Alexander's armies moved into Persian territory during those same years and in 1813 constrained the Shah to renounce his pretensions to eastern Georgia and to surrender the north-eastern section of the Armenian Plateau as well as several khanates extending from Ganja and Karabakh to Kuba and Baku. 5 The peace that was established by this settlement, the Treaty of Gulistan, was short-lived. The interregnum following Alexander's death, the "Decemberist" uprising, and Moslem rebellions in Russia's newly acquired Caucasian provinces convinced Persian Crown Prince Abbas Mirza that he could regain the ceded khanates. In 1826 the Persian Army crossed the frontier demarcated in the Treaty of Gulistan. Only after months of bitter contest did the Russian Forces, assisted by hundreds of Armenian volunteers, succeed in expelling the invader. 6 Tsar Nicholas' Caucasian Army, commanded by General I. F. Paskievitch, then pushed toward Yerevan and in October, 1827, captured that fortress city, which for decades had stood as the most imposing symbol of Persian domination on the Armenian Plateau. Leaving the Armenian volunteers to police the area, regular Russian units advanced across the Araxes River to the village of Turkmanchai, where the Ghajar dynasty of Persia capitulated and, in a treaty of peace, not only recognized Russian sovereignty over the territory lost in 1813 but also yielded two more provinces, the khanates of Yerevan and Nakhichevan. 7 Moreover, Armenian inhabitants of North Persia were to be permitted to resettle north of the Araxes River, the newly designated international boundary. During the following months, nearly fifty thousand availed themselves of that opportunity. 8
The negotiations at Turkmanchai had just been concluded when Russia became embroiled in war with Turkey. Ready for combat, Paskievitch's army drove westward into the Armenian Plateau as far as the great citadel of Erzurum. Along the entire route, Armenians welcomed the Russian troops as liberators and rejoiced that the day of deliverance was at hand. Such optimism was shattered by the peace treaty signed in September, 1829, at Adrinople. There, the Russian agreed to clear their forces from the eyalets of Erzurum and Kars, in return for which the Ottoman Sultan withdrew his claims to territories along the eastern littoral of the Black Sea and ceded the most of the pashalik of Akhaltsikh. 9 Because they had welcomed the Russian advance, many Armenians in Kars and Erzurum feared Moslem reprisals; others bewailed the prospect of restored Ottoman jurisdiction. For them the treaty of Adrinople offered an alternative. Within eighteen months they could quit their native villages, pass beyond the new frontier, and become subjects of Tsar Nicholas I. conversely, Moslems in Akhaltsikh were given the privileges of moving west of the established boundary. By the end of 1830, approximately one hundred thousand Armenians from the plains of Erzurum and Alashkert followed the example of those who had migrated from North of Persia to Transcaucasia. 10 Most of these Turkish Armenians settled in the abandoned Moslem areas of Akhalkalak, part of the former pashalik of Akhaltsikh. 11 No one could then have known that this action was to contribute to an Armeno-Georgian conflict nearly a century later. In 1918, the Armenian Republic was to demand Akhalkalak on geographic and ethnic principles, while the Republic of Georgia was to assert its historic and economic rights to the district. 12
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