Anatolia and Greece in 1920
Greece and Anatolia in 1920
The key divergence of TTL from OTL in that region remains that the Entente has stayed (more or less) together (instead of the Soviets becoming pariahs and other Powers squabbling with each other in controversial attempts at containing them): That has been and will be bad news for Turkey, generally speaking. Turkish interests were not helped by Wilson’s earlier and generally known incapacitation and replacement by Acting President Marshall, who did not share Wilson’s emphasis on national self-determination. And thus, just before his assassination, UoE president Avksentiev had signed, without much American protest, along with Damat Ferid Pasha, Eleftherios Venizelos, Vittorio Orlando (the Constantinople Conference was before the general elections) and David Lloyd George (the conference was also before Law’s “coup”), the Treaty of Constantinople. It entailed the establishment of various separate nation states on former parts of the Ottoman Empire: the Arab Kingdom of Syria, the Kingdom of Iraq, the Kingdom of the Hejaz, the Free State of Mount Lebanon, the Free State of Cilicia, and the Kurdish Free State. Neighboring states would acquire lands in which ethnically related populations lived: Greece would receive parts of Ionia and Pontus, the Armenian Federative Republic had its massive gains legalised. More territory was to come under international supervision and plebiscites would later be held in Eastern Thrace. The Powers would establish permanent military bases, particularly to secure free and open passage of the Straits, but also to maintain four other “free ports”, control Anatolian railroads and generally prevent any new insurgency to spread. The Ottoman Public Debt Administration was fully re-instated and reformed.
Well, this much I had divulged already. Here is a map which illustrates the situation:
Since the last time I discussed this region (in Updates 65 and 66), a lot has happened in Greece, Bulgaria, Albania and Anatolia. Some of the key external factors have been the UoE policy shift towards (militarily) frugal isolationsim from Avksentiev to Volsky, the replacement of David Lloyd George with Bonar Law in Britain, and the changes in Serbia and its behaviour towards its neighbours.
All three of them have strengthened the importance of Greece. While all five Great Powers want to keep the Straits open and the debt payments flowing, and the US, the UoE, the EFP and to some extent even the British (who were the only ones who undertook measures in this direction IOTL, but ITTL are less inclined to play a leading role, given their own dirty Irish laundry) want Ottoman war criminals indicted in The Hague, and at least the UoE, France and Britain have a vested interest in preventing the Ottomans from recovering so much strength as to be able to challenge their annexations, most Great Powers are not really willing to commit massive military resources to ensure that everything goes as required in order to achieve these goals. Prime Minister Bonar Law famously mused that “if I had to choose between the Anatolian Straits and the Suez, our vital imperial interests would clearly force me to prefer the latter over the former.” Vladimir Volsky’s Minister for Defense, Jan Sierada, has offered large parts of the Union’s Black Sea Fleet to the Greek for sale, and was only coerced by the Armenian FR’s delegates to the Council of the Union (who had threatened to veto otherwise absolutely consensual plans on adjudicating additional competencies over trade issues like measures and weights, which the Constitutional Assembly had not thought about, to the Union level) to significantly reduce the size of these naval sell-out plans and counterbalance them with additional land forces for the protection of the Armenian border and the maintenance of a strong force of “International Cossacks” to police the Ottoman Empire and help it in keeping down nationalist rebels. And that the US Army would not send boys to Anatolia was self-evident.
Greece, under the leadership of Venizelos, on the other hand, is very much disposed to commit these resources. Venizelos has two very good years in 1919 and 1920, with much less Greek refugees to accommodate and much more EFP help in doing so, with his army encountering much less resistance in its conquest of Ionia, and almost none when they take over Pontus from a mixed international force after a tweaked plebiscite which heavily favoured the more literate Greek population over the predominantly rural and illiterate Turks. The EFP Mandate of Eastern Thrace, which is mostly calm, will be ended on December 31st, 1920, and in the autumn of 1920, plebiscites have determined which parts of it fall to Greece and which to Bulgaria. (The option of remaining in the Ottoman Empire was only available in few selected constituencies.) Venizelos has made the “Megali Idea” come true. His popularity has only increased, but his powerbase in the military is still somewhat unsafe, given that he cannot really dispose of too many disloyal monarchist officers if he wants the Greek Army to be able to face all of its many challenges. Either way, though, the Venizelists are dominating over any opposition from both Right and Left (the latter being much weaker with less misery and displacements, too), and in spite of the electoral system which really disfavours them, their Liberal Party wins the popular vote even more clearly than in OTL in the 1920 elections and achieve a clear parliamentary majority, not least because of the Ionian and Pontic votes.
