The Black Sea

by Charles King

  The war spawned a series of massive population movements that dwarfed the multiple exoduses of the late nineteenth century. In eastern Anatolia, an uprising of Armenian revolutionaries had accompanied the Russian successes on the Caucasus front. An Ottoman counteroffensive against the Russians included reprisals against Armenian civilians. These massacres and deportations, now sanctioned by a government that had rejected the tolerant Ottoman ideals of the past for a new form of ethnic Turkish nationalism, culminated in an organized genocide in 1915. The Italian consul-general in Trabzon later recalled his experience in the port:

  The passing of the gangs of Armenian exiles beneath the windows and before the door of the Consulate; their prayers for help, when neither I nor any other could do anything to answer them; the city in a state of siege, guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete war equipment, by thousands of police agents, by bands of volunteers …; the hundreds of corpses found every day along the exile road; the young women converted by force to Islam or exiled like the rest; the children torn way from their families or from the Christian schools, and handed over by force to Moslem families, or else placed by hundreds on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and drowned in the Black Sea and the River Deyirmen Deré [Değirmendere]—these are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond ….37

  Throughout the Ottoman empire, but especially in the eastern provinces of Anatolia, somewhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenians and other Anatolian Christians were killed or died in forced marches to resettlement areas away from sensitive border regions.

  In the Balkans, the advance of Allied armies led to the flight of local Muslims, and all across the collapsing Ottoman and Russian empires, refugees of all religions fled to the seaports to escape violence and starvation. Civilians crowded the harbors, waiting for Russian, British or American ships to ferry them to safety. European and American relief workers arrived to organize distribution of food and clothing, while thousands of orphaned children were sent to new lives abroad.

  The armistice produced a formal cessation of hostilities on the western front, but north of the sea, the continuing violence of the Russian civil war meant further refugee outflows and mass starvation on the steppes of Ukraine. Soon, a major relief program was established to deal with the consequences. In early 1919, the U.S. Congress appropriated $100 million for relief assistance to Russia, as well as to Armenians, Greek Orthodox, and other Christian and Jewish populations in Asia Minor. A new American Relief Administration, headed by Herbert Hoover, was set up to organize the disbursement of assistance, and hundreds of agents were dispatched to the Balkans, Russia, Turkey, and the Caucasus to oversee the programs. Operations continued in Russia, even under the Bolshevik government, until the autumn of 1922. U.S. and other Allied ships patrolled the Black Sea harbors, provided security in the ports, and assisted in the evacuation of Russian refugees to Greece and other countries. Soon, however, the European powers would actively assist not only in moving people to safe locations but in actually sanctioning their permanent deportation—an instance of ethnic cleansing by international treaty.

  When the First World War ended, much of the Ottoman Black Sea coast was controlled by Allied powers. The Straits had been taken soon after the Ottomans signed the armistice in October 1918. Later, British forces quickly seized Batumi and the Transcaucasian railroad all the way to Baku. Other Allies took control of the northern Black Sea ports, now filled with refugees fleeing the brewing civil war across the former Russian empire. The ports then became channels not only for civilian relief, but also for Allied assistance to anti-Bolshevik armies fighting in Ukraine and southern Russia. The Allied High Commission, headquartered in Istanbul, became the effective government of the Ottoman empire and much of the Black Sea coast, overseeing assistance to the starving and displaced, not only in Anatolia but in southern Russia as well.

  The Ottoman state had been defeated and occupied, but a Turkish nationalist force was massing in central Anatolia. Mini-states—including a Greek “Republic of the Pontus”—had been declared by local powers. The difficult question of what to do with the remnants of the empire was formally resolved with the signing of the treaty of Sèvres by the Ottoman government and the Allies in 1920. The treaty provided for the creation of a rump and virtually demilitarized Turkish state, surrounded by areas carved off into Greek and Italian protectorates, and an independent Armenia and Kurdistan. The outer reaches of the empire were placed under British and French mandates. An international commission was appointed to govern the Straits, now declared open to all vessels in both peace and war. The Ottoman navy was to be almost completely disbanded.

