Russo-British agreement on Asia Minor

On 1 September 1916 the Russian ambassador in London, Count Alexander Benckendorff, sent the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Edward Grey, a note written in French. The Foreign Office received it the same day. In Russia, which still used the Julian calendar, it was 19 August. The note was a reply to a proposal Grey had made to Russia more than three months earlier, on 23 May. In it Benckendorff announced that His Majesty’s Government and the Imperial Government “had reached an agreement” on Russia’s future acquisitions in the Asiatic part of the Ottoman Empire.

The British chronology of the war records under this date that the Russian and British governments concluded the “Sykes-Picot” agreement on the possible partition of Asia Minor. This is a simplification, though an understandable one. The plan of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot proper, that is the division of the Arab lands, had been accepted by London and Paris in May. Benckendorff’s note, on the other hand, closed the last side of a triangle of secret agreements which British documents called collectively the “Asia Minor Agreement”, and which today is usually called the Sykes–Picot Agreement.

What the note confirmed

Benckendorff began by recalling that Grey had received from the French ambassador copies of the notes of 26 April in which the Russian government had accepted, on certain conditions, the Anglo-French plan for the creation of an Arab state or confederation of Arab states and for the division of Syria, Cilicia and Mesopotamia, “provided that the co-operation of the Arabs is secured”. In return Grey had proposed that Britain recognise the conditions that Russia had then set France. Now the ambassador listed in five points what the two sides had agreed. These were almost word for word the conditions of Grey’s note of 23 May.

Russia was to annex the regions of Erzurum, Trebizond, Van and Bitlis up to a point on the Black Sea coast west of Trebizond to be fixed later, as well as the part of Kurdistan south of Van and Bitlis, extending through Muş, Siirt and Jazirat ibn Umar to the mountains above Amadiya and the Merga Var area. The borders were defined in general terms, and the details were to be settled on the spot by a delimitation commission. Russia undertook to maintain in the new territories the concessions granted to the British by the Turks, as well as British navigation rights and the privileges of British religious, educational and medical institutions. Britain promised the same to Russian institutions in the territories that were to fall to it. The last point stated that each state annexing part of the Ottoman Empire would take over a share of the service of its debt.

The cabotage reservation

The only new element was a reservation attached to the fourth point. Benckendorff wrote that he had been authorised to state that the advantages granted in this point affected Russian legislation on cabotage, that is shipping between ports of the same state, which Russia reserved for its own vessels. This legislation, he recalled, had already led Russia to make special reservations in several treaties with other powers. In the Imperial Government’s view the matter could not be settled in advance, but it might later become the subject of a “friendly examination” by the two governments. The note did not say outright what traffic was meant, but Grey’s later reply shows that the Russians wanted to ensure that British navigation rights in the new territories did not extend to shipping between Russian ports on the Black Sea.

Changes in London and Petrograd

Much had changed in the three months since Grey’s proposal. In July Sergei Sazonov was dismissed; he had conducted the negotiations on the partition of Turkey from the start, and Russian diplomacy was taken over by the Prime Minister, Boris Stürmer. Grey himself, to reduce his workload, accepted the title of Viscount Grey of Fallodon in July and moved from the House of Commons to the House of Lords, and in the summer Lord Crewe partly stood in for him. A few days before Benckendorff’s note, on 25 and 30 August, the French ambassador Paul Cambon and Lord Crewe exchanged letters in which they corrected one word in the Anglo-French part of the agreement: the two states were no longer to “protect” but to “uphold” an independent Arab state.

The situation at the front had also changed. Erzurum and Trebizond remained in Russian hands, but at the beginning of August Mustafa Kemal’s Ottoman XVI Corps had retaken Bitlis and Muş. The Russian counter-offensive in the second half of August stopped the Turks but did not give Bitlis back to the Russians. Some of the lands that Benckendorff listed as Russia’s future acquisitions were thus again in Ottoman hands.

What came next

Grey replied only on 23 October 1916. In a short note he took note of the Russian reservation, which he called outright a matter of “grand cabotage” on the Black Sea, and agreed that it should be considered later. This note closes the collection of eleven letters which the Foreign Office put together in the spring of 1917 as the complete set of agreements on Asiatic Turkey. The agreement remained secret until November 1917, when the Bolsheviks published it along with other secret treaties of the Tsarist government and renounced Russia’s acquisitions.