PAN-TURANIANISM. In the Persian epic Turan means the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, in contrast to the culti vated country of Iran or Persia. The people of Turan were the nomads who had constantly overrun Persia from the north-east, and who belonged linguistically to the peoples speaking the so called agglutinative languages. The word 'Turanian was coined by modern European philologists to cover this agglutinative group.
Turanian researches were first taken up seriously by the Magyars of Hungary, and this for two reasons. The first reason was that the Magyar language belongs to the Ugro-Finnic branch of the agglutinative group. The second motive was political. During the half-century before the World War, the Hungarian statesmen were on the look-out for allies against the Pan-Slav movement, and seized on the fact that Turkish also was a Tura nian language (though of a different branch from Hungarian), in order to commend to the Turks the idea of a Magyar-Turkish entente against the Slays, a supposed linguistic kinship being assumed to imply a common racial origin. The Turks however translated Pan-Turanianism into Pan-Turkism, that is, into the narrower idea of a brotherhood between all peoples speaking Turkish dialects, with an insistence upon the aboriginal Turkish element in their own Osmanli language and culture. But the Ottoman Turks felt vividly their solidarity with the whole Muslim world. Thus the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress always tried to run Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism in double harness. It is only since the rise of a new Turkish national move ment in 1919 that the Turks have consciously and completely abandoned the Islamic basis of the Turkish state, and have con structed a Turkish republic on exclusively national foundations.
Meanwhile, Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his party have thrown over the other side of the original movement, which insisted not merely upon Turkifying the Ottoman state, but on re-creating the links between the Ottoman Turks and other Turkish peoples.
It is worthy of note, that the 15,000,000 or 16,000,000 Turks of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics have been given a far reaching political autonomy within the framework of the Union, which they never enjoyed under the Tsardom. Of the six republics constituting the Union two, namely the Turkmen and the Uzbeg Republic, are Turkish. Again, one of the three members of the Trans-Caucasian Republic (which itself is a member of the Union) is the Turkish Republic of Azerbaijan. Finally, within the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, which is the leading member of the Soviet Union, there are a number of autonomous Turkish units, such as the Tatar Republic, the Bashkir Republic, the Kirghiz Republic, the Karakalpak autonomous district, and several other less important territories like the Yakutsk Republic in the far north-east of Siberia.