Russians in Iran: Introduction

"Highly original in its focus, and often making use of completely new source material, Russians in Iran offers fascinating glimpses into the encounter between two Eurasian empires, far beyond the established narrative of the 'Great Game'." Moritz Deutschmann, author of ran and Russian Imperialism: The Ideal Anarchiss, 1800-1914 RUSSIANS IN IRAN Diplomacy and Power in the ajar Era and Beyond Edited by RUDI MATHEE AND ELENA ANDREEVA I.Be Tt lJ RI S LO:DON · NEW YOR< INTRODUCTION Rudi athee This volume is premised on the notion that Russia's historical involvement in Iran is as pervasive and longstanding as it is understudied and - often - misunderstood. Instinctive anti-colonialists, Iranians continue to be very much preoccupied with what hey consider the wholly negative, devious and even destructive interference of the British in their country's affairs over the past two centuries. Yet many are hardly aware of the act that, throughout the nineteenth and far into the twentieth century, the Russian presence in especially northern Iran was far more direct, invasive and consequential than that of the British. Indeed, they would be startled to hear and, likely unwilling to accept, that in some ways the presence of the British and the balance and "protection" they provided may even have prevented a more drastic Russian role in Iran's afairs. Russia's role in Iranian history since the nineteenth century is well known, to be sure; but especially or the period until World War I, it tends to be narrated in a patterned and somewhat reductionist manner, typically through the lens of the "Great Game," with Iran a mere buffer state between Russia and Great Britain, a hapless victim of great power politics (a notion cherished by many Iranians, who often see themselves as victims rather than as active participants in their own destiny). The chronology of this narrative along center-periphery dynamics begins with the two wars the countries fought in the early nineteenth century, is followed by the humiliating treaties imposed on the losing party - Iran, in both cases - continues with Russian high-level machinations and the Iranian reaction in the form of attempts to play off the British and the Russians against each other, and ends with Russia's opposition to the establishment of an Iranian parliament in 1908. The actors in this story are, on the Russian side, the successive tsars, rom Alexander I to Nicholas II, various Russian generals who are famous or inamous depending on one's perspecive, most notably Aleksey Petrovich Ermolov and Ivan Fedorovich Paskevich, and the poet-diplomat Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov, who met a tragic end in 3 RUSSIANS N IRAN TRODCION Tehran in 1829. On the Iranian side, we have Crown Prince 'Abbas Mirza, Iran's irst oficial "reormer," Fath 'Ali Shah and Naser al-Din Shah, as the most prominent and longest-ruling Qajar monarchs, various high-level envoys, and Naser al-Din Shah's well-known reformist chief minister, Mirza Taqi Khan Farahani, a.k.a. Amir Kabir. War and high-level diplomacy are almost invariably the main subjects of discussion and analysis. This volume sets out to thicken as well as to complicate this narrative by examining the intensive encounter between Russians and Iranians between the early Qajar period and the middle of the twentieth century on various levels. Its contributors look at Russia's inluence in Iran between 1800 and 1950 not simply as a story of inexorable "intrusion" and one-sided "domination," but as a complex, interactive process of mostly indirect control but also of constructive engagement. heir essays seek to open a window into the power and influence wielded in Iran not just by the "Russian government" through its representatives, but by Russian nationals, state and non-state actors, who operated in Iran in a variety of capacities. It steps down from the customary focus on oicial policy makers, diplomats and high-level military personnel, to consider those alongside, mid-level oficials as well as private citizens who became caught up in the convulsions of war, revolution and occupation that marked the interaction between the two countries to the point of leading to life-long migration and the adoption of new identities. The contribuions to this collection have also been selected to present the Russian­ Iranian encounter as a continuum, stretching well beyond the moment in 1908 when Russia brusquely intervened in Iran's parliamentary experiment by shelling the parliament. he aim is to connect Russia's involvement with Iran under tsarist rule to the role that the Soviet Union played in the politics and society of the country under the Pahlais, by looking or continuity as much as for rupture and interrupion. Each of the essays in this volume deals with an aspect of the Russian-Iranian interaction by considering the activities of Russian individuals, diplomats, military men, intelligence oficers, bankers, entrepreneurs, and architects active in Iran. Some of the chapters concentrate on a single person, a diplomat, or an advisor and agent, using biographical information about the individual as a prism to highlight a facet of Russo-Iranian relations. Others take a more structural approach by analyzing an aspect