable, they would lack a strong incentive to stay on their good side to get more loans in the future. At this point I can definitely envision the Anfu government trying to forge ties with Germany, a country that is not as interested in bleeding China dry for its own gain.

If the anti-Japanese Zhili Clique seizes power in the years following WW1 as OTL, Germany is immediately an obvious source of foreign backing, but OTL the Zhili Clique also dealt with the west and even with the Soviets to a limited extent. It really depends on what attitude the each of the Powers themselves decide to take on China.

Imagine the Warlord Era becoming the first modern proxy war between Germany and Britain, with France and Japan on the sidelines.

It's tempting to imagine something like this, but I'm not sure how likely it is. OTL the British refused to deal with any "warlord", and instead dealt only with the government in Beijing. Most other foreign powers took similar stances, and the only European power that did give support to warlords, the Soviets, made every effort to disguise state involvement in the aid missions they sent, and fostered the illusion that their representatives were private citizens. So it seems to me like there was an incentive for the powers to deal with the Beijing government, possibly because the regional warlords were much harder to hold accountable (indeed, the Soviets were betrayed by each and every one of the proxy warlords they gave support to, until the CCP). The Chinese warlords did have numerous dealings with Europe and Japan, but these mostly took the form of contracts with provate companies and individuals. It's possible that they would change that attitude if the Beijing government fell firmly into a particular power's sphere, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

The Beijing government has reasons to prefer to remain on good terms with all the Powers, since offending any one of them would lead to undesirable consequences. One important aspect of this is that Britain is still owed the Boxer Indemnity, and therefore has the ability to forgive it, or refuse to forgive it. They did so OTL under the consition that the sum be used for funding education in China (I think).

Japan is the power most likely to back warlord proxies, since their goal for China is to lay it completely prostrate to enable maximum Japanese economic penetration and explotation. However, there are no examples of Chinese warlords who became Japanese puppets before the Japanese actually invaded, since accepting too much Japanese backing came hand in hand with an unacceptable degree of Japanese control which was actually dangerous to the power of the warlords themselves.

So I think the most likely scenario would be a Chinese government that is associated with Germany, but not to the extent that it is a German ally, fighting against rival warlords that could have some sort of vague backing from Japan. Everything would change when the Japanese attack, of course, which I feel would still happen sooner or later, the Kwantung Army being what it is.

 

[NoMommsen]

30,000 Ruthenians where butchered as they fled the Russian advance out of fear traitors.

When did this happen?

During the Russian invasion and occupation of Galcia during the most panicked period August to November when they saw traitors in every shadow and they reacted.

For example on August 19 1914 you had orders like this given out to Army Group Kövess.


''
In our troops’ operations up to now, it has been repeatedly the case that they have been shot at by the population or also by Russian soldiers in male or female civilian clothing . . . It has also been ascertained that the Russophile population of various places in our own land is working in cooperation with the enemy and by informing the enemy (frequently through signals) is betraying its own troops.''

Such illegal conduct, stressed Kövess, demanded that officers and men respond ‘ most energetically ’. Any individual found carrying a weapon, or even keeping one at home, was to be immediately shot if on enemy territory or court-martialled and condemned if on Habsburg land. Villages and farms from where shots were fired were to be surrounded, set ablaze, and the guilty executed. When troops were to be quartered in a village inhabited by suspected ‘Russophile elements’, their advance guard should take the most influential inhabitants hostage and announce that ‘the slightest hostile act’ would result in them being ‘publicly and immediately executed’.

Ring of steel

Though it varied from unit to unit, Hungarians where noted the worst however virtually everyone treated them awfully out of perceived disloyalty, being told by their officers they are traitors and a degree of opportunity to take their fear and abuse them.

In the first few months as weird it is to sound the army almost broke over a 100,000 soldiers and officers had been killed, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 lost as prisoners and went berserk as they retreat from Galicia.

... perhaps the question shopuld have been fromulated more 'precisely'.

The original question was asking for a source on your rather exact number(s) of some war crime enacted on a certain ethnicity.

Your answer 'simply' states that the top brass of A-H military (in this case Kövess) were aware of 'illegal' acts of troops conducted on civilians (not the least out of what could be called partisan-"franc-tireurs"-fears). Crimes (and crimes these were I never doubt regradless the perpetrator) conducted by troops of every participating power.
Therefore a rather 'commonplace' answer for some rather specific question on a specific number named by you.


And where from do you have gotten your comparative assessment of the hungarian soldiers?

 

[boredviewer1234]

... perhaps the question shopuld have been fromulated more 'precisely'.

The original question was asking for a source on your rather exact number(s) of some war crime enacted on a certain ethnicity.

Your answer 'simply' states that the top brass of A-H military (in this case Kövess) were aware of 'illegal' acts of troops conducted on civilians (not the least out of what could be called partisan-"franc-tireurs"-fears). Crimes (and crimes these were I never doubt regradless the perpetrator) conducted by troops of every participating power.
Therefore a rather 'commonplace' answer for some rather specific question on a specific number named by you.


And where from do you have gotten your comparative assessment of the hungarian soldiers?

Sure my bad.

That said I must apologize for the late reply this is partially due to the nature of the book, the estimate of Ruthenians is 25,000 to 30,000 however that comes source is linked to a book in German I'm struggling to find and read.

Here's the source of my claim.

Ring of Steel

Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2014Winner of the 2014 Wolfson History Prize, the 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Society for Military History's 2015 Distinguished Book Award and the 2015 British Army Military Book of the YearFor the empires of Germany and...

www.google.ie

You can however find the same numbers in other books which are in English and easier to find if somewhat different interpretations as to how the killings got so bad.

For example in Germany ascendant : the eastern front 1915 by Buttar, Prit, author use's the 25,000 estimate and also blames the Polish dominated administration using this panicked period to settle scores as well anyone else who wanted to than a pure military affair.

https://www.google.ie/books/edition...25000+Ruthenians&pg=PA171&printsec=frontcover

Germany ascendant : the eastern front 1915 : Buttar, Prit, author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

448 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : 24 cm

archive.org

Others such such as Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War By Jörn Leonhard use the 30,000 figure and blame the AH military as a whole.

Pandora’s Box

Winner of the Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Prize “The best large-scale synthesis in any language of what we currently know and understand about this multidimensional, cataclysmic conflict.” —Richard J. Evans, Times Literary Supplement In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany’s...

www.google.ie

For the Hungarians Ring of fire notes they where the most commonly singled out as acts against Ruthenians though one the most likely explanation Honvéd troops given the issue with communicating with the local population given the different languages particularly seemed to have jumped the gun as the entire military was consumed by fear of partisan's and traitors among the Ruthenian population as well some ill discipline among Hungarian units like the cavalry.

 

[thezerech]

In regards to Hungarian tensions, the issue of Zakarpattia is relevant, a territory of the Transleithania with a Ukrainian majority, and the most relatively russophilic area of Western Ukraine due to the influence of the Orthodox Church. I haven't personally looked much into pre-1918 Zakarpattia myself, so this is speculative, but that prejudice may have played a role.

