by James Millar
The Soviet government reorganized the government-general in 1918 as the Turkestan ASSR of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. In 1924 the Turkestan republic was abolished. Its northern districts, inhabited by Kazakhs, were incorporated in the Kazakh ASSR of the Russian republic; its eastern districts, inhabited by Kyrgyz, were joined to the Kazakh republic as the Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast. The remainder of Turkestan was divided into the Turkmen and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics, the latter’s southeast forming the Tajik ASSR. See also: CENTRAL ASIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Seymour. (1988). “Russia’s Central Asian Empire, 1885-1917.” In Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, ed. Michael Rywkin. London: Mansell Publishing.
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TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH
Pierce, Richard A. (1960). Russian Central Asia., 1867-1917: A Study in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.
SEYMOUR BECKER
TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH
Through most of the 500 years preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and Turkey were enemies. Initially it was an expanding Ottoman Empire that conquered traditionally Russian lands, but then as the Ottoman Empire weakened, it was tsarist Russia’s turn to expand at the expense of the Ottomans. Highlighting Russian expansion was the Treaty of Kuchuk Karnadji in 1774, which not only gave Russia the Crimea, but also the right to intervene in the Ottoman Empire to protect orthodox believers. Then, in the nineteenth century, it was Russian military pressure, in cooperation with Britain and France, that helped free Greece from Ottoman control in 1827. While the Russian drive against the Ottoman Empire and Moscow’s efforts to control the Turkish Straits failed during the Crimean War (1853-1853), twenty years later (in 1876-1877) Russia helped free the Bulgarians from Ottoman control in a war against the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were on opposite sides, with Russia’s ally Britain promising the straits to Moscow to help keep it in the war.
Following World War I, when the communists seized control of Russia and Kemal Attaturk took power in Turkey, there was a brief warming of relations as Moscow supplied weapons to help Turkey drive out the armies of their common enemies, France and Britain. During World War II, Turkey was ostensibly neutral but appeared sympathetic to the Germans, and at the end of the war Stalin demanded bases in the Turkish Straits and Turkish territory in Transcaucasia. Stalin, however, was unable to implement Russian demands because of U.S. support for Turkey. At the same time, however, by solidifying its control over the Eastern Balkans, Moscow posed a threat to Turkey on its border with Bulgaria.
Throughout the early stages of the Cold War, Turkey was a loyal member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), sending troops to help the United States in the Korean War-much to
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the anger of Moscow. Relations between Moscow and Ankara, however, began to warm in the 1970s (in part because of the U.S.-Turkish conflict over Cyprus) and in the 1980s the two countries negotiated an important natural gas agreement. Still, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, relations could be seen as correct if not particularly friendly.
RELATIONS SINCE THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR
Since the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, Turkish-Russian relations have gone through three stages. The first period, 1991 to 1995, saw a mixture of economic cooperation and geopolitical confrontation; the second period, 1996 to 1998, witnessed an escalation of the geopolitical confrontation, and the third period, 1998 to 2003, following the economic crisis in Russia in August through September 1998, saw the relationship transformed into a far more friendly and cooperative one.
In the first period trade was the primary factor fostering the relationship. By the time of the Russian economic crisis of 1998, trade had risen to $10 billion per year, making Turkey Russia’s primary Middle East trading partner and at the same time creating a strong pro-Russian business lobby in Turkey, composed of such companies as Enka, Gama, and Tekfen. Indeed, Turkish companies even got the contract to rebuild the Russian Duma, damaged in the 1993 fighting, and Turkish merchants donated $5 million to Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign. Moscow also sold military equipment to Turkey, including helicopters (prohibited for sale to Turkey by NATO) that the Turks could use to suppress the Kurdish uprising in Southeast Turkey.
If economic and military cooperation was evident during this period, so was competition. With the collapse of the USSR, Moscow feared Turkish inroads into Central Asia and Transcaucasia seen by the Russian leadership as the soft underbelly of the Russian Federation. Reinforcing this concern were Turkish efforts to promote the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline route for Caspian Sea oil that would rival Moscow’s Baku-Novorossisk route. For its part, Turkey complained about the Russian military buildup in Armenia and Georgia, about the ecological dangers posed by Russian oil tankers going through the straits, and about Russian aid to the Kurdish rebels. On the other hand, once the first Chechen war had erupted in December 1994,
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Moscow complained about Turkish aid to the Chechen rebels.
Relations between Turkey and Russia sharply deteriorated in 1996 after Yevgeny Primakov became Russia’s foreign minister. Primakov sought to create a pro-Russian grouping of states such as Greece, Armenia, Syria, and Iran to outflank Turkey. Furthermore, he supported the sale in January 1997 of a very sophisticated SAM 300-PMU-1 surface-to-air missile system to the Greek portion of Cyprus, something that, if deployed, would threaten the airspace of a large part of southern Turkey. Turkey took the proposed SAM-300 sale seriously and threatened to destroy the missiles if they were deployed. Finally, Moscow stepped up its diplomatic support for the Kurdish rebellion, allowing Kurdish conferences to be held in Moscow.
