The Rebirth of Turkey

by Clair Price

Despite the Russian naval base of Sebastopol, Great Britain not only kept the Sultan in command of the Straits but even kept the Black Sea neutral. East of the Black Sea, however, the British writ did not run. Here between the Black Sea and the Caspian is the ancient barrier of the Caucasus Range, below which the Trans-Caucasian plateau forms a bridge both to the back of the Ottoman Empire and to Persia. Below the blue peaks of the Caucasus Range lay Tiflis, the capital of the Georgian Kingdom midway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, with the Turkish village of Batum on the Black Sea shores and the Tartar village of Baku on the Caspian. Turks and Tartars were both Moslem, but the old Georgian Kingdom was Orthodox and, extending in a broad belt down through the Ottoman provinces in eastern Asia Minor were most of the Armenians.

Expanding Russia was not long in bursting the barrier of the Caucasus Range. More than a century ago, it swallowed the Georgian Kingdom, snuffed out the eight little Tartar chieftains around Baku and found itself in contact with the Armenian Catholicos and the eastern fringes of the Ermeni community in the Ottoman Empire. In further accord with its policy of undermining that Empire, it availed itself of the presence of the Armenians in the usual imperialist manner and, in its war of 1876 against the Sultan, it drove its way deeply into his eastern provinces, transferring the Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty as it went. Its objective was the great bay of Alexandretta on the Mediterranean which was to free it of its Black Sea jail, a scheme which Great Britain recognized by secretly taking over the “administration” of Cyprus from the Sultan. The treaty of San Stefano stopped the Russian advance hundreds of miles short of Alexandretta and in front of the new Ottoman frontier, Russia developed Kars into a great fortress as a base for its further advance toward Alexandretta when opportunity offered.

Having seized Batum from the Sultan, Russia continued the consolidation of Trans-Caucasia under its own provincial governors and stamped the entire region with the unmistakable imprint of a Russian economic regime. It pierced the barrier of the Caucasus Range with a military highroad to Tiflis, which it prolonged as a railroad to Kars and the Armenian center of Erivan. It drove its railways past the east end of the Caucasus Range to make a Russian railhead and a Russian Caspian port of Baku, around which lay one of the greatest oil-fields in the world. It developed the village of Batum into a fortified Russian port on the Black Sea and with its Trans-Caucasian railroads from Batum via Tiflis to Baku, it made Batum the gate to the Caspian for all the Western world. Long before, it had driven the Persians from the Caspian, making a Russian lake of that inland sea, and Russian steamship lines from Baku to Enzeli, the port of Teheran, now made Batum the world’s gate to the Persian capital.

From the Trans-Caucasian bridge, the Russian march toward the sea forked into two directions. The direction in which the Russian Armies of 1876 turned, was toward Alexandretta on the Mediterranean. The other direction was indicated later when a railroad was carried from Kars to the Persian frontier, whence it was to be continued when requisite to Tabriz and Teheran. This might have exposed the Persian Gulf to Russia, but the Government of India had already made the Gulf more British than the Mediterranean. The Gulf had become a land-locked British lake whose narrow door-way into the Indian Ocean was dominated by the potential British naval base of Bunder Abbas. If Russia had succeeded in reaching the Gulf through Persia, a Russian port on its shores would have been imprisoned by Bunder Abbas, as the Russian Black Sea ports were already imprisoned by Constantinople and the Russian Baltic ports by the Sound. For the time being, the Russian Trans-Caucasian railhead on the north-west frontier of Persia awaited events.

East of the Caspian, however, a century of Russian advances down across the Moslem populations of Central Asia had brought the Russian frontiers all the way down to Persia and Afghanistan. Russian rule throughout this vast area had been as thoroughly consolidated under Russian provincial governments as had the Trans-Caucasian bridge. In time, a line of railway was driven from St. Petersburg via Moscow and Orenburg to Tashkent at the back of Afghanistan, whence it linked with the Trans-Caspian Railway from Krasnovodsk, opposite Baku on the Caspian. Direct communication was thus afforded from St. Petersburg and from the Trans-Caucasian country to Persia and Afghanistan. With a Russian resident ruling in the ancient Moslem capital of Bokhara, a spur had been dropped from the Trans-Caspian line at Bokhara City to Termez on the northern frontier of Afghanistan whence a caravan road threads its way up into the passes of the Hindu Kush and down again to Kabul and the Khyber Pass. From the Merv oasis, also on the Trans-Caspian line, another spur had been dropped to Kushklinsky Post on the Afghan frontier whence the traditional Herat-Kandahar-Kabul road leads to the Khyber Pass and the fat plains of India.

