by Oleg Shevchenko
[REGNUM] Eighty years ago, on March 18, 1946, the Iranian government presented the UN Security Council with the demand for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from its territory. Iran was then a pro-American monarchy, and the foreign army was Soviet.
If in Tehran what was happening was called an occupation, then for Iranian Azerbaijanis and Kurds the presence of the “Reds” was a chance for national self-determination.
Now the situation appears to be "exactly the opposite." The US is waging war against Iran and hoping to destabilize the internal situation with the help of ethnic minorities—Southern Azerbaijanis and Kurds. Tehran and Moscow, by contrast, are on good terms.
What does not change is that Iran finds itself at the center of the Great Game of the great powers.
In the 20th century, the battle for Iran began not 80, but more than a hundred years ago.
In 1921, against the backdrop of domestic political chaos and the “export of revolution” from Russia, the ambitious general of the Persian Cossack Brigade (created at the beginning of the century by Russian instructors), half-Azerbaijani, Reza Khan usurped power.
First, he took the post of first minister for himself, and in 1925 he took the throne from the last shah of the Qajar dynasty and crowned himself.
The 34th Iranian monarch, Reza Shah, founded the new Pahlavi dynasty. This putschist on the throne acted in a Napoleonic manner, but he oriented himself not toward France, but toward Germany.
Reza Pahlavi, with the approval of nationalists, broke the enslaving oil contracts with Britain, but he was unable to make the "land of the Aryans" truly sovereign: German influence replaced British influence. After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, a Tehran-Berlin axis began to emerge, encompassing a full range of contacts, from cultural to military-technical. This inevitably worried both Western capitals and Moscow.
In both 1939 and 1941, the Shahenshah State of Iran declared neutrality. But by the start of World War II, the German Reich was Iran's main partner (accounting for up to 50% of trade), including in oil exports.
By 1940, there were up to 3,000 German specialists in the country, both in uniform and without. When the Allied powers demanded that Reza Shah remove the Nazis, Pahlavi, on advice from Berlin, refused.
At the same time, Iran lacked the sovereign power to expel the British contingent that had "entered" the country in early 1941, following the suppression of a pro-German uprising in neighboring Iraq. The fate of the neutral Reza Pahlavi, who had been a near-open ally of Hitler, was sealed.
A Soviet T-26 tank on the streets of Tabriz, Iran. Northwestern Iran, 1941.
At the height of the Battle of Moscow, the USSR needed peace on its southern borders; Iranian fuel was to be kept out of the Wehrmacht's tanks. And the "Persian Corridor" from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf was intended to become a reliable Lend-Lease route.
In late August 1941, after Reza Shah refused to deport German agents from the country, the USSR and Great Britain launched a joint military operation. Units of the Transcaucasian Front crossed the Araks River and entered southern, Iranian Azerbaijan. British and Anglo-Indian troops occupied strategic positions along the Persian Gulf coast.
By September, the northwestern and northeastern borderlands were under our control, and the southern regions became a British occupation zone. Reza Shah was "offered" to abdicate, and the throne was transferred to Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The operation achieved its goals: 34% of allied cargo to the USSR passed through the “Persian Corridor”, and Tehran in November–December 1943 became a safe venue for a meeting between Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.
The "Big Three" assured the Shah that Iran's sovereignty would be preserved and that the Soviet and British contingents would be withdrawn "no later than six months after the cessation of all military operations." These declarations were reaffirmed at the Potsdam Conference of 1945.
For now, Mohammed Reza more or less controlled only the central part of the country.
In reality, each member of the "Big Three" had its own plans for Iran. Britain hoped to regain its former influence, which, under the 1919 Agreement on British Aid for the Advancement and Welfare of Persia, London directly controlled the Shah's government and army.
The United States hoped to bring the oil-rich country into its sphere of influence. In December 1945, the Americans secured the Shah's support by concluding an agreement with him to sell American assets in Iran at a low price and to settle Iran's Lend-Lease debt.
The USSR was playing its own game. Over the several years that Soviet troops were stationed in northwestern Iran—in Southern Azerbaijan and Eastern Kurdistan—Moscow's influence over the local population increased.
