Welcome to the deep dive. Glad to be here. So
if you want to understand the modern Middle East
or, you know, the borders of Russia and even
just the global obsession with oil, you really
have to look at this totally forgotten theater
of World War One. Oh, absolutely. Today, we are
unpacking the Caucasus campaign. We've got this
massive stack of historical research, military
records, articles, and our mission here is to
just extract all the critical, mind -blowing
insights from these sources. Right. You, listening
right now, can sound like a master historian
the next time geopolitics comes up at a dinner
party. It's just a phenomenal topic to dive into
because, you know, our collective memory of World
War I almost automatically defaults to one specific
image. The trenches. Exactly. The muddy, static
trenches of the Western Front. We picture the
Somme. We picture Verdun. Right. Guys just sitting
in mud for months. Yeah. But the events we are
exploring today, they paint a wildly different
picture of that global conflict. We're talking
about an incredible chaotic, fluid, and just
largely overlooked clash between the Russian
and Ottoman empires. This was a brutal, high
-altitude mountain war spanning from the South
Caucasus all the way down to the Armenian highlands.
It had global empires collapsing in real time.
In a level of unpredictability you just did not
see in France. Exactly. Okay, let's unpack this.
What was the actual core driver of this massive
conflict? Well, if we connect this to the bigger
picture, The stakes were just unimaginably high.
And they involved resources that honestly still
dictate global power today. Oil. Oil. But first,
territory. The Ottoman Empire, which was led
by War Minister Ember Pasha, they had a very
specific strategic goal. They wanted to reclaim
land they'd lost to the Russians decades earlier.
Back in 1877. Right, 1877. Specifically, these
regions like Kars, Ardahan, and the super vital
port of Batum. But beyond just drawing new lines
on a map, their ultimate grand objective was
to sever Russian access to the hydrocarbon resources
around the Caspian Sea. Because oil was rapidly
becoming the absolute lifeblood of modern empires.
Exactly. And the Ottomans wanted to control that
tap. That definitely explains the Ottoman drive.
But what was keeping Russia so invested in this
specific mountain fight? I mean, they had millions
of men locked in this desperate struggle against
Germany and Austria -Hungary over in Europe.
Yeah, they were heavily extended. Surely they
needed every single available soldier on that
Eastern front. They did. And for the Russian
Tsarist regime, the Caucasus was technically
a secondary front. Right. However, Foreign Minister
Sosnov and the Russian high command, they had
this grand vision that made the risk completely
worthwhile in their eyes. They wanted Constantinople.
Yes. They wanted full possession of Constantinople
and total control over the vital straits convicting
the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. It was this
centuries old Russian dream to secure a warm
water port. Unhindered naval access. Exactly.
And while these two massive empires are throwing
punches at each other in the freezing mountains,
You have, of course, the British hovering in
the background. Caspian oil enters the geopolitical
equation. Always. The British government desperately
needed to protect the Anglo -Persian oil company.
They had just secured these massive contracts
right before the war broke out. To supply oil
fuel for the Royal Navy. Right. So when Enver
Pasha pushed to establish this independent Transcaucasia
under Ottoman influence, the British started
coordinating with Russian forces purely to prevent
that. They had to protect their petroleum supply
lines. Wow. So this theater, which starts out
as basically a peripheral distraction for Russia,
it rapidly evolves into this chaotic multi -empire
collision over energy, territory, and basically
imperial survival. It really did. And when you
look at the actual forces that marched into those
mountains, the initial mismatch is striking.
It's massive. The Ottomans deployed their third
army to the region. which gave them a huge manpower
advantage early on. Yeah, the Ottoman Third Army
had up to 190 ,000 men available for the campaign.
190 ,000. But they were severely hampered by
their own logistics. They were poorly equipped
for high -altitude winter warfare. On the other
side, the Russians initially fielded the Caucasus
Army with about 100 ,000 troops. But they didn't
keep them. No. Because of devastating losses
in Europe, like the absolute disaster at Tannenberg,
the Russian high command continually drained
their Caucasus forces just to plug holes on the
eastern front. So they dropped their regional
strength down to just 60 ,000 men. 60 ,000 against
190 ,000. Being outnumbered three to one in hostile
mountainous terrain is a strategic nightmare
for literally any commander. But the Russians
did have some unique advantages that completely
shifted that balance of power on the ground.
They did. They received massive support from
Armenian volunteer units. These were highly motivated
fighters who had very deep personal stakes in
the region. And many of them had actually fought
alongside the Russians in previous conflicts.
Right. So they knew the drill. Those volunteer
units, organized under commanders like Andronik
Ozanian, they provided a critical backbone to
the Russian defensive line. This line stretched
from Van all the way to Erzinkin. And their numbers
grew quite a bit, didn't they? Oh, massively.
