Talat Pasha was one
of leaders of the Young Turks, Ottoman statesman, grand vizier (1917-18), and leading
member of the Ottoman government from 1913 to 1918.
The son of a minor Ottoman official, Talat was born
in 1874 and graduated from Edirne High School. He joined the staff of the telegraph
company in Edirne, but he was soon arrested (1893) for subversive political activity.
Released two years later, he was appointed chief secretary of posts and telegraphs in
Salonika and rendered important services to the Young Turk cause.
In 1908, he was dismissed for being a member of the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the conspiratorial nucleus of the Young Turk
movement. After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, however, he became deputy for Edirne in
the Ottoman Parliament, and in 1909, he was appointed minister of the interior. He became
minister of post and then the secretary-general of the CUP (1912).
Before the outbreak of World War I, Talat sided with
the Allied powers. In 1914, however, under the influence of Enver Pasa, minister of
war and one of the triumvirates, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of
Germany. Talat, as minister of the interior, had to take responsibility for the
deportation of the Armenians from the empire's eastern provinces, open to Russian
influence, to Syria and Mesopotamia; some historians blame him for the barbarity of the
operation. In 1917, he became the grand vizier; he resigned on Oct. 14, 1918, shortly
before the Ottoman capitulation to the Allies. In November, together with Enver Pasa
and Cemal Pasa, he fled to Germany, where he was killed by an Armenian three years
later. He was buried into the Turkish Cemetery in Berlin. In 1943, his remains were taken
to Istanbul and reburied in Sisli. His war memories were published after his death.
