defense held and Germany's Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme was left in the air.
The Russian Armies by this time had not only advanced deeply into the eastern provinces but had occupied their zone in northern Persia in sufficient force to link with the British in Mesopotamia. A very few of them had even been permitted to travel to Basra and below it to gaze upon the blue and British waters of the Persian Gulf.
But on March 12, 1917, the Czar abdicated.
On May 16, Kerensky's Republican Cabinet was set up at Petrograd, and the British Foreign Office entered at once into cordial relations with it.
On June 11, the French deposed Constantine at Athens, the Venizelist Government which was imposed on Old Greece entered the war on the side of the Allies, and ever since the failure of the British Dardanelles campaign, there had been an Allied Army based on Salonica, the key to Constantinople.
In July, Kerensky ordered General Baratoff to withdraw the Russian Armies from Persian soil. They melted away both from Persia (with the exception of a small force of die-hards who continued to hold Teheran hoping that the trouble at Petrograd would soon blow over), and from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
On Sept. 30, General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had thrown up his command of the Sixteenth Army in disgust after a break with Falkenhayn over the recapture of Bagdad, urged Enver Pasha to make the Russian collapse the occasion of withdrawal from the war. The disruption of the country's economic life and the constant drainage away
