Revolutionary Waves and Walls: The Russian and Ottoman Oppositional Movements in 1890-1909 between Connections and Disconnections

Abstract

In this thesis a comparative and connective history of the Russian and Ottoman oppositional movements will be explored between 1890-1909. Previous research has undersold the comparative and connective potential between these movements, a paradigm that this project seeks to challenge. This will be achieved using comparative methods and discourse analysis, but the novel approach of this research resides in the use of revolutionary scripts as a conceptual framework. This research finds that the paradoxical cultural and political experiences of the Russian and Ottoman empires in the nineteenth century, resulted in an ideologically and methodologically diverse, and often conflicting oppositional landscape. In both empires’ context-specific discourses about constitutionalism, each other, or their place in the world, seemed to put them on a diverging path. At the same time, revolutionist movements and discourses were developing in a parallel direction in both empires, transcending ideology and becoming an inescapable oppositional method. This reality of different ideologies and similar methods, opened the way for the Ottoman Young Turk opposition to take inspiration from Russian revolutionist methods, whilst retaining their own ideology and culture. In a similar vein, the concept of counterexamples (in revolutionary scripts) allowed the Ottoman opposition to learn ‘what not to do’ from the Russian revolution. This inspiration through revolutionist methods and confirmation through counterexamples, typified the Russian opposition’s unusual impact on specifically the Young Turk ideology and organisation before and during the revolution of 1908.