The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918)

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers, marked Russian defeat and the end of her participation in World War I.

The Bolshevik government had come to power in Russia after the October Revolution, but was in a desperate situation a few months later. The revolutionary government, as a first step in foreign affairs, released a decree about peace during the second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets on October 26, 1917. The decree, authored by Vladimir Lenin, proposed all belligerent countries to start negotiations to create a “fair democratic world.”



The Entente (Great Britain, France, United States, and Italy) rejected the decree and Soviet Russia went forward to sign a separate peace with the Central Powers. The negotiations started in Brest-Litosvk on December 9, with the participation of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The Soviet delegation, headed by Adolph Joffe, brought as conditions the evacuation of troops from occupied territories, freedom to nations enslaved during the war, relinquishing to all war compensations and penalties, et cetera.

The German delegation countered with its own plan, which included the annexation of the Baltic region to Germany and the division of Poland. Germany, besides, wanted to keep the Russian occupied regions in order to exploit their resources.

The Allies did not agree to negotiate peace, and Soviet Russia started separate negotiations with Germany on December 27. One month later, the Central Powers came to an agreement with the Central Rada (the all-Ukrainian revolutionary parliament) to obtain food from Ukraine in exchange for military aid. On the same night, Germany submitted an ultimatum to Russia to comply with German conditions, which entailed to take the German border to Narva, Pskov, and Dvinya. The next day, Lev Trotsky, who had taken over the Soviet delegation, answered that Russia would not sign the agreement, ceased the hostilities, and evacuated its troops. The Central Powers went on the offensive on February 18 in the entire Eastern front. The Russian armies could not resist and consented to an agreement on February 19. However, the Germans continued their offense and only stopped on February 22, dictating even harsher conditions.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party agreed to the signature of a peace treaty. The Treaty of Brest-Litosvk was signed on March 3, 1918. The harsh conditions of the treaty were humiliating. Russia lost the Baltic lands and part of Belorussia; Ukraine and Finland were declared autonomous republics, with the subsequent evacuation of the Red Army. More importantly, it also ceded to the Ottoman Empire the regions of Kars and Ardahan, which were Armenian territories, and Batum (Georgian territory) in the Caucasus. It is important to remember that, after the October Revolution and the retreat of the Russian troops, Turkey had gone on the offense and reoccupied the territories of Western Armenia lost to Russia in 1916, later invading the Caucasus. Interestingly, Russia no longer had effective presence in the region, and maintained a purely nominal attachment after the revolution.

The end of the hostilities allowed Germany to concentrate its forces on the southern front and start an offense from March 21 to June 17, 1918, but this was unsuccessful, as the Allied forces countered with a tactic of continuous attacks that finally ended in German defeat.

It is important to note that the Bolsheviks were not the legal and recognized authority of Russia in 1918, and therefore had no legal right to sign a treaty on behalf of the country. However, this signature allowed the Bolshevik government to keep the power and dismiss their opponents, particularly the Socialist Revolutionaries. In the end, this would also become a motive for the beginning of the bloody civil war in Russia that would last four years.

A supplementary agreement signed in Berlin on August 27 established the payment of six billion German marks by Russia to Germany as war compensation. However, the Treaty of Brest Litovsk was declared null and void by Russia on September 20 and after the end of the war, by Turkey on October 30, and by Germany on November 13.

Treaty of Moscow (March 16, 1921)

The Treaty of Moscow was signed between Soviet Russia and Kemalist Turkey on March 16, 1921. The Russian side yielded to most Turkish demands, and signed a document that was utterly damaging to Armenia for the sake of Russian-Turkish “friendship and brotherhood.”

The treaty was the outcome of the second Russian-Turkish conference, held in Moscow from February 26-March 16, 1921, with the participation of two Russian (Georgi Chicherin, the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, and Jelal Korkmasov) and three Turkish representatives (Yusuf Kemal bey, Riza Nur bey, and Ali Fuad pasha). Stalin, the Commissar of Nationalities, lobbied against any claim from Turkey that could put the Russian-Turkish alliance in risk. In a letter to Lenin on February 12, 1921, he had written: “I just learned yesterday that Chicherin really sent a stupid (and provocative) demand to the Turks to clean Van, Mush, and Bitlis (Turkish provinces with enormous Turkish supremacy) to the benefit of Armenians. This Armenian imperialist demand cannot be our demand. Chicherin must be forbidden to send notes to the Turks suggested by nationalist-oriented Armenians.” The Bolsheviks sought to halt further Turkish advance into the region. Weary from the ongoing Russian Civil War, which was winding down, they had no intent of starting a new war.