 

[Just a Turteldove Fan]

Except that in order for Germany to annex territory off the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia will have to sign off - it'd require amending the Constitution to give Austria representation in the Bundesrat and resolve any other legal issues, and the Prussian government has a veto on all amendments to the Constitution.

The logistics of Anschluss in a surviving German Empire are quite an interesting topic, actually, and I wonder if it'd actually even happen or whether it would get bogged down in a constitutional quagmire. 🤔 The Kulturkampf may be over, but the political establishment would still be uneasy about another large Catholic state, especially one which is very likely to band with Bavaria, Wurttemberg et al. and thus create a dangerous situation of dualism in the Bundesrat. Already the Southern Catholics were posing a problem there before the war, after all. And of course the German right would not be clueless to the fact that millions of Zentrum and SPD voters would be added to the electorate - and if Bohemia is annexed, that'll add millions of really angry Czechs into a country which was already frustrated with millions of uppity Poles.

In the OTL Anschluss, for obvious reasons, none of these issues really worried German leadership, but they'd likely cause a lot of headaches in TTL.

I've been giving this topic some thought over the last few days. I have concluded that Wilhelm would be a key player during the process. Due to his role as king of Prussia, his approval would be mandatory in any constitutional amendment. So convincing him would probably be the government's number one priority.

Knowing that it would be interesting to know what was Wilhelm's opinion about Anschluss in OTL and how that opinion could change in this ATL. What do you guys think?

 

[Augenis]

I've been giving this topic some thought over the last few days. I have concluded that Wilhelm would be a key player during the process. Due to his role as king of Prussia, his approval would be mandatory in any constitutional amendment. So convincing him would probably be the government's number one priority.

Knowing that it would be interesting to know what was Wilhelm's opinion about Anschluss in OTL and how that opinion could change in this ATL. What do you guys think?

Wellll, I personally would not be so absolutist. It was not the monarchs who cast their vote in the Bundesrat, it was the governments of the constituent monarchies, and while Wilhelm II had the prerogative of appointing Prussian minister-presidents, Prussia was still a constitutional monarchy, even if not a particularly democratic one, so there were limits to how much he could simply appoint his favorites (especially since the Personal Regiment era is over). And, depending on whether the chancellor-Prussian M-P positions being held by the same person rule persists, whoever is in power on the federal level, and the composition of the Reichstag that they would have to rely on, would be relevant as well.

 

[kham_coc]

Wellll, I personally would not be so absolutist.

It's also worth noting that even in victory the prussian elites would have been discredited and its population disillusionized - add in the fact that religion fell in importance and nationalism (particularly German nationalism, as opposed to localism) was strengthened which means that from a German perspective, Anschluss would have been unstoppable, and any attempt to stop it (in Germany) would have been deeply unpopular.

 

[boredviewer1234]

I will be honest, I agree with the idea the Prussian elites are probably going to suffer a serious setback in a win and a unification attempt will happen which will impact their situation further.

However I think Prussia can make a come back as sooner or later even if it never can reclaim it's importance of it's golden age, it's still one kingdom with a far large share of the table than many, the gains in the east by nature make Prussia a province that will play a importance role in keeping the various eastern puppets under German control.


That said on the topic of Anschluss I wonder how it will influence nationalism aboard? True German unification will have impact on all of Eastern Europe to Switzerland to even places like Finland with saw themselves as Nordic and related to Germans and plenty of nationalist will be inspired by it across the globe.

 

[Just a Turteldove Fan]

Wellll, I personally would not be so absolutist. It was not the monarchs who cast their vote in the Bundesrat, it was the governments of the constituent monarchies, and while Wilhelm II had the prerogative of appointing Prussian minister-presidents, Prussia was still a constitutional monarchy, even if not a particularly democratic one, so there were limits to how much he could simply appoint his favorites (especially since the Personal Regiment era is over). And, depending on whether the chancellor-Prussian M-P positions being held by the same person rule persists, whoever is in power on the federal level, and the composition of the Reichstag that they would have to rely on, would be relevant as well.

Oh yeah. The Prussian Landtag will have a say in the matter. But I assumed that Prussia being the most autocratic of any state, it would be the easiest for its monarch to change policy. I probably overestimated how much sway Wilhelm held in the parliament.

 

[PeytonTucker]

While I do not think it is impossible for Germany to annex Austria + Bohemia, and even think it’s quite likely in the event of a true Austro-Hungarian split, I do think it would severely hamper any attempts by the central government to restructure the empire away from Prussian domination. Federating the kingdom of Prussia within the larger empire, and establishing the greater (much more Catholic) Germany should both be feasible for a pragmatic German government, but doing both would likely just be a few steps too far for the Prussian elites.

Though somewhat in line with what others are saying, having secured victory, even a marginal victory, in Europe, if the German people see the Habsburg empire subsequently collapsing next door, I really don’t see how annexation doesn’t become the rallying cry of German nationalism. I feel that under certain circumstances, it would be nearly impossible for the German government to refuse annexation, especially if the Austrian Germans are asking for it, which they likely will be.

The political ramifications are very very interesting as well. It could all go a great many different ways depending on what happens and how the government + Prussian lords react.

 

[KingSweden24]

While I do not think it is impossible for Germany to annex Austria + Bohemia, and even think it’s quite likely in the event of a true Austro-Hungarian split, I do think it would severely hamper any attempts by the central government to restructure the empire away from Prussian domination. Federating the kingdom of Prussia within the larger empire, and establishing the greater (much more Catholic) Germany should both be feasible for a pragmatic German government, but doing both would likely just be a few steps too far for the Prussian elites.

Though somewhat in line with what others are saying, having secured victory, even a marginal victory, in Europe, if the German people see the Habsburg empire subsequently collapsing next door, I really don’t see how annexation doesn’t become the rallying cry of German nationalism. I feel that under certain circumstances, it would be nearly impossible for the German government to refuse annexation, especially if the Austrian Germans are asking for it, which they likely will be.

The political ramifications are very very interesting as well. It could all go a great many different ways depending on what happens and how the government + Prussian lords react.

To me, I think this is key. Annexation isn’t highly likely for a variety of reasons if Austria is ambivalent; but no German government says no if the Austrian one comes out and says “come on, do it! What are you waiting for!” (Arnold voice from predator)

 

[TheReformer]

Part 2 Tomorrow.

So, I've unironically rewritten this update four times now. Despite having read three books on the subject, along with dozens of other sources, working out exactly the trajectory of the Ottomans is actually quite difficult in this scenario precisely because they have not won the war - but equally they have not been defeated any where near as badly as OTL.

The difficulty really with my style of alternate history, is that I like to do extensive research, and then base actions and events that follow a PoD on real plans or experiences, certainly in period where we're not too far abridged from reality anyway. This, however, is much harder when there is so little clarity on what those plans and experiences might have been. This is particularly true of Turkey, because it IOTL was so dominated by Atatürk that there was no alternative political opposition. The civil war/independence war allowed him unlimited power, and the CUP's policy during the war eradicated any opposition - before they were themselves eradicated by the defeat.

