THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



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Photograph by M. O. Williams 



TEKKE TURKOMANS AND RUSSIANS ON THE) TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY 



'The Tekke Turkomans arc huge, line-looking men, who wear sheepskin hats a foot high. 

 The)' owe as much of their charm to their fantastic headgear as docs a stage beauty." 



thing within reach, and in some cases the 

 poster of one party had been covered by 

 the poster of another. Plate-glass win- 

 dows on finer shops than most American 

 cities boast had been daubed with paste 

 and plastered with posters, and few in- 

 deed were the shop-keepers who cared to 

 scrub off these disfiguring sheets before 

 the election was finished. Crude num- 

 bers indicating the various parties were 

 scrawled here and there, reminding me 

 very much of college days when the 

 Freshies painted "191 1" on every avail- 

 able spot and the Sophs changed the last 

 figure to a zero to show that the class of 

 1910 was still on the map. 



SIXTEEN POLITICAL PARTIES IN CITY 

 CONTEST 



The election in Tiflis was hardest on 

 street-cleaners and most profitable to 

 printers, for every party seemed deter- 

 mined to surpass every other party in the 

 number of flyers they could scatter on 



the streets and in all public places. For 

 months to come the buyer of small no- 

 tions in Tiflis will carry home his goods 

 in a slip of paper naming political candi- 

 dates. One of the sixteen parties in a city 

 where 100,000 votes were cast printed 

 2,000,000 flyers. 



Some of the parties published booklets 

 explaining their position, and party plat- 

 forms fell on the people from all sides. 

 When a people to whom the ballot is new 

 undertakes to choose from among sixteen 

 parties, it takes a judicial mind. But 

 most of the people seemed to have de- 

 cided in advance what ticket they would 

 vote, for I found no one who could give 

 me the names of all the parties repre- 

 sented by the sixteen numbers. 



Number 1, the Minshevik branch of the 

 Social Democratic party, polled nearly a 

 third of the votes cast. The Armenian 

 Federalist party came second Avith two- 

 thirds as many. They were followed 

 closely by the Bolsheviki, most of whose 