  Sèvres satisfied few. To the remnants of the Ottoman army, which now exercised de facto control over much of Anatolia, the treaty was the last capitulation of a defunct empire. To some Allies, particularly Greece, the treaty did not go far enough, since it did not allow the recreation of a “Greek empire” with its center in Istanbul. In the end, renewed war was the tool for resolving these differences. Greek forces, which had been given the task of occupying the Aegean coast, began to push across central Anatolia. Bedraggled elements of the Ottoman army regrouped under the command of one of the heroes of Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal, and began to organize a counterattack. A new Greek–Turkish war raged until the signing of an armistice in October 1922.

  At the end of the conflict, negotiations were undertaken to replace the treaty of Sèvres with a new agreement that would recognize the realities created by the Greek–Turkish conflict. The war had devastated Anatolia, moving populations around and virtually leveling vital cities such as Smyrna, which had been torched as the Greek army fled in the face of the advancing Kemalists. The retreat of the Greek expeditionary force had been accompanied by even further refugee flows and Turkish attacks on any group—Greek, Armenian or other—thought to be sympathetic to the old terms of the Sèvres treaty. The Ottoman empire was at a definitive end; the sultanate had been abolished and a new republic, now avowedly Turkish and national rather than Ottoman and imperial, was declared. Kemal, soon recast as Atatürk, headed a party that won elections for a new parliament.

  The outcome of the new round of negotiations was the organized movement of people on a staggering scale, an exchange sanctioned by the treaty of Lausanne, signed by Turkey and the Allies in July 1923.38 In an effort to homogenize the ethnic populations of both Greece and Turkey and protect minorities from reprisals by either government, the treaty authorized the compulsory transfer to Greece of up to 1.5 million Orthodox Christians from Anatolia, including the Black Sea coastal cities, as well as the movement of some 350,000 Muslims from Greece, especially Aegean Macedonia. (Greek Orthodox in Istanbul and Muslims in western Thrace were declared exempt from expulsion.) In addition to the psychological trauma of deportation—this time approved by the major European powers—the physical toll on the deportees was dramatic. Makeshift camps housed families before their transfer to crowded ships. Bandits and venal administrators liberated their possessions before they stepped on board and as soon as they stepped off. Provisions for their integration into the new host societies were often inadequate. Moreover, the very identities of the deportees often made integration difficult. The Lausanne treaty had been written as if distinguishing between “Greeks” (the term used for Orthodox Christians) and Muslims was an easy thing—and as if both communities should have felt some affinity for Greece and the new Turkish Republic as their natural homelands. But in many communities, the lines were indistinct. A person of Orthodox religious affiliation—the only criterion, according to the treaty, for being “Greek”—might speak only Turkish or a variety of Greek unintelligible to a Greek-speaker from the Aegean. A Muslim from Greece likewise might be most comfortable in Greek or a Balkan Slavic language, not Turkish.

  Nevertheless, communities were marked for wholesale removal based on their presumed ethnic traits. Disputes over whether a person or family was, in fact, “exchangeable”—subject to compulsory dep
ortation—were adjudicated by a special intergovernmental committee established under Lausanne. By the middle of the 1920s, Trabzon, Samsun, and Sinop had been virtually emptied of Christians. Even the Greek-speaking communities of the Pontic uplands, the Matzouka region where the last remnants of Byzantium had lingered on in monasteries and villages for centuries, came to an end. People who still called themselves Romans—Romaioi or Rumlar—suddenly became “Hellenes,” just as people who had once been simply Muslims now became “Turks.” And both found themselves in new, national homelands to which they had never owed allegiance. It was “a thoroughly bad and vicious solution,” declared Lord Curzon, one of the framers of the Lausanne treaty, “for which the world would pay a heavy penalty a hundred years to come.”39

