Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In the course of the conflict of February–March 1921, some 5,500 Red Army soldiers were killed and approximately the same number of Georgian fighters also lost their lives. Meanwhile, over the course of 17–19 March 1921, Georgian forces at Batumi forced the Turks out of the city, as they allowed Soviet forces in and as the Georgian government fled into exile aboard an Italian ship. Subsequently, under Article V of the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921), Turkey abandoned its claim to Batumi (whose Muslim population was to be granted autonomy within the Georgian SSR) in exchange for territorial concessions in Artvin, Ardahan, and Kars. Resistance to the Sovietization of Georgia continued, however, notably in the Svanetian uprising, the Kakhet–Khevsureti rebellion, and the national uprising of summer 1924 (the August Uprising), organized by the Committee for the Independence of Georgia, while in Moscow disputes over events in Georgia within the Bolshevik Party (particularly between Stalin and Trotsky, supported by the ailing Lenin) became acute in 1922 (the “Georgian affair”).

On 20 June 1989, at the height of the era of glasnost′, a special commission to investigate the events of 1921 was established by the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian SSR. It concluded: “The [Soviet Russian] deployment of troops in Georgia and seizure of its territory was, from a legal point of view, a military interference (intervention) and occupation aimed at changing the existing political regime.” It is now also established that, following the suppression of the 1924 uprising, almost 13,000 Georgians were executed, and a further 20,000 were exiled to Siberia.

SOVIET–MONGOLIAN TREATY OF FRIENDSHIP (5 November 1921). Signed at Moscow, following the establishment of the pro-Soviet Mongolian People’s Republic, this treaty formalized relations between the two contracting parties. Both agreed to suppress organizations hostile to their partner operating on their territories, to facilitate trade and the exchange of ambassadors and consuls, and so forth. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, in addition, “responding to the wise measures of the People’s Government of Mongolia in the matter of organizing telegraphic communications not dependent on the rapacious tendencies of world imperialism,” was contracted to transfer to Mongolian ownership all Russian telegraphic installations on Mongolian territory. It was also agreed that a special commission would be appointed to determine the frontier between Soviet Russia and Mongolia. By the Mongolian reckoning, the treaty was signed “on the 6th day of the 10th moon of the 11th year of the ‘Exalted by the Many’ [i.e., the 11th year of the reign of the Bogdo Khan].”

SOVIET–PERSIAN TREATY OF FRIENDSHIP (26 February 1921). This agreement between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Persia (signed for the Soviet government by G. V. Chicherin and L. M. Karakhan, and for Persia by Ali Gholi Khan Mochaverol Memalek) was one of a series of international agreements signed at this time by the Soviet government to win international recognition and thereby (it was hoped) increase its security as the civil wars wound down. (Others included the Anglo–Soviet Trade Agreement and the Soviet–Turkish Treaty of Moscow, both dated 16 March 1921, and the Soviet–Afghan Treaty of 28 February 1921.)