of the military, economic, and cultural entwinement between the two countries. Based on an array of sources, which include archival Russian and Iranian ones, they paint a rich tableau of the multifaceted role Russians have played in modern Iranian history. The volume presents its material chronologically yet follows a thematic approach as well. Part I deals with the nineteenth century, the period when the military and diplomatic conrontation and interaction between the two states intensiied, creating conditions of Russian dominance and Iranian subordination following military defeat, but also of the mutual imbrication characteristic of adjoining territories with permeable borders. The overall conclusion of the essays presented here is that the Russian involvement in Iran, before as well as after the Bolsheik Revolution, was vaied and complex, and can certainly not be summarized as just brutal and overbearing. Indeed, the various authors argue and demonstrate that the Russians were shrewd and calculating rather than doggedly single-minded in expanding and maximizing their inluence over Iran, their most consequential neighbor to the south, and that they were more driven by pragmatism than by ideology, even following the creation of the Soviet Union. Muriel Atkin opens this part and the volume as such with an overview of the origins of Russia's involvement in Iran in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She argues that this was an unlikely time for Russia to undertake the projection of its inluence into the southen Caucasus. After all, Russian foreign policy at that ime had more pressing concerns elsewhere, including recurrent battles with a perennil rival, the Ottoman Empire, the partiions of Poland, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. Peter the Great's successors had abandoned his ambition to gain territory on the Caspian coast and in the southern Caucasus decades earlier. Russia did not share a border with a reconstituted Iranian state under the new Qajar dynasty, and the lack of control over much of the Caucasus together with weak naval power in the Caspian Sea made gaining access to Iran dificult. Despite all this, the Russians chose to lay claim to the eastern Georgian kingdom and several other principalities of the southen Caucasus. That led to two wars with the newly acceded Qajar rulers, who also claimed those territories. Russia's victories in both wars, Atkin further argues, established a pattern of political and commercial involvement in Iran that would grow for the remainder of the tsarist era. Russia embarked on this path for reasons that included the desire to be acknowledged as a major power, the hope to use some of the disputed territories against foes in other colicts, the determination to maintain a policy once embarked upon, regardless of dificulties, and the personal ambitions and methods of the oficers on the ground. Soll Shahvar and Emil Abramoff next address the Russo-Iranian struggle for dominance in the Caucasus in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They do so in the form of a well-researched case study of conditions in Talesh/Lankaran, the khanate that hugs the southwestern Caspian, between 1747 and 1826. Using irst­ hand Russian sources and Persian local chronicles, the authors pay particular attention to the poliical maneuverings of the khanate's rulers, especially Mir Mostafa Khan (r. 1786-1814), in their pursuit of maximum autonomy over a frontier zone subject to intrusion by the Qajars, the Russians and even a far-away power like Napoleonic France. The igure of Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov, the legendary poet-diplomat who in 1829 met a tragic death at the hands of the Tehran mob, looms large in early nineteenth-century Russo-Iranian relations. Whereas in his homeland Griboedov is celebrated more as a national poet and a musician than as a diplomat, Iranians tend to see him as a symbol of Russia's heavy handedness vis-a-vis their counry. Firuza Melville discusses the invariably negative "Iranian" perception of Griboedov but, 2 4 5 RUSSIANS IN IRAN INTRODUCTON above all, sheds new light on the Russian side of the dichotomy on the basis of new archival material and recently published studies and biographies in Russian. Rather than narrating Griboedov's mission separately, she also analyzes its fate in conjunction with the role played by the representatives of the other signiicant outside power active in Iran at the time, Great Britain, intimating that the Russian envoy may have worked in collusion with the British representative John MacDonald against the latter's rivals, Henry Willock and Dr John McNeil. Elena Andreeva next examines the frequent occurrence of Russians deserting to Iran in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Using Russian archival sources, among them stories of speciic deserters, Andreeva focuses on the reaction of the Russian government to the presence of Russians who had led to Iran and now served there. The desertion of Russian soldiers to Iran, and their riendly reception by Qajar oficials, created such a stir in Russia's diplomatic and military circles that Emperor Nicholas I became personally involved in the matter. The way St Petersburg overreacted to this phenomenon, the