Not surprisingly, Chicherin refrained from his pro-Armenian position, and declared during the conference that Russia would not insist about passing the border to the west of the Akhurian (Arpachay) and the south of the Arax rivers. This meant that the entire province of Kars and the district of Surmalu (Igdir), which had never belonged to the Ottoman Empire, would go to Turkey. The Turkish delegation additionally claimed for the province of Nakhichevan, which historically had belonged to the Armenian Province and then to the governorate of Yerevan under the rule of the Russian Empire, to be put under Azerbaijani administration.

Thus, the treaty of “friendship and brotherhood” between Soviet Russia and Turkey recognized Turkish control over Artvin, Ardahan, Kars, and Surmalu. The region of Adjara, with the port of Batum, was returned to Soviet Georgia on the condition that it would be granted political autonomy due to its largely Muslim Georgian population. (Adjara became an autonomous republic within Georgia.) Turkey withdrew from Alexandropol (nowadays Gumri) and a new border was established between Turkey and Soviet Armenia, defined by the Arax and Akhurian rivers. According to these new boundaries, Mount Ararat and the ruins of Ani remained within Turkey.

The treaty also stipulated that Nakhichevan would become an autonomous entity under Azerbaijani protectorate. Azerbaijan obliged not to transfer the jurisdiction to a third party, namely, Armenia. Additionally, Turkey later acquired a small strip of territory known as the Arax corridor, which had also been part of the governorate of Yerevan. This corridor was located east of Surmalu, limited by the Arax River to the north and the Lower Karasu River to the south. It was a strategic strip of land that allowed Turkey to share a common border with Nakhichevan and, consequently, Soviet Azerbaijan.

Both signatory parties were internationally unrecognized, and thus were not subject of international law, which made the treaty illegal and invalid. The RSFSR, now under the guise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was legally recognized for the first time in 1924 by Great Britain. The Great National Assembly of Turkey was a non-governmental organization led by Mustafa Kemal, which did not have any legal grounds to represent the Turkish state in international relations. According to the Ottoman Constitution, only the sultan had the right to engage other states, be it personally or through a representative. The Kemalist movement was actually a rebellion against the legal authorities of the country, and Kemal was a criminal fugitive who had been sentenced to death by a fatwa signed by the Sheikh-ul-Islam, the highest religious authority of the Ottoman Empire, on April 11, 1920, and a court-martial on May 11, 1920.

The section of the Treaty of Moscow related to Armenia was a violation of international law, since treaties can only refer to the signatory parties and do not create any obligation to third parties that are not bound by treaty without the latter’s agreement. At the time of the Treaty, the Soviet regime had been thrown out from Armenia by the popular rebellion of February 1921.

The treaty was reaffirmed in October 1921 with the Treaty of Kars and the borders it established have been maintained ever since. However, this did not mean that Soviet policymakers necessarily accepted the terms of the treaty as permanent. After World War II, when the Soviet Union was at the zenith of its power, its leader Stalin reopened the issue on behalf of Armenia and his native Georgia. Supported by Moscow, both republics began to assert territorial claims against Ankara. According to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin made this move at the insistence of Lavrenti Beria, the deputy premier and a fellow Georgian. Indeed, Ankara sought the support of Washington, which had become suspicious of Soviet intentions with the onset of the Cold War. The issue was eventually dropped by Moscow and by 1952 Turkey joined NATO, precluding any further discussion on border revisions.

The frontiers established by the 1921 treaty remained unaltered and were maintained by the newly-independent states of Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

Following the shoot down of a Russian plane over the Syria–Turkey border in November 2015 and the rise of Russo-Turkish tensions, members of the Communist Party of Russia proposed the nullification of the Treaty of Moscow. Initially, the Russian Foreign Ministry considered this action in order to send a political message to Turkey.   However, Moscow ultimately decided against it in its effort to de-escalate tensions with Ankara.

Birth of Taniel Bek-Pirumian (November 22, 1861)

The decisive battles that led to the creation of the Republic of Armenia in 1918 had several professional officers among their leaders.

Taniel Bek-Pirumian came from a region that gave many military leaders throughout history: Artsakh (Gharabagh). He was born on November 21, 1861, in the village of Nakhichevanik, in the district of Khachen. He graduated from the city lyceum of Shushi, then capital of Artsakh, and started his military service at the age of twenty. He studied at the infantry lyceum of Tiflis from 1881-1883. Three decades later, in 1913, he graduated from the courses of the school of artillery of Oranienbaum (nowadays Lomonosov, in the region of St. Petersburg, Russia).

Meanwhile, he ascended in the ranks of the Russian army: sergeant in 1883, lieutenant in 1888, captain in 1890, and deputy colonel in 1913. He held positions as commander of squad, platoon, and battalion.
 

Pirumian fought at the Caucasian front in the Russian army during World War I. He was ascended to the rank of colonel in 1915 and decorated with several medals for his bravery. Like many of his colleagues, Pirumian remained in the region after the evacuation of Russian troops following the October Revolution of 1917, helping organize the nascent Armenian army.

