["Frontier India"] Between 1939-1940, Britain and France were actively planning a joint strike at the USSR and destroy the Baku oil fields. This information was present in the documents first presented in Moscow at the exhibition "On the Eve of the Great Patriotic War. September 1, 1939 — June 22, 1941".
The exposition opened on Wednesday in Moscow in the Exhibition Hall of Federal Archives. The exposition displays a wide range of historical documents stored in the Russian federal archives, in the Belarusian state archives, as well as in the departmental archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. There are more than 300 historical sources, many of which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The project was implemented with the support of the Presidential Grants Fund.
Both the countries, after the signing in August 1939 of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact called the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact, fearing the strengthening of the Third Reich due to supplies from the USSR, primarily oil, planned military action against the Soviet Union. They planned to bomb the Baku oil fields, as well as the Soviet Black Sea ports Batumi and Tuapse. To counteract the Soviet-German alliance, the possibility of destabilizing the situation in the Caucasus by activating national separatist and religious movements was also considered, and in extreme cases, a military invasion of the region by the French and British armies.
The proposed operation against the Soviet oil-producing regions was named Pike (’Spear’). At the end of March 1940, the Anglo-French Supreme Military Council decided to plan an attack on the Transcaucasus or the South Caucasus. But a month later, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that the USSR was changing its political course towards Germany, and the Pike operation was canceled.
As per the displayed documents, on November 4, 1939, the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union Lavrenty Beria, referring to information received by the Parisian station of Soviet foreign intelligence, informed the People’s Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov about secret dispatches of Anglo-French troops to the East. In the Persian Gulf. The troops were loaded, which were sent to Syrian ports, and in Syria itself, about 300 thousand soldiers were stationed under the command of French General Maxime Weygand. French intelligence services collected detailed information on the topography of the area, the condition of roads, and natural barriers in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan noted Beria in another report to Voroshilov in mid-December 1939. |