The only bright spot in Turkish-Russian relations during this period came in December 1997 when then Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin came to Ankara to sign the Blue Stream natural gas agreement, which would increase the amount of natural gas Turkey would import from Russia from 3 billion cubic meters per year in 2000 to 30 billion cubic meters per year in 2010, with 16 billion cubic meters coming from the Blue Stream pipeline under the Black Sea and 14 billion cubic meters coming from enlarged pipelines through the Balkans.
Following the Russian economic crisis of August-September 1998, confrontation gave way to cooperation in the Russian-Turkish relationship. This was due to a number of causes. First, Primakov’s efforts to build an alignment of Iran, Armenia, Syria, and Greece against Turkey fell apart as Greece and Turkey had a major rapprochement. Second, the economic crisis weakened Russia so that Primakov, who had become prime minister in September 1998, realized that Russia simply did not have the economic resources to implement the multipolar diplomatic strategy he had sought to promote, at least until Russia had rebuilt its economy. The consequences for Russian-Turkish relations were almost immediate, as Russia began to prize Turkey as an economic partner instead of confronting it as a geopolitical rival. Thus in October 1998, Russia refused to grant diplomatic asylum to Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan. Next, Moscow acquiesced in the deployment of the SAM-300 system on the Greek island of Crete instead of on Cyprus. Then, Moscow indicated it would not oppose the Baku-Tibilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Finally,
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Moscow stepped up its efforts to find external funding for the Blue Stream natural gas pipeline, which it made the centerpiece of its policy toward Turkey.
This change in policy direction toward Turkey was reinforced after Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president in January 2000. In October 2000 Russian prime minister Mikhail Khazyanov came to Ankara and stated that cooperation, not confrontation, was the centerpiece of Russian policy toward Turkey, and in November 2001, at the United Nations, then Turkish Foreign Mnister Ismail Cem and Russian Foreign Mnister Igor Ivanov signed an action plan for Turkish-Russian cooperation in Eurasia.
Tension
s remained over Kurdish and Chechen issues, over Russian military deployments in Transcaucasia, and over the passage of Russian oil through the straits. However, by the beginning of 2003, even with an Islamist now heading the Turkish government, Russian-Turkish relations were better than at any time in the last 500 years. Whether this rather halcyon condition will continue is a question only the future can decide. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; FOREIGN TRADE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freedman, Robert O. (2002). Russian Policy toward the Middle East since the Collapse of the Soviet Union. University of Washington. Freedman, Robert O. (2002). “Russian Policy toward the Middle East under Putin.” Demokratizatsia 10 (4). Harris, George. (1995). “The Russian Federation and Turkey.” In Regional Power Rivalries in the New Eurasia, ed. Alvin Z. Rubinstein and Oles Smolansky. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Insight Turkey: Special Issue Devoted to Turkey and Russia from Competition to Convergence 4 (2), April-June 2002. Sezer, Duygu Bazoglu. (2001). “Russia: The Challenges of Reconciling Geopolitical Competition with Economic Partnership.” In Turkey in World Politics, ed. Barry Rubin and Kemal Kirisci. Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener. Sezer, Duygu Bazoglu. (2000). “Turkish-Russian Relations: From Adversity to ‘Virtual Rapprochement’.” In Turkey’s New World, ed. Alan Makovsky and Sabri Sayari. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
ROBERT O. FREEDMAN
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
TURKMENISTAN AND TURKMEN
TURKMENISTAN AND TURKMEN
The Turkmen are probably the least-known major ethnic group in Central Asia, as they are a tribal-based people who live in the desert region between Iran and Uzbekistan. Turkmen are Sunni Muslims, although the affinity with Islamic practices is weaker than those of other ethnic groups in the region. Linguistically, the Turkmen language is part of the larger Turkic language group, and is considered to be closer to Azeri and Turkish, to the point of being mutually intelligible.
The Turkmen are known in the region as being nomadic peoples who have rarely been incorporated into regional empires. While a significant percentage of Turkmen live in the country of Turkmenistan, many live in bordering states. It is estimated that more than one million Turkmen live in Iran, slightly fewer in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively, and nearly 500,000 live in Uzbekistan. The country of Turkmenistan itself is home to 4.8 million people, of whom 3,696,000 (77%) are ethnic Turkmen. The significant minorities in Turkmenistan are Uzbeks (9.2%), Russians (6.7%), and Kazakhs (2.0%). The capital city of Ashgabat has an estimated population between 600,000 (official) and one million (unofficial). This discrepancy belies a rather unusual problem in the country: there has not been an official census since the Soviet-era census of 1989, thus it is difficult to ascertain with some level of confidence most population figures. The government declared at the beginning of 2000 that the population would exceed five million as a result of significant return migration of Turkmen from around the world. Non-governmental observers have not corroborated this figure, nor have they done the same for the current government claim that there are 5.7 million Turkmen living in the country.
