During and in the immediate aftermath of World War I, commentators contended that it was primarily the ‘Tsargrad dream’ that sustained Russia’s war effort. However, the Bolsheviks’ coming to power following their coup in November 1917 appeared to have put an end to Russia’s dreams about Tsargrad. This talk intends to demonstrate that, Russian imperial collapse notwithstanding, Constantinople’s allure was still strong enough in Bolshevik Moscow to generate outstanding literary works, artistic production, and, last but not least, geopolitical fantasizing. Ultimately, the ‘Russian Tsargrad’ dream survived for several more years following the First World War because the Bolsheviks (as well as their ‘White’ political opponents) fully appreciated the fact that between 1918 and 1922, Constantinople’s geopolitical fate was hanging in the air. Placed under the authority of the Allied armed forces, Istanbul was a bone of contention in the international arena and a target of multiple political conspiracies. It is this atmosphere of nervous uncertainty that is wonderfully reflected in a number of Russian literary works, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, but also in political memoranda and intelligence reports. Taken in their entirety, these sources demonstrate that more often than not, Russian political imagination during Istanbul’s short ‘Russian moment’ was grounded in a complex reality consisting of a series of intermingling plots, which reflected a real multi-sided geopolitical rivalry over Constantinople.
Igor Torbakov is a senior fellow at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. A trained historian, he specializes in Eastern European, Russian, and Eurasian intellectual and cultural history. He held fellowships at the Kennan Institute, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the German Council on Foreign Relations, Södertörn University, the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He holds an MA in History from Moscow State University and a PhD from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He is the author, most recently, of After Empire (Ibidem Press, 2018).
Clemena Antonova, IWM Research Director of The World in Pieces Program, will moderate the discussion.