With the Ottomans having lost the war here, but without allied occupations, it's unclear exactly what various actors may have done - so I've winged it in many places, albeit in a sensible, evidence based manner. So, I'm satisfied with this series of events, and they make sense to me - but may come across as a little 'predictable' or suspiciously close to real history. In many ways I think this is justified given the actors around at this time, and given the effective Ottoman military defeat, but who knows - realistically other actors may have emerged in these circumstances I simply don't know about.

I'll leave it an open question to debate therefore, based on the data below. Given the condition of the empire in late 1918, who would you see as having risen to power, or an alternative path?

Regardless - enjoy my take on it!

---

The New Ummah
Ottoman Woes
November 1918 - June 1919​

Harvard University, 1997, Continued...

…“The post-war development of the Ottoman Empire was a chaotic culmination of essentially fifteen years of decline and wars against European powers who had slowly stripped away most of the Empire.

“Turkey, as is probably the better way to refer to the state, as a nation had by the end of the war become politically defined by their resistance to the efforts of European powers to colonise them. Starting with the loss of Libya and Rhodes, the Ottomans had gradually lost land in Europe to various nativist revolts and then Balkan wars throughout the period after 1900.

“This had really shaped the Ottoman worldview. Many of their most well known leaders, Mustafa Kemal, Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha etc - they all came from the ‘European’ part of Turkey - often the Selanik region, now Thessaloniki, and Thrace.

“You see, when you look at the Ottoman Empire it’s worth remembering that the very existence of the Empire at all was because of its European holdings. The Ottoman dynasty built itself in it’s very early days in Europe precisely to escape the chaos of Anatolia’s beyliks, and masked themselves as a rightful successor to Rome. So the Turks legitimately saw themselves as part of Europe, not as some foreign invader. That, ultimately, was the cause of their eventual rise to power - and that fact was reflected prior to the Balkan wars when areas like Salonika, like Thrace, Bosnia and others had sizable Muslim populations.

“The loss of such huge tracts of land therefore left these men largely feeling like they’d been robbed of their own home - and they blamed this on the existence of minorities within the Empire which they increasingly viewed as alien. These were primarily non-muslim minorities though, excluding groups like the Kurds, Turkomen and Arabs - though in the latter case the Arabs were seen as in need of being ‘ruled’, and a disruptive, backwards people.

“It’s important to note though that these men were not ethno-nationalists. This is a serious misunderstanding of Turkish history prior to the war that has long been perpetuated inaccurately by historians unfamiliar with this period - but they did not want a homogenous Turkish state for only Turks.

“The ruling party, known as the Committee for Union and Progress, or CUP, wanted an islamic civilization state as a hub for a pan-islamic movement to decolonize the Islamic world. They were a radical, brutal and ideologically purist sect of the Young Turks movement, which we have often discussed when looking at Turkey in this period throughout this module.

“As you will remember, the Young Turks were aiming for a system of more constitutional governance in the Empire - stripping back the old sultanate in exchange for a ‘nation’ of the people, not one defined by a crown. In this there were two main camps, the Liberals and Nationalists.

“The liberals were generally more open to a western, inclusive attempt at nation building behind an idea of ‘Ottomanism’ more than anything else. This Ottomanism basically viewed the nation not as an ethnic state defined by language and race, but as a values-based understanding of nationalism - more like a modern state view than the then European view that a people made a state. Ottomanism firmly advocated the idea that the Empire could be held together as a multicultural community of peoples, united behind a common goal of prosperity and security - regardless of faith.

“The Nationalists meanwhile tended to favour a separate path to modernity than that taken by Europe. They did not see modernising the Empire as a matter of bringing in outside talent or abandoning cultural ideals and heritage as the Liberals did. The nationalists fundamentally saw the Empire as being in need basically of just strong men to lead it as capable administrators, to strip away the 'rot' and industrialize on their own terms.

“They admired Japan greatly as a result of this desire to take a ‘different’ path to modernity; seeing it as the main example of how to modernise without being colonised, and hoping to emulate their rise to international relevance in a similar manner.

“Prior to and during the war therefore they sought to prevent the justification for further internal splintering of the Empire by relocating large segments of the population. This meant moving large numbers of Kurds, Assyrians and other ethnic groups away from cohesive majority regions into a more disparate ‘spread’ across the Anatolian heartland.

“The idea behind this, which was the brainchild of Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha, was that if you spread out minorities enough there would be a Turkish ethnic plurality everywhere. This in turn would then prevent the creation of ethno-states as had emerged in Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Greece - all of whom had now robbed the Empire of its wealthy European provinces.

“The CUP also pursued a brutal policy of displacement and genocide against their Armenian population, though the trigger of this was again not specifically so much the CUP’s ideological beliefs and more the start of the war itself. Unfortunately, due to Armenians practising a strain of Christianity, the CUP had quickly and unfairly painted the Armenians as a sort of fifth column within the country after the start of the war.

“This was absolutely absurd, but was the consequence of military failures against Russia during the war and Russia’s own campaigns to try and bring on side the Armenian population. The frustrating thing here too is that the Armenians by a significant majority served within the Ottoman army over the Russian one - so it was all an entirely deluded paranoia on the part of the Turks. One that was created and mentally justified by the fact that the Balkan wars had emerged in not a dissimilar fashion.

“Armenians were in most cases patriots who accepted the concept of Ottomanism. They wanted a stable nation that they could play a part in, and one that respected them for their different beliefs - rather than suppressing their faith. The war of course changed all of this though, and did so in an enormously self-harming manner for Turkey. In their ruthless campaign to try and prevent the division of their country, the CUP employed genocidal techniques unseen in modern warfare up to this point.

“Stories from the Anatolian east spoke of columns of women being marched naked from town to town, famished, denied basic sustenance and water, and often left to simply rot on the roadsides when they inevitably died.

“Worse tales still were of organised pogroms where police and military officials would cooperate to systematically slaughter entire towns and villages worth of Armenians, looting their corpses in horrifyingly graphic scenes that appalled foreign journalists. One such tale spoke of how the rotting corpses of hundreds of Armenian civilians, still ‘pulsing with life’, were found in one eastern Anatolian town by a German journalist - appalling even the Turks' allies in Berlin.

“There was also an idea to relocate hundreds of thousands of Armenians to camps in Assyria, which some have attempted to use as a justification for the action as simply one of several efforts by states in history to detain ‘suspect’ populations during conflicts. In the eyes of some naive historians, the deaths that followed on these marches were simply an accident or the fault of the war - but this is simply untrue. From the start, it seems blindingly obvious to anyone that marching tens of thousands of people to camps in the desert not built to sustain them was an obviously intentional effort to fail, killing thousands.

