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Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After the outbreak of the Soviet‑German war, Soviet media institutions fulfilled their major prewar role as a propaganda tool. The portrayal of German anti‑Jewish policies fell largely within their functions if only because such reports could not be authenticated as long as the enemy remained in control of Soviet territories. Therefore, they were likely regarded by many Soviet people as merely one more Soviet propaganda spin. Among them was a Jewish family, the Ginsburgs, from the South Russian city of Rostov‑on‑Don. Soviet media can be credited in no small measure with disseminating awareness of the Germans’ real intentions towards the Jews that ultimately reverberated to the Ginsburgs and incited some of them to evacuate while others considered leaving. However, the critical information on the proximity of the German forces was frequently unavailable or distorted. The impact of the messages emanating from the Soviet media depended on whether they accorded with the mindset of their consumers, such as the Ginsburgs, and whether these consumers were able and willing to verify media content from other sources, mainly rumors coming from refugees. In cognizance of the family’s fear of Soviet censors and their desire not to upset each other overall, one can say that the penetration of Soviet media notions is noticeable in 1941.