Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/338

 could not sanction Russian "spheres of interest" or Russian territorial aggrandizement at the expense of Turkey. A government which preached "self-determination of peoples" and "no annexations" could not confirm the secret treaties of 1915-1916. A government which was engaged in repelling foreign invasion and in resisting counter-revolutionary insurrections had to keep within strict limits its military liabilities. Therefore, Soviet Russia speedily foreswore any intention of occupying Constantinople, declared unreservedly for a free Armenia, and proceeded forthwith to withdraw its troops from Persia. These measures were considered "a complete break with the barbarous policy of bourgeois civilization which built the prosperity of the exploiters among the few chosen nations upon the enslavement of the laboring population in Asia," as well as an expression of Bolshevist Russia's "inflexible determination to wrest humanity from the talons of financial capital and imperialism, which have drenched the earth with blood in this most criminal of wars."[2]

Turkish Nationalist resistance to the Treaty of Sèvres met with a sympathetic response on the part of Bolshevist Russia, and on March 16, 1921, the Government of the Grand National Assembly and the Government of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic signed at Moscow a treaty to confirm "the solidarity which unites them in the struggle against imperialism." By the terms of this treaty Russia refused to recognize the validity of the Treaty of Sèvres or of any other "international acts which are imposed by force." Russia ceded to Turkey the territories of Kars and Ardahan, in the Caucasus region, as a manifestation of full accord with the principles of the National Pact. The Soviet Republic, "recognizing that the régime of the capitulations is incompatible with the national development of Turkey, as