Leaving the Ottoman Empire: Muslim Return Migration to Russia and Refugee Crises on the Russo-Ottoman Border, 1865–80

Between 1860 and 1914, about one million Muslims from the Russian Empire’s North Caucasus region immigrated in the Ottoman Empire. They settled throughout the Ottoman domains, from the northern Balkans, across Anatolia and Kurdistan, to southern Syria. Historical literature on muhajirs (refugees or immigrants) traditionally focuses on the Ottoman management of refugee resettlement or refugees’ integration into Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies. In contrast, this paper examines a relatively unknown phenomenon of Muslim return migration to Russia. Based on archival research in Turkey, Russia, and Georgia, I found that, in the final half-century of Ottoman rule, about 40,000 refugees managed to return to the Caucasus. Many Muslim refugees cited insufficient land allotment, infertile soil, and conflicts with neighbors in their Ottoman settlements as their reasons for an attempted return to the Russian Empire.

This paper focuses on two refugee crises, or, to be precise, “returnee refugee” crises, that occurred on the Russo-Ottoman border. The first crisis involved several thousand Chechen Muslims, who had emigrated in 1865 and attempted to return to Russia later the same year, stranded on the Arpachay River separating the Ottoman province of Erzurum from the Russian province of Aleksandropol. The second crisis involved several thousand Abkhaz Muslims, who had fled Russia during the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War and chose to return home in 1880, but spent months in detention in Batum. In both cases, Russian authorities proved unwilling to allow reimmigration, citing Russia’s ban on return migration for Muslims. Likewise, the Ottoman government, which had invested in the agricultural settlement of refugees, tried to prevent its new immigrants from returning to Russia. The refugee crises, I argue, led to the reevaluation and reform of Russia’s return migration ban. Simultaneously, they pushed both the Russian and Ottoman empires to ramp up their border security and restrict frontier migration.