“The only cases where I think it could be argued that the Ottoman Government under Talaat probably did not intend to cause the mass deaths of civilians was with the killing of Assyrian citizens, which Talaat was horrified about… and yet entirely to blame for. This was a consequence of commanders on the ground acting without orders in reprisals against the Christian Assyrians, whereas Talaat ideologically saw the Assyrians as turkic and not a ‘threat’ akin to the Armenians. Their killings allegedly 'horrified' Talaat - which just goes to show that he was conscious of his morally bankrupt treatment of the Armenians.

“Regardless, the consequence of all this social engineering with such stupid reasoning was that enormous, staggering amounts of the population were killed. Areas of the national interior had been depopulated by anywhere between 25-50% of the total population by 1919, including all ethnicities, and the economies of the Empire’s eastern provinces absolutely were decimated.

“Starvation ran rife, trade was in collapse, and the entire world - especially the Arab states that these same CUP leaders claimed to be carrying out such atrocities in order to lead - were revulsed by the Ottoman genocide. In fact, as we mentioned before, there was a strong campaign by Sharif Hussein in Mecca to quite literally topple the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph and take the religious title for himself.

“Worse still, the war had killed some 25% of all soldiers called up or volunteering to serve the army; over 800,000 men - with an equal number injured. Most had died from cold, disease, malnutrition - and the incompetence of their commanders. Of 20 million Ottoman citizens at the start of the war, 4 million died during the conflict alone, without considering the loss of millions of Arab citizens to Britain after it. This is statistically one of the largest population losses of any country in the war - only really being oustripped by poor, ravaged Serbia.

“As such, the Ottoman Empire in 1919 was now beyond the sick man of Europe. It was quite literally missing limbs - as were many of its citizens. It’s foot was very much in a grave.

“Yes, it had occasionally ‘proven’ itself in various battles of the war, such as in Kut al-Amara, as well as at Gallipoli… debatably, but these victories were almost entirely driven by luck or other factors - and very hollow at that.

“At Gallipoli for example, a battle hailed in history as a total and complete disaster for Britain - and not without reason - it should be remembered that nearly 100,000 more Turks were killed due to their own lacklustre military planning than allied forces. Many of them simply died from disease and malnutrition.

“The Empire meanwhile was economically shattered, it’s population was decimated, it’s trade links gone, it’s political system shot to the core, and to top it all off, the Ottomans also successfully drew the ire of Germany in their efforts to take Baku.

“So, as you can see, of all the belligerent states it would be the Ottoman Empire who were probably in the worst state of all on the Central Powers side come the end of the war.

“Now, let’s just go over some of the basic political actors involved here. There are several main figures to keep in mind. The first and foremost being Talaat Pasha.

“Talaat was one of three men who took over the country as heads of the CUP just prior to the war. An authoritarian former military man, he joined forces with Enver Pasha and Ahmed Cemal, both senior military figures, to seize power from the Liberal young Turks of the Freedom and Accord Party in 1913 in the ‘Raid on the Sublime Porte’.

“The three men initially governed as Triumvirs, but during the war both Enver and Cemal had allowed themselves to become subordinated to Talaat in all but name due to their own ideological or military goals.

“Enver, for example, was determined to pursue a ‘pan-turanist’ policy in Central Asia with the collapse of Russia aimed at basically building if not an actual empire there, then a sort of sphere of influence. He was an idealogue, and a military man. Hailed once as the saviour of the Empire, he became Minister of War during the world war and in the end committed everything to an attack on the Caucuses in a race to Baku with the German Kaukasien expedition under Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein - which I think we can all agree is easily one of the best German military names out there.

“Cemal meanwhile was out of the triumvirate very early on. As Minister for the Navy, he had actually opposed an alliance with Germany - instead supporting a pact with France, but after being defeated on the issue he staked his reputation on a self-aggrandising mission to reconquer Egypt from the British which ultimately failed - spectacularly. With the failure, and his army’s subsequent destruction at the hands of the British in the Palestinian campaign, by 1919 his reputation was essentially shot.

“Enver and Talaat therefore were really the main rivals of the triumvirs, and the only men truly in charge of the country come the end of 1918 and the armistice with Britain. Enver, despite being Minister of War, spent significant time out in the east in the city of Batumi though and therefore Talaat, who acted as Grand Vizier to the Sultan, was allowed essentially an open road to taking full control of the country.

“Talaat stacked the Government ministries, as well as his own party’s leadership committee, known as the CUP’s Central Committee, with loyalists. As such, Enver soon became an afterthought in the capital - albeit a powerful one within the actual army proper.

"Talaat and Enver had a strained relationship, but were ultimately reliant on one another. Enver was vital to maintaining the war, while Talaat was vital to keeping the civilian Government running - roles befitting of their personalities. Enver being a charismatic, decisive ‘adventurer’ with big ideas, such as his well documented ‘Turanist’ goals, while Talaat was a competent bureaucrat with almost obsessive tendencies to document everything. This made them a capable pair, but one with differing ideological goals and methods which often left their respective supporters at one another’s throats.

"One such well documented dispute would be that between Istanbul party boss Kara Kemal on the one hand, and the quartermaster-general, İsmail Hakkı Pasha. The former, a close collaborator of Talât, controlled the porters of the capital and played a leading role in the organisation of ‘national’ companies that controlled the provisioning of the civilian population and that were explicitly intended to be profitable, in order to accumulate capital for the desired new Muslim business class. İsmail Hakkı Pasha meanwhile was close to Enver, and as Quartermaster General was in charge of the provisioning of the armed forces in a situation where the army was deemed to have automatic priority and controlled the national transport networks. Both men were engaged in intense competition over the spoils of the very lucrative trade in foodstuffs, engaging in massive corruption to the benefit of either side of the party and dispute between Talaat and Enver.

"Thus when the army proved incapable of solving the food shortages in the country in the summer of 1918 a Ministry of Provisioning was created and Talaat’s man Kemal was put in charge. This was possible because of Enver’s absence from the capital, which weakened him politically and allowed the CUP’s central committee to become dominated by Talaat’s men. With the central committee in practice having taken over the governance of the state, this left Talaat in a strong position in 1918.

“Throughout the war, Talaat pursued fervent policies aimed at social engineering that we have discussed, and near-enough replaced the entire state apparatus around the CUP as a political organisation. Ironically, you hear a lot about the Bolsheviks being the main ‘party that were a state’ - well, the CUP got there first. The party’s Central Committee in effect became the cabinet of the Empire, with the actual state Government becoming slowly less and less relevant.

“The Sultan, Mehmed V, had died in July of 1918 just prior to the end of the war and his more ambitious and active half-brother Mehmed VI took the throne. The Sultanate, while technically powerful, by 1918 was lacking any real political allies and credibility. It’s one thing having power on paper, but if the Vizier’s allies controlled the entire military, civil service and political class, that power meant very little.

