Turkey as an Influential North Caucasian Émigré Centre Between the Two World Wars

Having hosted a large number of North Caucasian immigrants since the end of the 19th century, Turkey has always been a very important centre for the political activities of the Caucasian Mountaineers. eTh political activities of the Mountain immigrant community show some characteristic diefrences across Turkey, the Caucasus, and Europe. While these activities were sometimes limited only to the internal politics of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, some of them were focused on the liberation of the Caucasus, and some of them were related to both. eTh common point of all these activities is that they are the circles of a chain of nested individual events which seem to be completely irrelevant and independent from each other. Caucasian Mountaineers became a great power in the palace, army, and politics as soon as they have begun to appear in Ottoman social life. Many émigré leaders had joined the Ottoman opposition movement as decisive rulers during the revolutionary years. Association of Circassian Unity (Djamiyet-i Ittikhadiye-i Cherakise) that had been founded in Cairo in 1899, can be considered to be an example of early North Caucasian activism in the Ottoman Empire.1 hTe Caucasian Mountaineers who had decisive roles in the Ottoman and Russian revolutions, had always been in close communication and cooperation with each other. Magomed Bek Hadjetlashe (aka Gersh / Grigory Ettinger) who was a spy of the Tsar's secret police was a very striking example of this. He was exposing the regime opponents on both sides by manipulating the dissidents in both the Caucasus and 1 (39) 2022 pamięć i spr awiedliwość