Soviet Russia was no in contact with Nationalist Turkey and in the Treaty of Kars which the Turks signed on Oct. 13, 1921, with the Soviet States of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Kars and Ardahan provinces which had been wrested from the Ottoman Empire in the Russian War of 1876, were returned to Turkey, and the port of Batum was opened unreservedly to Turkish commerce.
Soviet Russia was now in contact with Persia also. Here, despite the fact that the country was occupied by the North Persia Force and the South Persia Rifles, Sir Percy Cox had been unable to assemble a Persian Parliament which would ratify the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 and in February, 1921, a Russo-Persian Treaty was signed at Moscow in which Soviet Russia abandoned all Czarist Russian claims on the Persian Government and recognized no zones of influence in the country. Meanwhile the North Persia Force maneuvered the Czarist die-hards out of Teheran and itself took over the old Cossack Division, officering it with British personnel. At the last moment, just before the North Persia Force was to retire to its base at Bagdad early in the summer of 1921, the Cossack Division marched on Teheran and installed a new Persian Government which valiantly repudiated the Anglo-Persian Agreement and proposed to share out the Persian Ministries among the Allied Governments and the United States, reserving for the British the right to appoint advisers in the Ministries of War and Finance only. But the Zia-ed-Din Government lasted only as long as the North Persia Force lasted. Zia fled to Bagdad with the last of the North Persia Force in May, 1921. The last of the British officers were withdrawn from the Cossack Division and the South Persia Rifles were disbanded. At present, neither British nor Russians are engaged in reiterating “in the most categorical manner the undertakings which they have repeatedly given in the past to respect absolutely the independence and integrity of Persia.”
Soviet Russia has lifted from Islam the weight with which Czarist Russia once bore it down and Mr. Lloyd George’s Government has not succeeded in its effort to supply alone the weight it took both Russians and British to supply in 1907. Mr. Lloyd George could not prevent Islam in India from joining the Hindus in non-cooperation with the West. He could not prevent Islam in Persia from following to the extent of non-cooperation with his Foreign Secretary. That demon which Sir Edward Grey once lightly referred to as the “spirit” of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, has been slowly departing, wrenching civilizations apart as it went. Its stubborn retreat from the countries it wasted and the slow return of Islam to life in its wake, comprise the background before which the remainder of this narrative is set.
XIII
THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR BEGINS
CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE GROWTH OF GREEK NATIONALISM—SURROUNDED BY BRITISH FORCES, THE TURKS GO BACK TO PEACE—APPLICATION OF THE SECRET TREATIES WHICH THE ALLIES HAD DRAWN UP DURING THE WAR—THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE BREAKS OFF ITS RELATIONS WITH THE OTTOMAN GOVERNMENT.
As every body knows, a brook called the Sweet Waters of Europe ripples down into a long bay called the Golden Horn, which divides Constantinople in Europe into two parts. On the northern side, between the crowded Golden Horn and the great Bosphorus, lie the suburbs of Galata and Pera, Galata behind the thicket of masts along its quai and Pera climbing the steep streets onto the hill beyond. Galata and Pera constitute the foreign suburbs where the Embassies, armed with the Capitulations, have never permitted the Ottoman Government to govern, except during the four years of the war when they were not in a position to prevent the Government from abrogating the Capitulations. Here were the Embassies and Legations, all of them except the Persian Legation, although the Ottoman Government was not here and never has been.
Between the little Golden Horn and the great green Sea of Marmora, a bold peninsula curls out to Seraglio Point. Here, within the five-mile wall which encloses its landward side, lies Stamboul to which Galata and Pera bear the same cultural and historical relationship as Yonkers bears to New York. Indeed, one could ignore Galata and Pera as negligible suburbs of foreigners were it not that by the slow expansion of the Capitulations through the centuries, these small foreign suburbs have slowly turned the capital upside down until the Mudros armistice in 1918 finally ushered the Anglo-French command into Pera in possession of complete authority. Here in Stamboul was the seat of the Ottoman Government and here are the greatest monuments of Islam. The broad peninsula on which Stamboul lies is tipped with the great shrines of Islamic culture, its sky-line is pierced with the minarets of its mighty mosques, of Ayiah Sophia, Ahmedieh, Valideh, Bayazid, Suleimanieh and Mohammed II.
Here in Stamboul also, in the small Greek suburb of the Phanar at the head of the Golden Horn, was the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the head of the Rûm community in the old Empire. The old Byzantine Empire had lost its territorial basis in 1453, but it had remained in the political capital of Islam as an ecclesiastical, political and commercial force centering at the Phanar. The Patriarch himself had become an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Ottoman Government and was appointed by the Ottoman Minister from a list of three candidates proposed by the Holy Synod. Relations between the Caliph-Sultan and the Patriarch remained generally peaceful even after the Old Greeks secured their independence in the 1820’s, and there was no appreciable Greek nationalism in the Rûm community until the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 called upon Moslems and Christians alike to give up their dividing community institutions and assume the equal rights and the equal duties of Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman nation. That call, accompanied by the opening of the Parliament at Constantinople, brought Greek nationalism from Old Greece into the Ottoman Rûm community, and the Balkan Wars widened the breach which was opening between the Ottoman Government and the Phanar. It produced so difficult a situation that an agreement was finally reached in 1914 between the Old Greek and the Ottoman Governments for an exchange of minorities, but the outbreak of war suspended its operation. Until the spring of 1916 the Ottoman Government, in view of the neutrality of Old Greece, refrained from any steps against its Rûm community, but when the French command at Salonica imposed the Venizelos Government on Athens and brought Old Greece into the war as an enemy, the Ottoman Government took immediate steps to deport its Rûm communicants along the coast of Asia Minor out of the range of Allied naval activity. Like the great Armenian deportations of 1915, these Greek deportations were military in their origin but they were far better controlled throughout their course than the former had been.