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ARMENIA IN MODERN TIMES 315
Armenia received an area on the map embracing about 127,000
square kilometres. This was a good deal less than what
had originally been contemplated ; but it would have
been sufficient for the Armenians. Unfortunately, however,
the Turco-Armenian territories in question were still in
Turkish occupation. The Allies did not explain how the
Armenians were to get them ; nor did they take any steps
whatsoever to carry out the new obligations they had under
taken, and secure to the Armenians the area they had given
them on paper. The whole transaction strikes one as a sorry
farce—as if the statesmen of the Great Powers took it for
granted that obligations undertaken in respect of a small
people, with no natural sources of wealth, are of no importance
if they prove inconvenient. Encouraged by their strange
indifference, Mustapha Kemal refused to be bound by the
treaty, although the legal Government of Turkey had signed
it; and he attacked the Armenians instead. The Powers
took no notice ; they had allowed the Armenians to shed
their blood in the Allied cause, and had rewarded them with
a worthless document.
With the collapse of Denikin’s " volunteer army " at the
beginning of 1920, the position in Transcaucasia was entirely
changed. On April 27, 1920, the Bolsheviks took Baku.
When the British troops were withdrawn from Batum on
July 6, 1920, Georgia and Armenia were left entirely to their
own resources in their struggle for independence. In Sep
tember of the same year the Turks advanced again from
the west. The Armenians lacked ammunition, provisions,
uniforms ; and no one helped them. The Georgians had
their hands full, and the Allied Powers, as usual, did nothing.
Kars was tåken almost without a shot being fired, and once
more there were ghastly massacres ; Alexandropol was also
tåken, the country was pillaged, and the people massacred.
Erivan escaped the same fate at the last moment by forming
a soviet and accepting an alliance with the Government at
Moscow, while the Government under Khatissian fled to the
mountains.
On December 2, 1920, the treaty of peace between the
Governments in Erivan and Angora was signed at Alexan
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