ABSTRACT
End of the First World War: the Soviet Union and Turkey The end of the First World War effectively destroyed the power centres in the Near East by excluding tsarist Russian, German and Ottoman empires from the political scene for the foreseeable future. With all of Britain’s wartime rivals defeated, and the Bolsheviks fighting for their own existence in the Russian Civil War, the most likely solution appeared to be for Britain to impose ‘order’ as the victorious force in the lands stretching from the Caspian in the East to the European hinterland of the Black Sea Straits in the West. These vast lands, which had been partly under the sovereignty of the former Russian Empire and partly under the Ottoman Empire, suddenly became an area of British interest.
