 As with most people of his generation, World War I played a large role in his personal transformation.With the war's outbreak, Sultan-Galiev and his wife Rauza Chanysheva moved to Baku, where Sultan-Galiev began to write for a variety of newspapers.He seems to have absorbed amongst the city's diverse population of Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, Russians, Tatars, and Iranians, a deep and growing dissatisfaction with the tsarist autocracy, its resistance to reform, and handling of the war effort.