  Were these forced migrations and the deaths they produced instances of genocide? Most of the population movements differed on two key criteria usually used to distinguish genocide from other forms of organized violence: the degree to which there is an intent to eliminate a people as such, rather than simply remove them from a piece of territory, and the existence or otherwise of a clear ideology—of racial superiority, say—to justify killing. Only rarely, such as the Armenian case in 1915, did there seem to be an eliminationist impetus to the actions of governments; rarer still was a coherent ideology to rationalize it. Yet the easy conceptual distinctions between genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced migration are normally lost on the targets of state-organized violence. For most of the victims and their descendants, the deportations and killings are now treated as discrete historical events, turning points in the collective consciousness of the groups involved. Like all such events, they have names: the Ch’art to Armenians, the Katastrophe to Pontic Greeks, the Mübadele to Turks.

  The demographic changes on the seacoasts from the 1860 s to the 1920 s were the direct result of government policies and were unprecedented in scope and in their tragic consequences for the victims. The Crimean Tatar population, diminishing since the eighteenth century, was cut still further by the outmigration to Bulgaria and other Ottoman lands. The western Caucasus uplands were virtually depopulated, with Circassians and other highlanders scattered across the Balkans and the Middle East. The Armenian communities in Trabzon, Samsun, and other ports along the southern and southeastern coasts began to disappear in the massacres of the 1890 s and were then wiped out in the organized killing of 1915. Less than a decade later, Orthodox Christians—Greeks, of a sort, but usually with little sense of connection to the Greek nationstate—were removed from the littoral areas and “returned” to Greece.

  The rest of the twentieth century would see still further diminution of the cultural heterogeneity that had long defined the coast, most spectacularly with the mass killing of Jews and further deportations of Crimean Tatars and Caucasus peoples during the Second World War. In tandem with this rapid cultural homogenization of the coastline, historians, writers, and other nationalist intellectuals were engaged in a similar pursuit in their own domains: an effort to purify the historical record and to uncover—or, in most cases, construct—an ancient and unassailable link between the nations of the hinterland and the sea itself.

  “The Division of the Waters”

  The emergence of new states around the coastline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries raised the issue of state control over the sea and its resources. Already in 1878, the question of “the division of the waters” of the Danube—that is, the delimitation of control over fisheries and the demarcation of state boundaries in the shifting channels of the delta—had been taken up in the treaty of Berlin. Over the coming decades, determining which state owned which bits of the sea would assume increasing importance as a subject of diplomacy among the coastal powers.

  The idea of “territorial waters” is an obvious oxymoron, the result of the extension of concepts derived from control of land to the sea. It was a concept still imperfectly enshrined in international law well into the twentieth century. Its development depended on a host of factors: the emergence of international legal institutions, scientific advances in measurement of latitude and longitude, and improvements in naval technology which allowed states to patrol waters that they claimed as theirs. On the Black Sea, the clarification of interstate boundary lines lagged behind other parts of the world. Even today, there is no international agreement concerning the distance from shore that Black Sea littoral states may assert as their exclusive domain, and disputes over fishing rights have been problems. In 2000 a Ukrainian coastguard ship fired on and sank a Turkish trawler that had strayed into waters claimed by Ukraine.

  However, between the world wars, two important conventions were worked out to govern international relations on the sea and in the Straits. The same Lausanne treaty that had approved the Greek–Turkish population exchange also regulated passage between the Aegean and the Black Sea. The treaty affirmed the complete freedom of navigation through the Straits in times of peace, for both merchant ships and vessels of war; but the maximum military force to be sent into the Black Sea was never to be greater than that of the most powerful fleet maintained by one of the littoral countries: the kingdoms of Bulgaria and Romania, the Soviet Union, and Turkey. The shores of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles were to be demilitarized, with Turkey giving up the right to station troops and equipment within 15 km of the coasts. Dissatisfaction with that provision prompted Turkey to call for a revision of the Lausanne treaty a decade later. A new international document, the 1936 Montreux convention, returned full Turkish sovereignty over the coastal reaches of the Straits and reaffirmed the principle of free passage in peacetime. When at war, Turkey reserved the right to govern passage through the Straits at its own discretion. The convention also set limits on the size and number of naval vessels that foreign powers could send into the Black Sea and the length of time they were allowed to remain there. With the exception of a few safety regulations instituted unilaterally by Turkey in the 1990 s, the Montreux convention is the international instrument that has governed access to the sea to this day.

