TURKEY AND IRAN
At the end of the war, thanks to the victories of the Red Army, Stalin set out to redraw the map of the world.55 His underlying assumption was that the rivalries among the imperialists, especially Great Britain and the United States, would continue and would degenerate into squabbles over colonial spoils. In the meantime, the Soviet Union would, “through a mix of diplomacy and force, become a socialist world power.”56
Although what the USSR might do in Europe was then a major concern of the West, Soviet energies also spilled over the border into Turkey and Iran and soon into Asia. Moscow’s ambitions in regard to Turkey, until 1923 the Ottoman Empire, went back generations. Most recently, in the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and France had intervened to help the Turks defeat Imperial Russia. In 1936 the Montreux Convention had settled the touchy issue of the neutrality of the Dardanelles, the narrow Turkish strait where the Black Sea flows into the Mediterranean. It was agreed that this waterway would be open to Soviet warships and that Turkey could close it during wartime or if it felt threatened. As a native of Transcaucasia, Stalin was well acquainted with the political and cultural struggles in that region, and at the Tehran Conference (1943) he pleaded for revision of this treaty, which in effect kept the USSR bottled up in the Black Sea. In May 1944, partly to put pressure on Turkey and also to clarify postwar ethnic relations in the border region with that country, Moscow ordered the deportation of 183,135 Turks from the Crimea and in September a further 69,869 from Georgia.57
In the summer months prior to the Potsdam Conference (to meet July–August 1945), Stalin pursued a number of initiatives in Turkey, and on June 7 he instructed Molotov to press on in his discussions with the visiting Turkish ambassador.58 The assertive commissar demanded the renunciation of the Montreux Convention. In addition, he wanted an agreement for the USSR to build military bases on the strait for its and Turkey’s “joint defense.” For good measure, he sought the return of disputed territories, such as Kars, Ardahan, and Turkish Armenia. The goal was to remove Turkey “as an independent player between the British Empire and the Soviet Union.”59
Amazingly enough, the Turkish government managed to elude these high-handed tactics, and while in no position to defeat the massive Red Army, it was able to keep the Soviets at bay in 1945. Armenians hoped Stalin would encourage their repatriation from Turkish Armenia to join their brothers and sisters across the border in the USSR. However, the ethnic emotions he fostered among his own Armenians and Georgians led them to make conflicting nationalist claims to the same parts of Turkey. That December those ambitions and rumors of war fueled nationalist demonstrations in Turkey. Stalin was unwilling to push as far as some of his local paladins wanted, and in February 1946 the Kremlin, instead of invading, tried yet again to talk the Turks into submission. It was too late, for by that time the climate of world opinion was tilting decisively against Soviet ambitions. Hence Stalin’s letter to Molotov on November 20 in which he said that “the time was not yet ripe” for a clash with Turkey. Thereafter, tensions on that front eased somewhat.60
Conditions in northern Iran looked more promising. The USSR and Iran shared a border that stretched for some 1,250 miles. Moreover, the people in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, with its capital in oil-rich Baku, spoke the same language as and shared the Islamic religion of their brothers and sisters across the frontier in northern Iran’s Azerbaijan. At least some of those living on the Iranian side felt a kinship with their brethren and looked admiringly at life in the USSR, in spite of the terror that had torn through it over the years.
Moreover, the Red Army was physically present in Iran, because since late August 1941, and by agreement among the Allies and the Iranian government, Soviet forces occupied the northern part of that country, while the British did the same in the far larger area around Tehran and the south. They were there to keep the oil from the Germans and to secure the crucial supply lines from the West, across Iran into the Soviet Union. All parties understood that the troops would be withdrawn within six months of war’s end. Britain, not the United States, exercised predominant influence in Iran, and like the Soviet Union, it sought to capitalize on the wartime situation to obtain oil concessions, in a rivalry that went back well before 1914. The United States was no less interested in the oil, and especially after it extended Lend-Lease aid to Iran in March 1942, American troops and civilians took up residence as well.
With the Western Allies preoccupied in France, where troops landed in June 1944 to defeat Germany, on September 25 that year the Soviet Union pressed its demands on Iran for a large area in the north to be set aside for Soviet-Iranian oil exploration.61 When the Iranians dithered and held out, the secretary of the Communist Party in Soviet Azerbaijan, Mir Jafar Bagirov, approached the Kremlin and suggested that he organize separatist movements over the border into northern Iran and create a new Democratic Party there. On July 6, 1945, Stalin gave the go-ahead. The Politburo told Bagirov to establish in Tabriz (capital of Iranian Azerbaijan) “a group of responsible workers to guide the separatist movement” and to prepare elections using slogans from Stalin’s playbook. The peasants should be promised lands taken from state holdings and large landowners, and workers should be told that the new government would end unemployment and begin economic development.62
As it happened, Bagirov was no ordinary party functionary. Although he consciously mimicked Stalin’s ruling style, he was more ostentatiously cruel, self-indulgent, and despotic. In the late 1930s he used terror to eliminate a long list of “enemies,” from personal rivals, to those in the Party who questioned anything he did, to peasants who doubted the modernizing aspects of the regime or its collectivization drive. The deaths of tens of thousands were on his hands as he led a bloodstained rampage that, among other things, wiped out the cultural elite of Soviet Azerbaijan.63
In mid-1945 this character was peering over the border into northern Iran and no doubt relishing the prospect that a regime like his own could be established there. Iran already had a small Communist movement, led by the Tudeh, or People’s, Party, and though it had some support, Stalin was cold to its call for a national revolution. He ignored it, perhaps because he thought it would be too ambitious for Communists to aim for all of Iran, an aspiration that would run up against British and American objections. Instead he limited the action to the north of the country. The Kremlin ordered the new Democratic Party of Azerbaijan (DPA), under longtime Communist activist Seyid Jafar Pishavari, to establish “friendship societies,” to spread the word, and to form armed combat groups, all generously financed from Moscow.64
Although some historians suggest that Stalin was mainly interested in getting oil concessions, the far-reaching orders he issued sound as if he was ready to exploit the moment for all it was worth.65 Britain and the United States were a little concerned about what Moscow was up to, and they asked for Stalin’s reassurance at Potsdam in August 1945 that the Red Army would, as promised, withdraw from Iran in six months. In fact, the Kremlin promptly became more directly involved in fomenting armed insurrection in the region. Besides supplying arms and money, by early November the Soviets were sending in special operations agents to organize armed insurgents, and when Tehran ordered its army to bring order in Tabriz, the Red Army intervened. Quite apart from anything Moscow might have ordered, Pishavari showed great initiative and by year’s end had established DPA control. The USSR backed his secessionist movement and also the smaller one of the Iranian Kurds, in the short-lived Republic of Kurdistan.