Talaat Pasha

Talaat rose through the Committee of Union and Progress during the Hamidian era, leading its Salonica chapter before the 1908 Young Turk Revolution restored parliament. Elected deputy from Adrianople, he became Minister of the Interior and helped topple Sultan Abdul Hamid II the following year. Crises in the Balkans and internal power struggles turned him and the Unionists from multicultural Ottomanism toward hard-line Turkish nationalism. In 1913 he and Ismail Enver staged a coup; after their partner's assassination, an autocratic triumvirate - Talaat, Enver, and Ahmed Cemal - ruled the Empire. He and Enver brought the Ottomans into the First World War. On 24 April 1915 he ordered the roundup of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, most of whom were murdered; on 30 May he issued the Temporary Law of Deportation. He became Grand Vizier in 1917, negotiated Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks, and introduced social reforms, but Allied breakthroughs forced his resignation. He fled the night of 2-3 November 1918; an Ottoman tribunal sentenced him to death for subverting the constitution, war profiteering, and organizing the massacres. In exile he backed Atatürk's nat