“As such, Mehmed had largely spent his time just waiting to see how the war would play out. A major player in his own right, he had friends within the CUP - but ideologically favoured the since banned Freedom and Accord Party, known as the ‘Liberal Entente’. He geopolitically tended to favour a rapprochement with Britain, and this view began to be strengthened as the war came to a close.

"Talaat Pasha though, with the end of the war, suddenly found his position far more ‘wobbly’ than it once was. The problem with being an absolute ruler of a state, even with a Sultan technically above you, is that when things go wrong, the blame rather quickly falls upon your own head. Of course this was in part true too for Enver, who the public had grown to hate over his perceived mishandling of the war - though as the frontman of the regime; Talaat was left juggling the most balls.

“The defeat at the hands of Britain was extremely damaging to the credibility of the CUP. The sole Central Powers state to concede to foreign demands in the war, the Ottomans were embarrassed and the credibility of Talaat and Enver was deeply shot by the incident. This was only made worse when in July 1918 Ottoman and Germano-Georgian troops fought a brief skirmish in Georgia.

“The Ottoman 3rd Army’s attack on the German expeditionary force enraged Berlin. This was also worsened by the fact that Enver Pasha then ignored Germany’s request that the ‘Army of Islam’ delay its advance to Baku soon after. German General Hans von Seeckt was soon dispatched to Batumi, where he threatened Enver with a total withdrawal of German advisors and arms from the Empire, forcing Enver to concede.

“The commander of the 3rd Army, Vehip Pasha, was sacked following the incident - but in the end Enver did manage to take Baku first. As a result of his insolence to Germany though, the new German civilian Government quickly cut off the Turks - leaving them to their fate.

“So, now we’ve covered the context, we’ll start in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty of Alexandria. With the signing of the Treaty on November 13 1918, Talaat would come under fire from just about every wing of the CUP; the radicals, the moderates, and even some of his own allies. Of course, he had no real choice, but facts have never prevented critics from taking advantage of political weaknesses - and by late 1918 Talaat had many enemies, albeit ones without significant power.

“The Treaty also did not go down well in the Empire’s major cities. Enraged that after eight years of war the ottomans had lost Libya, lost the Arab provinces and lost literally all of Europe save for a strip of Thrace - the people had had enough. Riots in Konstantiyye and other major cities across the Empire erupted on an almost daily basis and the military dissolved like tissue paper in water. Protests like the Sultanahmet Protest became the first major public demonstrations in Ottoman history, as more than 200,000 people gathered in the Sultanahmet square to protest the defeat. The soldiers returned home, the army’s lower ranking officers lost faith in their commander Enver, and ordinary soldiers asked themselves what exactly they had fought for - even if Enver insisted that the capture of Azerbaijan was in itself a worthy sacrifice.

“For a moment, it really did look like the Empire may just utterly collapse - but the problem was, the CUP had been so effective at destroying dissent that really there was just nobody left to take over. The people couldn’t turn to the liberals - they were all exiled, in hiding or largely irrelevant. They couldn’t turn to bolshevism - most Turks didn’t know what it was; 90% of the Turkish population could neither read, nor write - and the spread of popular ideology in that form simply was simply not compatible with the tenets of Islam. They couldn’t even really easily replace the CUP from within their own ranks, because the party was so stacked with yes-men that the actually competent people had long since been flushed down to the lower ranks.

“For Talaat this exposed the fundamental flaw with his approach to the war; he had taken an ‘all or nothing’ approach that essentially relied on victory to succeed. Now, with his failure to do so, even though the capital had never been threatened and the anatolian core was intact, he had been very publicly and demonstratively proved wrong on the most impactful decision by the Government since its inception.

“Writing of his difficult position in November, he remarked to CUP Opposition figure and anti-war party member Mehmed Cavid that he felt ‘trapped’ between three ‘fires’. The growing fallout of the war, the ever-growing impatience and arrogance of Enver Pasha, and the growing irritation of the new unruly Sultan Mehmed VI. Essentially the only other power figure left was the Sultan, and that’s where dissent began to start.

“Sultan Mehmed VI was not a strong man in November 1918, but the CUP were so weakened by the war that it temporarily made him strong. Politically, he had virtually no allies, and very few options - but strictly speaking constitutionally this was not the case. The Sultan was able to appoint and dismiss Grand Viziers of their liking; but none had actively been able to do so for some time as any time they tried to adjust the national political situation, they were either overthrown or had their Governments replaced by coups.

“Unfortunately, Mehmed was not a man experienced with governing. He’d been Sultan for barely a few months, but he had his head screwed on and he knew that the status quo was not working. An anti-unionist, he recognized that with the current Government in place nobody, and I mean nobody, was going to assist the Empire in its recovery - and that evidently their policies had consistently failed. He also knew that just to the north of him there was a ravaging, raging revolution that had just killed the entire royal family of Russia, and that while I think historians agree it was very, very unlikely that the Ottoman Empire was ever going to erupt into revolution, the Sultan couldn’t have made that judgement at the time.

“Sultan Mehmed therefore made something of a gamble and tried to succeed where his predecessors had failed and dismiss the CUP from power. He was greatly aided at first in this endeavour when Talaat himself came to the verge of resigning after signing the Treaty. He and his senior Government colleagues feared that they may just be swept from power - which was not an unfair concern. The party itself did not control the army, even if a lot of it's officers were members of the CUP, and therefore given the empire's shocking military defeat the party leadership did legitimately fear that the army may just walk in and remove them. This was particularly evident months before the war even ended, while on a visit to palestine, Enver had insisted that the road he had driven on during his drive to Jerusalem be depopulated of soldiers - in case one tried to kill him.

"However, Talaat refrained from stepping down. The reason for this was simple; the best way to protect yourself from consequences, was to be in charge of those consequences. He had successfully negotiated a treaty with Britain that, yes, did cost the Empire its Arab provinces - but did not see the country occupied. As such, outside powers were not going to arrest him; only the Government could do that, and he was the Government. So, he stayed - determined to protect himself.

"Sultan Mehmed though immediately went on the offensive, aided by a CUP member turned turncoat former War Minister Ahmed Izzet Pasha.

“Ahmed Izzet Pasha is one of those men you hear about only in relation to this one event in history, and had he not played this particular part probably would have been easily forgotten to time. He was at best a mediocre general of albanian origins who had fought in the war during 1916 and had been a senior member of the young turks when they had seized power in 1908. In essence, he was a man of the old order who sympathised with the aims of the Young Turks and CUP, but had grown very disenchanted with them during the war itself - particularly after he was so heavily defeated by the Russians in 1916 that he was 'mothballed' to the army reserves.

"Always something of a reluctant Young Turk, the shock of defeat in the war stung Ahmed Izzet to the core, and made him question whether the approach of the young turks had actually achieved anything at all. Discussing the matter with the Sultan, he said in November 1918: 'Since the 1908 revolution the old strength of the sultanate has been lost', arguing that the political scene had just become a battleground between strong personalities like Enver and Talaat.

