Bolsheviks take Merv

According to the British chronology of the war, on 18 August 1918 Bolshevik troops occupied Merv, today the city of Mary in Turkmenistan. The exact day cannot be established. F. J. Moberly’s British official history states only that after the battle of Bairam Ali the Bolsheviks drove the Transcaspian government’s troops “through Merv to Dushak”, and Soviet sources write in general terms that in August the Reds took Bairam Ali and Merv. The town may therefore have fallen into their hands a few days earlier than the chronology records.

Merv lay in an oasis on the Murghab, on the edge of the Karakum desert, and was the largest centre of the eastern part of the Transcaspian Oblast. In July it had joined the uprising against the authority of Tashkent. Pavel Poltoratsky, the Turkestan government’s commissar who had come for talks with the insurgents, was detained there by the workers and shot together with his companions on the night before 22 July. Now the town returned to the Bolsheviks. For the government in Ashkhabad it was a heavy blow. Charles Ellis, a British officer who took part in the fighting in Transcaspia, stresses that the irrigated oasis of Merv supplied most of the food for the capital of the oblast. The Bolsheviks also gained the whole railway line from Merv to the fortress of Kushka on the Afghan border. Its garrison had not gone over to the insurgents, and the Kushka arsenal held guns, ammunition and other stores which allowed the Tashkent forces to be better armed.

The defeated Transcaspian troops halted only at Dushak, and then fell back to Kaakha station. In those weeks the inhabitants of the Merv and Tejen oases suffered looting by both sides, and in addition the raids of the Turkmen chieftain Aziz Khan, who, taking advantage of the confusion, attacked Tejen and plundered it, and on news of the Bolsheviks’ approach withdrew across the Afghan border.

The next day, 19 August, General Wilfrid Malleson signed an agreement in Mashhad with an envoy of the Transcaspian government. The British promised arms, money and the participation of their soldiers in the fighting, in return for the right to use the port of Krasnovodsk, a ban on the export of cotton and the destruction of the railway should the Turks or Germans approach along it. Malleson was already bringing up reinforcements from the East Persia Cordon: further companies of the 19th Punjabis, and later also the 28th Light Cavalry. About 500 Punjabis under Lieutenant-Colonel Knollys crossed the border and at the end of August took up position near Kaakha alongside the Transcaspians. Merv remained in Bolshevik hands until the autumn. Transcaspian troops entered it only on 1 November, after the Reds had lost the battle of Dushak.