All the world’s a stage

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923. By Sean McMeekin. Penguin Press; 576 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30.

FEW international relationships are as volatile and important as that between the Russians and the Turks. Although they were a formidable combination when they occasionally teamed up (against the French in 1798-99, for example), the tsars and the sultans were more often at loggerheads. In fact they clashed in 12 wars between the 16th and the early 20th century. Not much has changed since. In the early 21st century Turks and Russians have veered between warm commercial relations and war by proxy over Syria.

The last big Russo-Turkish war, which formed one of the fronts in the first world war, is a source of continuing fascination to Sean McMeekin, a history professor at Bard College north of New York who previously taught at two universities in Turkey. In “The Ottoman Endgame”, a sweeping account of the last 15 years of the Ottoman empire, the most original and passionately written parts concern the fight between Russians and Turks in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus.

Two things distinguish Mr McMeekin from many other writers in English about this period. First, he has a deep empathy with Turkish concerns, and he hews closer to the official Turkish line than to the revisionist, self-critical approach taken by some courageous Turkish liberals. Second, he has some unusual insights into imperial Russian thinking, based on study of the tsarist archives.

Mr McMeekin finds it easy to imagine the world as it appeared to the young masters of the Ottoman realm, as they and their Teutonic allies faced the combined forces of Russia, Britain and France; and he brings alive the memory of tsarist commanders like Nikolai Yudenich and the titanic battles they fought in wild places like Van and Erzurum, with ghastly consequences for civilians on the wrong side.

The author has a well-founded sense that traditional theocratic powers which look ramshackle or even moribund to Western eyes can still act with ruthless effectiveness when the strategic stakes are really high; and he applies that point in equal measure to the late Ottoman empire and to the late tsarist one.

Using this lens, he brings some useful correctives into focus. It has become a commonplace to say that the Middle Eastern boundaries now being challenged by Islamic State are the ones laid down by an Anglo-French deal, struck in 1916 and known as the Sykes-Picot agreement. Actually, Mr McMeekin insists, it was an Anglo-Franco-Russian deal; and he argues, controversially, that the Russians were senior partners in the bargain.

Many students of the period will see in Mr McMeekin’s approach a barely hidden agenda. He stresses the fighting spirit of all the forces battling for the tsar, a coalition which at certain times and places included local Armenians. Whether with disgust or approval, that emphasis will certainly be interpreted as a way of vindicating or explaining away the mass deportation of Armenians, decreed in 1915, which was really a death march.

In fact, Mr McMeekin does not play down the fact that many hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished “…whether through starvation, thirst, disease, simple exhaustion, or at the hands of execution squads.” As he delicately puts it, the choice of a parched strip of Syrian desert as the uprooted Armenians’ destination suggests that “the survival of the deportees was not…[the] first priority” of Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman official whom Armenians regard as the main perpetrator of genocide.

To many, such cautious turns of phrase will amount to praising, or at least excusing, by faint damnation. But if Mr McMeekin’s purpose was merely to exonerate all Ottoman behaviour and play down Armenian suffering, he would not have included the observation of a Venezuelan soldier of fortune who saw on a mountainside “thousands of half-nude and bleeding Armenian corpses, piled in heaps orinterlaced in death’s final embrace.”