By the later stages of the conflict, there were
up to 150 ,000 Armenian troops operating in the
Near East. Wow. And they possessed an intimate
knowledge of the local terrain that regular Russian
conscripts just completely lacked. Furthermore,
they were incredibly well equipped. With Russian
gear. Exactly. They frequently recovered and
maintained the absolute best artillery and rifles
that the regular Russian army left behind. OK,
here's where it gets really interesting to me.
Just a completely surprising detail. Japan. was
actively involved in this mountain war in the
Middle East. It's wild. The sheer distance and
logistics involved in that are mind -boggling.
It is one of those stunning historical footnotes
that reminds you this was truly a world war.
Right. Japan was allied with the Entente powers,
and their logistical support proved vital for
a Russian empire that was constantly struggling
with massive supply shortages. Because Japan
supplied them with, what, 300 ,000 rifles? 300
,000 rifles, they sent military observers, they
sent artillery captains right to the front lines.
And the divers. Yes. They actually deployed 12
highly specialized Japanese naval divers all
the way to the Black Sea port of Sevastopol.
Just to help raise that sunken Russian dreadnought,
the Empress Maria. Moving hundreds of thousands
of weapons and specialized naval teams across
the Trans -Siberian Railway, it just highlights
how globally interconnected this seemingly isolated
mountain conflict really was. Absolutely. But,
you know, even with global supply lines, no amount
of rifles could protect these armies from the
environment itself. No. Which takes us to the
winter of 1914. It is hard to overstate the absolute
nightmare that unfolded at the Battle of Sarakamish.
This was December... 1914. Right. Ottoman war
minister Enver Pasha makes the fateful decision
to take personal command of the third army. His
most experienced generals strongly advised against
this. They basically told him to remain in a
defensive posture for the winter. Because launching
an offensive in those conditions was tactical
suicide. Total suicide. But Enver ignored them.
He forced this massive, overly complex flanking
maneuver aimed at retaking the city of Kars.
And they were fighting at 6 ,500 feet above sea
level. In December. In December. And the sources
note that many of the Ottoman soldiers were wearing
standard -issue summer uniforms. Because the
winter gear had been delayed or just completely
lost in transit, the logistics were doomed from
the exact moment the march began. The Ottoman
army was attempting to supply nearly 100 ,000
men using a single railway line, and a network
of snowbound, rudimentary mountain passes. A
complete recipe for disaster. And the Russian
commander, General Nikolai Yudinich, he recognized
the absolute peril his enemies were putting themselves
in. So what did he do? He simply held his ground.
He fortified his defensive positions and let
the brutal environment do the heavy lifting.
Let the winter fight for him. The cost was staggering.
Out of the 95 ,000 Ottoman soldiers who marched
into that offensive, less than 18 ,000 survived
to retreat. It's just devastating. The historical
records show that 30 ,000 men literally froze
to death in the snow. Entire units were found
frozen in their bivouacs. It wasn't even enemy
artillery that broke the third army. It was the
sheer inescapable cold. The entire Ottoman NIACS
Corps ultimately surrendered. It was an unmitigated
catastrophe. Enver Pasha had essentially overseen
the complete destruction of his own fighting
force. So he just leaves? He quietly gave up
command and scurried back to Constantinople,
but he faced a severe political crisis. He couldn't
just return to the capital and admit that his
own strategic arrogance had annihilated the Third
Army. So Enver needed a scapegoat, someone to
deflect the blame away from his horrible leadership.
Exactly. He publicly blamed the defeat on the
local Armenians living in the region. He claimed
they had actively rebelled and sided with the
Russian forces, acting as this sort of fifth
column that undermined his offensive. Wow. And
this act of political scapegoating to cover up
a military failure, it would serve as the catalyst
for horrific, world -altering consequences just
a few months later. Right. And as we move into
1915, we arrive at the most tragic aspect of
the caucus's campaign, the devastating toll on
civilians. Yeah. Now, before we dive into these
events, we need to pause here. We want to be
completely transparent with you. The historical
tests we are using detail the Armenian genocide
as well as massive atrocities committed against
Muslim and Greek populations. Right. Our strict
rule here is that our goal is not to take sides.
We are not endorsing any political viewpoints.
We are strictly and impartially reporting the
historical facts, the statistics, and the claims
exactly as they are documented in our source
material. Exactly. And the escalation of violence
against civilians really began around the city
of Van. In April 1915, the Ottoman Interior Minister
issued claims that Armenians in the region were
actively rebelling and coordinating with the
advancing Russian forces. The source records
describe an incredibly desperate siege at Van.