In the decisive days of May 1918, Taniel Bek-Pirumian was entrusted with the general command of the front of Sardarabad, which was dangerously close to Etchmiadzin. On May 21, the Ottoman forces occupied the village and the railway station of Sardarabad, and advanced towards Ghamishlu. The next day, the battalion of the “Condemned to Death” (մահապարտների գունդ) of Gharabagh, headed by Poghos Bek-Pirumian (first cousin to Taniel), counterattacked and chased away the Ottoman troops up to Sardarabad, which was liberated in the late afternoon. The Ottomans fortified themselves in the surrounding heights and led a counteroffensive on May 24-26. The three-day battle was fiercely contested and ended in an Armenian victory. In those delicate moments, Taniel Bek-Pirumian’s military experience and his iron will played a fundamental role. He entered the fraught of the battle, leaving the command to Lieutenant Alexandre Chnéour, a Russian officer in the Armenian army. Personally heading a column of soldiers, he disrupted and repelled the Turkish advance in the central area of the battlefront.

Bek-Pirumian continued his career in the Republic of Armenia and was ascended to the rank of major-general in late 1919. He was appointed military commander of Kars. However, he broke his leg in a car accident, and was taken prisoner by the Turks in October 1920 after the fall of Kars. In January 1921 he was transported to Alexandropol and delivered to the representatives of the 11 ^th Red Army.

The Bolshevik terror was rampant in newly sovietized Armenia. In 1921, soon after being liberated from Turkish prison, Bek-Pirumian and other high-ranking Armenian officers were shot on the road of Gharakilise (nowadays Vanadzor) to Dilijan. The corpse of the unfortunate general was secretly moved to Etchmiadzin and buried in the cemetery of the church of St. Gayane. Another hero of Sardarabad, his cousin Poghos Bek-Pirumian, overwhelmed by the Bolshevik terror, took his own life.

Fall of Kars - October 30, 1920

The Turkish nationalist movement headed by Mustafa Kemal, with headquarters in Ankara, did not recognize the Treaty of Sevres signed by the legal government of the Ottoman Empire on August 10, 1920. Barely a month later, on September 23, Turkish armed forces under the command of General Kiazim Karabekir started an attack, without mediating a war declaration, against the Republic of Armenia. A month later, again, the fortress of Kars—the most important bulwark of the Southern Caucasus—would fall almost without a fight to the advancing troops.

Kars, the capital of an Armenian medieval kingdom ruled by a branch of the Bagratuni family, had changed hands several times over the past hundred years. After being briefly occupied by Russian troops in 1855 during the Crimea War of 1854-1856, it was occupied again during the Russian-Turkish war of 1877 and annexed to the Russian Empire as a result of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. It fell to the advancing Turkish troops in March 1918 and was re-conquered by the troops of the newly born Republic of Armenia after the Turkish retreat following the end of World War I.

The young commander of the fortress, Col. Mazmanian, gave the order of attack to his soldiers, who refused to follow his orders and, instead, deserted. Confronted with the shameful desertion, Mazmanian took his own life with his revolver in the sight of his soldiers. According to the memoirs of Karabekir and other sources, the Kemalist soldiers and the Turkish, Kurdish, Muslim, and Armenian Bolshevik rebels occupied the entire city in three hours, took hundreds of Armenian officers and soldiers as prisoners, seized an enormous quantity of war material (cannons, projectiles, weapons, and bullets) and massacred thousands of people among the civil population; in 1920-1921, the Turks would kill a total of 20,000 Armenians in the city and the province of Kars. Years later, Garegin Nejdeh, who headed the successful defense of Zangezur against the attacks of Azerbaijanis and Bolsheviks from 1919-1921, would write: “The shame of Kars is not only of the government of the Republic of Armenia, but of the entire Armenian people. The armies measure their forces and clash, but the nations are the winners or the losers. Under the walls of Kars, not only the Armenian soldier and the general were defeated, but also the entire Armenian people, lacking spirit of fight and bravery."

A general view of modern Kars with the central Armenian church in the foreground and the fortress in the background.

The effects of the fall of Kars would be catastrophic. Despite Armenian heroic resistance in other places, two weeks later, Alexandropol (now Gumri) fell to the Turks, which practically reached the outskirts of Yerevan from the west. The cabinet of Prime Minister Hamo Ohanjanian fell, and Simon Vratzian became Prime Minister of a coalition cabinet, which lasted scarcely a week. On November 29, 1920, Bolshevik forces entered Armenia from the east, and the Armenian government, confronting the menace of destruction, chose the lesser of two evils and power was transferred to the Communists on December 2. Armenia would enter the Soviet Union in 1922 as part of the Federative Republic of Transcaucasia.

The trauma of the fall was masterfully addressed by poet Yeghishe Charents, a native of Kars, in his only novel, Yerkir Nayiri (Land of Nayiri), published in 1926. The fall of Kars still remains a polemical one in the historiography of the Republic of Armenia.