"The Sultan's gamble was simple. He essentially went to Talaat, and said this; your Government is hopelessly discredited, and the one party that we can rely on for future support is Germany. Germany's alliance is still in place, at least in law, until January 1920 - it therefore is vital that the Government repair relations with them to ensure our future security, and to help facilitate a recovery. If you will not resign, then the only way to do that is to dismiss the person who broke those relations in the first place; Enver.

"This was actually a uniquely clever move. In dismissing Enver, the CUP's effective grip on the military would be weakened, while equally it would be a popular move among the military's rank and file. Further, it provided Talaat with a 'scalp' to blame for the defeat in the war, and dismissed Enver - who presented the main point of disruption between the Empire and Germany. Enver was also powerless to stop this, as he being in Batumi isolated him politically. The Sultan also added to this by demanding that Ahmed Izzet take over as War Minister, thus securing an ally in a key government position - along with demanding a general reshuffle of the cabinet to include more pro-palace inclined CUP members from the ‘Anti War’ faction, including the aforementioned Mehmed Cavid.

"For a strong Talaat, acceding to this demand would have been bizarre at best - but conditions left him with little choice. Any radical use of force or rejection of the Sultan's request would result in further political division due to Ahmed Izzet's status as a member of the anti-war wing of the CUP. Talaat was also unaware of Ahmed Izzet's 'conversion' of sorts to oppose the principles of the CUP's rule - instead believing him to be a party member, just a reluctant one disappointed by the war's conclusion. As such, offering Enver as a pound of flesh and installing a party member, but internal opposition figure of little repute, seemed like a way to win credit and demonstrate flexibility. In an instant, in effect, the Sultan had offered him a way to extinguish one fire and help battle another.

"Instead though, Talaat inadvertently weakened his position as the Sultan had no intention of halting his assault on CUP authority there. Now, I could go into intense detail about the exact negotiations and how they went - but I’ll keep this bit brief so I don’t lose your attention. But essentially what happens next is two key changes. One; Enver immediately saw the writing on the wall and abandoned his Army of Islam, fleeing over the border into, of all places, the Caucuses.

“The reason he went there was simple, at the time much of Dagestan and Chechnya were controlled by Circassian and Turkomen muslims in the form of the ‘Mountain Republic’ - a fairly bizarre state of sorts established by the Germans during their march into the Caucuses. In reality of course this state was barely a state - and more an excuse for local autonomies to govern themselves. However this suited Enver nicely, so he went there and hid out for a while.

“We probably won't touch on him again for a good while, but long story short he eventually went north to Moscow when the Red Army advanced into the Caucuses in the spring of 1919, where he bizarrely made solid connections with the Bolshevik Government there. This of course is bizarre because of his later actions against the reds, general Russo-Turkish hostility, and actions by the reds soon after his arrival - but we’ll touch on those later.

“The second change was, importantly, that the Sultan immediately began pressing on the army to remove Talaat. Now, this may sound bold - but if he was ever going to flip the Ottoman political system around, this would be the time. With an ally as Minister for Defence, Sultan Mehmed saw his chance and took it. The military, then headed by Chief of Staff Cevat Pasha, was extremely hesitant to endorse this policy though - and this is not wholly surprising. For all their power and influence, the Ottoman armed forces were actually surprisingly apolitical - which I appreciate may seem a bit unusual for you all.”

*A hand is raised*

Student: “Was the CUP not installed by the military?”

Lecturer: “Yes and no, but I appreciate the chance to clarify. Much of the CUP came from within the military of the empire - but it was not the same as the party. Ottoman military officials were, remarkably, quite neutral politically towards the end of the war. This is not for a lack of opinions, but actually due to their genuine lack of ambition and motivation.

“The Ottoman Army had, during the constitutional era, become significantly more nationalist - that is absolutely true and military units of course played a part in handing power to the CUP in the raid of the sublime porte. However, by 1918, the entire military was also disenchanted with the current leadership of the nationalist cause, and had grown hostile to their reliance on Germany during the war, which left a lot of their officers feeling a bit like a colony.

“As a result they had slipped into a sense of confused, apolitical apathy. Cevat Çobanlı was therefore never going to leap at the chance to get rid of Talaat, even if he largely disagreed with his policies. Him and his fellow commanders genuinely just saw it as something that needed to be sorted outside of their oversight. Thus, in a private meeting in late November it was made clear that the Army would not act against the Sultan if he dismissed Talaat - which was all that the Sultan really needed.

“So, now the army essentially knows what the Sultan is up to and therefore there is a significantly greater risk that Talaat will, eventually, find out. It is on this basis that the Sultan, perhaps quite boldly, decided to strike.

“On Friday November 22, barely weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Alexandria and just days after Talaat had reformed his cabinet, Sultan Mehmed summoned him to the Dolmabahçe Palace and dismissed him on the spot, before detaining him and a handful of loyalists.

“It is actually really quite remarkable that Talaat had not fled at this point, but historians are generally convinced that he had survived the worst of the post-war crisis, and that he could at least ride out the immediate post-war period to ensure his security. This is doubly shocking because the CUP’s own intelligence branch, the ‘Special Organization’ - or Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa - found out about the Sultan’s discussions with the army prior to the coup and informed Talaat, who apparently just chose to ignore them.

“I think really all of this just points to Talaat having underestimated the Sultan, or maybe having been driven into delusion by his position and the war itself. His arrest near enough caused the effective dissolution of the CUP at this point, though the party would not formally collapse until December 5 during their postponed annual congress. Here, the ascendent anti-war party under Ahmed Izzet expelled a large part of Talaat’s support base, renamed the party as the ‘Renewal Party’, and therefore most historians agree that the CUP ends there.

“Sadly, or I suppose not so sadly, this is where we leave Talaat. He has been hugely influential, but equally hugely controversial - and I’m sure some of you will be glad to see the back of him. He would spend the rest of his life in jail following a show trial conducted at the behest of the Sultan in February 1919 which also saw several other prominent Ottoman CUP officials tried and jailed - though most simply fled into exile; notably the vile Dr. Mehmed Nazım - who would be assassinated by an Armenian man, Soghomon Tehlirian, in Berlin in 1921.

“This was all a great victory for the Sultan, but equally left much of the country in a state of genuine confusion. The Anatolian interior remained largely in anarchy, the military was at best ambivalent about the new Government, and there were active political movements emerging aimed at further eroding confidence in the state.

“The new Ottoman Government, led by Ahmed Izzet, meanwhile saw a return of various actors that had for a long time remained in the background - lucky not to be in jail, and sometimes in exile. The aforementioned anti-war former Minister of Finance Mehmed Cavid, a CUP member of the anti-war persuasion, was appointed to the Finance brief once more. Rıza Nur, an exiled former Liberal Entente official, meanwhile returned to the Empire shortly after the coup on invitation of the Sultan and was appointed to the Foreign Affairs brief. The remainder of the cabinet, as you can see on this slide behind me, was similarly made up of a hodge podge of independents, anti-war CUP officials, and some Liberal Entente officials.

