The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by a sharp surge of political interest throughout the Turkic world. One of the most important causes of this political awakening was the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which was greeted with enthusiasm and sympathy across the entire Muslim world. A notable part in the ripening of this epoch-making event was played by our kinsman — a descendant of Soltan-Mut and of the Chopan-shawkhal — Prince Ahmed Saib-bey Kaplan. What is known of him is that he was born in 1859 into the family of Abu-Muslim Kaplanov, a colonel of the Tsarist army; in 1888, having risen to the rank of cavalry captain (rotmistr), he emigrated to the Ottoman Empire. As a man of noble birth he was admitted to the Sultan's personal guard; but, disillusioned with the order of things at the court of the despotic Abdülhamid II, he moved to Cairo, the capital of Egypt. There he went over decisively to the side of the Young Turk organisation banned in Turkey — Ittihad ve Terakki ("Union and Progress") — which demanded the restoration of a constitutional monarchy in the Ottoman Empire. The point is that a constitution drafted by Midhat Pasha had been adopted in Turkey in 1877, but was soon abolished by Sultan Abdülhamid II.
Here is what Ahmed Saib's good acquaintance, Celâl ed-Din Korkmasov — editor of the newspaper Stambulskiye Novosti ("Istanbul News") — wrote in 1909 about his subsequent activities: "Sancak is the organ of the Turkish historian and committee member (Ittihad ve Terakki) Ahmed Saib. In the pages of Sancak there appeared the Historical Studies from the Recent Reigns, which vividly illuminated all the negative, weak sides of the old regime. Considerably later the same Ahmed Saib began to issue in Egypt the newspaper Şûrâ-yı Ümmet ('The National Council'), which was soon transferred to Paris; Ahmed Rıza (the ideological leader of the Young Turk movement) took a very close part in its publication. Şûrâ-yı Ümmet continued to appear right up to the July coup" — i.e., the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
It should be explained here that in 1909–1910, while staying in the Ottoman capital, Korkmasov developed vigorous political and journalistic activity. Together with Kaplan's liberal ally Ahmet Cevad, he produced the first Russian-language newspaper in Turkish history — Stambulskiye Novosti. The paper, published in 1909–1910, was a richly political and scholarly edition; from the very beginning two currents took shape within it — the right (the publisher, Ahmet Cevad) and the left (the editor, Celâl Korkmas, as he styled himself in Turkey). If the first printed material about the political situation in Turkey and the work of the new Young Turk parliament, the second gave greater attention to questions of the economy, the culture and the history of the provinces of the empire.
The splendidly illustrated Stambulskiye Novosti addressed the fairly numerous Russian-speaking community of émigrés in the Ottoman Empire. The paper carried material on the economy, culture and history of Turkey. Among these were pieces by Russian-language authors — Korkmasov himself (he signed as Celâl-bey or D.K.) and A. Shirinsky (who devoted a long article to the problems of Crimean muhacirs) — as well as a whole series of translations from the Turkish of authors such as Ahmet Midhat (the greatest Turkish prose writer and philosopher of his time), and works of fiction by Turkish authors (many of them translated into Russian for the first time). What most interested us, however, was the paper's publication of Ahmed Saib's article "How We Obtained the Constitution".
In his preface to the first instalment Korkmasov wrote: "The author of this article, Ahmed Saib-bey, is one of the outstanding Young Turk figures, a prominent journalist and a well-known historian. In Egypt he published the Young Turk organ Sancak ('The Banner'), and later, together with Ahmed Rıza-bey — now President of the Chamber — he edited the newspaper Şûrâ-yı Ümmet. Ahmed Saib-bey is known as the author of many solid works on the history of Turkey. His writings — The History of Sultan Abdülaziz, The History of Sultan Murad, The Beginning of the Reign of Abdülhamid, The Last Turkish War, and many others — cover the second half of the last century. At present Ahmed Saib-bey is a member of the Historical Institute, founded on the initiative of Sultan Mehmed V in order to compile the National Ottoman Library".
For the reader who is not as closely familiar as Korkmasov was with the political realities of Ottoman Turkey a century ago, we should add that, after the split that occurred at the First All-Ottoman Congress of the opposition parties (4–9 February 1902), Ahmed Saib sided firmly with its evolutionist wing — the Turkish analogue of the early twentieth-century Russian Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). He became at that moment director of the Cairo bureau of the Young Turk movement. The cause of the transfer of Şûrâ-yı Ümmet — which was, incidentally, the principal press organ of the moderate wing of the Young Turks — was the arrest of Ahmed Saib Kaplan by the Anglo-Egyptian authorities (Egypt had been occupied by Great Britain since 1882), at the request of the Turkish Sultan Abdülhamid II.
Gradually distancing himself from the ruling wing of the Young Turks, Kaplan took up teaching at the University of Istanbul and, from 1911 onward, the publication of the journal Historical and Political Truth, in which he brought out articles on the internal and external policy of Turkey and on the fate of the North Caucasian muhacirs (emigrants).
From 1915 Ahmed Saib Kaplan took an active part in the creation and work of the "Committee for the Defence of the Rights of the Oppressed Turko-Muslim Peoples of Russia", among whose founders were the Azerbaijani philosopher of Islam and political figure Ahmet Ağaoğlu — a close comrade of Abusufyan Akayev and the creator of the first political party in the history of Azerbaijan, Difâi — and the outstanding Tatar scholar-politicians Yusuf Akçura (the former editor of the newspaper Kazan Muhbiri, and afterwards founder and editor of the journal Türk Yurdu) and Rəşit İbrahim (a Siberian Tatar). In December 1915 the Hungarian journal International Relations (Kulugu Hadygy), sympathetic to the Turks, published a map of the Committee's territorial project. It envisaged the independence of Turkestan, of Kazakhstan (which included Western Siberia as far as the confluence of the Irtysh and the Ob, that is, the territory of the former Siberian Khanate), of the Crimean Khanate, of the Confederated States of the Caucasus, and of the Kazan Khanate — extending from the tundra in the north to the Caspian Sea in the south. In 1916 the Committee addressed a declaration to the President of the United States, Wilson, demanding intervention against the arbitrary treatment of Muslims that prevailed in Russia. Let us recall that 1916 was the year of the terrible famine in Central Asia, which provoked there an uprising brutally suppressed by the Tsarist army. At the same time the Committee merged into a single body with the "League of the Native Peoples of Russia".
That same year Ahmed Saib took part, as a member of a substantial delegation, in the Third Conference of Oppressed Nations (L'Union des nationalités) in Lausanne, where he represented the interests of his native Kumyk people. Besides the general documents drawn up in the name of the Society, separate memoranda were prepared in the name of each people. The common content of all the documents was a demand for "full equality of the Turko-Muslims with the Russians", for cultural autonomy, and for the non-interference of the state in religious and cultural-linguistic life.
Ahmed Saib Kaplan died in 1920 in Istanbul under British occupation. But the idea of freedom to which he had devoted his life was, in the end, to triumph — even though only after his death. Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) secured the annulment of the separatist Treaty of Sèvres and inaugurated the modern history of Turkey — a history whose policy was founded on positions that owed much to the evolutionist wing of the Young Turks led by Kaplan. For that reason, thirty years after Kaplan's death, in 1950, the Turkish scholar Halûk Şehsuvaroğlu wrote: "Ahmed Saib offers an example of lofty self-sacrifice and of service to the highest goals of the nation; his name occupies one of the most honoured places in the gallery of figures of the Young Turk Revolution". To this we may add, for our own part, that one of the places of honour belongs to him, by right, in the history of our own people as well.