Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/148

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overthrew them in favor of what is now the Socialist Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Soviet Russia was no in contact with Nationalist Turkey and in the Treaty of Kars which the Turks signed on Oct. 13, 1921, with the Soviet States of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Kars and Ardahan provinces which had been wrested from the Ottoman Empire in the Russian War of 1876, were returned to Turkey, and the port of Batum was opened unreservedly to Turkish commerce.

Soviet Russia was now in contact with Persia also. Here, despite the fact that the country was occupied by the North Persia Force and the South Persia Rifles, Sir Percy Cox had been unable to assemble a Persian Parliament which would ratify the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 and in February, 1921, a Russo-Persian Treaty was signed at Moscow in which Soviet Russia abandoned all Czarist Russian claims on the Persian Government and recognized no zones of influence in the country. Meanwhile the North Persia Force maneuvered the Czarist die-hards out of Teheran and itself took over the old Cossack Division, officering it with British personnel. At the last moment, just before the North Persia Force was to retire to its base at Bagdad early in the summer of 1921, the Cossack Division marched on Teheran and installed a new Persian Government which valiantly repudiated the Anglo-Persian Agreement and proposed to share out the Persian Ministries among the Allied Governments and the United States, reserving for the British the right to appoint advisers in the Ministries of War and Finance only. But the