“There is one face there though which you may be surprised is missing. Who are you expecting to see?”

Student: “Mustafa Kemal?”

Lecturer: “Mustafa Kemal, exactly. Now, as you can see the Minister of War appointed by Ahmed Izzet and the Sultan was Shevket Turgut Pasha. A much less reputable leader, but a fairly high ranking officer of the Army Command staff, Shevket Turgut was handed the position as a safe pair of hands for the new Ministry - even though he very firmly supported the military and it’s political opposition to any power grabs by the Sultan.

“Mustafa Kemal meanwhile is not there, in spite of his requests, pleas and demands to take the role. This is indicative of a smaller power battle that was emerging at the time between the ‘new’ officers of the Ottoman Army, and the ‘old’ Officers. This split was essentially over what role in the new state the army ought to play; should it guide the future of the country, or try and take a fairly traditional, neutral stance and allow political actors to decide it’s fate.

“Mustafa Kemal was very much one of the ‘younger’, albeit barely, officers who took the view that the Army should be dictating things, and as you all know he will play a big part in the Ottomans’ future.

“So, let’s just remind ourselves a little about Mustafa Kemal. As I’d said earlier, Kemal was born in Salonika and came to prominence during the war after he commanded forces during the Gallipoli campaign. He had never really been intended as a frontline commander, and was quite junior when the war started on account of his differing, irritable politics that often disagreed with the CUP’s party line. A member of the party, but an opponent of it’s goals and methods, Kemal was both a radical and a moderate within the CUP.

“This may sound confusing, but it comes down to a fundamental difference of opinion between CUP leaders like Talaat and Enver, and Kemal. While those two looked to Germany’s autocratic, almost stratocratic model of Governance, Mustafa Kemal looked more towards Republican France, where he had spent time during his youth.

“To say he was a liberal would be an exaggeration, but he essentially saw in France a model for more moral and effective Governance than Germany offered. He was briefly jailed for his beliefs, but because he was very well liked by the military and ultimately ‘one of them’, he always managed to land on his feet. In many ways too, he often got away with acts of extreme insubordination, at one point going so far as to directly complain to the cabinet over Enver’s head as Minister of War about military policy - which very well could have been the end of him.

“He had of course further cemented his reputation during the war when he was appointed Commander during the desperate defence of Adana against British forces towards the war’s end, and had also further proved himself earlier when he halted the Russian advance during the war. He was broadly seen as one of the Empire’s most competent generals, and had earned himself a national reputation for quite literally being the man who held back three successive attempts to strike a final blow on the Turks.

“He and several of his colleagues, most notably men like Mustafa İsmet, Mustafa Fevzi, Musa Kâzım, Ali Fuat and Refet Pasha, all were marginally younger than the likes of the Chief of Staff Cevat Pasha. These were the kinds of men who saw the Sultanate as a drag and had wholeheartedly backed the efforts of the CUP - right up until they so clearly failed.

“Cevat Pasha meanwhile, along with officers like Wehib Pasha, Esat Pasha Janina, Suleyman Sefik Pasha and of course Ahmed Izzet Pasha, advocated neutrality in the political disputes of the Empire and preferred to maintain the army as a passive observer of affairs - aiming to protect stability. This does not mean that the Army would never act against the Sultan, but Cevat and the others believed that the number one thing the country needed was stability. Politics could come later.

“Cevat’s view of course did not hold for too long. December of 1918 and January of 1919 became dominated by the slow rise of the younger men, who began to organise politically - led above all by Mustafa Kemal.

“Kemal offered a determined vision for the country that involved, in essence, doing away with the old system and reforming the state into a modern, western nation led by non-aristocratic leaders. He wanted radical reforms to the constitution and to society, and that made him dangerous. The other big question though was religion - and this is where Kemal was really controversial. Kemal was hostile even to the concept of the Caliphate, which was a matter that split the Young Officers.

“The likes of Musa Kâzım, Ali Fuat and Refet Pasha were men who were, ultimately, still Unionists. They believed in the ideas of the CUP, but just believed the party’s leaders had been misguided, and their military defeat had forced their removal. They believed above all though in the primacy of the ‘mission’ of the CUP; that being the establishment of an autocratic state built around the principles of political Islam, republicanism and militarism. Unlike Mustafa Kemal, they did not see the west as something to be copied, but as something to target. They wanted industrialization, but without the societal change that Kemal sought.

“This is more important for next week’s lecture, but I should also mention at this point that they, in believing this, quickly amassed support among the CUP’s old rank and file. This was particularly true of Musa Kâzım - for reasons we shall soon discuss. However, I’ll mention here that the former Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa - that special organisation we spoke about - were particularly keen on this group. The Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa had by now collapsed, but it’s agents were still active regionally and by January 1919 had reorganised. Enver, now in exile, was not really deposed as their leader but instead just became irrelevant, and the organisation fell behind Çerkes Dipsheu, an Islamic Socialist from western Anatolia, and an official called Hüsamettin - the last real head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.

“Anyway, all you need to know is that these men were the kind of men who were now taking charge of the skeleton that was the CUP, and these were the political actors. Now we get to what happened in 1919.

“1919, as you would expect, was turbulent. It started with fresh elections which saw the election of a new Grand Assembly mostly composed, ironically, of former CUP members - though there were also a good few dozen Liberal Entente members too who returned from exile. Ahmed Izzet stepped down as Grand Vizier at this point, and was replaced by Rıza Nur, who despite being of the Entente persuasion led a ministry dominated above all by Mehmed Cavid - who came to control the old Anti-War CUP - now dubbed the ‘palace unionists’.

“Nur and Cavid oversaw a Government which largely focused on three things; re-establishing order in Anatolia, stabilising the Ottoman currency, and, above all, desperately clamouring to improve relations with Berlin again. Ironically this was not the preferred direction Nur wanted to take, he instead favoured a rapprochement with Britain, but this largely failed on account of general Ottoman anti-British hostility post-Alexandria and French financial insolvency.

“Berlin thus once again became the only source of future solvency, and thus December through to March were spent by the Ottomans basically trying to put right relations with their former ally. They did this by offering deals to German companies for Ottoman oil in Baku, but negotiations soon stalled over ownership rights and the German desire to see the Ottomans apply pressure on the British over Rhodes - which Britain had seized in early 1919 after the Italians erupted into civil conflict. The negotiations were later scrapped in May - for reasons that will soon become clear.

“On re-establishing order, the Government more or less immediately put an end to Unionist ‘social engineering’, though in practice violations in the east against Armenians continued for months as the effects of unionist violence continued to play out. The army proved helpful fairly quickly in bringing bandits to heel in Anatolia by the end of 1919, and therefore the economy began to function again - particularly when a good harvest, at least given the conditions, came around later in the year.