A group of about 1500 Armenian defenders barricaded
themselves inside the city. They were trying
to protect 30 ,000 residents and an additional
15 ,000 refugees who had fled in from the surrounding
countryside. And they held off regular Ottoman
forces for more than three weeks. Using mostly
antique weaponry, reportedly just 300 modern
rifles and a thousand pistols among the entire
group. It's incredible. They maintained that
defense until Russian General Udenich finally
arrived with his forces to relieve the city.
But following the events at Van, things took
a dark turn. On April 24th, 1915, Ottoman Interior
Minister Talat Pasha passed orders that initiated
the Armenian genocide. And the official Ottoman
justification, according to the historical archives.
The official justification they documented was
that the Armenian population could serve as a
potential fifth column in league with the Russians.
So the Armenian population was systematically
removed from their homes and forced on long death
marches. Directed toward concentration camps
located in the middle of the Syrian desert. Right.
And the methods documented in our sources from
this period are brutal. They include forced marches,
deliberate starvation, disease, rampant abuse
by guards, and indiscriminate massacres all along
the deportation routes. These actions accomplished
the Ottoman government's goal of removing Armenians
from their historic homelands, which resulted
in the total depopulation of Western Armenia.
And the human cost. The ethnic cleansings and
massacres carried out under these orders resulted
in the deaths of between 600 ,000 and 1 .5 million
Armenian civilians. To maintain our strict impartiality.
and accurately reflect the entirety of the historical
record we're looking at. We also have to look
at the counter atrocities documented throughout
the region. Yes. Historian Usur Umit Ugungur
notes that severe atrocities were carried out
against the local Muslim Turks and Kurds by the
advancing Russian army and its allied Armenian
volunteer units. Right. The historical consensus
from the texts is that a massive portion of the
local Muslim Turks and Kurds fled westward. They
were trying to stay ahead of the Russian invasion
in 1916. to escape the violence. And the records
indicate that the number of Muslim civilians
killed by the troops of the Russian coalition
reached roughly 600 ,000 people. 600 ,000. And
in addition to this, 300 ,000 Greek civilians
also lost their lives amid the wider ethnic conflicts
and deportations sweeping the region. This raises
an important question. It does. This raises an
important question for you, as the listener reflecting
on this period. How does total war completely
destroy the civilian fabric of an entire geographic
region? Wow. When you place these numbers side
by side, up to 1 .5 million Armenians, 600 ,000
Muslims, 300 ,000 Greeks, it forces us to confront
the sheer unimaginable scale of tragedy that
impacted all populations. It birthed a level
of generational trauma that far outlasted the
empires that initiated the war. Absolutely. The
devastation was total. And the demographics of
the region were permanently altered. Yes, they
were. Now, as we move forward in the timeline
to 1916, the momentum on the battlefield took
another dramatic turn. Russian General Yudanish
pulled off what looks like an absolute master
class in military deception. He orchestrated
a brilliant offensive basically. by weaponizing
the environment. In early 1916, Yudenich secretly
mobilized his forces out of their winter quarters.
Which was unthinkable. Unthinkable. The Ottoman
command safely assumed that no army would dare
attack in the bitter mountain cold, especially
after the horrors everyone had just witnessed
at Sarikamish. So Yudenich used that exact assumption
against them. He force -marched his troops through
the winter terrain directly toward the major
Ottoman fortress at Erzurum. He achieved total
tactical surprise. And just completely crushed
the Ottoman defensive lines. The Russian military
was suddenly dominant across the entire theater.
Overnight. Following Erzurum, they captured the
ancient Black Sea port city of Trabzon. They
pushed deep into Anatolia, seizing Mush and Bitlis.
By the end of 1916, the Ottoman Second and Third
Armies were entirely on the ropes. Russians had
decisively won the battlefield. They were preparing
to push even further south. But then in 1917,
the absolute unimaginable happens. The Russian
Revolution erupted. Completely upends the board.
The entire dynamic of the global war flipped
overnight. The Russian military didn't suffer
a tactical defeat to the Ottomans on the battlefield?
No. The Russian army simply disintegrated from
within? That's wild to think about. The political
and social chaos happening back in Petrograd
rapidly infected the front lines in the Caucasus.
Because the troops were already suffering terribly
from typhus and scurvy. Right. And with the Tsar
deposed, they frankly no longer saw a reason
to fight an imperial war. The psychological shock
of this moment is fascinating to read about,
particularly the impact of something called Order
Number One. Oh, yeah. This was a directed issue
by the Petrograd Soviet, the Council of Workers
and Soldiers that had essentially taken control
of the Russian capital. Order Number One literally
democratized the Russian military. It's such
a bizarre concept for an army. It allowed individual
military units to elect their own representatives
and actually vote on whether to follow the orders
of their officers. Think about that. You have
a heavily armed military force occupying hostile
foreign territory and suddenly their rank -and
-file soldiers are holding committee meetings
to vote on whether they should hold the line?
or just board trains back to Russia. And the
vote was overwhelmingly to go home? Naturally.
