Turks take Batum

On 14 April 1918 Ottoman troops took Batum, the most important port of Transcaucasia on the Black Sea, the terminus of the railway from Tiflis and Baku. Russia had taken the town from Turkey forty years earlier, after the war of 1877–1878, and had made it a fortress and a port through which Caucasian oil was exported. According to the British historians of the Caucasian wars W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, and most more recent studies, the Turks attacked Batum in the morning and the fortress surrendered the same day. The Turkish press announced the victory over the following days. The British chronology of the war gives the date as 15 April.

The ultimatum

Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Soviet Russia undertook to withdraw from the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum. The Transcaucasian authorities in Tiflis did not recognise the treaty and had been negotiating with the Turks at Trebizond since 14 March. The Turks were losing patience. On 6 April an ultimatum arrived from Constantinople demanding the evacuation of the disputed districts by 10 April. The head of the Transcaucasian delegation, the Georgian Menshevik Akaki Chkhenkeli, was ready to give way. He asked only that Batum be left to Transcaucasia, since without it the region lost its access to the sea, and when the Turks refused he agreed to negotiate on the Brest terms. According to Allen and Muratoff, on 10 April acceptance of the ultimatum was sent from Tiflis; according to other sources, that day the government recalled the delegation from Trebizond. Events had in any case slipped out of control. On 12 April the Turkish commander of the troops approaching Batum demanded the surrender of the fortress and its surroundings by the following day at the latest.

The Georgians did not want to give up the town without a fight. The head of the Transcaucasian government, Evgeni Gegechkori, argued that Batum could easily be defended, and Irakli Tsereteli made a fiery speech in the Transcaucasian Seim in favour of defending the town and rejecting the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Armenians had long been in favour of fighting the Turks. Only the Azerbaijani deputies, reluctant to make war on fellow Muslims, were against. The Seim rejected the ultimatum, and from 14 April Transcaucasia, which had until then not considered itself a party to the war, was formally at war with the Ottoman Empire. Tsereteli and Noe Zhordania left at once to organise the defence.

Capitulation

It was already too late. On 14 April units of the Ottoman 37th Caucasian Division, supported by irregulars of the Laz and Adjarians, attacked Batum. According to Allen and Muratoff, within a few hours the fortress commandant decided to capitulate. About 3,000 soldiers of the garrison, including 600 officers, were taken prisoner. Russian and Soviet studies state that there were as many as ten to twenty thousand soldiers and about a hundred guns in the fortress, and that the town council itself dissolved the Bolshevik defence committee and chose a delegation to receive the entering Turkish troops. The port was handed over almost without a fight. The rest of the Georgian corps fell back to positions between Kobuleti and Ozurgeti, known from the fighting in the Crimean and Russo-Turkish wars.

In the Ottoman Empire the capture of Batum was greeted with euphoria. Together with Kars and Ardahan, the town belonged to the “three sanjaks” lost in 1878, which were remembered in Constantinople as Alsace and Lorraine were in France. Newspapers wrote of “the recovery of Batum”, and within a few days politicians and journalists arrived there. According to the French historian Étienne Forestier-Peyrat, Enver Pasha himself soon toured the coast, visited Trebizond and Batum and proclaimed the liberation of the three sanjaks. Streets were renamed: Dondukov-Korsakov Street became 3rd Army Street, and Petrograd Street became Constantinople Street.

The loss of Batum shook Tiflis. The Georgians, who had until then most strongly opposed concessions, concluded that the only way out was to proclaim the independence of Transcaucasia and resume negotiations. Batum remained in Turkish hands until the end of the war. In May it was here that a new peace conference met, at which the Turks demanded much more than at Brest.