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uncoiled, the new regime in Russia was fighting for itslife and did well to regain the vital Baku oilfields andmost of Transcaucasia. The key fortress of Kars, butnot Batum, the terminus of the pipe-line and railwayfrom Baku, was ceded to Turkey (March 1921), and thesame peace treaty laid the ground for an entirely newrelationship between the Turkey of Mustapha Kemal andthe Soviet Russia of Lenin, who had always denounced theaggressive designs of tsarist imperialism and preachedthe liberation of Asiatic peoples from the thrall of theWest (cf. p. 308).The Soviet-Turkish treaty of March 1921 indicatedSoviet ideas as to the future of the Straits. They wereto be open to the commerce of all countries, but theregulations as to passage of warships were to be decidedupon by international agreement between the statesbordering the Black Sea only, without prejudice to theindependence of Turkey and the security of Constantinople.These were mere hopes. The actuality provedto be a settlement that could scarcely be more unfavourableto the Soviet Union, namely the treaty ofLausanne ^923) concluded between Turkey and theWestern powers in the face of violent Soviet protests.The treaty of Lausanne left Constantinople and theStraits to Turkey, but demilitarized them under internationalsupervision. This solution ran counter to thealmost invariable Russian view in the past that it wasbetter to have fortifications at the Straits, even thoughin Turkish hands, which might at least deter or stopintruders, rather than to have nothing barring the wayto the Black Sea. In view of Soviet naval weakness thisold view that the primary essential was to prevent entryinto the Black Sea rather than to secure Russian exit wasbound to be uppermost. Thus no comfort was foundin the fact that the treaty of Lausanne gave Sovietwarships of all types full right of passage through theStraits in peace or war, if Turkey were neutral. Forat the same time it gave substantially the same right tonon-Black Sea states, subject only to the condition thatin peace-time no one such state should send into theBlack Sea a force larger than the Soviet navy; a limitation288