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CHAPTER 1
Istanbul, 1915: A Revolutionist Heading an Empire
IT WAS SPRING 1915. Let us zoom in on the office of Talaat Bey, the minister of the interior, in the building known as the Sublime Porte, the seat of the government in the historical center of the European side of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul — then often still referred to by its historical name, Constantinople.
Married with a Cause
Talaat was bulky but not fat, a tall man with wide shoulders, a broad face, black eyes, bushy eyebrows, and black hair (which turned gray in 1918). Physically and mentally, he was an imposing figure. His office was a big and relatively light room, particularly notable for the several telephones on his desk. At times he also gave his orders from the telegraph in his home office.
He was married to Hayriye Hanim and had no children (he had learned from his doctor that he could not father a child; see chap. 3, sec. "Sobered, Disturbed, Depressed"). He lived instead in a symbolic marriage — or passionate concubinage — with his cause: Make Turkey strong again! Somewhat puzzlingly, he asserted himself as a Muslim of Turkish descent, a "son of empire," and a patriotic revolutionist. "We must win back our old strength, our old influence," he told the Germans in late 1915. He and his friends pursued a "great national ideal," as they called it, informed by Ottoman imperial glory and contemporary ethnoreligious nationalism (not the socialism inspired by Marx nor the universal positivism in Auguste Comte's sense).
Theorists of modern revolutions might therefore identify Talaat as an imperially biased right-wing revolutionary (or rather "revolutionist," in the terminology of this study, and to be distinguished from a value-based right-wing stance). Psychologists, in turn, might find him addicted to power — compensation, perhaps, for having been deprived of children and family. Power was "the dearest thing that he had known," he confessed a few days before being killed in Berlin in 1921, adding that "one could have too much of a good thing." He was the only grand vizier who ascended, step-by-step, to power from below — from subversive opposition to continuous membership in parliament and ministries in different cabinets. From summer 1913, Mehmed Talaat (both names are forenames; Ottoman Muslims did not have surnames) was the actual head of the government, even if he was promoted to grand vizier, with the honorific title of "Pasha" only in 1917. Before, he was only "Bey."
He owed his predominance to his strong position within the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a primarily conspiratoral party organization directed by the Central Committee. It had its headquarters on Nur-i Osmaniye Street, a few minutes' walk from the Sublime Porte on one side and the Hagia Sophia cathedral (transformed into a mosque after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453) and the Sultanahmed Mosque on the other, and next to the house in the Yerebatan neighborhood where Talaat lived with his wife. Komiteci (or komitaci) is the Turkish name for a member of a conspiratory committee of revolutionists. The CUP was the foremost organization within a broad Young Turk movement that had begun as an opposition force against Sultan Abdulhamid II, the last ruling sultan of Ottoman history. Talaat's cause was the Central Committee's cause and — as he, at least, maintained — the cause of "the people," the Turkish nation, and of Islam.
After their putsch in 1913, the CUP Central Committee alone dictated politics and the allocation of ministries. When the committee had organized the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 (see chap. 2, secs. "Talaat's Lead on the Road" and "Under the Shadow"; chap. 3, sec. "The Ottoman Spring"), it could only partly control politics. In the aftermath of the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II, it had been inclined to democracy. The CUP then had even allied with the main Armenian party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). Publically, then, both groups pursued the common goal of establishing constitutional rule. A longtime Central Committee member and an experienced administrator, Talaat used his networks to concentrate power, to impose policies, and to organize action. It was he who had principally prepared the putsch of 1913; the same is true for the reconquest of Edirne in the same year during the Second Balkan War, which won him and the CUP huge prestige among patriots.
Ever since his childhood in Edirne (the early Ottoman capital in European Turkey), Talaat had an emotional attachment to the Selimiye Mosque (see chap. 2, sec. "From Edirne"). It recalled past glory, although the mosque's sponsor, the late sixteenth-century sultan Selim II ("the drunkard"), stood for imperial decadence. His grandfather and namesake, Selim I "the grim" (yavuz), however, provided a strong role model for the Young Turks and served as the party's patron saint. In a similar vein, the Young Turks, most of whom hailed from the Balkans, understood themselves as superior "sons of conquerors" (Evlad-i Fatihan), within a geography that had remained largely Christian. Tellingly, after his forefathers' conquest of Western Asia Minor and the Balkans, in the early sixteenth century, Selim I had not only conquered Eastern Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt but also waged war against domestic adversaries called Kizilbas, today better known under the general designation of Alevis.
