ements.
Accordingly, the Pan-Turanians, while not actually persecuted, were
never in the Sultan's favour. With the advent of Young-Turk nationalism
to power, however, all was changed. The "Ottomanizing" leaders of the
new government listened eagerly to Pan-Turanian preaching, and most of
them became affiliated with the movement. It is interesting to note that
Russian Tartars continued to play a prominent part. The chief
Pan-Turanian propagandist was the able publicist Ahmed Bey Agayeff, a
Volga Tartar. His well-edited organ, _Turk Yurdu_ (_Turkish Home_),
penetrated to every corner of the Turko-Tartar world and exercised great
influence on the development of its public opinion.

Although leaders like Ahmed Bey Agayeff clearly visualized the entire
Turanian world from Finland to Manchuria as a potential whole, and were
thus full-fledged "Pan-Turanians," their practical efforts were at first
confined to the closely related Turko-Tartar segment; that is, to the
Ottomans of Turkey, the Tartars of Russia, and the Turkomans of central
Asia and Persia. Since all these peoples were also Mohammedans, it
follows that this propaganda had a religious as well as a racial
complexion, trending in many respects toward Pan-Islamism. Indeed, even
disregarding the religious factor, we may say that, though Pan-Turanian
in theory, the movement was at that time in practice little more than
"Pan-Turkism."

It was the Balkan wars of 1912-13 which really precipitated full-fledged
Pan-Turanism. Those wars not merely expelled the Turks from the Balkans
and turned their eyes increasingly toward Asia, but also roused such
hatred of the victorious Serbs in the breasts of Hungarians and
Bulgarians that both these peoples proclaimed their "Turanian" origins
and toyed with ideas of "Pan-Turanian" solidarity against the menace of
Serbo-Russian "Pan-Slavism."[163] The Pan-Turanian thinkers were
assuredly evolving a body of doctrine grandiose enough to satisfy the
most ambitious hopes. Emphasizing the great virility and nerve-force
everywhere patent in the Turanian stocks, these thinkers saw in Turan
the dominant race of the morrow. Zealous students of Western
evolutionism and ethnology, they were evolving their own special theory
of race grandeur and decadence. According to Pan-Turanian teaching, the
historic peoples of southern Asia--Arabs, Persians, and Hindus--are
hopelessly degenerate. As for the Europeans, they have recently passed
their apogee, a