Caspian for all the Western world. Long before, it had driven the Persians from the Caspian, making a Russian lake of that inland sea, and Russian steamship lines from Baku to Enzeli, the port of Teheran, now made Batum the world's gate to the Persian capital.
From the Trans-Caucasian bridge, the Russian march toward the sea forked into two directions. The direction in which the Russian Armies of 1876 turned, was toward Alexandretta on the Mediterranean. The other direction was indicated later when a railroad was carried from Kars to the Persian frontier, whence it was to be continued when requisite to Tabriz and Teheran. This might have exposed the Persian Gulf to Russia, but the Government of India had already made the Gulf more British than the Mediterranean. The Gulf had become a land-locked British lake whose narrow door-way into the Indian Ocean was dominated by the potential British naval base of Bunder Abbas. If Russia had succeeded in reaching the Gulf through Persia, a Russian port on its shores would have been imprisoned by Bunder Abbas, as the Russian Black Sea ports were already imprisoned by Constantinople and the Russian Baltic ports by the Sound. For the time being, the Russian Trans-Caucasian railhead on the north-west frontier of Persia awaited events.
East of the Caspian, however, a century of Russian advances down across the Moslem populations of Central Asia had brought the Russian frontiers all the way down to Persia and Afghanistan. Russian rule throughout this vast area had been as thoroughly consolidated under Russian provincial
