Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands

18. Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Urmia and Astrabad), October 1914–December 1917

18 Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Urmia and Astrabad) OCTOBER 1914–DECEMBER 1917 Peter Holquist The area of the Caucasus and northern Anatolia was one of the areas of most intense and extended violence in the First World War. Factors both longstanding and contingent sparked this violence. But undoubtedly one key factor was that this was a borderland region, one of the shatterzones where empires crashed together like tectonic plates. In the early twentieth century the discipline of political geography developed models for these regions that are so particularly prone to instability and unrest. The Russian Empire was prominent as a foil in these theories. During the latter stages of the Great Game, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon thought up and even tried to implement a “buffer zone” between Russian and British interests in Persia and India. Of course, he would also pursue a related program in 1919 when he sought to impose the “Curzon Line” in Eastern Europe. In 1915, James Fairgrieve sketched out a model of a “crush zone” of small states existing between the German and Russian Empires.1 In the aftermath of the Second World War and as the Cold War developed, other scholars elaborated this model. The Anglophone scholars who developed this concept of the “‘shatter zone’ in Europe” often employed quotation marks around the term, having adopted it from interwar German literature.2 Not coincidentally, all these concepts emerged out of one or another iteration of the contest between the Atlantic West and Russia (be it the British Empire versus the Russian Empire in the nineteenth-century Great Game, or the United States versus the Soviet Union in the Cold War). In short, there is a history to the idea Forms of Violence 335 of “buffer zones,” “crush zones,” “shatter zones,” and “shatter belts,” the historicity of which determined which areas came to be identified as such “zones.”3 As critics of this literature have noted, it tends to reify historical conditions as near-permanent, quasi-geological features . One result is that such treatments tend to subordinate or overlook complex dynamics in favor of one-dimensional explanations—“the clash of civilizations,” for instance. In this chapter I describe independent dynamics—military violence and the breakdown of order in revolution—that played out within a borderland region. Regions sitting astride two empires indeed have specific features, as this literature has rightly noted. But we need not reify these concepts. In Alfred Rieber’s felicitous formulation , such regions were shaped by “persistent factors” rather than “permanent conditions.”4 The Caucasus was one such “contact zone” between the Russian and Ottoman Empires. This RUSSIAN OCCUPATION OF ARMENIA AND PERSIA IN WORLD WAR I Eu p h r a t e s Post-1919 boundaries Russian offensive December 1914 to September 1915 Russian offensive October 1915 to May 1916 Turkish offensive and retreat in November, 1914 Territory conquered by Russia in the Russo-Turkish War 1877-78 Territory occuped by Russia in Turkey and Northern Persia O T T O M A N E M P I R E R U S S I A N E M P I R E TIFLIS (Tbilisi) Kars Bayazid BAKU YEREVAN TABRIZ Ezerum Van Urmia Khoi Elizavetpol' (Ganja) Ardahan MOSUL Diyarbikir Trebizon Tigris Lake Van Caspian Sea P E R S I A Iraq Syria Azerbaijan Azerbaijan Armenia L a k e Urmia B l a c k S e a 336 Peter Holquist “contact” emerged historically, rather than out of some “clash of civilizations.” For both empires , greater contact with one another was itself the result of the disappearance of the “Wild Steppe” which had served for centuries as a buffer between them.5 With the end of the Wild Steppe, a space subdued not by one power alone but collectively by the empires which surrounded it, the struggle became one of an overall contest between empires, particularly the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Russia came to confront the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus as a result of the Russian annexation of the Georgian kingdom (in 1801) followed by the incorporation of Armenian territories—an advance which resulted more from Russian expansion against Persia than against the Ottomans. (The Treaty of Turkmenchai, ending the 1826–1828 Russo-Persian War, ceded Erivan and Nakhchivan provinces to the Russian Empire.) This advance against the Persian Empire set the stage for the escalation of...