Pan-Turkism

Pan-Turkism, political movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which had as its goal the political union of all Turkish-speaking peoples in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, China, Iran, and Afghanistan. The movement, which began among the Turks in Crimea and on the Volga, initially sought to unite the Turks of the Ottoman and Russian empires against the growing Russian tsarist domination.

In 1883 İsmail Gasprinski, a Crimean Turk, proclaiming the “unity in language, thought and action” of all the Turkish-speaking peoples in the Russian and Ottoman empires, established the Turkish newspaper Tercüman in Crimea. In 1911 Yussuf Aktshura Oghlu founded in Constantinople (Istanbul) a similar paper, Türk Yurdu (“The Turkish Homeland”). At the same time, prominent Turkish writers such as Ziya Gökalp and Halide Edib Adıvar, author of the novel Yeni Turan (1912; “The New Turan”), glorified the common legendary past and the future of the Turkish race. Their symbol was a she-wolf (Bozkurt), regarded as the mother of the race and worshiped before the Turkish conversion to Islam.

During the years 1913–18, when Turkey was involved in a bitter struggle with Russia, Pan-Turkish propaganda was officially promoted by the Ottoman government. In the 1920s and ’30s, Kemal Atatürk deemphasized Pan-Turkism, instead encouraging Turkish nationalism within Turkey. During World War II, the revival of Pan-Slavism under Joseph Stalin and the Russian threat to Turkish autonomy brought a renewed, though slight, interest in Pan-Turkism among some Turks. The demand for a federation of Turkish states continued after World War II among the Turkish-speaking Islamic peoples in the Soviet Union.