On the other hand, the same Russian bureaucracy resorted to every means to win the sympathy of the Turkish and Kurdish inhabitants remaining in Armenia. With that purpose in view, in the spring of 1916, on behalf of the ministry for foreign affairs at Petrograd, Count Chakhowsky with his own organization established himself in Bashkalé (a city in the district of Van) and distributed nearly 24,000 rifles to the Kurds of the neighboring regions. It is needless to say that not long after those very rifles were used by the Kurds against the Russian army both in Persia and Armenia. This amazing action of Count Chakhowsky was taken so openly that it was even known to ordinary Russian soldiers, who were extremely enraged against the Count, a fact which accounts for the murder of the same Count Chakhowsky in Persia by Russian soldiers, when the discipline of the Russian army was relaxed on account of the revolution which took place in the spring of 1917. THREE. While the Russians were preventing the Turkish Armenian immigrants from returning to their own lands, they, in the spring of 1916, commenced to organize in Turkish Armenia colonies of Cossacks. The Russian administration sent special propagandists to the northern Caucasus to persuade the Cossacks living there to move to Armenia, and during that same year 5,000 of them, under the name of agricultural battalions, were already cultivating the plains of Alashkert, lands which rightly belonged to the Armenians. This last act of the Russian government was so revolting that even the liberal organs of the Russian press complained of the government for such inhuman proceedings, while in the Russian Duma two Russian representatives, N. Milukoff and A. Kerensky (both of whom played such great roles the following year in the downfall of Czarism), publicly criticised the government of the Czar for its base treatment of the Armenians. Documentary evidence relating to this disgraceful action of the Russian government, which incensed the ire of prominent liberals in the Duma, may be found in the July 28, 1916, issue of the _Retch_, the organ of the Constitutional Democrats in Russia. In order to characterize this criminal action of the Russian bureaucracy against the Armenian people who were martyred for the allied cause, it may be worth while also to cite the following details: