"Peasants of Mesopotamia! The English have declared your country to be independent; but 80,000 English soldiers are stationed in your country, are robbing and plundering, are killing you and are violating your women.

"Peasants of Anatolia! The English, French, and Italian Governments hold Constantinople under the mouths of their cannon. They have made the Sultan their prisoner, they are obliging him to consent to the dismemberment of what is purely Turkish territory, they are forcing him to turn the country's finances over to foreign capitalists in order to make it possible for them better to exploit the Turkish people, already reduced to a state of beggary by the six-year war. They have occupied the coal-mines of Heraclea, they are holding your ports, they are sending their troops into your country and are trampling down your fields.

"Peasants and workers of Armenia! Decades ago you became the victims of the intrigues of foreign capital, which launched heavy verbal attacks against the massacres of the Armenians by the Kurds and incited you to fight against the Sultan in order to obtain through your blood new concessions and fresh profits daily from the bloody Sultan. During the war they not only promised you independence, but they incited your merchants, your teachers, and your priests to demand the land of the Turkish peasants in order to keep up an eternal conflict between the Armenian and Turkish peoples, so that they could eternally derive profits out of this conflict, for as long as strife prevails between you and the Turks, just so long will the English, French, and American capitalists be able to hold Turkey in check through the menace of an Armenian uprising and to use the Armenians as cannon-fodder through the menace of a pogrom by Kurds.

"Peasants of Syria and Arabia! Independence was promised to you by the English and the French, and now they hold your country occupied by their armies, now the English and the French dictate your laws, and you, who have freed yourselves from the Turkish Sultan, from the Constantinople Government, are now slaves of the Paris and London Governments, which merely differ from the Sultan's Government in being stronger and better able to exploit you.

"You all understand this yourselves. The Persian peasants and workers have risen against their traitorous Teheran Government. The peasants in Mesopotamia are in revolt against the English troops. You peasants in Anatolia have rushed to the banner of Kemal Pasha in order to fight against the foreign invasion, but at the same time we hear that you are trying to organize your own party, a genuine peasants' party that will be willing to fight even if the Pashas are to make their peace with the Entente exploiters. Syria has no peace, and you, Armenian peasants, whom the Entente, despite its promises, allows to die from hunger in order to keep you under better control, you are understanding more and more that it is silly to hope for salvation by the Entente capitalists. Even your bourgeois Government of the Dashnakists, the lackeys of the Entente, is compelled to turn to the Workers' and Peasants' Government of Russia with an appeal for peace and help.

"Peasants and workers of the Near East! If you organize yourselves, if you form your own Workers' and Peasants' Government, if you arm yourselves, if you unite with the Red Russian Workers' and Peasants' Army, then you will be able to defy the English, French, and American capitalists, then you will settle accounts with your own native exploiters, then you will find it possible, in a free alliance with the workers' republics of the world, to look after your own interests; then you will know how to exploit the resources of your country in your own interest and in the interest of the working people of the whole world, that will honestly exchange the products of their labour and mutually help each other.

"We want to talk over all these questions with you at the Congress in Baku. Spare no effort to appear in Baku on September 1 in as large numbers as possible. You march, year in and year out, through the deserts to the holy places where you show your respect for your past and for your God—now march through deserts, over mountains, and across rivers in order to come together to discuss how you can escape from the bonds of slavery, how you can unite as brothers so as to live as men, free and equal."

From this summons the nature of the Baku congress can be imagined. It was, in fact, a social revolutionist far more than a nationalist assembly. Of its 1900 delegates, nearly 1300 were professed communists. Turkey, Persia, Armenia, and the Caucasus countries sent the largest delegations, though there were also delegations from Arabia, India, and even the Far East. The Russian Soviet Government was of course in control and kept a tight hand on the proceedings. The character of these proceedings were well summarized by the address of the noted Bolshevik leader Zinoviev, president of the Executive Committee of the Third (Moscow) International, who presided.

Zinoviev said:

"We believe this Congress to be one of the greatest events in history, for it proves not only that the progressive workers and working peasants of Europe and America are awakened, but that we have at last seen the day of the awakening, not of a few, but of tens of thousands, of hundreds of thousands, of millions of the labouring class of the peoples of the East. These peoples form the majority of the world's whole population, and they alone, therefore, are able to bring the war between capital and labour to a conclusive decision....