Russians abandon Van

On 3 August 1915 the last Russian ambulance columns set out from Van, followed and flanked by crowds of Armenian refugees. After only two and a half months of Russian rule, the city, which in the spring had survived the siege by Ottoman troops, was once again left undefended. According to the classic history of the wars on the Caucasian frontier by W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, the last Russian units left Van on 4 August. The British chronology of the war recorded the evacuation under 3 August, the day on which most of the inhabitants left the city.

Defeat at Malazgirt

The retreat was the result of a lost battle north of Lake Van. In mid-July the Russian IV Caucasian Corps of General Oganovsky was advancing in the valley of the Eastern Euphrates, and its left flank had reached as far as Tatvan on the western shore of the lake. The Turks, however, had assembled considerable forces in the area under the command of Abdülkerim Pasha, and from 20 July they struck at the scattered Russian units. On 26 July the Russians gave up Malazgirt, and their retreat turned into flight. South of the lake General Trukhin, who with Cossacks and Armenian volunteer detachments had been approaching Bitlis, had to turn back. On 29 July he reached Van.

Van, lying far to the south of the new front line, could not be held. The commander of the Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, was in any case planning to shorten the front and strike at the Turks from another direction. According to the account of the American missionary doctor Clarence Ussher, on Saturday 31 July General Nikolayev, commanding in Van, announced that all the inhabitants of the province, foreigners included, should flee. According to Turkish sources, the Russians gave the Armenians three days to prepare.

Exodus

The city emptied within a few days. The roads leading north, towards the Russian border, were crowded with ox-carts, pack donkeys, cattle and people on foot carrying their belongings on their backs. Peasants from the surrounding villages burned their fields before leaving, so that the grain would not feed the approaching Ottoman army. The leaders of the Armenian self-government, which had ruled Van under Russian protection since May, also left, among them the governor Aram Manukian. Ussher, ill with typhus, left the city on 3 August with a group of American missionaries in Russian ambulances.

The refugees had 160–240 kilometres ahead of them, alternately across mountains and dry plains, in the August heat, with little water. Most went by way of Bergri, north-east of the lake, and the passes north of it towards Iğdır and Erivan. Some of the refugees from the southern part of the province fled across the Persian border towards Salmas. The columns were attacked by Kurds while still on the road, and people died of exhaustion, thirst and disease.

How many there were

The figures are estimates. The British collection of documents on the fate of the Armenians, compiled in 1916 by James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, speaks of a quarter of a million Armenians from Van, Alashkert and the surrounding area. According to a report from Etchmiadzin quoted there, by 13 August about 203,000 refugees from Van itself and its surroundings had arrived in Russia, and Ussher wrote that in that week over 270,000 people from the vilayets of Van, Bitlis and Erzurum crossed the border. Many of them died on the way or in the first weeks after arriving in the Caucasus, mainly of dysentery and starvation.

For the Armenians of Van it was the second catastrophe of the year. In the spring they had been saved by the arrival of the Russians, but at the same time the Armenian genocide was under way in almost the whole of Anatolia: deportations and massacres, from which escape with the Russian troops was for many the only chance of survival. Ottoman troops soon entered the ruined city.