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In this local history, Alexander E. Balistreri takes the border region around Kars as a case study for the interaction of two empires being dissolved by revolution and war. Focusing on the effects of the Russian Revolution in this border region (under Russian sovereignty in 1917), the chapter makes two contributions: First, it outlines the complicated political institutions that emerged in Kars during the revolutionary period, including a regional executive run by representatives of each of the region's major ethnic groups. Second, it establishes a chronology of political events in the region. Several important elements of this chronology almost never been discussed in the literature until now: the pogrom against Muslims in April 1917, the Congress of Kars Agricultural Laborers in May 1917, and the Bolshevik mutiny in Sarıkamış in January 1918. Balistreri argues that the events in Kars do not easily fit into either a "nationalist" or a "leftist" narrative. Instead, the acts of competition and cooperation between nationalist and socialist forces in Kars ran parallel to the general political trends in the Caucasus at the time. As a result, a detailed knowledge of Kars helps us better understand the way the revolution was experienced more broadly between the Russian and Ottoman Empires.
