Karl Marx is known as the theoretician of communism; his support for the people of Kars, who showed an incredible resistance to the Russian army in 1855 and 1856, and his revelation of the hypocrisy displayed by Britain are little known. History, however, has recorded what Karl Marx and General Williams did to help this city.

Despite the fact that British officers headed by General Williams directed the defense of the fortress, the conduct of the British government towards the Kars defenders was rather ambiguous, for secretly it was interested in weakening its Ottoman “allies”. However, upon Williams’ return from Russian captivity in 1856, the British government arranged a pompous reception and gave him awards and honorary titles.

Marx, wrote four essays on Kars which are known as the Fall of Kars and are critical of the British government. He writes:

“If Kars is the key to Erzurum, Erzurum is key to Constantinople, and the central point of the strategical and commercial lines of Anatolia. Kars and Erzurum, once in the hands of Russia, the British land trade, via Trabzon to Persia is cut off. The British government aware of all these circumstances coolly advises the Porte to surrender the keys of its house in Asia, when scarcely one of the two was in danger, and invites the beseiged army of Kars to come to the reinforcements forbidden to come to the beseiged army. ‘If,’ says his lordship, “the Russians are to be defeated” (where is the necessity – he seems to ask), he thinks a defeat would be the more decisive and easy the further it took place within the Turkish frontier, i.e. the more strong places and territory are surrendered to the Russians, and, in fact, the nearer to Constantinople.”

Kars had no hope. Writing on September 1, 1855, General Williams describes the pitiful conditions:

“The most is made of our provisions; the soldiers are reduced to half allowances of bread and meat or rice-butter. Sometimes 100 drachmas of biscuit instead of bread; nothing besides. No money. Mussulman population, 300 rifles, will soon be reduced to starvation. Armenians are ordered to quit the town tomorrow. No barley, scarcely any forage. Cavalry reduced to walking skeletons, and sent out of garrison; artillery horses soon the same. How will the field pieces be moved after that? What is being done for the relief of this army?”

Despite these impossibilities, a miracle happened and the Russian army was defeated in Kars. Between the Russian retreat on September 29 and Kars’ surrender on November 24, two months passed during which British policy remained ambiguous.

GENERAL WILLIAMS: Williams was born in Annapolis, Nova Scotia in the southeast of Canada. He entered the Royal Artillery as a lieutenant in 1825 and in 1841 was posted to Turkey. He was promoted to general after his victory in Kars on September 29, 1855. The people of the town of Wellington, 30 kilometres south of Williams’s home in Ottowa, renamed their town Kars to distinguish it from a nearby town with the same name. General Williams died in London on July 26, 1883 and was buried in Brompton Cemetery.