Igor Torbakov

The project seeks to fill a historiographic lacuna by examining the prominent place Constantinople occupied in the Russian political and historical imagination. The study intends to explore how the “Tsargrad myth” exercised Russian imagination throughout the crucial decade of 1913-1923—that is, before and after the watershed of 1917. It focuses on the period when Russia’s Tsargrad myth reached its peak in the years of World War I (when Constantinople seemed almost within reach), before the abrupt anticlimax of the immediate postwar years, when Russians indeed came to Constantinople in huge numbers—not as glorious victors, however, but as wretched refugees from a collapsed empire. It will be demonstrated that, Russian imperial collapse notwithstanding, the allure of Tsargrad/Constantinople was still strong enough, both in Bolshevik Moscow and among the refugees massed on the Bosphorus, to generate outstanding literary works, artistic production and, last but not least, geopolitical fantasizing.