Greece does acquire some Russian ships in the end (we’ve discussed some options in the thread already) because they need to enlarge their navy significantly now that they have Ionia and Pontus to defend. They secure these gains, and because international (and especially EFP) goodwill is both available and of extreme importance to Greece, who do not want to be forced to defend themselves against resurgent Turks alone (like they did IOTL), great emphasis is placed on the prevention of massacres after the first horrible incidents in Smyrna shocked the public. Greece also commits additional troops to the international forces which aid the Ottoman government in restoring and maintaining control over its territory haunted by nationalist rebels. To recall from earlier updates: There is no Turkish Nationalist Army. There have only been rogue military officers – pretty much the same ones as IOTL, based around the Karaköl Society and strategically led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha – refusing their orders to stand down, demobilise their troops and hand over their weaponry to Entente control points, and instead trying to continue the fight in the mountainous, inaccessible hinterland. These rebels are many, and initially they can count on a solid degree of covert political support from the Ottoman Empire’s urban Turkish (and not only Turkish) elites. At the few points where they faced open battles – mostly when Entente forces were able to encircle them –, they suffered defeat after defeat, and they lost many a capable military leader in those carnages. But their strategy of choice is guerrilla resistance. As such, they have never formed a coherent political alternative to the Ottoman state. There were no Congresses of Siva or Erzurum like IOTL, and there certainly isn’t a rivalling Parliament in Ankara. There is no progressive republican nationalist agenda associated with the name of Kemal, the Hero of Gallipoli. There are only bandits hiding in villages, sabotaging bridges just when trains with cargo relevant for the Great Powers are about to pass them, and all that.
In Istanbul, Damat Ferid Pasha has stepped down as Grand Vizier after he had to sign the humiliating treaty. He is replaced by Ahmed Tefvik Pasha (who had also been his predecessor, and whom he is going to succeed again in 1920). The two represent different factions of the Ottoman elites: on the one hand the Freedom and Accord Party, envisioning a liberal monarchy in which traditional Ottoman institutions became mere labels for Western-style structures, cautious social reforms, and economic integration into Europe. On the other hand, there are more conservative elements concentrated in the higher bureaucracy and former military who saw it as the prime necessity to resist Western domination, the disintegration of the state apparatus and the military as the backbones not only of Ottoman strength but also of Ottoman identity in principle, and who tended to see conservative religious views as fundamental to this whole edifice, too. While the conservatives were less drastic in their severing all ties with the former CUP politicians and even welcomed some of them among their faction, they were nevertheless united with the Freedom and Accord Party in the realization that the CUP’s war aligment had been fatal and its genocidal policies had damaged the Ottomans’ standing in the eyes of the rest of the world unnecessarily, and thus they shared the goal of preventing a return of groups too closely linked with the CUP. Both factions were not battling each other on the streets – not only because they had common enemies there in the nationalist rebels, but also because they had very little following among the broader masses in the first place. They relied on the Ottoman institutions to pursue their goals, dislodge their rivals and further their own agenda – and both their leaders also relied on the support of the Great Powers, who soon became very aware of the fact that the needed them, too, to hold the heavy yoke they had placed on the Turkish people in place. One reason why this rivalry was not openly decided and resolved was that Sultan Mehmet was, if we want to put it positively, “above this partisan strife”. (Or one could also say, he cared very little for the whole circus of politics.) And so, like IOTL, the Lower House of Parliament dominated by the CUP was dissolved at the Entente’s behest in 1918, but unlike IOTL, new elections are held late in 1919, under Ottoman auspices, and the two rivalling factions supported by the Great Powers did their best to make sure that “dangerous forces” – by which they meant both far-right, CUP-revivalist attempts like the Renewal Party and more revolutionary, republican and socialist groups like those of Ethem Nejat and Hüseyin Hilmi at the same time – would not obtain any victory in it. Not without British and French aid, the more liberal Freedom and Accord Party (HIF) and the new-formed more conservative Ottoman Justice Party (Osmanli Adalat Firkazi, OAF) de facto found a modus vivendi, or a gentlemen’s agreement, to share the power in the new Ottoman system between each other.
