A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Volume I: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongo

A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Volume I: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire by David Christian

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I would have probably gotten more out of this book had it been required reading as part of a college course on the subject. As is, it was incredibly dense and tried to cover too large a subject. It's good, but just too much at once.



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The Armenian Genocide happened, this book brings the proof.

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility by Taner Akçam

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In 2016, on our last day in Istanbul, my wife and I visited the Military Museum. I loved it and took about a hundred pictures, but there was one galley we didn't enter. That was the one that was dedicated to denying the Armenian Genocide.

In this astounding and terrifying book, Taner Akçam traces the campaign against the Armenians and other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire from the late 19th century dreams of expanding the Sultan's rule to ethnically Turkish states in Central Asia, through the rise of the nationalist movement, WWI, and finally to the aborted attempts to try those responsible for the atrocity and the eventual cover-up and denials.

Akçam details, using copious first-hand sources and documentation, every step of the process and shows that the CUP knew from the start that their goal was genocide. Naming names, he shows how officials marked people for removal, often pre-selecting Muslim families to take over properties or seizing it for themselves. How Areminans from one province were forced across a border into another province, where they were killed, allowing the officials in the first province to say they just moved the victims. It's disgusting.

Much of the information comes from the Extraordinary Court Martials held after the Turkish defeat in WWI. Reading how the disgraced and disbanded CUP reformed as the Nationalist Party, and then simply took in men who had been fingered as active participants in the genocide made my blood boil.

One thing I came away with was a greatly diminished view of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey's greatest national hero and first president of the Republic. Lionized as a great leader and modernizer, he turned a blind eye to the genocide and actively worked to bury it.

This is a book anyone interested in history should read. And the Turkish government needs to admit that under their orders, even if it was still the Ottoman Empire, about one million Armenians and Greeks were systematically stripped of their rights and property, driven out of their homes, and murdered.





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