The Russian Revolution and Istanbul

The Russian Revolution, which took place in 1917, has an interesting connection to Istanbul.

In late 1916, Russian statesmen and commanders made a sudden decision to launch a naval landing on Istanbul. Revolutionaries would prevent this decision from being realized.

By the end of 1916, it was almost certain that a revolution would occur in Russia. Up until this date, Russia had failed to achieve any of its strategic goals, and there was an uncontrollable state of public outrage. Although the Russians were achieving success on the Ottoman and Austrian fronts, they were completely ineffective against the Germans. Battles fought against the Germans always resulted in heavy defeats. This situation made the victories on other fronts strategically meaningless. The Galicia disaster, which took place in the autumn of 1916 and ended with 1,000,000 casualties, was the final straw. The public was accusing the Tsar, whose wife was German, and the government of treason. Clearly seeing the gravity of the situation, Russian civilian and military decision-makers thought that they could prevent the impending revolutionary movement not through token successes, but only by capturing a target of historical importance in Russian geopolitics, such as Istanbul.

Although Istanbul had been Russia's goal for 150 years and one of the reasons for its entry into the First World War, a landing operation against Istanbul had not even been on the table until December 1916. Indeed, the chance of success was indisputably low. By the end of 1916, however, the necessity for Russian decision-makers to act within the framework of logic had largely disappeared. Furthermore, the situation in which the Ottoman Empire found itself made the operation feasible. As a result of three years of war, the Ottoman army was extremely exhausted and scattered across fronts far from Istanbul. It was certain that it would be even more exhausted in 1917. The mastermind of the operation, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, the Turkish-origin commander of the Black Sea Fleet, admitted that the operation was very risky but believed there was a chance of success. Before 1917, such a possibility did not exist.

The Tsar approved the plan on December 24, ordered preparations to begin, and placed Admiral Kolchak in charge of the operation. The planned operation was to be a landing operation like Gallipoli.

When preparations began, the countdown to the revolution had also started, and the operation needed to be implemented urgently. However, preparing such a large-scale operation was a time-consuming process, and the feared revolution broke out on March 8, 1917, while preparations were still underway. The revolution soon engulfed Petrograd, and on March 15, Tsar Nicholas II bowed to pressure and abdicated the throne.

With the end of the Tsardom in Russia, what the planners of the Istanbul operation feared had come to pass. However, this development would not deter the Tsarist Russian commanders; on the contrary, it would convince them that the only way to restore the Tsardom was to capture Istanbul.

However, they now faced a serious obstacle. The Bolsheviks, who carried out the March Revolution, hated the Tsarist system and, in line with this reality, found any ideology identified with Tsarist history unacceptable. This included the 150-year-old dream of capturing Istanbul. The Bolsheviks, who were growing stronger by the day and beginning to have a say in the administration, intended to liquidate everything belonging to the Tsardom.

Kolchak and the Tsarists around him, failing to grasp the gravity of the situation, would continue their preparations without slowing down. These individuals had also convinced the Provisional Government, which was established after the Tsar left the administration, not to abandon the war goals of the Tsarist era. The stubbornness of the Tsarists to capture Istanbul would form the basis of the Bolshevik opposition in the spring of 1917.

As a result of Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov declaring that they had not abandoned their goals of taking the straits and Istanbul, the Bolsheviks revolted once again. As the events spiraled out of control, Milyukov and Minister of War Aleksandr Guchkov resigned in May.

This development did not turn Kolchak from his path, and he continued with the landing preparations. Fortunately for Kolchak, the revolutionaries in the Black Sea were having disagreements with the revolutionaries in Petrograd and were distant from Lenin. However, the arrival of Bolshevism in the Black Sea was inevitable. A rebellion that broke out in Odessa in June would spread to the entire Black Sea. As a result of the rebellion, the Sailors' Soviet, based in Sevastopol, declared in June that it had dismissed Admiral Kolchak. This development meant that the dreams of capturing Istanbul had effectively come to an end.

The final nail in the coffin of the 150-year-old dream of taking Istanbul would be driven on July 26, when a group of revolutionary sailors secretly entered the Bosphorus in a motorboat. In a glass bottle they threw into the water near the shore, they left a message wishing for the war between the two countries to end as soon as possible and for the two societies to live as good neighbors.

The anti-imperialist and anti-war character of the Russian Revolution had prevented a second Gallipoli from happening in Istanbul.