This long loop of line from St. Petersburg and the Caspian to the back of Afghanistan traversed territory securely held by Russian arms and the British had no contact with it, except the frontal contact of their railheads on the southern frontier of Afghanistan, i. e., within India itself. Except for diplomatic exchanges between London and St. Petersburg, the Government of India had no means of making itself felt at Bokhara City and the Merv oasis. Indeed, Russia had made even the Afghan capital of Kabul an intermittent nightmare in India. Long ago, Russian intrigue in the Afghan capital had compelled the East India Company in 1839 to dispatch an expeditionary force to occupy Kabul and unseat its Amir, an expeditionary force which found Afghanistan so hostile that it was wiped out of existence in such a disaster as British India has never known before or since. Again in 1879, Russian resentment over the Congress of Berlin led to the dispatch of a Russian mission to Kabul and when a British mission was turned back at the frontier, the Government of India sent a second expeditionary force to set up a new Amir at Kabul. Intrigue at Kabul became Russia’s favorite reply to any strain in Anglo-Russian relations, but it was not in Afghanistan that the real weight of Russian expansion finally made itself felt. Its construction of the Trans-Caspian railway had given it a base at Askabad on Persia’s north-east frontier, for an advance down across Persia to the Indian Ocean outside Bunder Abbas. Here was a project which at one stroke would not only free Russia of its inner Black Sea jail and its outer Mediterranean jail, but would enable it to create a second Vladivostok on the Indian Ocean which would take the British Indian sea lines in the flank and cut the Indian peninsula bodily out of the British Empire.

Russia now projected a railway from Askabad to the Persian provincial capital of Meshed and thence south past the Seistan, reaching the Indian Ocean presumably at Chahbar or Gwatter Bay. Having filled the Persian capital of Teheran with Russian intrigue and having thoroughly Russianized Meshed, Russia now began to close the Seistan gateway through which the great British Indian fortress of Quetta flanked the route of its projected railway. Belgian customs officials in the employ of the Russianized Persian Government, Russian “scientific” missions and a strange “plague cordon” began mysteriously to break up the caravans which were moving into and out of the Seistan.

In the meantime, the Government of India had drawn the western frontier of its Baluchistan province to include Gwatter Bay and had made a British railhead of Chahbar. Further than this, it was difficult to go effectively. There was no subject population in the south of Persia to subvert from its rulers in the north, as was the case with the Arabs in the adjacent Ottoman Empire. Nor could the great British Legation at Teheran bolster up the weak Persian Government as a buffer against Russia, for the Persian capital lay far away to the north in the very shadow of Russia. Ever since that day a century ago when Russia burst the barrier of the Caucasus Range, a day whose dire meaning for India was only beginning to be realized, Teheran had been exposed to Russia. It lay now only 200 miles from Enzeli on the Russianized Caspian and some 1,600 miles from Quetta inside the Seistan, a caravan route so arduous as to be out of the question. The Government of India’s only road to Teheran was the 800-mile highroad via Bagdad from Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf.

The situation was a perilous one, however. The Cairo-Calcutta line of the great British Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme would be cut in Persia by Russia’s projected route from Askabad to the Indian Ocean. The Government of India had envisaged a line extending from Constantinople to Kabul as an outworks in front of its Cairo-Calcutta line. That Constantinople-Kabul line was the common interest of the Ottoman Caliph and the Emperor of India, but its conception was hopelessly tardy. It had been broken a century ago when the East India Company was fretting about France, and Russia was bursting the barrier of the Caucasus Range to occupy the Trans-Caucasian bridge; for in any Constantinople-Kabul line, the Caucasus Range is a frontier as indispensable to the Government of India as the Hindu Kush itself.

Even at Constantinople, the accustomed rule of the British Embassy had been supplanted by the rising influence of the German Embassy. A formidable new German enemy was already moving in force along the roads to British India. Great Britian was losing ground both in Constantinople and in Persia, which had now become the most vulnerable spots in its very vulnerable Indian Empire. The Czar was on his way to become the ruler of the world, and the British Government surrendered. At the price of a heavy retreat in Persia, it purchased a truce with its Russian enemy and faced about to meet its new German enemy.