Alevis did not (and do not) identify with orthodox Sunni or imperial Islam but did have sympathies with premodern Shiite Iran, and had connections to Bektashi heterodoxy, a well-established religious network in the early Ottoman world. Talaat's nation, in contrast, was tantamount to Turkish-speaking Muslims relying on the Ottoman state. But while his political roots lay in the Ottoman power organization based on Selim I's achievements, Bektashism played a role even for Talaat, since its tekke (cloisters) had offered a safe niche for dissidents under Abdulhamid and cultivated a more liberal spirit than the Sunni orthodoxy that the sultan demanded. After the ascendance of Turkish nationalism in the early 1910s, a few CUP intellectuals tried to co-opt Alevis and Bektashis, purporting that they were the true bearers of Turkishness in language and in habits, who had resisted assimilation to the surrounding Kurdish tribes and to Arab- and Persian-influenced imperial culture. But this modestly successful CUP flirtation with Alevism scandalized conservative Sunni Muslims.
War and the patriotic call to fight for the nation is political tender in times of crisis, if enough people follow the call. Talaat had applied this maneuver during a deep CUP crisis on the eve of the Balkan Wars in September 1912, for Edirne's reconquest in 1913, and again in July 1914 (see chaps. 4and 5). Then, a small group around him decided to use Europe's July crisis as a chance to approach Germany and to conclude, finally (after several frustrated attempts in the months and years before), an alliance with a European Great power. Talaat embraced war as a game-changer, although this was a gamble with high stakes and even higher risks.
The secret treaty on 2 August 1914 demanded active war from Turkey. Henceforth, an ambitious world war agenda dominated politics. Although the German-speaking war minister Enver Pasha, an iconic military hero of the 1908 revolution, appeared as the figurehead during these plots, Talaat pulled the strings. Contrary to traditional wisdom, he was not less in command of the CUP's notorious paramilitary forces than Enver. This "Special Organization" prepared a war of conquest into the Caucasus and actually made raids from August 1914 onward. He was also centrally involved in the proposition to the German ally in October 1914 to launch a naval attack on the Black Sea to provoke open war with Russia. Only then did the world know for sure of the Turkish-German alliance. In his memoirs, written in 1919, Talaat misleads the reader to believe that he was not aware of the planned aggression. What he wrote after defeat served as a vindication in his larger, ongoing political struggle in exile (see chap. 6).
"On first impression, this is a lucid mind" (April 1915)
Behind the desk at the Ministry of the Interior in mid-April 1915 was a forty-one-year-old man who impressed his freshly arrived German visitor, journalist Emil Ludwig, with his energy, willpower, and the striking aura of a self-made man. Talaat was very active, yet at the same time, he was apparently friendly and approachable. He signed documents and made telephone calls while carrying on his conversation with Ludwig. From time to time, secretaries entered and exited the room. Talaat's smile and charm, even under stress, were famous. Upon meeting Talaat for the first time, Ludwig (soon to gain renown as biographer of powerful politicians) already had a penetrating view of the man: "At first sight this is a lucid mind. But behind it, within him, there is a subdued daemonic temper chained up."
A British deputy who had known Talaat from a few encounters wrote in 1921, shortly after the former grand vizier was killed in Berlin, "I only know that he was, in himself, fearless, and anyone who, like myself, only knew him superficially found him to be kindly and with a singular charm." Interacting within the function of his political goals, Talaat often joked, in cold blood, about unresolved issues or, enjoying his power, at times teased his CUP friends and ministers. He had the ability to quickly spot psychological weakness in people, including European diplomats, yet he knew little beyond the universe of the CUP, the political home that he had guided since late 1912. In meetings, he was convivial and sociable, his personality dominating the situation.
Indeed, behind the smile was a brain that planned, constructed, and carried out what would be called one of the most monstrous political acts of the twentieth century: the extermination of the Ottoman Armenians. Many others have noted Talaat's charm and his capacity to humor the people who came to him. At times he combined this charm with melancholy — the melancholy of a man presiding over a crumbling empire — which made him likable, particularly to the Germans, and mollified even angry friends in his presence. For Talaat, sadness served as a weapon. In addition to this, he was an emotional person and wept at times, for example, at a ceremony in a soldier cemetery or after the death of Sultan Mehmed V. Sly, perhaps, rather than intelligent and farsighted, he possessed the emotional and social qualities of a networker, a strong instinct for power, and an excellent memory, which tended toward the vengeful. "Why did we enter the war?" Talaat asked rhetorically, in order to shape Ludwig's flattering report in the Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily); he answered his own question with a CUP mantra: "We had to reestablish our independence, and we were sure that we would achieve this best at Germany's side."
More than the other Great powers, Wilhelminian Germany was attracted, politically and culturally, to Turkey. During the war, Germany was ready to adopt a laissez-faire approach vis-à-vis Turkey's men of radical action and demolitionist domestic policy, at times fascinated by them. Germany's interest in re-empowering Ottoman Turkey — and its noninterference in its ally's domestic policies — were essential for Talaat's designs. This was particularly true in order to have "a free hand" in what he called "the national struggle for survival" against his fellow Armenian citizens. Social Darwinism — a belief in a deathly "fight for survival," as interpreted from Darwinist notions like "survival of the fittest" and applied to human society — played a seminal role during World War I in general and for CUP members in particular.