The early history of the Turkmen is generally told by outside writers and observers. Turkmen (or Turcomen) tribes were noted by early travelers in the region and were often the source of concerns, for the Turkmen were noted for looting caravans and raiding settlements. Such stereotypes plagued the Turkmen up through the nineteenth century,
Women walking along a street in Turkmenistan, one of the most isolated regions of the Soviet empire. © G?RARD DEGEORGE/CORBIS
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Turkmenistan, 1992. © MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION when the Russian Empire expanded to the region known as Transcaspia. Since the 1700s, Russian officials had heard complaints of Turkmen raiders taking Russian settlers in what is now Kazakhstan and selling them into slavery. In the 1870s, it was decided that the Russian empire should incorporate the region of Transcaspia into their southern holding. In 1880, Russian forces launched from the port of Fort Alexandrovsk along the eastern banks of the Caspian Sea and headed eastward. Initially repelled at the fortress of Goek Tepe, they regrouped under the leadership of General Skobelev and subdued the Turkmen resistance in the following year. The final southernmost border of the Russian empire was established in 1895 in a treaty with Great Britain, effectively ending any competition over Central Asia in the so-called Great Game. However, tsarist control of Transcaspia was short-lived. With the outbreak of World War I, there was a concurrent increase in tribal activity against their Russian overlords. Turkmen participated in the 1916 draft law rebellion and effectively became autonomous with the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917. Throughout the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the region of Transcaspia was under the control of various competing powers, including a Turkmen tribal leader named Ju-niad Khan, as well as forces from the British Army who were sent to protect Allied interests in the region.
Eventually, the region fell under the control of the Red Army as the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war came to a close. The actual notion of a Turkmen state was not realized until the twentieth cen1590
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TURKMENISTAN AND TURKMEN
tury, with the creation of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924. Carved out of the territories between Uzbekistan and the bordering countries of Iran and Afghanistan, Turkmenia, later called Turkmenistan, was created for the tribal groups in the region. These nomadic tribes, from the Tekke, Yomud, and others, slowly developed a common Turkmen identity. Through the period of Soviet rule, Turkmenistan was one of the least-integrated union republics in the Soviet Union. It was noted for providing raw materials such as cotton and gas to the country’s planned economic system. It was also viewed as the strategic front line against U.S.-supported Iran.
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and, like the other union republics, Turkmenistan became an independent state. The First Secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party was declared president, first of the Turkmen S.S.R. and later the Republic of Turkmenistan. Saparmurad Niyazov has been president ever since. In the process, he has created a strong cult of personality that includes ever-visible displays of his pictures, statues, and overall domination of the state-run media. His work of the late 1990s, the Rukhnama, has become a spiritual foundation for the Turkmen state and is something that all Turkmen must learn. Indeed, any opposition to Turkmenbashi Birigi (Father of the Turkmen, the Great) centers on challenging this personalistic rule.
Economic development in the country remains a paradox. In spite of a great potential in energy wealth, it remains mired in poverty. And while there are magnificent new buildings in the center of the capital city of Ashgabat, the countryside is dotted with substandard housing and living conditions. Turkmen traditionally have been nomadic herders, with an economy that is relatively autarkic. However, since independence, there has been a push to exploit the oil and gas reserves of the country. Because of an inability to find reliable, paying customers, Turkmenistan has not been able to benefit greatly from this natural resource. As o
f the early twenty-first century, Turkmenistan is listed as having 150 trillion cubic feet of gas, which is one of the top ten deposits in the world. However, a lack of firm agreements with energy companies has resulted in much of this remaining unexplored.
The estimated 2002 gross national product (GDP) of the country was $21.5 billion, resulting in an estimated purchasing power parity (PPP) of $4,480 per capita. However, real per capita income was closer to $1,000 with most living on less than
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$200 per annum. An artificial exchange rate, vast corruption, and the concentration of wealth at the top level all have created conditions of abject poverty for the majority of Turkmen. Trade remains limited to countries such as Russia and Ukraine, the latter of which uses barter deals to finance Turkmen gas imports. There are also modest trade relations with neighboring Iran, capitalizing on a rail link that crosses the Turkmen-Iranian border.
Because Turkmenistan neighbors Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to the north, and Afghanistan and Iran to the south, these four states, plus Russia, play a decisive role in Turkmen foreign policy. However, tempering any effort at expanding relations is the current Turkmen foreign policy of “positive neutrality,” which was declared in December 1995. According to this concept, Turkmenistan is not to be part of regional alliances and security arrangements. Thus, while it is technically part of the NATO Partnership for Peace program and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Turkmenistan rarely participates in conferences and meetings and never participates in joint security exercises. The magnitude of internal problems, though, may eventually compel the Turkmen government to more actively engage with outside states, particularly if it ever hopes to benefit from the energy reserves that have been underutilized. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST