British occupy Merv

On 1 November 1918 the troops of the anti-Bolshevik government in Ashkhabad and an accompanying Indian detachment entered Merv, today the city of Mary in Turkmenistan. The date is given by F.J. Moberly’s British official history, and following it by the British chronology of the war, which speaks of the “reoccupation of Merv by Russian and British forces”. The phrase is something of an exaggeration. Nobody had to capture the town, because the Bolsheviks had left it several days earlier. According to Russian studies the Reds withdrew from Merv during the night of 28–29 October, and the Transcaspians and Indians entered an empty town.

This was the fruit of the Battle of Dushak. On 14 October the 19th Punjabis and troopers of the 28th Light Cavalry, at the cost of heavy losses, routed the main Bolshevik forces from Tashkent there. A few days later the Reds abandoned Dushak and fell back to Tejen, and on 23 October further, to Merv. They began removing the remaining stores from the Kushka fortress on the Afghan border. Charles Ellis, an officer of the British mission in Meshed, writes that in the end the threat of being outflanked was enough to make them flee Merv, although in reality it was little more than a patrol action. The Bolsheviks fled towards Chardzhui on the Amu Darya, burning the railway bridges behind them, and the Transcaspian troops set off after them.

For the government in Ashkhabad the return of Merv meant a great deal. The irrigated oasis on the Murghab, lost in August, supplied most of the food for the capital of the Transcaspian region, and famine threatened there before the winter. Ellis notes, however, that the matter was not simple. During the occupation the Bolsheviks had taken the Turkmens’ stores. The inhabitants of the oasis were embittered and now did not want to sell their produce for increasingly worthless money, and the Ashkhabad government did not dare to carry out requisitions.

Just then the Government of India forbade British and Indian troops to advance beyond the Merv oasis. Ellis links this to the tense situation in Afghanistan, the lack of reinforcements and considerations of higher policy. The Transcaspians took it as proof that the British cared only about the defence of India. With the Armistice of Mudros the Turkish-German threat, which was the reason General Wilfrid Malleson had come to Transcaspia in the first place, had disappeared. Ellis believed that if the defeated Bolsheviks could have been pursued with larger forces, it would probably have been possible to take the bridge and the town of Chardzhui.

The commander of the Transcaspian troops, Oraz Serdar, pressed on alone, with armoured trains, infantry and artillery. In mid-November, after the accidental explosion of an ammunition wagon, his troops panicked and fell back about 160 kilometres, to Annenkovo station. The front came to a halt there for the winter. Merv, however, remained in Transcaspian hands, and in the following weeks the British stationed artillery and infantry from the former Dunsterforce there, in Ashkhabad and in Krasnovodsk.