On 24 April 1915, Talaat sent circulars to his provincial governors and a long telegram to Enver, the vice commander of the Ottoman army. (The sultan was the nominal commander.) In them, Talaat defined the current domestic situation as a general Armenian insurrection. He evoked the specter of a Russian-backed Armenian autonomy in Eastern Asia Minor, where Turkey risked losing the war. Neither his circulars nor his memoirs mention that he and his friends had prepared and started the war in the East in August 1914 (see chap. 5). Their aim? To restore Turkey's strength and full sovereignty, abolish internationally monitored reforms for the crisis-ridden Kurdish-Armenian eastern provinces, and reconquer territory lost decades ago in the Caucasus and beyond.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, in the eastern provinces unrest had accompanied lack of security and justice. Diplomacy called the issue "the Armenian Question" and considered it an essential part of the modern "Eastern Question": What could or should be the future of the Ottoman Empire — which is the future of the Near East — and what should Europe do about it? A main stumbling block for any easy answers was the Ottoman nonMuslims' demand for equality. It met fierce opposition by local lords and Sunni leaders, particularly in Eastern Asia Minor, where non-Muslims were still regarded as zimmi, obliged to respect Muslim hegemony in state and society. The Armenians, the most vocal group demanding reforms, were denigrated as agents of foreign Christian powers who wanted to rule over them. Young Armenian activists spread ideas of social revolutionary change, sought foreign backing, and began to coordinate self-defense tactics. About 100,000 Armenians, mostly men, were massacred in 1895, and roughly another 20,000 in April 1909, by gangs organized in mosques who connived with or were supported by state officials and local notables. Islamist discourse by various authorities — as an honest, though solitary, Kurdish historian in the 1970s reminded us — had publicly incited Muslims to kill the gavur (non-Muslim) en masse and made killing a duty to the ummah (community of Muslims).
To forestall collapsing entirely within its periphery, the state had to conspire with and co-opt violent reactionary forces. The Great powers, in turn, lacked viable common ground and failed to act. They were paralyzed, not only by imperialist competition but also by their fear that the collapse of the state would lead to dangerous geostrategic conflicts and seriously affect their economical investments and interests. Ottoman diplomacy under Sultan Abdulhamid II exploited this constellation, and the state did not prosecute domestic mass crimes, which he had largely condoned, except for their repercussions abroad. During World War I, the situation further worsened. Though the government had signed a reform plan for Eastern Asia Minor in February 1914, war and German acquiescence allowed Talaat to suspend it, and, by the end of 1914, to abrogate it completely.
Talaat had convinced himself that reforms would ultimately lead to the region's autonomy and possibly to territorial loss, as in the recent case of Macedonia. (In that case however, Talaat's purposeful warmongering during autumn 1912, as well as long-standing deficits in the administration, had played a role.) The loss of almost all of European Turkey in 1912–13 had converted him and his friends into radical partisans of a fresh Turkish nationalism. This new current dismissed any residual belief in Ottoman multinational coexistence and claimed Asia Minor as a "Turkish home/homeland" (Türk Yurdu), and let itself simultaneously become obsessed by Ziya Gökalp's expansive vision of "Turan." It assumed the successful assimilation of non-Turkish Muslims, particularly Kurds, but not of Ottoman Christians. Such ambitious goals of social transformation, as well as imperial restoration and expansion, could only be achieved through war. Dreams of conquest toward Turan via the Caucasus region were extremely popular among young elites, foremost military officers, from August 1914, but saw catastrophic frustration in late 1914. They were revived, however, when czarist Russia collapsed in 1917.
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On 24 April 1915 Talaat decided to end the Armenian Question once and for all, after meeting with CUP friends and receiving suggestions from young, radical governors in the East during the days and weeks before (see chap. 5). Although quite open to the Armenians after the constitutional revolution of 1908, he now fanatically hated and deeply feared them as the main obstacle to his personal ambitions and a Turkish future that he no longer conceived as related to the principles of the Ottoman constitution. In his circular, he ordered the arrest of the Armenian elite. Actually, he was suspicious of all non-Muslim groups with political projects, and of the Zionists as well. During dinner with US ambassador Henry Morgenthau on the same day, he expressed the conviction that "they [the Zionists] are mischievous" and that "it is their [the CUP rulers'] duty to get rid of them." The German ambassador Hans von Wangenheim told Morgenthau three days later that "he would help Zionists but not Armenians." And, in fact, Germany protected Jews but not Armenians. With his 24 April 1915 orders, Talaat even surrendered former political friends to interrogation, torture, and, in most cases, murder. Before killing those arrested, the security apparatus, a part of his ministry, extorted confessions to prove that there was a general Armenian conspiracy. In fact, there was no conspiracy. But in Talaat's calculated conspiracy theory, which was spread during spring 1915, there was.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Talaat Pasha"
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