This is the story of the twilight struggle that the Ottoman and Russian empires waged for the borderlands of the Caucasus and Anatolia. Although the two empires were vastly unequal in their capabilities, the struggle yielded no victor. The instinct for self-preservation brought both empires to the same fate, ruin. Fear of partition led the Ottoman state to destroy its imperial order, whereas the compulsive desire for greater security and fear of an unstable southern border spurred the Russian state to press beyond its capacity and thereby precipitate its own collapse and the dissolution of its empire. The struggle shattered the empires, and the empires in turn shattered the peoples in their borderlands, uprooting them, fracturing their societies, and sending untold numbers to death.

The story begins at a moment of hope and promise, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. On 23 July, the sultan of the Ottoman empire renounced autocracy and declared the restoration of the constitution he had suspended three decades earlier. The announcement, as contemporary observers and later historians alike have emphasized, sparked outbursts of joy of a kind all but forgotten in the troubled empire. The nineteenth century had been a difficult one for the empire Tsar Nicholas I had derisively dubbed “the Sick Man of Europe.” It had been hemorrhaging territory, resources, and people in the face of persistent predation from without and experiencing strife among its constituent peoples within. The restoration of the constitution offered hope that this unhappy history could be reversed.