support among the Muslim and Russian unemployed. By February 1920, the Bolshevik Party had 4,000 members in Baku and Tiflis, who were openly agitating in the streets and urging Moscow to send in the troops. The Azeri army was much too weak to put up any serious resistance against the 70,000 troops of the Eleventh Red Army then moving south towards Azerbaijan through the Terek and Dagestan regions. Most of its senior staff, made up of Turks and Georgians, had been infiltrated by the Bolsheviks. But it was Turkey's acquiescence which sealed the conquest of Azerbaijan. By March 1920, when British forces occupied Constantinople, Kemal Ataturk's nationalists were ready to agree to the Soviet take-over of the Caucasus in order to secure Moscow's aid for the Turkish independence movement against Britain. The Caucasus would thus become a channel for the shipment of Soviet weaponry into Turkey. Kemal agreed to start military operations against Armenia to help bring this about. The alliance with Turkey enabled the Reds to win a sizeable fifth column of Turkic-Muslim support in Azerbaijan during their invasion. The Turkish officers of the Azeri army welcomed the northern conquerors, naively believing that they had no intention of ending the independence of Azerbaijan and that their aim was to help the pan-Turk movement. On 28 April the Red Army entered Baku without armed resistance. No one was prepared to defend the Azerbaijan nation. Ord-zhonikidze and Kirov, the leaders of the Caucasian Bureau established by the Central Committee in Moscow to Sovietize the Caucasus, arrived the next day and began a reign of terror. Several leaders of the national government were executed and uprisings in the Azerbaijani countryside were brutally put down.93
Turkey's involvement was equally vital in the Soviet conquest of Armenia. The whole identity of this tiny and embattled nation was defined by its fear and hatred of the Turk. The Dashnak leaders relied upon this to keep the country united in the face of overwhelming difficulties which it confronted after the declaration of Armenian independence in May 1918. The country was overcrowded with refugees from Anatolia who had fled from the Turkish massacres and this placed a huge strain on the economy. Then there were the bitter
territorial disputes with Georgia in the north and Azerbaijan over Nakhichevan, Zangezur and the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh.* Unlike its two neighbours, Armenia had no foreign allies. Britain, in particular, supported Azerbaijan against it. It had always preferred to deal with 'gentlemen Turks' than with 'swarthy Christians', as Arnold Toynbee put it in a biting critique of Whitehall's policies.94 Britain, after all, was the greatest colonial power in the Muslim world. Isolated internationally and surrounded by hostile powers, it was perhaps natural for the Dashnaks to appeal to Armenian nationalism. They promised to build a new Armenian Empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian. As the first step towards this Armenian forces occupied eastern Anatolia and carried out a series of revenge massacres against the Turkish population. It was a foolish provocation — Kemal's nationalists were bound to fight back — and one can only conclude that the Dashnaks either greatly underestimated Turkish strength or, through their own xenophobia, were temporarily deprived of their senses. Perhaps both.
A war between Turkey and Armenia was just what the Bolsheviks needed. Their own organization in Armenia was minuscule — at the First Party Conference in Erevan only a dozen people turned up — so a Red invasion was not feasible. In May 1920, shortly after the Eleventh Army had occupied Baku, the Bolsheviks in Kars staged a coup in the hope of sparking a Red invasion to help the 'revolutionary masses', but this was easily suppressed and Lenin, who was more concerned with Poland at this stage, instructed Ordzhonikidze to hold off. But six months later, in November 1920, with the Armenians on the brink of a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Turks, Lenin ordered the Reds to march on Erevan. As they did so, the Soviet diplomatic mission in the Armenian capital presented the Dashnak government with an ultimatum to surrender power to a Revolutionary Committee, which was following the Red troops from Azerbaijan. The Dashnaks complied, seeing surrender to the Soviets as a lesser humiliation to defeat by the Turks. They could resist neither. On 29 November the Armenian Soviet Republic was declared. 'Thus one more Soviet Republic,' Ordzhonikidze cabled to Moscow. The Dashnaks entered a coalition with the Bolsheviks but were soon persecuted by their Russian 'allies' and forced into exile, along with many other Armenian nationalists and intellectuals. Meanwhile the Reds carried out a ruthless campaign of requisitioning, carrying off train-loads of food and booty to Russia. The zeal of the new regime was such that
* The Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is still the subject of disputes today, was a summer-pasture ground for the Azeri nomads. Armenia claimed the region in 1918. There were Armenian settlements there, from which many of the nation's leading intellectuals had come, and so, like Mount Ararat, the region became a symbol of Armenia. The Armenian government tried to stop the Azeris from coming into the region by setting up border guards. This resulted in bitter local fighting. Both the Soviets and the British favoured giving Karabakh to the Azeris.