pressure it exerted on the ajar authorities by way of threats and demands for the arrest and extradition of deserters, must be seen, the author argues, as another manifestation of Russia's ambivalent, insecure ype of Orientalism - ighhandedness in its treatment of Iran as a way to compensate for its own inadequacy as a power on a par with Western Europe. The theme of Russian intervention and intrusion is further developed in Part II, which moves the investigation to the turn of the twentieth century, and more particularly to the period up to World War I. The irst of the three essays in this part addresses the crucial role played by the Caucasus as an incubator of ideas and a springboard for action in the adjacent empires; the others explore instances of actual Russian commercial, diplomatic and military encroachment on Iran. Houri Berberian shows us how the Russian-ruled Caucasus, long a crossroads between empires and the East-West trafic of people, goods, and ideas, became the nursery of a set of revolutionary ideas hat germinated at the turn of the century and that came to fuel the revolutions erupting in rapid succession in Russia, Iran and the Ottoman Empire between 1905 and 1909. Uniquely multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual, the Caucasus in some ways remained peripheral to these empires. Yet as a center of both cultural reception and transmission, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Caucasus also became the playground and battleground of socialist and nationalist revolutionary ideas that subsequently permeated both Iran and Anatolia. Irina Pavlola reminds us of the economic dimension of Russia's entanglement with Iran at the tun of the century, a topic that is as important as it remains under­ researched. Her essay discusses Russian investment in Iran in the late Qajar period, and more speciically explores the operations of Russian loan operations in Persia in the 1890s by way of a Discount and Loan Bank that was established as a Russian State Bank branch. Opening up a new chapter in Russo-Iranian relations, the bank offered the prospect of substantial investments in Iran's economy, including road construction and a revival of trade. The author singles out its sponsorship of cinema for the shah and his entourage as a particularly good example of the bank's role as a facilitator of Russia's economic and cultural penetration of late Qajar Iran. My own essay concentrates on politics and military matters and explores the sequence of events culminating in the shelling of the Astan-e Qods-e Razavi, the holy shrine of the eighth Shi'i Imam in Mashhad, by Russian troops on 31 March 1912. It presents this incident less as a simple confrontation between the Russians and the Iranians than as an evolving story of foreign intervention and machination in collusion as well as tension with local and regional forces. It also seeks to sort out the various, rather contradictory readings of the incident, by identifying the forces behind the acions and reacions that led up to the assault for their moives and objecives. These include the Russian and British governments and their respective local representatives, the Qajar authorities, and various local and regional non-state actors. Part III puts a more focused lens on the theme of image-making and representation by way of Russia's intelligence gathering in Iran in the early twentieth century. Its subjects are the military men, engineers, and scholars who, in their diaries, reports and research indings, described and mapped Iran, making it intelligible and domesticating it for themselves, their employers and their superiors. N. K. Ter-Oganov uses the letters of the Russian military Orientalist, Konstantin Nikolaevich Smirnov, as a source of information on Iran's military and political conditions on the eve of World War I. Smimov spent seven years (1907-14) on an oficial mission to Tehran at the shah's court, serving as a tutor of the crown prince, the young Soltan Ahmad Shah. Smirnov's handwritten archival materials, including his private letters addressed to his spouse, Xenia Karlovna Smimova, and sent from Qazvin, Kermanshah, Kerind and Qasr-e Shirin, give us a real feeling of contact with many historical events. In addition to enriching our inormation about the careers and opinions of Iranian politicians as perceived by Russian observers, Smirnov's letters allow us to draw portraits of Russian military, iplomatic and politicians active in Iran during World War I. Intelligence gathering is the topic of Denis Volkov's chapter as well. Volkov highlights the military and diplomatic dimension of the professional career of Vladimir Minorsky, who remains best known for the important scholarly contributions he made to the history of early modern Iran once he had left Russia for the West following the Bolshevik Revolution. Volkov examines Minorsky's leading role in the activities of the Russo-Anglo-Turkish-Iranian Quadripartite Boundary Commission on the eve of World War I as an example of a Foucauldian knowledge/power collaboraion between administrators and scholars. Minorsky's career combined diplomacy and military matters with a deep knowledge of Iran and its borderlands, especially Kurdistan. The main character in Lana Ravandi-Fadai's