People of the Revolution and the USSR

Nationalism 1865–1927 ○ Angina

Armenian fedayi commander who rejected the Republic of Armenia and held Zangezur with his own division

Born in Shabin-Karahisar in the Ottoman Empire in 1865, he led fedayi units of the Dashnaktsutyun and in the First World War commanded the first Armenian volunteer battalion of the Russian army. Refusing to recognize the Republic of Armenia or the Treaty of Batum, he took control of Zangezur with his Special Striking Division in 1918. The historian Donald Bloxham writes that he sought to make it homogeneously Armenian by destroying Muslim villages, while Antranig Chalabian argues that he saved Zangezur’s Armenians from annihilation. In December 1918 he halted his advance into Karabakh at British request, and in 1919 he disbanded his unit. He died in Fresno, California, in 1927.

Turkey state institutions Nationalism 1881–1922 ✕ Killed fighting the Red Army

War minister among the Three Pashas who took the Ottomans into the war and was a main perpetrator of the Armenian genocide

Born in Constantinople, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress and became a hero of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. After the 1913 coup he became war minister and ruled the empire with Talat and Djemal as the Three Pashas. He took the Ottomans into the First World War in alliance with Germany, and after losing most of his army at Sarıkamış in December 1914 blamed the defeat on the Armenians. He was a main perpetrator of the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides. After the defeat he fled and was sentenced to death in absentia. He worked with the Bolsheviks, then in 1921 in Central Asia went over to the Basmachi rebels, and was killed fighting the Red Army in 1922.

Turkey state institutions Nationalism 1881–1938 ○ Natural death

Gallipoli commander who led the national movement and founded the Republic of Turkey as its first president

Born in Salonica, he joined the Young Turk movement and made his name defending Gallipoli in the First World War. After the defeat he landed at Samsun in May 1919 to organise the national movement against occupation, and in 1920 convened the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. With gold and arms from the Bolshevik government he defeated the Greek army, and the Treaty of Lausanne recognised the victory. In these years the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia’s Armenians and Greeks was completed through massacres, deportations and population exchange. He abolished the sultanate in 1922 and in 1923 became the first president of the republic, pursuing secularising reforms and Turkification under one-party rule. He died in 1938.

Turkey state institutions Nationalism 1882–1948 ○ Heart attack

Eastern Front commander of the Turkish War of Independence who invaded Armenia in 1920 and imposed the Treaty of Alexandropol

Born in Istanbul in 1882, he graduated at the top of his class from the Ottoman Military College and fought at Gallipoli, at Kut and on the Caucasus front in the First World War. Joining Mustafa Kemal’s national movement, he commanded the Eastern Front in the War of Independence. He invaded Armenia in September 1920 and took Kars and Alexandropol; during the campaign his army displaced and massacred tens of thousands of Armenian civilians. He signed the Treaty of Alexandropol in December and the Treaty of Kars in 1921. In 1924 he founded the Progressive Republican Party, the first opposition party, which was closed; elected speaker of the Grand National Assembly in 1946, he died in office in 1948.

Turkey state institutions Nationalism 1884–1973 ○ Natural death

Officer who negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne and succeeded Atatürk as Turkey’s second president

Born in Smyrna, an Ottoman officer, he won the First and Second Battles of İnönü in the War of Independence as chief of the General Staff and commander of the Western Front. As Turkey’s chief negotiator at Lausanne in 1922–1923 he faced down Curzon and replaced the Treaty of Sèvres with the Treaty of Lausanne. As prime minister for most of Atatürk’s presidency he carried out the secularising reforms; after the Sheikh Said revolt he pushed the Turkification of the Kurds, and he is considered one of those responsible for the Dersim massacre. Elected second president in 1938, he took the title “National Chief” and kept Turkey in armed neutrality in the Second World War. After defeat in the 1950 election he handed over power peacefully. He died in 1973.

Nationalism 1889–1960 → Died in exile

Crimean Tatar politician who ran the military and foreign affairs of the Crimean People’s Republic and led the national movement in exile

Born in 1889 into a family of wealthy peasants in Kizil-Tash in the Yalta district, he met Noman Çelebicihan at the law faculty of Istanbul University. After publishing The Oppressed Crimean Tatar Nation in the 20th Century in 1911 he escaped arrest by studying in Paris, and on his return in 1914 he went through cadet school and became an ensign. In 1917 he briefly edited Millet and became director of military and foreign affairs in the Directory set up by the Qurultay. Driven out by the Bolsheviks in January 1918, he fled to Kyiv; under the German occupation he became foreign minister of Sulkiewicz’s Crimean Regional Government and sought recognition of its independence in Berlin. After the German withdrawal he went to Istanbul, founded the newspaper Emel and supported Prometheism. He took the surname Kırımer in 1934 and died in Istanbul in 1960.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Nationalism 1890–1970 → Died in exile

Leader of the Bashkir national movement who proclaimed Bashkir autonomy, commanded the Bashkir Army and took it over to the Soviet side

Born in 1890 in Kuzyanovo, Ufa province, he taught Turkic history at the Qasimiya madrasa in Kazan. In 1917 he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries and was elected to the Constituent Assembly; with Sharif Manatov he organised the Bashkir Central Shuro, proclaimed Bashkir autonomy and became commander of the Bashkir Army. Arrested by the Bolsheviks in February 1918 and freed in April, he fought alongside Dutov and Kolchak, but in February 1919 took his troops over to the Soviet side. He became chairman of the Bashrevkom in 1920, resigned in June in protest at the curtailing of autonomy and led the Basmachi movement in Turkestan. He emigrated in 1923, became a Turkish citizen in 1925, a professor at Istanbul University and a doctor of the University of Vienna, and died in Istanbul in 1970.

