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