As we have already mentioned, from the beginning of the war the Russian
bureaucracy tried on the one hand by various false promises to win over
the sympathy of the Armenians, while on the other it tried by every
means to keep the Armenian military forces away from the Caucasian
front. Only seven battalions of Armenian volunteers were kept on the
Caucasian front. As we have already seen, those few battalions even, in
1914 and 1915, rendered to the Russians invaluable services, twice
saving the right and left wings of the Russian army from an unavoidable
catastrophe by their heroic resistance; but the Russian official
communiqués do not contain one line in which the battalions of Armenian
volunteers are even mentioned. The same silence was maintained by the
Russian communiqués concerning the heroic resistance of the Armenians at
Van, and with regard to the assistance which the Armenian volunteers
rushed to that city. This was the policy of the government of Russian
Czarism from the beginning of the war to the end of its existence,--to
avoid in every way speaking about the Armenians and Armenia. The
Russian press was even forbidden to speak about the massacres carried on
in Turkish Armenia at the hands of the Turkish government. Therefore,
when the capture of Erzeroum in 1916 made the immediate co-operation of
the Armenian volunteers unnecessary to the Russians, the
commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army at the time, Grand Duke Nicolas
Nicolaevitch, ordered the disbanding of all the battalions of the
Armenian volunteers. Besides this amazing treatment of the Armenian
military forces, the Czar's government removed from the Caucasus before
the war all the Armenian officers and replaced them by generals
(manifestly anti-Armenian in spirit) from the Russians, Georgians, and
other Caucasian races. The object of this move was to enable the
government to check the national aspirations of the Armenians, and to
give it a plausible opportunity at the end of the war to take over the
Armenian vilayets without gratifying the demands of the Armenians for
autonomy.
[Illustration: The civilian Armenians of Urfa who defended themselves
against the Turks and the Kurds in July, 1915.]
From the third month of the war, it became clear to us that the Russian
government pursued unswervingly its Lobanoff-policy toward the
Armenians. What was that policy? In 1896, when an English correspondent
interviewed the Russian minister of foreign affairs, Count Lobanoff
Rostowsky, and asked him why Russia did not occupy the Armenian vilayets
of Turkey in order to save that Christian people from the Turkish
massacres, the Russian minister cynically replied: "We need Armenia, but
without the Armenians." It is worth while, then, to give here a few
actual facts which reveal this fiendish policy pursued by the Russian
government toward a people which was the only one of all the peoples of
the Caucasus and the Near East to help the Russian army by its
unreserved co-operation, and which was the only factor that saved the
Caucasian front from an unavoidable catastrophe in 1914 and 1915.
ONE. Every time that the Russian army was forced to retreat from the
recaptured parts of Turkish Armenia, no precautionary measures were
taken in order to save the local Armenian inhabitants from the
inevitable massacres. For example, in December, 1914, when the Turks
advanced as far as Sarikamish and Ardahan and forced the central Russian
army to retreat from the neighborhood of Alashkert and Bayazid, the
commander of the local forces, General Abatzieff (an Acétine Moslem who
had joined the Greek church) strictly ordered the local Armenian
inhabitants, nearly 32,000 in number, not to stir from their places, and
in order to have his command accurately carried out he placed mounted
Cossack patrols in the plains of Alashkert lest the Armenian peasants
should emigrate toward the Russian frontier, in which direction the
Russian army with its transports had already been moving since December
13. Three days later the second battalion of the Armenian volunteers,
which had been fighting in the first-line positions for over two months
under the command of the same general, returned to the army headquarters
for a well-earned rest, and there only it heard about the serious
happenings already mentioned, and the extraordinary attitude assumed by
the Russian general. The Armenian peasants from every side appealed to
the Armenian volunteers with tears in their eyes and begged to be saved
from an inevitable massacre. The commander of the Armenian volunteers,
Armen Garo, and his brave assistant, Khetcho, who died like a hero in
July, 1915, on the shores of Lake Van, went immediately to General
Abatzieff and asked him to revoke his order and permit the Armenian
inhabitants to move with the army toward Igdir. The hostile general
refused their request, his answer being that, if the people stirred from
the place, he would be unable to remove the army transports soon enough.
When he heard this answer, Armen Garo immediately telegraphed to Igdir
and appealed to the commander-in-chief of the fourth army, General
Oganowsky, and in touching words asked for his intervention. On the
following day only, thanks to the intervention of General Oganowsky, the
Armenian volunteers received permission to organize the retreat of the
Armenian inhabitants of the plains of Alashkert toward Igdir and to
defend them from the attacks of the Kurds. During the seven days that
the retreat lasted the Armenians lost only 400 persons, and most of
those on account of the severe cold. Another example of this hostile
treatment of the Armenians by the Russian authorities might be
mentioned,--the retreat from the Van district in July, 1915. There
General Nikolaeff for eight continuous days deceived the Armenian
leaders and made them remain idle (telling them every day that he would
not retreat under any circumstances, and that therefore it was entirely
needless to remove the people), until behold, one day, July 18, he
suddenly sent for the mayor of Van, Aram, and the commander-in-chief of
the Armenian volunteers, Vartan, and informed them that he had received
orders to retreat immediately, but in order to make it possible for the
people to prepare for departure, he would wait until the 20th of the
month. Thus the Armenian leaders were forced to remove in two or three
days nearly 150,000 people of the Van region, and if those three
battalions of Armenian volunteers had not been there to protect the
people from Kurdish and Turkish raids, the loss of life during the
journey would have been tenfold more than it actually was. Whereas, if
the Russian general had not been so deceitful in his behavior but had
given an opportunity of seven or eight days to organize the retreat, it
would have been possible to direct the people to Erivan without the loss
of a single life. The Armenians suffered a loss of 8,000 to 10,000 men,
women, and children during the retreat.
[Illustration: KHETCHO
The commander of the cavalry corps of the Armenian volunteers, who was
killed in July, 1915, near Bitlis.]
TWO. When Turkish Armenia was almost wholly emptied of its Armenian
inhabitants, due to these successive retreats, the Russian government
raised all sorts of barriers before the refugees to prevent them from
returning to their former homes when the Russian army recaptured the
Armenian vilayets. For example, in 1916-1917, scarcely 8,000 to 10,000
Armenians were permitted to go back and inhabit the region of Van; the
rest were compelled to stay within the borders of the Caucasus as
refugees. Toward the latter part of 1916, even among Russian
governmental circles there was talk of transferring to Siberia nearly
250,000 Turkish Armenian immigrants who had sought refuge in the
Caucasus, because it was objected that no available lands existed there
for them. Russians considered it a settled question that even after the
war the Turkish Armenians would not be permitted to return to their own
homes.
On the other hand, the same Russian bureaucracy resorted to every means
to win the sympathy of the Turkish and Kurdish inhabitants remaining in
Armenia. With that purpose in view, in the spring of 1916, on behalf of
the ministry for foreign affairs at Petrograd, Count Chakhowsky with his
own organization established himself in Bashkalé (a city in the district
of Van) and distributed nearly 24,000 rifles to the Kurds of the
neighboring regions. It is needless to say that not long after those
very rifles were used by the Kurds against the Russian army both in
Persia and Armenia. This amazing action of Count Chakhowsky was taken so
openly that it was even known to ordinary Russian soldiers, who were
extremely enraged against the Count, a fact which accounts for the
murder of the same Count Chakhowsky in Persia by Russian soldiers, when
the discipline of the Russian army was relaxed on account of the
revolution which took place in the spring of 1917.
THREE. While the Russians were preventing the Turkish Armenian
immigrants from returning to their own lands, they, in the spring of
1916, commenced to organize in Turkish Armenia colonies of Cossacks. The
Russian administration sent special propagandists to the northern
Caucasus to persuade the Cossacks living there to move to Armenia, and
during that same year 5,000 of them, under the name of agricultural
battalions, were already cultivating the plains of Alashkert, lands
which rightly belonged to the Armenians. This last act of the Russian
government was so revolting that even the liberal organs of the Russian
press complained of the government for such inhuman proceedings, while
in the Russian Duma two Russian representatives, N. Milukoff and A.
Kerensky (both of whom played such great roles the following year in the
downfall of Czarism), publicly criticised the government of the Czar for
its base treatment of the Armenians. Documentary evidence relating to
this disgraceful action of the Russian government, which incensed the
ire of prominent liberals in the Duma, may be found in the July 28,
1916, issue of the _Retch_, the organ of the Constitutional Democrats in
Russia. In order to characterize this criminal action of the Russian
bureaucracy against the Armenian people who were martyred for the allied
cause, it may be worth while also to cite the following details:
In the month of July, 1915, the Armenian inhabitants of Erzeroum, nearly
25,000 in number, were likewise deported by the Turkish government,
leaving all their real and personal property at the disposal of the
Turks. The governor of the place, Tahsin Bey, arranged a scheme by means
of which every Armenian before leaving the city could store his goods
and household furniture (with the name of the owner on each article) in
the cathedral, with the apparent purpose of returning them to their
owners after the war, but with the real purpose of preventing so much
riches from falling into the hands of the Turkish mob, in order to
appropriate them later for the government. The cathedral of Erzeroum was
packed with the goods of the exiled Armenians when the Russians captured
the city in February, 1916. Ordinary human decency demanded that the
Russians should not have touched the articles stored in that sacred
edifice, especially as they belonged to the very martyred people whose
professed sympathies for them (the Russians) were the cause of their
being exiled to the deserts of Mesopotamia. But the fact is that the
commander of the Russian army, General Kaledine himself, set the example
of desecration; he personally entered the cathedral first, and selected
for himself a few car-loads of rugs and sundry valuable articles. Then
the other officers of the Russian army followed his example, and in a
few days half of the contents of the church was already pillaged before
the representative of the Armenian Committee, Mr. Rostom, after repeated
telegrams, was able to receive an order from Tiflis to stop the plunder.
In that same summer of 1916, the Buxton brothers (representatives of the
Armenian Committee of London) and other English Armenophiles came to
Armenia. When they witnessed all these disgraceful particulars they
could not believe their own eyes, so monstrous was the attitude of the
Russian government toward the Armenians. The English and American
friends of Armenia consoled them by saying that on their return they
would have the privilege of explaining this state of affairs to their
government and that they would doubtless do all in their power to
protect the rights of the Armenians. These were the circumstances under
which the Armenian people joined its fate to the allied cause from the
very beginning of the war, and, having made colossal sacrifices during
three whole years, was almost crushed to death in the claws of Turkish
and Russian despotism.
[Illustration: The mounted troops of the second battalion of Armenian
volunteers of the Caucasus, November, 1914.]
In that same sorrowful summer of 1916 the Armenians heard the news that
England, France, and Russia had signed an agreement concerning Armenia.
According to that agreement Russia was to take over the three vilayets
of Turkish Armenia, Erzeroum, Bitlis, and Van, while southern Armenia
and Cilicia were to be put under the guardianship of France. One must be
an Armenian in order to feel the depth and intensity of the bitterness
and disappointment which filled the hearts of all the wandering
Armenians from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia. Every Armenian asked himself
or herself: Was this to be our recompense?
In those very days (September, 1916) one of the agents of the German
government in Switzerland approached Dr. Zavrieff (one of the
representatives of the Armenian Committee of that place) with the
following proposal:
"You Armenians made a great mistake when you joined your fate to
that of the Allies. It is time for you to rectify your mistaken
policy. Your dreams with regard to the historic Armenia are
unrealizable. You may as well accustom yourselves to that fact, and
before it is too late you will do better to join the fate of your
people with the German policies, and remove the remnants of the
Armenian people to Mesopotamia, where the Germans will put at the
disposal of the Armenians every means which will enable them to
create for themselves a new and a more fortunate fatherland under
their (German) immediate protection."
In order to persuade his Armenian opponent, the German agent constantly
reminded him of the agreement (between England, France and Russia), and
especially of the hostile attitude of the Russians up to that time
towards the Armenians. The news of this German proposal reached the
Caucasus in December of the same year. It was made the subject of
serious consultation among the Armenian leaders. The writer of these
lines was present at those conferences, and his impression was this: Had
there not been that superhuman adoration (so peculiarly Armenian) which
every Armenian has for his ancestral home and recollections so
sanctified by blood, the German proposal would very likely have been
accepted by the Armenians at that psychological moment when their hearts
were overflowing with bitterness and disappointment toward the Russian
government,--a member of the allied nations. The outcome of those
conferences was that we decided to continue our former policy toward the
Entente, in spite of the base behavior of the Russians towards us, and
at the same time to invite the serious attention of our great Allies of
the west to our hopeless situation.