Nevertheless, keeping the remaining rebels down is requiring a lot of effort. The burden on Greece is almost more than the small (and still bitterly divided) country can carry. Even France is putting greater emphasis on stabilising the Ruhr, absorbing their new colonial acquisitions, and engaging in new adventures in North Africa and China, and thus limiting itself to the pacification of their Lebanese and Cilician protectorates and Cilicia’s immediate ore-rich hinterland. UoE troops, apart from those stationed along the two Straits as part of the international forces securing their openness and neutrality – and propping up the Sultan’s feeble government in Istanbul – are concentrating on Eastern Anatolia, where the unstable new Kurdish Free State gives everyone a lot of headaches and parts of it meddle in the anti-Ottoman rebellion, too.
And so, when another bomb goes off in a church full of Armenian refugees somewhere in Anatolia, the International Security Force kindly appeals to the Italian government to step up its military presence on the peninsula. Italy’s first troops have landed in Adalia in the spring of 1919, like IOTL, but unless IOTL where it happened as a sort of gesture of defiance when Orlando was not making a bella figura in Paris, ITTL they come as part of a greater international force from the beginning. British diplomats are hinting that the Treaty of Constantinople could be re-negotiated and lands from the Meander Valley to Side, rich in minerals like chrome and agriculturally productive, being Anatolia’s prime exporting regions of figs and olive oil, could be ceded to Italy in exchange for more engagement in combatting the chauvinistic Turkish terrorists.
But things have changed in Italy since these first landings in Adalia. The kingdom has gone through a bloody failed revolution, elected a new parliament in which a broad governing coalition – the Gran Alleanza led by the President of the Senate Don Luigi Sturzo – has been formed with ambitious aims of reforming Italy’s economy, society, and political system, and now, in 1920, Serbia is threatening its Montenegrin ally, infiltrating its forces into the nominally EFP- but factually Italian-protected Republic of Albania, and annexing Mandate territory in Western Yugoslavia, threatening to become another behemoth beleaguering Italy’s Adriatic flank. Sturzo’s Liberal Minister for War, Marcello Soleri, is indeed willing to engage in Anatolia, too, and the nationalist press is cheering for Anatolian annexations which would bring Italy another step closer to the mediterranean-spanning glory of the Roman Empire.
But neither Sturzo, nor his moderate socialist and socialist-revolutionary coalition partners on the left are willing to engage in this adventure. There is no Italian minority in Anatolia to speak of, there were not even any historical precedents to legitimise their interference (if one didn’t want to go back into antiquity), and Don Sturzo was keen on learning from the Cyrenaic mistakes in the costly struggle against the Senussi which had ended in a new and less openly unequal settlement with the Muslim natives after the kingdom had spent vast resources. Protecting Catholic Croat refugees and the elected (well, not exactly in fair and violence-free elections, but still...) governments of Montenegro and Albania was one thing. (And his socialist and populist-agrarian coalition partners would add, stopping the chauvinistic tyranny which murdered politically active workers and peasants was a worthwhile effort, too.) Italian engagement in Western Yugoslavia, Montenegro and Albania was consensual, thus. Here, more resources would be devoted. But sinking endless resources – even if it was “only” colonial troops from Somalia – into Anatolia in the hopes of gaining there what one could not defend in North Africa was not. Italy would not withdraw from its international engagement in the Ottoman Empire altogether, no, but it would not multiply its troops there, either.
That left only the UoE. The Armenian government was adamant: the danger of a new murderously racist, pan-Turkic regime arising out of an instable Ottoman rump Empire was not removed yet! Before the Union could talk about deepening federal competencies, starting new infrastructural projects, legislating new frameworks for international involvement in the extraction of public natural resources etc., it would have to commit to safety on the Anatolian peninsula. Volsky might well let down his allies in Berlin and on the Balkans, if he thought that wise, Armenian Prime Minister Ohanjaniyan commented, but he would not neglect Armenia’s life insurance against another Aghed! – And so it was indeed. The Armenian blackmail was a precedent which laid bare the weakness of the central government, in the eyes of some – or the prudent preservation of each republic’s most vital interests, in the eyes of others. As its result, while elsewhere UoE troops were reduced and called home, Anatolia saw a surge in the presence of the troops which were still nicknamed “International Cossacks”, although over the course of 1919 and 1920, more and more Circassians, both from the Mountainous FR of the Northern Caucasus and from Russia, would come to serve in these units.
The key divergence of TTL from OTL in that region remains that the Entente has stayed (more or less) together (instead of the Soviets becoming pariahs and other Powers squabbling with each other in controversial attempts at containing them): That has been and will be bad news for Turkey, generally speaking. Turkish interests were not helped by Wilson’s earlier and generally known incapacitation and replacement by Acting President Marshall, who did not share Wilson’s emphasis on national self-determination. And thus, just before his assassination, UoE president Avksentiev had signed, without much American protest, along with Damat Ferid Pasha, Eleftherios Venizelos, Vittorio Orlando (the Constantinople Conference was before the general elections) and David Lloyd George (the conference was also before Law’s “coup”), the Treaty of Constantinople. It entailed the establishment of various separate nation states on former parts of the Ottoman Empire: the Arab Kingdom of Syria, the Kingdom of Iraq, the Kingdom of the Hejaz, the Free State of Mount Lebanon, the Free State of Cilicia, and the Kurdish Free State. Neighboring states would acquire lands in which ethnically related populations lived: Greece would receive parts of Ionia and Pontus, the Armenian Federative Republic had its massive gains legalised. More territory was to come under international supervision and plebiscites would later be held in Eastern Thrace. The Powers would establish permanent military bases, particularly to secure free and open passage of the Straits, but also to maintain four other “free ports”, control Anatolian railroads and generally prevent any new insurgency to spread. The Ottoman Public Debt Administration was fully re-instated and reformed.
Well, this much I had divulged already. Here is a map which illustrates the situation:
Since the last time I discussed this region (in Updates 65 and 66), a lot has happened in Greece, Bulgaria, Albania and Anatolia. Some of the key external factors have been the UoE policy shift towards (militarily) frugal isolationsim from Avksentiev to Volsky, the replacement of David Lloyd George with Bonar Law in Britain, and the changes in Serbia and its behaviour towards its neighbours.
All three of them have strengthened the importance of Greece. While all five Great Powers want to keep the Straits open and the debt payments flowing, and the US, the UoE, the EFP and to some extent even the British (who were the only ones who undertook measures in this direction IOTL, but ITTL are less inclined to play a leading role, given their own dirty Irish laundry) want Ottoman war criminals indicted in The Hague, and at least the UoE, France and Britain have a vested interest in preventing the Ottomans from recovering so much strength as to be able to challenge their annexations, most Great Powers are not really willing to commit massive military resources to ensure that everything goes as required in order to achieve these goals. Prime Minister Bonar Law famously mused that “if I had to choose between the Anatolian Straits and the Suez, our vital imperial interests would clearly force me to prefer the latter over the former.” Vladimir Volsky’s Minister for Defense, Jan Sierada, has offered large parts of the Union’s Black Sea Fleet to the Greek for sale, and was only coerced by the Armenian FR’s delegates to the Council of the Union (who had threatened to veto otherwise absolutely consensual plans on adjudicating additional competencies over trade issues like measures and weights, which the Constitutional Assembly had not thought about, to the Union level) to significantly reduce the size of these naval sell-out plans and counterbalance them with additional land forces for the protection of the Armenian border and the maintenance of a strong force of “International Cossacks” to police the Ottoman Empire and help it in keeping down nationalist rebels. And that the US Army would not send boys to Anatolia was self-evident.
Greece, under the leadership of Venizelos, on the other hand, is very much disposed to commit these resources. Venizelos has two very good years in 1919 and 1920, with much less Greek refugees to accommodate and much more EFP help in doing so, with his army encountering much less resistance in its conquest of Ionia, and almost none when they take over Pontus from a mixed international force after a tweaked plebiscite which heavily favoured the more literate Greek population over the predominantly rural and illiterate Turks. The EFP Mandate of Eastern Thrace, which is mostly calm, will be ended on December 31st, 1920, and in the autumn of 1920, plebiscites have determined which parts of it fall to Greece and which to Bulgaria. (The option of remaining in the Ottoman Empire was only available in few selected constituencies.) Venizelos has made the “Megali Idea” come true. His popularity has only increased, but his powerbase in the military is still somewhat unsafe, given that he cannot really dispose of too many disloyal monarchist officers if he wants the Greek Army to be able to face all of its many challenges. Either way, though, the Venizelists are dominating over any opposition from both Right and Left (the latter being much weaker with less misery and displacements, too), and in spite of the electoral system which really disfavours them, their Liberal Party wins the popular vote even more clearly than in OTL in the 1920 elections and achieve a clear parliamentary majority, not least because of the Ionian and Pontic votes.
Greece does acquire some Russian ships in the end (we’ve discussed some options in the thread already) because they need to enlarge their navy significantly now that they have Ionia and Pontus to defend. They secure these gains, and because international (and especially EFP) goodwill is both available and of extreme importance to Greece, who do not want to be forced to defend themselves against resurgent Turks alone (like they did IOTL), great emphasis is placed on the prevention of massacres after the first horrible incidents in Smyrna shocked the public. Greece also commits additional troops to the international forces which aid the Ottoman government in restoring and maintaining control over its territory haunted by nationalist rebels. To recall from earlier updates: There is no Turkish Nationalist Army. There have only been rogue military officers – pretty much the same ones as IOTL, based around the Karaköl Society and strategically led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha – refusing their orders to stand down, demobilise their troops and hand over their weaponry to Entente control points, and instead trying to continue the fight in the mountainous, inaccessible hinterland. These rebels are many, and initially they can count on a solid degree of covert political support from the Ottoman Empire’s urban Turkish (and not only Turkish) elites. At the few points where they faced open battles – mostly when Entente forces were able to encircle them –, they suffered defeat after defeat, and they lost many a capable military leader in those carnages. But their strategy of choice is guerrilla resistance. As such, they have never formed a coherent political alternative to the Ottoman state. There were no Congresses of Siva or Erzurum like IOTL, and there certainly isn’t a rivalling Parliament in Ankara. There is no progressive republican nationalist agenda associated with the name of Kemal, the Hero of Gallipoli. There are only bandits hiding in villages, sabotaging bridges just when trains with cargo relevant for the Great Powers are about to pass them, and all that.
In Istanbul, Damat Ferid Pasha has stepped down as Grand Vizier after he had to sign the humiliating treaty. He is replaced by Ahmed Tefvik Pasha (who had also been his predecessor, and whom he is going to succeed again in 1920). The two represent different factions of the Ottoman elites: on the one hand the Freedom and Accord Party, envisioning a liberal monarchy in which traditional Ottoman institutions became mere labels for Western-style structures, cautious social reforms, and economic integration into Europe. On the other hand, there are more conservative elements concentrated in the higher bureaucracy and former military who saw it as the prime necessity to resist Western domination, the disintegration of the state apparatus and the military as the backbones not only of Ottoman strength but also of Ottoman identity in principle, and who tended to see conservative religious views as fundamental to this whole edifice, too. While the conservatives were less drastic in their severing all ties with the former CUP politicians and even welcomed some of them among their faction, they were nevertheless united with the Freedom and Accord Party in the realization that the CUP’s war aligment had been fatal and its genocidal policies had damaged the Ottomans’ standing in the eyes of the rest of the world unnecessarily, and thus they shared the goal of preventing a return of groups too closely linked with the CUP. Both factions were not battling each other on the streets – not only because they had common enemies there in the nationalist rebels, but also because they had very little following among the broader masses in the first place. They relied on the Ottoman institutions to pursue their goals, dislodge their rivals and further their own agenda – and both their leaders also relied on the support of the Great Powers, who soon became very aware of the fact that the needed them, too, to hold the heavy yoke they had placed on the Turkish people in place. One reason why this rivalry was not openly decided and resolved was that Sultan Mehmet was, if we want to put it positively, “above this partisan strife”. (Or one could also say, he cared very little for the whole circus of politics.) And so, like IOTL, the Lower House of Parliament dominated by the CUP was dissolved at the Entente’s behest in 1918, but unlike IOTL, new elections are held late in 1919, under Ottoman auspices, and the two rivalling factions supported by the Great Powers did their best to make sure that “dangerous forces” – by which they meant both far-right, CUP-revivalist attempts like the Renewal Party and more revolutionary, republican and socialist groups like those of Ethem Nejat and Hüseyin Hilmi at the same time – would not obtain any victory in it. Not without British and French aid, the more liberal Freedom and Accord Party (HIF) and the new-formed more conservative Ottoman Justice Party (Osmanli Adalat Firkazi, OAF) de facto found a modus vivendi, or a gentlemen’s agreement, to share the power in the new Ottoman system between each other.