The command structure just evaporated. The Russian
army slowly packed up its personal gear and abandoned
the front. They get good behind. They left the
newly formed Armenian National Forces completely
alone to hold a 600 kilometer front against the
regrouping Ottomans. And the sheer volume of
military hardware they abandoned is staggering.
In Baku alone, the retreating Russian forces
simply walked away from 160 artillery cannons,
180 heavy machine guns, and an estimated 160
million cartridges of ammunition. 160 million?
The newly independent local forces suddenly found
themselves heavily armed but vastly outnumbered.
This massive power vacuum sets the stage perfectly
for the absolute free -for -all that consumed
the region in 1918. It was chaos. With the Russian
regular army entirely removed from the board,
the Ottoman Empire rushed its forces back in
to reclaim all the territory they had lost over
the previous three years. But the absence of
Russian authority was so profound that entirely
new, unexpected players scrambled into the Caucasus
to secure their own interests. Right. And this
is where the alliances break down into complete
absurdity. Total absurdity. You have German troops
arriving in the Caucasus in June 1918. But wait,
the German Empire was allied with the Ottoman
Empire. They were fighting on the exact same
side of the war. They were allies in Europe.
But in the caucuses, the ultimate prize was the
immense oil wealth at Baku. It always comes back
to the oil. Always. The German general staff
actually deployed troops to Georgia to compete
directly against their own Ottoman allies for
regional influence and petroleum resources. They're
fighting their own friends. The Germans went
so far as to threaten to withdraw all military
and financial support for the Ottoman Empire
if the Turks didn't halt their advance into Georgian
territory. That is a stark demonstration. that
the need for oil trumped even the most critical
military alliances. The sheer variety of factions
fighting in 1918 makes it look like a complete
geopolitical free -for -all. Enver Pasha created
a brand new specialized force called the Army
of Islam. which was specifically designed to
march on Baku and seize the oil fields. And meanwhile,
the British are scrambling. They deployed an
allied force of Australian, British, Canadian,
and New Zealand troops. And they drove all the
way from Baghdad through the mountains in Ford
vans and armored cars. Which is an insane road
trip. It really is. They were literally called
Dunster Force, named after their eccentric commander,
General Lionel Dunsterville. Dunsterforce was
a desperate attempt by the British Empire to
secure the Baku oilfield before the Ottomans
or the Germans could get there. Right. And amidst
the chaos of armored cars, German opportunists
and Ottoman advances, you have the desperate
birth of brand new nations. The short -lived
Trans -Caucasian Federation collapsed and out
of its ashes came the sudden proclamations of
the First Republic of Armenia, the Democratic
Republic of Georgia and the Azerbaijan Democratic
Republic. These newborn nations were fighting
for their very existence while centuries -old
empires were just collapsing all around them.
And this is exactly why this chaotic scramble
in 1918 matters to you today. The borders that
were drawn in panic during this period and the
fierce ethnic conflicts over regions like mountainous
Karabakh and the Kishovan, these are the exact
same geopolitical fault lines that continue to
flare up on the news right now. It's all connected.
The total casualties for this specific campaign
were staggering, over 300 ,000 dead for the Ottomans
and nearly 120 ,000 for the Russians. But the
regional conflicts birthed in the vacuum of 1918
far outlasted both the Romanov and Ottoman empires.
So we started this deep dive looking at a battle
over Caspian Sea oil and imperial borders. We
journeyed through freezing mountain passes where
tens of thousands perished in the snow. We witnessed
the total tragic devastation of civilian populations
across the board. Saw a centuries old Russian
dynasty collapse from the inside out. And watched
a bizarre scramble of armored cars and newborn
republics fight for a new world order. Yeah.
So what does this all mean? Well, I want to leave
you with one final, profound historical counterfactual
to mull over. OK. Consider the timeline of events.
By late 1916, General Yunesh and the Russian
army had completely decimated the Ottoman forces
on this front. They had taken Erzurum, secured
Trabzon, and were actively preparing to push
their offensive deep into Mesopotamia. They were
winning. They were dominating. If the Russian
Revolution had held off for just one more year,
just 12 months, the Tsarist empire would have
won the Caucasus campaign decisively. They almost
certainly would have achieved their centuries
-old goal of capturing Constantinople. That's
crazy to think about. Imagine how completely
different the map of the modern Middle East,
the Soviet Union, and Europe would look today
if the Tsar had survived just 12 more months.
It completely rewrites the entire 20th century.
That is a staggering what -if to think about.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. We
hope you walk away with a much richer understanding
of this chaotic, world -altering theater of war
and the invisible lines of history that still
shape our modern world. Keep questioning the
history behind the headlines, and we will catch
you next time.