XXth Century Citizen's Atlas map of Central Asia.png|thumb|The borders of the Russian imperial territories of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand during 1902–1903.]] 
 The Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet considered that British India had been drained of troops and decided to avoid committing more troops to Persia from Europe, by sending a mission of picked men to train local recruits at Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia. The War Office undertook to send  officers and  to organise local forces and replace the Russian Caucasus Army. Another force was to be raised in north-western Persia by by Lieutenant-General W. R. Marshall, commander of the III (Indian) Corps of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force (MEF Lieutenant-General Frederick Stanley Maude); the French took responsibility for the area north of Caucasus. In Armenia, the local Christians had been sympathetic to the Russians and feared that a revival of Ottoman power would lead to another massacre. It was believed in London that they would be willing recruits and that some Russian soldiers in the region remained willing to fight, despite the Russian Revolution. 

 On 13 April 1918, the Baku Soviet Commune, a Bolshevik and Left Socialist Revolutionary (SR) faction led by Stepan Shahumyan, was established in Baku, having overthrown the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. On 26 July, the Centrocaspian Dictatorship, an anti-Soviet alliance of Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks), overthrew the Baku Commune in a bloodless coup. All the factions involved tried to gain support from about  and Austro-Hungarian former prisoners of war. Those men willing to fight tended to be sympathetic to the Bolsheviks based in Astrakhan and at Tashkent, the terminus of the Trans-Caspian railway (Central Asian Railway). German and Ottoman armies in eastern Ukraine and Caucasus sent troops and diplomatic missions to Baku and further afield. 

 ==Prelude== 
 ===Dunsterforce=== 

 [[File: