A very interesting post was published on the occasion of the end of the presidential election in Turkey by the "Interpreter" telegram channel (https://t.me/tolk_tolk/16064 ):

" Erdoğan won legally in Turkey. And I am just now reading about the situation of Turkish prisoners of war in Russia during the First World War (Izvestia of Tula State University. Humanities", 2011).

There were two kinds of people immediately identified among the Turkish prisoners. The Russians put the Turkish Greeks and Bulgarians in the highest, i.e. the best content, and the Turks and Armenians themselves in the lowest. The Armenians were considered to be no different from the Turks in their way of life and attitude towards Russia.

On the whole, all enemy prisoners of war were divided into three classes. The highest were Germans and Hungarians, the middle was Slavs (including Turkish Greeks) and the lowest were Turks. This difference was reflected in the severity of the work, food, places of confinement, etc.

The Turks, as an inferior class of POWs, were taken to Siberia and the Far East. And here are the results of this transportation: "According to the American historian of Turkish origin Yucel Yanykdag, during the winter of 1915 only 200 of 800 Turkish prisoners of war bound for the camps of the Priamursky Military District reached their destination. The rest died of cold and hardship en route.

Although the figure given for the death rate (75%) looks monstrous, we must admit that it is quite comparable to the true figure, because according to our estimates, up to 50% of the Turkish prisoners of war died in Russia during the winter of 1914-1915".

It was only in the second half of 1915 that the attitude towards the Turks began to change - when the government realised that there was a shortage of workers in the economy. Instead of rye bread, which the Turks could not stomach, they were given wheat bread. Their clothes were renewed, and doctors were made available. Even then, however, the Turks were treated worse than all the POWs as labourers - they were sent to the hardest jobs:

"The phrase 'preferably Turks' appears in employers' applications for prisoners far more often than 'Germans' or 'Hungarians'. They were eager to work in underground mines and open-cast mines, in cement factories, sleeper factories, peat mines and irrigation works.

However, the Turks were especially valued by builders of railways. One of the clearest proofs of it is the following telegram from the Commander-in-Chief of Arkhangelsk and White Sea water region to the Naval General Headquarters from April 6th 1917: "To save Murmansk railway it is necessary to send to Kem and Kandalaksha 11.000 prisoners of war, preferably Turks who are familiar with earth and stone works". It is clear that Turks were killed more intensively than other prisoners of war during the works. The exchange of Turks for Russian prisoners of war also started later than anything else.

" Whereas the exchange of doctors, orderlies and invalids between Russia, on the one hand, and Germany and Austria-Hungary, above all, had already begun in 1915, the negotiations with Turkey lasted almost to the end of the war. For example, the first 24 Turkish soldiers, from the 108th general hospital in Petrograd, designed for the repatriation of disabled war prisoners, did not leave Turkey for their homeland until September 26, 1917. By that time, 19.296 members of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies were repatriated here. End of post.

These facts completely refute the myths imposed for decades about "exceptionally kind and generous" Russia and the Turks, who were engaged exclusively in "atrocities" and "genocide". The Turks themselves allegedly suffered neither atrocities nor genocide.

Here we see the tragedy of thousands of Turkish prisoners of war in Russian captivity, subjected to inhuman treatment and gruelling hard labour, most of whom perished because of it. One of the places where Turkish prisoners of war were held by Tsarist Russia is well known, for example, to the inhabitants of Baku. It was located not far from the city, in the Caspian Sea on Nargin Island (now Boyuk Zira) during the First World War, where a camp for Turkish prisoners of war (actually a concentration camp) was set up. The conditions and mass deaths of POWs, including those from typhus and other diseases, were appalling there as well.

It is also interesting to analyse the national composition of the Ottoman POWs. The Nargin concentration camp housed 3,761 Turkish prisoners of war by 23 July 1915, of whom 118 were officers. The majority of the prisoners of war were Turkish army prisoners of war, who were Turks and Kurds by ethnicity. The other nationalities included: Armenians (one Ober officer, two doctors, and 169 enlisted men), Albanians (one Ober officer), Greeks (two doctors and 47 enlisted men), Arabs (one Ober officer and 150 enlisted men), Adjarians (one enlisted man) and Circassians (24 enlisted men).  The Armenians were the third largest ethnic group of Turkish POWs. They outnumbered and outnumbered (by about 5%) the Arabs, for example, who were much more numerous in the Ottoman Empire. It is likely that in other camps of the Turkish POWs the proportion of Armenians was not less. As well as prisoners of war, many Turkish Armenians were killed on the battlefields, or died from their wounds. Many returned alive and some of them settled in Istanbul, where their descendants still live today.

In other words, the mass of Armenians fought honestly for their country, the Ottoman Empire, and when they were in the ranks of the Turkish army no one thought of subjecting them to "genocide". Tragically, the fate of those of them who ended up in Russian captivity, to the "liberators".  The way the captive Turkish Armenians were treated by the Russian authorities is very well described in the above post of the "Interpreter" - as an "inferior class", along with the Turks. The mortality rate of Armenian Turkish servicemen in Russian captivity was therefore probably no lower than that of the Turks in percentage terms.

The question is: Do the Armenian nationalists, who regularly shed crocodile tears about the "suffering of Armenians", remember the real suffering of those Armenians who honestly fulfilled their duty to their homeland - the Ottoman Empire - who were captured and died in Russian concentration camps? Or about those Armenians who fought for Turkey and died on the battlefields? Is there even a single monument to these people in Armenia? Is there even a single study or mention of them, or even a list of their names? Do they not deserve to be remembered by their fellow tribesmen? Or Armenian nationalists care only about the memory of terrorists, as they demonstrated by erecting a monument in Yerevan to those who committed crimes within the framework of the "Nemesis" terrorist campaign?

George Mazniashvili