I am fascinated with the histories of the people who lived in the long nineteenth century, which culminated in the Great War period and its aftermath. I like tracing transformations in and interconnectedness of their lives throughout the globe. My special focus is on the entanglement in the relationships between European, Ottoman, and Russian societies with the emphasis on the changes in the Ottoman and Romanov Empires. My dissertation deals with a redefinition of social roles and identities of people in the contexts of mass migration of Russian Civil War refugees to Istanbul, then under the Allied occupation. It also studies a mechanism of bureaucratic refugeeization of forcibly displaced people, which was accompanied by the echoes of colonialism, concerns of the nation-state, and principles of modern humanitarianism.