Lithuania state institutions Nationalism 1895–1979 ○ Died in exile

Lithuanian officer and envoy in Berlin who founded the Lithuanian Activist Front behind the June Uprising of 1941

Mobilised into the Imperial Russian Army in the First World War, he was the first to enlist in the Lithuanian armed forces after independence in 1918, and on 1 January 1919 his men raised the Lithuanian flag over Gediminas’ Tower in Vilnius. He became Chief of the General Staff in 1925 but had to resign after opposing the 1926 coup. He was envoy to Germany in 1927–1930 and 1938–1941. After the Soviet occupation of 1940 he founded in Berlin the Lithuanian Activist Front, which sought to restore independence by working with the Nazis; named prime minister of the provisional government in 1941, he was held under house arrest by the Germans. In 1944 he was arrested for a memorandum demanding a Lithuanian government. After the war he settled in the United States, working at the Library of Congress. His antisemitic writings have made dedications in his honour controversial.

Beiyang government and warlords Nationalism 1901–2001 ↓ Arrested 1936 · natural causes

The “Young Marshal” who detained Chiang Kai-shek at Xi’an and opened the way to the second united front

In December 1936 he detained Chiang Kai-shek at Xi'an, forcing the Second United Front against Japan, and paid for it with more than fifty years under house arrest.

Son of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, he inherited the Northeast when the Japanese killed his father in 1928 and pledged allegiance to Nanjing that year. Driven from Manchuria in 1931, he was sent against the Communists, but in December 1936 he and Yang Hucheng seized Chiang Kai-shek at Xi’an to demand an end to civil war and resistance to Japan. Zhou Enlai brokered the release; Zhang flew back with Chiang and spent more than fifty years under house arrest. Freed in the 1990s, he died in Hawaii at 100.

Nationalism 1909–1954 ✕ Executed

Officer who founded the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters in 1949 and led the partisan resistance as its chairman

Born in Palanga, he graduated from the War School of Kaunas in 1929 as an artillery officer and studied at the School of Applied Artillery in Fontainebleau, France, in 1936–1938. In the deportations of June 1941 his sister’s whole family was sent to Siberia; under the German occupation he retired rather than serve the Nazis. In 1944 he joined the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force, and when the Red Army returned he joined the Lithuanian Liberty Army and the partisans, rising to the leadership. In February 1949 he founded the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters and became its chairman, working to unify the partisan units and give their struggle a legal framework. Paralysed by a cerebral haemorrhage in December 1951, he was arrested on 30 May 1953, interrogated in Moscow by Beria and executed in Butyrka prison in 1954. In 2009 he was officially named the fourth President of Lithuania.

Nationalism 1918–1957 ✕ Executed

Partisan commander “Vanagas” who led the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters from 1952, the last commander to be captured

Born to a Lithuanian immigrant family in New Britain, Connecticut, he came to Lithuania at the age of three. He graduated from the War School of Kaunas in 1940 and worked as a teacher, and after the NKVD pressured him to spy on his students he joined the partisans in early 1945 under the nom de guerre Vanagas (“Hawk”). He commanded the Dainava military district and the Southern Lithuania Region, published underground newspapers, and in 1949 became first deputy chairman of the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters. Succeeding Jonas Žemaitis as its leader in 1952, he ordered an end to armed struggle in favour of passive resistance. Betrayed by a former classmate, he was arrested in October 1956, tortured and executed in November 1957. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has alleged that a unit he commanded in the June 1941 uprising took part in killing Jews; the Lithuanian government denies this.

Nationalism 1921–1951 ✕ Killed by the MGB

Lithuanian partisan leader who crossed the Iron Curtain in 1947 to seek Western support and was killed by the MGB after returning

Born to a farming family in the village of Juodbūdis near Kaunas, he joined the Catholic youth organisation Ateitis and the far-right, antisemitic and anti-Soviet Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) at secondary school, and was imprisoned by the NKVD during the Soviet occupation of 1940–1941. After the Red Army returned in 1944 he worked in the Kaunas underground, joined the armed resistance in 1946 and commanded the Birutė brigade of the Tauras military district. At the end of 1947 he crossed the Iron Curtain with partisan documentation for the West, was trained by French intelligence and the CIA, and wrote Fighters for Freedom. Parachuted back by the CIA in 1949–1950, he was killed by the MGB near Pabartupis in the autumn of 1951. According to several witnesses he took part in the Lietūkis garage massacre in Kaunas in 1941; the Lithuanian government denies this.