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Abstract

This paper examines Türkiye's diplomatic and cultural engagement with Xinjiang's Turkic Muslim communities between 1933 and 1949, drawing on recently declassified documents from the Ankara-based Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Diplomatic Archives of Turkey. Challenging prevailing assumptions in the literature that characterize Türkiye's Xinjiang policy as primarily driven by pan-Turkist or pan-Islamist ideological commitments, this study argues that geostrategic calculations consistently took precedence over ideological solidarity throughout the period under review.

The paper traces Türkiye's evolving diplomatic posture across three distinct historical junctures. The first concerns Türkiye's response to the Turkic Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (1933–1935), during which Ankara carefully distanced itself from the republic's pan-Islamist overtones while quietly monitoring developments through its diplomatic missions in China, Japan, and Afghanistan. The second juncture focuses on the role of individual diplomatic actors — most notably Mesud Sabri Baykozi and the figures collectively known as the "Three Effendis" — whose relationships with Turkish diplomatic representatives reveal the instrumentalization of cultural and linguistic affinity for strategic ends rather than ideological kinship. The third juncture examines the Second East Turkestan Republic (1944–1949), a Soviet-backed government that placed Türkiye in an acute geopolitical dilemma: how to navigate between Soviet expansionism, Chinese territorial sovereignty, and emerging American strategic interests in the region.

A central contribution of this paper is its analysis of Türkiye's cultural diplomacy as a foreign policy instrument. Far from reflecting a coherent pan-Turkist vision, Ankara's cultural outreach toward Xinjiang's Turkic communities functioned as a flexible tool calibrated to the shifting demands of Cold War alignment. As Türkiye transitioned from cautious neutrality during World War II to full integration into the Western bloc through NATO membership, its approach to Xinjiang was reframed accordingly — with the Uyghur diaspora increasingly positioned as an asset in the broader contest against Soviet influence.

By situating Türkiye's Xinjiang policy within the longue durée of its post-Ottoman foreign policy formation, this paper contributes to ongoing debates at the intersection of diplomatic history, minority politics, and Cold War geopolitics in Central Eurasia. It also offers a methodological argument for the indispensability of underutilized Turkish-language archival sources in the study of the region's modern history.

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This paper examines how Soviet history textbooks narrated Central Asia and the Caucasus across different stages of Soviet rule, focusing on the cases of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. While official Soviet ideology emphasized internationalism and the transformation of formerly “backward” societies, textbook narratives produced more complex, layered, and historically shifting representations of local populations.

The study analyzes Soviet history textbooks from the 1920s and 1930s as well as from the late Soviet period, with particular attention to the positioning of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan within broader Soviet historiography. The source base includes a selection of all-Union Soviet history textbooks from the 1920s to the late Soviet period, as well as republic-level textbooks published in the Azerbaijan SSR and the Kazakh SSR during the 1970s and 1980s. Using a discourse-oriented approach, the paper explores how these materials constructed the “other,” narrated the incorporation of these regions into the Russian Empire, and framed their historical development.

The analysis traces how representations of local societies evolved in relation to changing ideological priorities. In early Soviet narratives, the discourse was explicitly anti-colonial, portraying the Russian Empire as an oppressive and exploitative force. From the mid-1930s onward, however, this framing shifted: Russia increasingly appeared as a historically necessary agent of progress and, over time, as a benevolent and leading force in the development of “backward” peoples.

Particular attention is given to the positioning of local actors within Soviet historical narratives and to the extent to which their voices were incorporated into these accounts. The paper examines how these voices were mediated through broader ideological frameworks and how their narrative function changed across different periods. This question is approached in light of Spivak’s formulation—Can the subaltern speak?—while remaining attentive to the specific historical context of Soviet rule.

The findings suggest that the Soviet case cannot be adequately understood as either fully colonial or consistently anti-colonial. Instead, the analysis reveals a critical shift from the mid-1930s onward, as broader processes of political centralization increasingly positioned Russia at the core of Soviet historical narratives. This transformation involved both a gradual re-centering of Russia in historical narratives and a corresponding hierarchization around Russia, reshaping the representation of peripheral societies through the late Soviet period. In this sense, the paper approaches Soviet rule through the lens of coloniality, asking whether hierarchical modes of representation persisted beyond the formal end of the Russian Empire.

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What did the Second World War mean for the Kazakh people? Was it part of the Soviet Great Patriotic War, the broader anti-fascist struggle, the Chinese War of Resistance against Japan, or a distinct struggle for survival? This paper rethinks these questions by examining the largely overlooked history of Kazakhs on the Chinese Front between 1937 and 1945. It focuses on how this transnational ethnic group navigated multiple political and military contexts, making contingent choices within a “non-native” wartime environment.Existing research has primarily centered on Kazakh participation in the Soviet war effort and the mobilization of Central Asian populations, while more recent studies have begun to recover Kazakh wartime experiences. However, Kazakh involvement in the Chinese Front remains insufficiently explored. In response, it conceptualizes Kazakhs on the Chinese Front as a unified analytical subject and situates their wartime trajectories within overlapping historical spheres of China, the Soviet Union, and Mongolia. Drawing on transnational ethnohistory, borderland studies, and identity-based approaches, the study highlights how wartime conditions reshaped ethnic identity, political alignment, and forms of participation.Methodologically, the research integrates archival materials, oral histories, semi-structured interviews, and transnational textual sources to reconstruct these fragmented experiences. By examining how Kazakhs engaged with competing ideological and political forces, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of World War II beyond state-centered narratives and offers a new perspective on transnational ethnic agency in times of global conflict.

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From 1916 to 1922, Russia was shaken by the First World War and the Russian Civil War. These upheavals are often presented as having severely disrupted, if not entirely halted, the trade networks through which Russia had come to dominate commerce in Xinjiang. This paper, however, argues that such a narrative obscures the long-established merchant networks that continued to sustain cross-border trade despite war, embargoes, and the formal closure of official routes. Rather than collapsing outright, commerce adapted to new political conditions through the activities of merchants, carriers, brokers, and firms whose ties long predated the crisis. Many of these actors were Central Asian Musulmans whose identities, kinship ties, and commercial relationships transcended the boundaries of the modern nation-state. Drawing on British consular records and Chinese archival sources, this paper shows that exchange continued from Ili in the north to Kashgar in the south through informal and semi-clandestine channels. Merchants moved goods across the frontier despite official prohibitions, while Russian commercial institutions, such as the Russo-Asiatic Bank, various private companies, and individual merchants in Xinjiang, adapted flexibly to the gradual unraveling of the treaty-power regime that had once guaranteed extensive privileges to Russian subjects. By examining the activities of Russian merchant communities during this transitional moment, the paper also complicates the understanding that the commercial relationship between Russia and Xinjiang was exploitative. It reveals how state-backed economic imperialism was mediated on the ground through local negotiation, personal relationships, and the pragmatic repositioning of Musulman merchants amid shifting political authority.