Did the Ottoman government rationalize the Armenian Genocide and other instances of ethnic cleansing as a response to Russian expansion?
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It is always difficult to name one reason for a complicated historical event. Usually there are many reasons. The point of view expressed in your question is defended at least by some historians. For example
Sean McMeekin, The Russian origins of the first world war, Harward UP, 2011
has a chapter (Chapter 6, p 141-174) on the role of Russian policies in the Armenian genocide.
Upvote:18
This question can be very much opinable, but I want to address some points:
Did the architects of the Armenian Genocide during World War I plan their actions in part as a reciprocal population transfer.
Armenians were not expelled from their homes, they were exterminated. It was not a population transfer. If Armenians are now concentrated in the Caucasus and not in Eastern Anatolia, it is because the ones in Eastern Anatolia were killed en masse and the ones in the Caucasus were not, not because they moved from one area to the other.
I remember being confused during the course about why ethnic tensions suddenly flared up in the Ottoman empire during this time period.
One word: decadence. Racial and religious tensions were there1 but there was a strong power that kept the status quo (so minorities would not rebel, and Ottomans would not have to use heavy handed tactics to suppress them).
And it was not so sudden: check rebellions like the Migrations of the Serbs, the Orlov Revolt, etc. While fighting was not continuous, at no time I would call the situation "pacific".
Was the movement to oust Muslims from the newly independent Greece in part spurred on by imperial Russia.
First time I have heard about that.
Remember, Greek people were rebelling (again) on their own against Ottoman power and fought a pretty brutal war against them, so they likely had very little sympathy for anyone who could side with Istambul. And the reason that they were rebelling was because they wanted to live in a Greek state, under Greek law (and, at the time, law included religion).
It was the time when the ideal was the "nation state": a single, unified national identity under the same state.
Really, there is no need to look for2 external factors to explain that.
I remember reading that during World War I, all Armenians, even those loyal to the Ottoman Empire, were under suspicion by the government for being a "fifth column"
And with good reason. The Empire had lost almost all of its European territories to breakaway minorities (some of them supported by Russians), and the Armenians had their own.
On the other hand, an overlooked Russian (and Western) influence was the use of the rights of Christian minorities as an excuse to wage war against the Ottoman Empire. Any time a Christian power wanted a casus belli, an incident or a riot would be used to justify a new war, a new defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and new territorial losses and concessions.
This could have greatly increased the appeal3, to the Ottoman empire leadership, of building a Turkish only state.
TL/DR The initial situation of the Ottoman Empire was far from being as ideal as you describe it. While to some degrees the politics of the Porte may have been influenced by the actuation of foreign powers, adscribing all of what happened to Russian (or even all the combined foreign) influence without considering the internal situation of the Empire is too much of a stretch, unless there is solid documental evidence.
1 While more tolerant with minorities than others, the Ottoman Empire was always the Empire of Ottoman Turks over other, second-class citizens belonging to minorities.
2 Anyway, I will not claim that Russia did or did not have a hand at this. I only claim that, even if there were no foreign intervention, the process is not difficult to understand, so I would like to see some documentats that justify claiming that it was Russia fault.
3 Again, the nation state was already the ideal model.
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