  Yet there was a deeper sense in which states began to exercise greater interest in what happened on the water. The sea and its territorial waters became not only the purview of the states around the shore; both were also celebrated as the patrimony of the historical nations which those states were held to represent. Historians searched back through history to find evidence of a seafaring inclination among the Getae and Daci, the Thracians, and other ancient peoples. The link with the sea was lauded as the essence of national greatness, a vital connection to the wider world. Already at the christening of the first Romanian steam-powered gunboat in the late nineteenth century, the minister of war argued that its major tasks would be not only “to instruct the sons of the people in the art of navigation” but also “to encourage them to regain the lost dominion” on the water.40 In late imperial Russia, the preeminent historian N. S. Solov’ev was clear on the ways in which the sea connected the Rhos of the ninth century—now recast as proto-Russians—to the rest of Europe, and the tragic invasions of nomadic peoples that eventually severed this economic and cultural tie:

  Southern Rus’ proper was a borderland, the European fringe of the steppe. It was a low fringe, unprotected in any way by nature, therefore open to frequent overflow of nomadic hordes…. Not only did the nomads attack Rus’, they cut it off from the Black Sea coast, making communication with Byzantium difficult…. Barbarian Asia strove to deny Rus’ all routes and ways by which it communicated with educated Europe.41

  Solov’ev’s multivolume history of Russia ended in the mid-1970 s, when Russia’s reestablishment of connections with both northern and southern Europe—through the partition of Poland and the opening of the Black Sea—had at last undone the alienation created by the barbarian invasions centuries earlier. Both the empire and the Russian nation had at last, according to Solov’ev, reestablished their place among the leading European peoples, with access to the world’s oceans.

  The ancient inhabit
ants of the seaboard were brought into these emerging narratives of nations and their rightful connection to the water. The new science of ethno-history sought the origins of modern states and peoples in the murky past. The Rhos became Russians or, for later historians in Ukraine and its diaspora, Ukrainians. Getae and Daci, Latinized after Trajan’s conquest of the lands north of the Danube, were treated as inchoate Romanians. Thracians became Bulgarians. In the rare instances when living versions of these antique forebears could be found, states developed policies to cultivate connections with them. For example, in the southern Balkans, the Romanian kingdom worked to foster ties with the Vlachs, upland shepherds who still spoke a latinate language similar to Romanian. Before the First World War, Romania sponsored schools and scholarships for Vlach children and, in the 1920 s, embarked on a statesubsidized “colonization” program that brought thousands of Vlach families from Albania, Greece, and Macedonia to Dobrudja. From the state’s point of view, colonization was doubly appealing: It brought an unredeemed component of the Romanian nation back to their putative motherland, and it also helped tip the demographic balance in favor of Romanian-speakers in a part of the country that was largely Bulgarian, Turkish, and Tatar.

  The effort to rediscover the ancient peoples of the coast could sometimes lead in bizarre directions. Just before the First World War, stories began to surface about a population of “Negroes” living around the port of Batumi. They were said to be the descendants of former African slaves once taken into Ottoman service or, in the most fantastic speculations, one of the lost tribes of Israel or even remnants of the curly-haired Colchians (who, according to Herodotus, were descended from the Egyptians). Russian ethnographers rushed to study the strange people, but they usually found little more than a few individuals with dark complexions, hardly the “tribe” that they had expected. Nevertheless, tales of the Black Sea Negroes popped up periodically throughout the century. Soviet propagandists between the world wars used them as examples of the “friendship of peoples” and cultural tolerance promoted within the Soviet state, while some black American activists pointed to this “tribe” as evidence of the racial harmony that communism could engender.42