Nevertheless, keeping the remaining rebels down is requiring a lot of effort. The burden on Greece is almost more than the small (and still bitterly divided) country can carry. Even France is putting greater emphasis on stabilising the Ruhr, absorbing their new colonial acquisitions, and engaging in new adventures in North Africa and China, and thus limiting itself to the pacification of their Lebanese and Cilician protectorates and Cilicia’s immediate ore-rich hinterland. UoE troops, apart from those stationed along the two Straits as part of the international forces securing their openness and neutrality – and propping up the Sultan’s feeble government in Istanbul – are concentrating on Eastern Anatolia, where the unstable new Kurdish Free State gives everyone a lot of headaches and parts of it meddle in the anti-Ottoman rebellion, too.
And so, when another bomb goes off in a church full of Armenian refugees somewhere in Anatolia, the International Security Force kindly appeals to the Italian government to step up its military presence on the peninsula. Italy’s first troops have landed in Adalia in the spring of 1919, like IOTL, but unless IOTL where it happened as a sort of gesture of defiance when Orlando was not making a bella figura in Paris, ITTL they come as part of a greater international force from the beginning. British diplomats are hinting that the Treaty of Constantinople could be re-negotiated and lands from the Meander Valley to Side, rich in minerals like chrome and agriculturally productive, being Anatolia’s prime exporting regions of figs and olive oil, could be ceded to Italy in exchange for more engagement in combatting the chauvinistic Turkish terrorists.
But things have changed in Italy since these first landings in Adalia. The kingdom has gone through a bloody failed revolution, elected a new parliament in which a broad governing coalition – the Gran Alleanza led by the President of the Senate Don Luigi Sturzo – has been formed with ambitious aims of reforming Italy’s economy, society, and political system, and now, in 1920, Serbia is threatening its Montenegrin ally, infiltrating its forces into the nominally EFP- but factually Italian-protected Republic of Albania, and annexing Mandate territory in Western Yugoslavia, threatening to become another behemoth beleaguering Italy’s Adriatic flank. Sturzo’s Liberal Minister for War, Marcello Soleri, is indeed willing to engage in Anatolia, too, and the nationalist press is cheering for Anatolian annexations which would bring Italy another step closer to the mediterranean-spanning glory of the Roman Empire.
But neither Sturzo, nor his moderate socialist and socialist-revolutionary coalition partners on the left are willing to engage in this adventure. There is no Italian minority in Anatolia to speak of, there were not even any historical precedents to legitimise their interference (if one didn’t want to go back into antiquity), and Don Sturzo was keen on learning from the Cyrenaic mistakes in the costly struggle against the Senussi which had ended in a new and less openly unequal settlement with the Muslim natives after the kingdom had spent vast resources. Protecting Catholic Croat refugees and the elected (well, not exactly in fair and violence-free elections, but still...) governments of Montenegro and Albania was one thing. (And his socialist and populist-agrarian coalition partners would add, stopping the chauvinistic tyranny which murdered politically active workers and peasants was a worthwhile effort, too.) Italian engagement in Western Yugoslavia, Montenegro and Albania was consensual, thus. Here, more resources would be devoted. But sinking endless resources – even if it was “only” colonial troops from Somalia – into Anatolia in the hopes of gaining there what one could not defend in North Africa was not. Italy would not withdraw from its international engagement in the Ottoman Empire altogether, no, but it would not multiply its troops there, either.
That left only the UoE. The Armenian government was adamant: the danger of a new murderously racist, pan-Turkic regime arising out of an instable Ottoman rump Empire was not removed yet! Before the Union could talk about deepening federal competencies, starting new infrastructural projects, legislating new frameworks for international involvement in the extraction of public natural resources etc., it would have to commit to safety on the Anatolian peninsula. Volsky might well let down his allies in Berlin and on the Balkans, if he thought that wise, Armenian Prime Minister Ohanjaniyan commented, but he would not neglect Armenia’s life insurance against another Aghed! – And so it was indeed. The Armenian blackmail was a precedent which laid bare the weakness of the central government, in the eyes of some – or the prudent preservation of each republic’s most vital interests, in the eyes of others. As its result, while elsewhere UoE troops were reduced and called home, Anatolia saw a surge in the presence of the troops which were still nicknamed “International Cossacks”, although over the course of 1919 and 1920, more and more Circassians, both from the Mountainous FR of the Northern Caucasus and from Russia, would come to serve in these units.