The Treaty of Kars (Turkish: Kars Antlaşması, Russian: Карсский договор, tr. Karskii dogovor, Georgian: ყარსის ხელშეკრულება, Armenian: Կարսի պայմանագիր, Azerbaijani: Qars müqaviləsi) was a peace treaty that established the common borders between Turkey and the three Transcaucasian republics of the Soviet Union (today the independent republics of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan). The treaty was signed in the city of Kars on 13 October 1921 and ratified in the Armenian capital Yerevan on 11 September 1922.
Signatories of the Treaty of Kars included representatives from the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, which in 1923 would declare the Republic of Turkey, and from the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian Soviet republics with the participation of the Russian SFSR. The latter four parties would become constituent parts of the Soviet Union after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and the December 1922 Union Treaty.
The treaty was the successor treaty to the earlier Treaty of Moscow of March 1921. Most of the territories ceded to Turkey in the treaty were acquired by Imperial Russia from the Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. The only exception was the Surmali region, which had been part of the Erivan Khanate of Iran before it was annexed by Russia in the Treaty of Turkmenchay after the Russo-Persian War of 1826–28. The treaty was signed by the Turkish Provisional Government Representative General Kâzım Karabekir, MP and Commander of Eastern Front Veli Bey, MP Mouhtar Bey, and Ambassador Memduh Şevket Pasha, Soviet Russian Ambassador Yakov Ganetsky, Soviet Armenian Minister of Foreign Affairs Askanaz Mravyan and Minister of Interior Poghos Makintsyan, Soviet Azerbaijani Minister of State Control Behboud Shahtahtinsky, and Soviet Georgian Minister of Military and Naval Affairs Shalva Eliava and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Financial Affairs Aleksandr Svanidze. The Treaty of Kars reaffirmed the terms of the earlier Treaty of Moscow concluded in 1921 between the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and the Russian SFSR. It defined the boundaries between the new Turkish Republic and all three Transcaucasian republics. The Kars treaty provided for the territory of the former Imperial Russian Batum Oblast to be divided. The southern half of the former oblast, largely correspondent to the Artvin Okrug with the city of Artvin, would be annexed to Turkey. The northern half, largely correspondent to the Batum Okrug with the strategic port city of Batum, would become part of Soviet Georgia as the Adjar ASSR (present-day Adjara). The treaty required that the region be granted political autonomy due to the largely Muslim local population and that it implement "an agrarian system in conformity with its own wishes."
The Treaty of Kars カルス条約
