World War 1 and the Caucus

I'm reading a fascinating book about a mysterious author from the city of Baku in Azerbaijan. Never heard of either? Check out the map.

As you can see, Azerbaijan is a small country between Iran and Russia. Baku is a city on the Caspian Sea. In the early 1900s Baku was one of the richest cities in the world as it become a high-functioning oil port. Before the discover of crude petroleum in Saudi Arabia and other states in the Middle East, oil was literally found in and around the Caspian Sea, as pools of oil were on the surface of land in this area.

Oil millionaires funded what was an ethnically diverse city in the East. Muslims, Jews, Russians, Aremenias, Turks, you named it from the East lived in relative peace and prosperity in this city. It was World War 1 that brought total chaos to this region and shaped the 20th century.

I know very little of WW1. Most of my understanding of the conflict is picturing the Western Front in France and trench warfare between the Germans and the British/French/American troops. Gas masks and machine guns. A few images from Gallipoli. I think of the peace and the attempt to create the League of Nations and the high cost to Germany, giving rise to Fascism and World War 2.

But this was only a portion of the conflict, which spanned literally across the world. First off, to put the thing in context, prior to WW1 there were feudal empires ruling across many countries and a few Colonial empires. The Ottomam Empire still existed, a mixture of peoples: Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and Greeks. This was a diverse Islamic Empire where Jews and Christians (Armeniana is a bit time Christian country from the time of the Crusades) and Muslims lived together. Russia was still ruled by the Czar. Austria-Hungry was an empire that stretched from Prague to Budapest and included Bosnia. Germany was the Prussian Empire, France and England, colonial powers.

But what is so interesting about this time that we forget, or never knew, was all the crazy little groups that existed within these empires. World War 1 was started by an anarchist who killed the Arch Duke Ferdinand. Anarchists were basically terrorists who wanted an end to all government. They were small, but crazy, not totally unlike Al Queda. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia because they wouldn't bring the men to justice (Not unlike the US declaring war on the Taliban). Because of a complex set of alliances and an existing arms race between Britian and Germany, the world exploded.

The East, however, sounded like complete madness. Russia entered on the Allied Side and fought against Germany and the Ottomans. The Czarist armies were huge, but underperformed and were getting their asses kicked. Meanwhile, revoluationaries in Russia saw how weak the Czar armies were and gave them confidence. The Bosheviks used terror and the secret police to attack the Czar and try to take over Russia. Russian bailed on WW1 to fight it's own internal revoluation - and one could interpret the Russian Revolution as part of WW1. However, prior to bailing, Russia had tried to attack the Ottomans and pictured extending the Russian empire all the way to Constantinople...even though they failed. In response, the Ottomans were susceptible to the militant groups within the empire knowns as the Young Turks. Instead of viewing the Ottoman Empire as a mix of Arabs, Kurds, Jews, Armenians, they viewed the Turks as the superior race and sought to create a large Turkish empire that extended into Russian-held lands, including Mongolia. They saw themselves as descendants of the Khans. Bear in mind, in the East, the values of war were different than what we know today. Empires conquered each other and the people didn't believe so much in things like countries and nationalities. They basically paid taxes to whoever conquered them and simply lived under different regimes - ideas such as nationalism and so forth were not much of an issue. This changed after WW1.

In any case, these young Turks used racism and found an internal enemy: the Armenians (Christians - possibly linked to the Russian Czar) and committed the first modern genocide in an effort to seize more power. The Bolshevicks turned out to be more successful than even they imagined, but in Russia there seemed to be total chaos between tons of different groups: the Reds: Bolsheviks and revolutionaries and the Whites: Monarchists, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Moderate Socialists...it was perhaps because of the many differences in the Whites that they lost, but something we may forget about the Russian Revolutions is that the true radicals won...that it was not moderate communists, but radical, terrorists.

Baku was in the middle of this and at various times occupied by German soldiers, Russian Czarist forces, and Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks controlled the population with the Cheka, a secret police whom Hitler later modeled the Gestapo after. Hitler also modeled his Jewish genocide after the Turkish genocide of Armenians, famously saying, look what happened to the Armenians - no one did a thing.

Anyhow, enough talking on this subject, I just find the whole era and time fascinating and it's crazy that it happened only 100 years ago.