“Another area where the potential for international embarrassment soon arose though in Smyrna, where the large Greek urban and coastal population began to riot and protest in early 1919 in favour of autonomy. The Greeks, while not overly fussed by the idea of actually joining Greece, had become restless like the rest of the country - but the difference of course was that they were Greek. Their nationality difference immediately set off alarm bells among the military, and violent methods were quickly used to suppress the situation without oversight by the Government. This marked the first major real break on policy between the Government and the Army, and briefly threatened war between Britain, Greece and the Turks for a second time.

“On currency meanwhile, the Ottoman Government attempted to begin exporting oil to, of all places, Russia. The bolsheviks were desperate for foreign currency, and as were the Ottomans. With the Germans stalling therefore, a confused looking delegation of Ottoman officials and a scraggly looking group of Bolsheviks sat down in February 1919 to try and hash out a deal. This was actually successful at first and an agreement was hashed out in late February, but practical constraints of the Bolsheviks not controlling all of southern Russia limited trade opportunities until April to May. The Turks also managed to successfully procure loans from the now net creditor Japan, albeit very small ones made by the Japanese more as a gesture of goodwill following the Germano-Japanese peace agreement in early 1919.

“But, this brings us to the main crisis of the Government. In May 1919, largely without warning, Bolshevik forces invaded Azerbaijan. By May, the whites in southern Russia had largely collapsed due to German inactivity and even aid to the bolsheviks in the region and lacking foreign aid - as well as a German-engineered split between Denikin and the Cossacks.

“As I’ve alluded to, this is where the Germans and Bolsheviks truly collaborated for the first time - with Lenin inadvertently almost triggering an uprising of the Left Communists in the RSFSR over this invasion. However, that’s for my Russian Revolution module.

“Anyway, so the Red Army marches in and are met by Enver’s half brother Nuri Pasha. Nuri had retained the role largely due to his inactivity and, in the kindest possible way, irrelevance. With Enver’s exile, he became a convenient figure to leave out of central Turkish politics and, while nearly tried as a CUP leader, was spared by the Sultan and Ahmed Izzet after he was made to publicly condemn his half brother’s policies.

“Nuri’s Army of Islam was, frankly, just not prepared for the Red Army. While obviously not a stellar force, the Red Army’s forces under a young officer called Tukhachevsky used cavalry, some limited armour and a vast infantry force to quickly push much of the exposed and by now half-dissolved Ottoman Army of Islam into Baku and the mountains. Here, the offensive obviously slowed - but did not stop. Instead, the Ottoman army essentially dissolved and were scattered when Nuri was recalled and his army lost faith.

“The invasion triggered an immediate credibility crisis in the Government, damaging both the state’s credit income and reputation - after all, what did the Turks gain in the war other than Baku. Things were only made worse therefore when Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, seeing an opportunity, began to mobilise forces near the Thracian border - threatening the Turks with Ferdinand’s long-sought aspiration to take their capital.

“Nothing came of the latter of course, the Bulgarians were really just too broke and their army just too weak to successfully attempt an attack, but the Tsar came close - and it was never forgotten by members of the Ottoman leadership.

“Within a week of the invasion, War Minister Shevket Turgut was dismissed and, lo and behold, finally Mustafa Kemal was brought in. By now Cevat Pasha had sided in the military’s internal battle with the Young Officers under Kemal, and therefore the threat quickly became genuine to the Sultan’s position - leaving him and Nur with only one option; to placate the army.

“Kemal was quick, and fairly ruthless about his work. Musa Kâzım and his eastern army had already largely reached Armenia where they crushed a series of red partisan uprisings in Armenia before preparing to meet Tukhachevsky’s Red Army. After some initial engagements though, Kâzım halted Tukhachevsky’s force with relative ease due to their strained supply status, and with that soon won the title of ‘saviour’ of the eastern provinces.

“By June the Soviet-Ottoman War was in effect over. The Bolsheviks took Baku after a brief siege during which a large segment of the local Azerbaijani population actually assisted them against the Ottomans who had become disliked for their corruption. A treaty was signed in Batumi, and the Bolsheviks’ Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was established.

“For the Sultan’s administration, this was in effect the death blow. Protests began again of a similar scale to the post-Alexandria protests calling for Kâzım, or Kemal, or anyone to take over from what most Turks felt was the Government that had lost them their limited gains in the war. And so, the military did just that.

“On Sunday June 2, in what amounted to a very bloodless, very textbook coup, Kemal and his officers took over the Sublime Porte and declared that the military was taking control of national administration. Ahmed Izzet, Nur and Cavid were arrested, though all were soon released, and Sultan Mehmed was placed under house arrest.

“A military council, led by Kemal as President of the Council, was soon established. Kemal dismissed Cevat Pasha as Chief of staff, appointing Mustafa Fevzi, and Musa Kâzım was appointed as Minister of War. The rest of the cabinet was stacked by minor bureaucrats and military officials loyal to the clique, which ultimately became something of a ‘quinquevirate’ led by Kemal, Fevezi, Kâzım and Ali Fuat, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Hüseyin Rauf as Chief Minister. The Sultan was, finally, deposed for good, and with the Grand Assembly suspended, the Military Council chose to simply abolish the monarchy entirely - suspending the constitution.

“And so, there we are. Less than a year and we’ve had four viziers, a military coup, a dramatic dismissal, a war, two peace treaties, an election, and now a suspension of that same legislature by this new regime, and the abolition of the monarchy. The Empire had gone from a nationalist dictatorship, to a sultan-dominated return to pre-1913 ‘politics as usual’, to a military Junta without a monarch at all.

“Now of course, would come the hard part. Fixing everything - and Kemal obviously would meet resistance on that.

“That’s all for today. A lot to cover, well done for sticking with it. We’ll take a closer look at some of those twists and turns next week.”

 

[Kylia]

Well.

Sucks to be Turkish, apparently.

 

[Rattenfänger von Memphis]

Again, a much appreciated, in-depth look at a key player in this ATL which is often overlooked in other ATLs : the Ottoman Empire. The use of Turkish language accent marks only added to its authenticity for me. The interaction between the Turkish Triumvirs seemed very reminiscent of the Second Triumvirate in the Roman Republic in that the rather serious workhorse Talaat Pasha (Octavian) derived his power by remaining in the capital while the more charismatic Enver Pasha(Mark Anthony) was away in the East with Ahmed Cemal (Lepidus) the weaker third wheel who was soon weeded out of power.

I liked that the new Turkey was considering using another Asian power as a possible future model

“They admired Japan greatly as a result of this desire to take a ‘different’ path to modernity; seeing it as the main example of how to modernise without being colonised, and hoping to emulate their rise to international relevance in a similar manner.”

I also liked the almost throw-away incident of Turkey’s wartime ally Bulgaria considering an attack on Constantinople.

I pictured the Harvard professor giving this lecture as our own TheReformer. My favorite quote from this excellent chapter was so succinctly descriptive…

““As such, the Ottoman Empire in 1919 was now beyond the sick man of Europe. It was quite literally missing limbs - as were many of its citizens. Its foot was very much in a grave.”