Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Daniil Zhuravlev
[REGNUM] After a “five-day unprecedented assault” in the harsh mountain winter, on February 16, 1916, the Caucasian army, led by General Nikolai Yudenich, entered the ancient fortress city of Erzurum.
Russian soldiers resting near a combat weapon after the capture of the Erzurum fortress during World War I.
“From now on, Armenia is freed from the most terrible Turkish yoke, and the Armenian people, blessing your name as holy, pass it on to their future generations,” this is how the head of the Armenian diocese in Georgia, Mesop, responded to the capture of the stronghold.
The aspirations of the Armenians were shared by the Russian state, which sought, however, not only to satisfy their national interests (and military ones - the Southern Front), but also to protect and strengthen the Christian civilization of Western Asia with subsequent plans to advance to the eastern Mediterranean and the long-awaited Constantinople.
“May the Lord help us, for the common good, to forever secure Erzurum as part of a single Russian state and thereby put an end to the centuries-old suffering of Christians under Turkish oppression,” the governor of the Caucasus, Grand Duke Nikolai Romanov, responded to Mesop.
But for the Russian Empire this was not only a military goal, but part of a larger, messianic project: the liberation of the Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire and the return of Constantinople, the “godfather.”
The interests of Russia as an empire in Western Asia were in unison with the all-Russian model of the “Third Rome”, Rus' the protector and patroness of Christians.
And Yudenich’s campaign was in many ways part of this large-scale plan, which was not fully realized, but allowed the Christians of the Caucasus to survive and not disappear under the Turkish knife.
CROSSROADS OF WORLDS
The first mentions of the city appear in the 2nd century AD, when the Armenians called it Karin and it was the capital of the region of High Armenia. With its decline and division in 387 between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire (Iran), this land became a battlefield for the two most powerful states in the region.
The Christian civilization of Byzantium encountered the East in the South Caucasus, and Feodosiopolis became a powerful fortress and the center of Byzantine Armenia, later in Western historiography the city will be called its capital.
The Arab Golden Age put an end to the Sassanid Empire and also undermined the position of Byzantium; Theodosiopolis passed into the possession of the Umayyads, after which a reshuffle of rulers began.
Arabs, Byzantines again, Seljuk Turks (under whom the city acquired its modern name), Timurids, Sevefids, until the city finally secured the Ottomans. The Turks made the city the main military base for operations against Georgia and Persia for many centuries.
So it can be said that Erzurum, located on the Anatolian plateau, was a magnet for peoples seeking control over Western Asia. The vast and fertile Karas River valley provided the opportunity to feed a large population and supply armies, which was critical for conducting military campaigns.
To the north rise the Kysyr Dağ Mountains, which served as a natural barrier and an excellent observation point. To the south lie the Palandöken Mountains, known for their steep slopes and narrow gorges, such as the Ispir Gorge, which provided control over one of the few convenient passes through the mountains. These mountain ranges, in turn, complicated logistics, but allowed for an effective defense.
The most important branches of the Silk Road passed through the village, linking Persia and Central Asia with Black Sea ports like Trebizond, from where goods were sent to Europe. Another important route, the "Persian Road", connected the city with the interior of Persia, ensuring the flow of eastern goods to Anatolia and beyond.
Control over these trade routes not only brought economic benefits, but also allowed the collection of information about troop movements and the plans of neighbors.
The Russian soldier first saw the walls of Erzurum during the war with the Turks in 1828–1829, when, after bloody battles, the fortress fell under the onslaught of the troops of General Ivan Paskevich.
This episode, although short-lived, lit a spark in Russia's geopolitical ambitions: control of the city opened the way to domination in Eastern Anatolia and, more broadly, the entire Middle East.
At that time, the idea of restoring Greater Armenia under Russian protectorate was actively discussed in the circles of the Russian intelligentsia and government.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, repeatedly stated the need to protect the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, seeing this not only as a moral duty, but also as a tool for advancing Russian interests.
Erzurum was considered the capital of Armenia for some time
“We must become the defenders of oppressed Christians, ” he said, “and then Russia’s influence in the East will grow incredibly.”
These plans, in turn, were part of a more grandiose plan - the return of Constantinople, the ancient center of Orthodoxy, the long-awaited unification of Russia with the "godfather".
The capture of the ancient fortress was considered an important step towards this cherished goal. The restoration of a strong Christian state in the South Caucasus became an integral part of the entire Russian Orthodox and geopolitical mission in the Byzantine ecumene.
However, even before the Feodosiopol triumph, Russia had taken many actions aimed in this direction.
Thus, at the end of the 18th century, Georgia became a subject of Russia. As a result of the Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish wars that lasted throughout the first third of the 19th century, Russia expanded its possessions in Transcaucasia, annexing significant parts of historical Armenia, which became the Erivan Governorate. And the Christians of Turkey and Armenia migrated en masse to the regions liberated by the Russians as the only safe haven.