Soviet specialists exploited the Shah's national policy failures: Reza Pahlavi, despite his half-Azerbaijani origins, appointed Persians to key positions, and the teaching of the Azerbaijani language in schools was banned. With the arrival of the Red Army, the situation changed.
Local leftist and simultaneously separatist movements, supported by Moscow-based advisers, also exploited social contradictions: landowners in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan were primarily Persians, while indigenous peoples were tax-paying peasant farmers. The process of national awakening was overseen from Baku by Mir Jafar Bagirov, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Azerbaijan SSR.
In December 1945, the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan was proclaimed in Tabriz, the center of Southern Azerbaijan. Its leadership—according to historians, on Stalin's direct orders—was led by a trusted figure, Seyid Jafar Pishevari. He was one of the founders of the Iranian Communist Party, who had participated in the "export of revolution" back in the 1920s. He had been imprisoned under the first Shah Pahlavi, but after the change of power, he was released at the request of the USSR.
On January 22, 1946, a republic was proclaimed in the Kurdish city of Mahabad, within the Soviet zone. Its main force consisted of troops from Iraq led by the tribal leader Mustafa Barzani, who would later become a prominent military and political figure in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Given the weakness of the Shah's Iran, the prospect of seizing these territories and expanding Soviet borders southward arose. At the same time, Britain was in no hurry to withdraw its troops.
Stalin also appeared to be planning a regime change in Tehran from a pro-Western to a pro-Soviet one. In November 1945, an uprising, organized by the Tudeh Party, the Iranian Communist Party, began in the Soviet zone of responsibility.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi sent troops from Tehran to suppress communists, Azerbaijanis, and Kurdish forces. However, the Shah's forces were blocked by the Soviet contingent. There were no clashes, however—the contingent simply divided the area of responsibility between the Shah's troops and the various rebels.
Meanwhile, the Cold War was unfolding globally. The Iranian crisis was becoming a major flashpoint.
The Soviet Union, having entrenched itself in Eastern Europe to protect itself from its former "partners," also took active action in other areas. In some places, this worked (in the Chinese civil war, in the Vietnamese communists' war against the French colonial forces), while in others, Stalin's leadership resorted to tactical retreats.
This was the case, in particular, in Iran. In January 1946, the Shah, with support from London and Washington, appealed to the UN Security Council. On March 4 and 5, Soviet tank columns began moving toward Tehran, as well as the borders with Turkey and Iraq.
General view of the UN Security Council meeting on the Iranian issue. 1946
Consultations continued for several weeks. On April 4, 1946, a Soviet-Iranian agreement was signed in Moscow, under which Stalin promised to withdraw his troops. Mohammad Reza gave the go-ahead for the creation of the Soviet-Iranian Oil Company (SOIN), which was granted oil concessions in the north of the country.
In addition, the number of deputies from the rebellious regions in the Iranian representative body was increased, and the latter were promised broad autonomy.
The Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan and the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad were "folded," Jafar Pishevari emigrated to Soviet Azerbaijan, and Kurdish commander Masoud Barzani withdrew his troops across the border. Most of the Soviet protégés were not abandoned.
From the Barzan tribe alone, 200 people went to study at higher and secondary specialized educational institutions; Barzani graduated from the Frunze Military Academy.
But the previous order was restored in the territories occupied by the Shah's troops. The SOIN project was abandoned. Encouraged by his Western allies, the Shah (citing the Majlis's decision) refused to ratify the oil agreement.
Perhaps coincidentally, after this, armed units of Iraqi Kurds entered the territory of the Shahate and began a guerrilla war against Iranian troops.
But overall, the Iranian crisis was resolved to Stalin's detriment. In 1950, the Shahanshah State of Iran joined the American-created CENTO (Central Treaty Organization, a regional equivalent of NATO).
But the Shah and his regime were also playing their own game.
Despite all the mistakes made by Pahlavi (which ultimately led to the 1979 revolution), by the end of the 1950s Iran had already developed a balanced and mutually beneficial policy towards its northern neighbor.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the USSR provided Iran with preferential loans, which Tehran repaid with gas supplies. Its southern neighbor commissioned the Soviet Union to build industrial and infrastructure facilities, and Soviet specialists developed the country's coal and iron ore deposits.
Even Iran, a member of CENTO, was not viewed by Moscow as a hostile state. This pragmatic interaction continued even after the regime change in 1979.