Turks retake Trebizond

On 24 February 1918 units of the Ottoman Third Army entered Trebizond, the most important port of north-eastern Anatolia. Less than two years earlier, in April 1916, the Russians had taken it. Now there was no one left to defend it. The Russian Caucasus Army had disintegrated after the revolution and its soldiers had gone home. According to the British historian W. E. D. Allen and the Russian émigré Paul Muratoff, the Turkish advance along the coast met no resistance. The real fighting was taking place at that time far inland, near Erzincan.

An armistice no one guarded

Since the autumn of 1917 there had been no shooting on the Caucasus front. On 18 December (5 December Old Style) the commander of the Russian Caucasus Front, General Mikhail Przhevalsky, with the consent of the Transcaucasian authorities, concluded an armistice at Erzincan with the commander of the Third Army, Vehip Pasha. The Transcaucasian Commissariat in Tiflis, which included Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, did not recognise the Bolsheviks, but nor had it declared complete separation from Russia. After the armistice Russian troops began to leave the occupied Turkish lands en masse. From then on the front was held only by a few Georgian units and a newly formed Armenian corps. According to Allen and Muratoff, at the beginning of 1918 it numbered at most about 16,000 infantry, a thousand cavalry and a few thousand militia, scattered over a vast area from Erzincan to Van.

The Turks meanwhile were resting and replenishing their forces. Despite the British advances in Palestine and Mesopotamia, the government of Enver Pasha kept the Third Army in reserve for the Caucasus. After the revolution in Russia it saw a chance of regaining the 1878 frontier and even of expanding towards the Turkic peoples of Transcaucasia. According to Allen and Muratoff, Vehip Pasha had 45,000–50,000 men and 160 guns, a force entirely sufficient against the Armenians and Georgians. Pretexts were supplied by news from the occupied lands. Vehip bombarded the Russians with protests against the plundering by soldiers returning home and against the massacres of Muslims of which he accused Armenian units. Between the Armenians who had survived the genocide of 1915 or had returned in the wake of the Russian army, and the Kurds of the Dersim mountains, bloody clashes occurred almost daily.

Erzincan and Trebizond

On 12 February Turkish infantry attacked an Armenian outpost at Çardaklı on the road to Sivas. A second column came up from Kemah and on 13 February stood about 11 kilometres from Erzincan. According to Turkish tradition the town returned to Ottoman hands on that very day. Colonel Morel, a former Russian military attaché in Tokyo, who held Erzincan with about two thousand Armenian volunteers, had to order a retreat to Erzurum. From 14 to 24 February his column marched through snow and frost, shielding thousands of terrified refugees from Kurdish raids. According to Allen and Muratoff, 40–50 per cent of the soldiers and refugees suffered frostbite. Turkish divisions occupied Erzincan and Mamahatun behind them, and part of their forces entered Bayburt.

At the same time the II Caucasian Corps moved off along the coast of the Black Sea and in the valleys to the south of it. Trebizond had lived through the winter in chaos. Russian soldiers mutinied and plundered the town, and officers commandeered local ships to escape. Order was restored by the Greek Metropolitan Chrysanthos, who according to some accounts acted as governor under the Russian occupation. When the last Russians had sailed away, the Turks entered the town. By the end of February they had also taken Gümüşhane. Neither the government in Constantinople nor the new authorities of Transcaucasia formally regarded themselves as parties to a war. The Turks claimed that they were simply returning to their own provinces.

For the Armenians of the recovered lands this meant mortal danger. Without waiting for the Ottoman troops, the inhabitants of the areas around Erzurum, Hınıs, Van and the Eleşkirt valley asked to be evacuated beyond the old Russian frontier, and a considerable part of the young Armenian army had to be dispersed to cover their departure. Erzurum was defended by a detachment of the famous partisan commander Andranik Ozanian. He was unable to hold it, and on 12 March the Turks took the city. The day before the capture of Trebizond, on 23 February, the Transcaucasian Seim convened in Tiflis and began deliberating on the terms of peace with Turkey. In mid-March the negotiations opened in Trebizond itself. Meanwhile the peace treaty signed by the Bolsheviks at Brest on 3 March obliged Russia to withdraw its troops also from the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum, lost by Turkey in 1878.