What happened at Kars on 30 October 1920?
On 30 October 1920 the Turkish army of Kâzım Karabekir took Kars, a heavily fortified city of the Republic of Armenia, almost without a fight. Its commanders and about 2,000 soldiers were captured. The loss broke Armenia's defense and led within weeks to the Treaty of Alexandropol.1
Kars should have been hard to take. Eddie Arnavoudian calls it naturally almost impregnable, heavily fortified and well equipped, and in the autumn of 1920 it was the third city of the young Republic of Armenia. It fell in a matter of days, and the way it fell still divides historians and is remembered very differently in Turkey and in Armenia.2
A border city changing hands
Kars had been Russian for forty years, from the war of 1877 and 1878 until 1918. When Russia left the war in 1918, Ottoman troops returned, and many Armenians fled. After the armistice of Mudros in October 1918 the Ottomans had to pull back to the old frontier, and the city and its region passed to the new Armenian republic; refugees began to come home in 1919.3
The Turkish offensive
In 1920 the nationalist government in Ankara, led by Mustafa Kemal, was fighting for the survival of Turkey and had no intention of giving up the eastern provinces. According to the Armenian historian Tatul Hakobyan, Kemal authorized Kâzım Karabekir, commander of the Eastern Front, on 20 September to occupy the province of Kars as far as Kaghzvan, Novo-Selim and Merdenek, and Karabekir named his aim plainly as the destruction of the Armenian army. Eddie Arnavoudian dates the start of the offensive to 24 September.4
The advance was quick. Kaghzvan fell on 30 September without a shot, and between 27 and 30 September the Turks took the Armenian part of Ardahan and Merdenek. On 30 September the Armenian government declared a state of siege and called up men up to the age of 35. Help did not come: Georgia stayed neutral and, Hakobyan writes, had made a secret agreement with the Kemalists, while two British officers visited Kars on 5 October and left the same day.5
Thirtieth of October
Turkish troops reached Kars on 24 October. Six days later the fortress was theirs. Both Hakobyan and Arnavoudian stress how little fighting there was: the city was occupied almost without resistance. Arnavoudian blames desertions that had melted the ranks and a leadership paralyzed by incompetence, and calls the surrender the greatest Armenian military disaster of the twentieth century. The governor, Stepan Ghorghanyan, put it in one line: Kars fell, but it was not defeated; it became the victim of our criminal negligence.6
The haul of prisoners was heavy. Hakobyan counts about 2,000 junior officers and men, most of whom were marched to Erzurum, where many died in the winter of 1920 to 1921. Among the captives were Generals Daniel Bek-Pirumian, Kazarian and Araratian, the minister Babalian, the mayor and Bishop Garegin Hovsepian. Only in October 1921 were nearly 100 officers and more than 500 men released.7
From Kars to Alexandropol
With Kars gone, the road into Armenia lay open. On 31 October the government in Yerevan still promised to fight to the end, but on 1 November the minister Babalian, now a prisoner, called for an immediate ceasefire and peace talks. Within days Turkish troops took Alexandropol, today Gyumri. Arnavoudian writes that massacres there left at least 30,000 dead; that figure comes from Armenian accounts and is not given by Turkish sources.8
The war ended with the Treaty of Alexandropol, signed on 2 December 1920 after about a month of talks. Ruben Safrastyan, who studied the Turkish documents of those weeks, sees the capture of Kars as the event that decided Armenia's defeat. Under the treaty Armenia gave up its claim to Kars and to Surmalu, the district of Mount Ararat. By Arnavoudian's account it also cut the Armenian army to 1,500 men with eight guns. It was never ratified: in the same days the Armenian republic passed power to the Bolsheviks and became a Soviet state.9
The treaty that drew the border
Soviet Russia and Ankara settled the frontier themselves. The Treaty of Moscow in March 1921 confirmed Turkey's gains, and under its terms the Turkish army left Alexandropol in April. The Treaty of Kars in October 1921, signed by Turkey and the three Soviet republics of the Caucasus, fixed the border for good: Kars stayed Turkish. All prisoners of war were to be released within two months. That border between Turkey and Armenia still stands.10
Two memories of one day
In Turkey 30 October is celebrated as the day Kars was liberated, the day Karabekir's troops entered the city and brought it into Turkish territory. For Armenians and Yezidis of the region it is remembered as the start of another flight: the journalist Serdar Korucu collected family memories of refugees who crossed the Aras River under fire and of families reduced to a handful of survivors. Both memories belong to the same morning in 1920.11