study, Nikolai Markov, translated his fascination with things Iranian into a professional career. Bon in Georgia, and having fallen in love with Iran 7 RUSSIANS N IRAN NTRODCION during a brief stay in Tabriz, Markov served in the Russian Cossack Brigade and at the onset of the Reza Shah period settled in Tehran, where he became a successful architect. Between 1922 and 1940 he designed many of the government buildings and minisries that still stand in southern Tehran, in addition to several mosques and landmark buildings like the Jeanne d'Arc girls' school and its male counterpart, Alborz College. The author discusses Markov's career, showing how he strove to create a harmonious blend of tradiional Iranian architecture and a modenist style commensurate with twentieth-century needs. She also demonstrates that the Church of Saint Nicholas built by Markov in Tehran is a replica of the Church of the Annunciation of the Holy Virgin in the Kremlin destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1932, and argues that Markov - the orthodox tsarist in exile who ought Bolshevik forces while serving in Iran's Cossack Brigade - thus intended to "resurrect" the church that his foes had destroyed. Finally, Part IV takes the discussion to the period following World War I and the creation of the Soviet Union. Looking at the period between 1920 and 1950, it explores the lives of a number of Russian subjects who, through fate and circumstance, ended up in Iran and in some cases stayed and built up a new lfe in that country. Two of the essays in this section also examine the seriously understudied episode during World War II, when Iranians experienced four years of direct Russian occupation. Mary Yoshinari tries to make sense of the fact that many of the early Soviet oicials who spent all or part of their professional lives in Iran hailed from the middling and even lower classes, came from the ethnically diverse Russian periphery, and were often Jewish. She identiies what she calls a "double immersion in the East" among those who joined the ranks of the foreign service and served in far-away lands, formative years spent in an environment in which the familiar blended with the often Muslim exotic, the enduring lure of this environment, and a fervent belief in progress and the transformative power of scientiic government in a country like Iran, akin to what they had experienced in their own ancestral backwaters. The next essay, by Rowena Abdul Razak, addresses the relationship between the Iranian Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Its good intentions and genuine desire for change notwithstanding, the reputation of the Tudeh has always been that of an entity closely associated with the Soviet Union and willing to do its bidding giving the Pahlavi state as well as the Islamic Republic ample excuse to suppress it. A reassessment of the party and its perceived closeness with the Soviet Union, particularly during the Tudeh's early years, however, reveals a more complex picture. Using Russian archival sources, the author revisits the Tudeh-Soviet association during World War II - the period of the British-Soviet occupation of Iran as well as the time of the party's foundation and formative years - to conclude that the Tudeh actually served an important role within the alliance. Shrewd and practical, the Soiets - like the British - vied for the hearts and minds of the Iranians by engaging in cultural and political propaganda. At the start of the occupation, they used the Tudeh to spread an anti-Fascist message. But as the war evolved in favor of the Allies, the Soviets became more conident and this in turn saw the Tudeh also displaying more political inluence. In the book's inal essay, Nikolay Kozhanov offers a revisionist interpretation of ussia's motives for occupying the northern half of Iran during World War IL He irst argues that the reason for their interventi9n bore little relationship to the oficially stated one of Iran's refusal to expel its German "spies." While Great Britain intended to protect the property of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the Soviets were primarily interested in the creation of a safe route for military supplies through Iran. Yet, in contrast to the British, the Soviet Union tried to avoid a military confrontation with its southen neighbor. In the early summer of 1941, Moscow made several eforts to persuade Tehran to allow the Allies to use Iran's infrastructure for the delivery of lend­ lease consignments to the USSR. It partly succeeded in this: the Iranian government agreed to the passage of non-lethal munitions and goods. Faced with a negative response to the request for weapons transit, Moscow was still having doubts about the necessity of a military invasion. This hesitance turned to determination, with reports of Soviet diplomats and intelligence oficers warning the Russian authorities that London was prepared to invade Iran without the assistance of Moscow. Unwilling to let its traditional opponent seize complete control over Iran, at that point Moscow agreed on the joint military operation against Iran. In the transliteration we have opted or the Library of Congress system for Russian and or the system used by the Jounal of Persianate Societies. 6