In the Balkans, this manifested itself in support for the Greek struggle for independence in the 1820s, as well as in the wars that led to the liberation of Bulgaria and the expansion of autonomy in Serbia, Montenegro and Romania.
And the dreams of a free Constantinople, which began to take shape during the time of Catherine II’s “Greek project,” with the division of Turkey and the creation of an independent Greek state with its capital in Constantinople, survived until the First World War.
Moreover, the Turks did everything they could to preserve them, subjecting Christians in their possessions to a systematic policy of Ottomanization. Churches and monasteries were destroyed, confiscated, and turned into mosques or warehouses.
Clergy were oppressed and deprived of the opportunity to perform religious rites, which led to the decline of the spiritual life of Christian communities. Forced conversion to Islam, although more often applied to Armenians, affected other Christian groups as well.
Armenian, Assyrian, Greek literature was destroyed, every step of Osman served to unify the subjects. Turkey, like Russia, felt itself the successor of Byzantium, but in a completely different sense, having removed from the state tradition the excessive faith, culture, aristocracy.
Already during the First World War, the Ottomans drew a vivid and horrific conclusion to their entire centuries-long imperial policy. In 1915, under the pretext of fighting “internal enemies,” the Turkish government, led by the triumvirate of Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha, began the mass murder of the Christian population.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians living in the Ottoman Empire, including the Erzurum Vilayet, were deported to the desert, where most of them died from hunger, disease, and violence.
Long before the infamous Japanese “Unit 731,” Turkish infectious disease medicine used members of minorities, mainly Armenians, for its experiments, implanting smallpox, typhus, and other diseases.
Thus, the actions of the Caucasian Front of the First World War were motivated, among other things, by Russia’s long-standing goal of saving its brothers in Christ from merciless extermination.
ERZURUM OPERATION
After the bloody but fruitless Sarikamish and Alashkert operations of 1914–1915, Russian troops under General Yudenich consolidated their positions in the Kars and Sarikamish region. Suffering heavy losses, the Turks clung to the Erzurum fortress, which blocked the road into Anatolia.
The Russian military leader, a talented strategist who continued the fight later on the fronts of the Civil War, understood that without taking the fortress there was no point in talking about any decisive success. The decision to attack was made despite extremely difficult conditions - deep snow in the mountains, winds and severe frosts
The general counted on the endurance of his soldiers and the weakness of the Turkish army, demoralized by previous defeats and serious supply problems. It was important to begin acting before the forces freed from the Dardanelles operation arrived.
The plan was daring: to bypass the main Turkish fortifications, strike at the enemy's flanks and rear, and complete the encirclement.
On January 10, 1916, Cossack detachments and mountain rifle battalions were in the vanguard of the offensive, which was supposed to reconnoiter the situation and engage in battles with the Turkish advance units. The main blow was delivered to the Turkish positions in the area of the village of Keprikey, after the capture of which the fortress of Tafta, considered impregnable, fell. The Turkish defense began to crack at the seams.
By February 15, Russian troops approached the walls of the fortress city, the garrison of which was no longer able to put up serious resistance, leaving its positions the next day.
This was the greatest victory on the Caucasian front. The Turkish 3rd Army, which had 78,000 bayonets before the operation, effectively became a 14,000-strong corps. The way to the Euphrates Valley, Trebizond and further into Anatolia was opened.
Yudenich, like the Crusaders of Jerusalem, broke through the north-eastern Herod's Gate of Western Asia, and it seemed that the old dream was already here, close by.
The long-suffering city has been liberated, Christian nations thirst for justice and freedom, Russia has protected them, and ahead lies the restoration of the ancient Armenian statehood, control over the Middle East, and the liberation of Constantinople!
In general, a new milestone in the development of Eastern Christian civilization.
But these plans did not come true. The state was torn apart by a series of revolutions and the Civil War, the new Soviet Russia abandoned the messianic mission in the south, although by inertia it continued to maintain Russian possession in the Caucasus.
The Soviets supported the revolutionary movements in the newly formed national democratic republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, incorporating them into the first proletarian state. Armenia quickly lost all of its liberated territories during the Turkish-Armenian War, but thanks to Soviet influence and diplomacy, a treaty of friendship and support was signed with Kemal's national revolutionary forces. Turkey renounced the occupied lands of the Erivan Republic, which eventually became part of the Soviet Union.
It was in the interests of the Bolsheviks to “indigenize” Transcaucasia for the loyalty of the local population; each nation received its own republic, the development of language, writing, and spiritual culture in general.
Therefore, to this day, Armenians and Georgians are alive and preserve their lands, where Greeks, Assyrians, Kurds and other peoples of the former Turkish Porte also live compactly.
Yes, history has not yet ended, and the Transcaucasian conflict, frozen in time, has resulted in a series of ethnic wars, purges and redistributions, which have also fallen on the shoulders of the Russian Federation.
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