"The Royal Navy in the Caspian Sea 1918-1920" Topic

"The operations by British naval, army and air forces in support of anti-Bolshevik forces in northern Russia 1918-1919 are fairly well known, much less so are the concurrent operations in southern Russia and the Caspian Sea.

In the aftermath of the March 1917 Russian revolution and the Bolshevik coup detat of the following November the politics of the regions bordering the Caspian Sea were of labyrinthine complexity.

It could be said that the peoples to the east of the sea were divided vertically into four main ethnic groups: Muslim Azerbaijanis and related peoples, then generally (and inaccurately) known as Tartars; Georgians; Armenians; Russians. Politically these were divided horizontally into three main groupings: royalists who hoped for the restoration of Czarist rule; so called Social Revolutionaries who favoured various ill-defined forms of democracy but were united in their determination to be independent of Russia; Bolsheviks loyal to Lenins Moscow regime. Each main political group encompassed many sub-groups. Most factions controlled armies of varying degrees of reliability and effectiveness and there was an intricate and constantly changing pattern of alliances and internecine strife. For a few months there was an unstable multi-ethnic coalition government of the whole region based at Tiflis (Tiblisi) but by mid-1918 this had collapsed and Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia had declared themselves independent sovereign states and all had unstable anti-Bolveshik governments…"
Full article here
gwpda.org/naval/caspian.htm

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