Russian diplomatic policy toward Turkey has likewise undergone important changes. Imperial Russia had been a bitter opponent of Imperial Germany in the Bagdad Railway project. Imperial Russia had conspired with Great Britain and France to bring about the collapse and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Imperial Russia was the “traditional enemy” of the Turk. But Imperial Russia was destroyed in 1917 by military defeat and social revolution. Regardless of the pronunciamentos of bourgeois imperialists like Professor Milyukov, revolutionary Russia was certain to look upon the Near Eastern question in a new light. Political and economic disorganization incidental to the war and the revolution would have made it imperative for any government in Russia to curtail its imperialistic pretensions. And with the advent of Bolshevism the outcome was certain. A government which was anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist 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]