even beehives and barbers' instruments were expropriated in the name of the Friendship of the Peoples.95
The fall of Armenia left Georgia surrounded by the Reds. Of the three Caucasian nations, this was the most viable as an independent state. The Georgians had a clear sense of their own national history and culture, a large native intelligentsia, and in the Mensheviks a genuine national leadership. During its first six months of independence, from May to November 1918, Georgia had the protection of the Germans, and after that of the British. The Menshevik government, led by Noi Zhordaniia, modelled itself on the German Social Democrats, putting statesmanship before social revolution. This was a reverse of the Mensheviks' dogma which had prevented them from taking power in 1917. But with 75 per cent of the vote in the elections to the National Assembly there was simply no other national party.
Land reform was the basis of their power. By breaking up the larger farms and estates, owned increasingly by Armenians, they won the support of the Georgian peasants, who were allowed to buy most of the land at democratic prices. The land reform consecrated the smallholding peasant as the embodiment of the Georgian nation. It forged a synthesis of national and class solidarity — the Georgian peasants and impoverished nobles against the Armenian bourgeoisie — which enabled the Menshevik government to enjoy two years of relative stability.
Only the ethnic minorities, the Ossetians and Abkhazians, with their demands for self-government, caused serious difficulties. Their high-handed treatment by the government in Tiflis, which was not immune to petty chauvinism, gave the Bolsheviks a real base of support. It was here, among the poor tribes of the northern Caucasus, that they built up their military organization for the subversion of independent Georgia. The Ossetian rebels were trained by the Bolsheviks in Vladikavkaz, just across the border in Russia, and sent across the mountains into Georgia. Within Georgia itself, the Bolsheviks had almost no support. The tiny Georgian police force had no difficulty in suppressing the Bolshevik leadership. In May 1920, when the Tiflis Bolsheviks tried to stage a coup to persuade the Eleventh Red Army (then in Baku) to launch an invasion, it was easily put down. Lenin ordered the Reds to pull back from Georgia: troops were needed on the Polish Front and, at least as Lenin later claimed, Georgia was not yet ripe for Sovietization. On 7 May, the Soviet Government signed a treaty with Georgia recognizing its independence and pledging not to interfere in its internal affairs.96
Here the Georgian Mensheviks made a fatal mistake. In a secret clause they agreed to legalize the Bolshevik Party in Georgia. Hundreds of activists were released from jail. No doubt the Mensheviks rationalized this as the price of guaranteeing Georgia's independence. But, as their oldest foes, they should
have known better than to trust the Bolsheviks. The Georgian Bolsheviks now became a fifth column of the Red Army based in Baku. Strikes and revolts against the government were planned from the Soviet Embassy in Tiflis with the aim of sparking an invasion. Lenin remained opposed to the military option, favouring a more gradual process of revolutionary subversion. Like Trotsky, he was concerned by the possible reaction of the British and the Germans, with whom the Bolsheviks were hoping to trade, not to mention the reaction of Turkey. The Western Socialist leaders had hailed Georgia as the only truly socialist country in the world. Karl Kautsky and Ramsay MacDonald had made a pilgrimage to Tiflis during 1920 and returned to Europe full of praise. There were also a practical problem. Kamenev, the head of the Red Army, warned that the troops of the Eleventh Red Army were too exhausted for a new offensive. But Ordzhonikidze was impatient for the liberation' of his native Georgia and, without Moscow's
