A Peace to End all Peace (58 page)

When the First World War came to an end, the British Prime Minister’s attention was too much occupied elsewhere for him to pay much attention to Persia, the Ottoman Empire’s eastern neighbor, which was not, in any event, an area of the world in which he took much interest. By default the way was left open for George Curzon, chairman of the Eastern Committee of the Cabinet and, from 1919 onward, Foreign Minister, to take charge. Lord Curzon cared about Persia more than he cared about practically anywhere else.

Curzon’s tendency was to exaggerate the importance of areas in which he was expert and there was no question that he was an expert on Persia. His journey in 1889 to that then little-known land was famous; and his book
Persia and the Persian Question
was judged to be the standard authority on the subject in the English language. His view, correspondingly, was that the magnitude of British interests in that country was immense.

From the nineteenth century, Lord Curzon brought with him a strategy of creating “a Moslem nexus of states” in the Middle East as a shield to ward off Russian expansion.
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Russian expansionist designs had figured prominently in his expressed thoughts and in his writings when he explored Central Asia in the late nineteenth century, and had figured prominently in his politics when he became Viceroy of India early in the twentieth century. When the Bolshevik Revolution brought about Russia’s withdrawal from her forward positions, Curzon proposed to take advantage of the situation by putting his British-sponsored Moslem nexus of states into place. In the nineteenth century the nexus would have been a line across the Middle East from the Ottoman Empire through the Persian Empire to the khanates and emirates of Central Asia and Afghanistan; but Curzon was in no position to reconstruct a line that long.

Driven to withdraw by Winston Churchill and his policy of radical retrenchment, British forces almost everywhere in Asia were being evacuated from positions that Lord Curzon wished to see maintained. Of the nexus, only Persia remained—but there Curzon retained his solitary dominance of British policy. Edwin Montagu, a member of the Cabinet’s Eastern Committee, observed that the draft minutes of a meeting of the committee, from which all members but Curzon were absent, recorded that “the Committee agreed with the Chairman.” “Surely you will not allow this to stand?” Montagu wrote to Curzon; “the Committee consisted of the Chairman: and the Chairman, of course, not unnaturally, agreed with the Chairman.”
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Insofar as Persia was concerned, that was the manner in which he proceeded, taking policy entirely into his own hands and ignoring the reluctance of his Cabinet colleagues to follow where he led.

“The integrity of Persia,” he had written two decades earlier, “must be registered as a cardinal precept of our Imperial creed.”
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Safeguarding that integrity against future Russian encroachments remained the principal object of his policy. The means at his disposal, however, were few and slender.

The end of the world war found Britain (and British India) with small forces in four areas of Persia. In the northeast and the northwest, there were the tiny military missions of Generals Malleson and Dunsterville, whose adventures in Russia were followed earlier (see Chapter 38). On the Gulf coast there were a few garrisons of Indian troops. In the south there was a native force recruited during the war and led by British officers, called the South Persia Rifles; but mutinies and desertions, triggered before the armistice by a tribal revolt against British rule, had brought its effectiveness into question.

These forces were insufficient to Lord Curzon’s purposes, even had there not been pressure from the War Office and from India to make further reductions in troops and subsidies. Curzon therefore concentrated his energies on the organization of a new British-supervised regime in Persia that could transform the sprawling, anarchic, much-divided territory into an efficient, effective country able to support and defend itself, and thus dispense with British subsidies and troops.

The plan was embodied in a treaty between Britain and Persia that Lord Curzon imposed upon the governments of both countries. Flabby young Ahmed Shah, last of the fading Kadjar dynasty to sit upon the throne of Persia, posed no problem: he was fearful for his life and, in any event, received a regular subsidy from the British government in return for maintaining a pro-British Prime Minister in office. Under Lord Curzon’s supervision, the British Minister in Teheran negotiated a treaty with the Persian Prime Minister and two of his colleagues—who demanded and received a secret payment of 130,000 pounds from the British in return for signing it.
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Curzon was proud of the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 9 August 1919. “A great triumph,” he wrote, “and I have done it all alone.”
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By the terms of the agreement, British officers were to construct a national railway network; British experts would reorganize the national finances; a British loan would provide the wherewithal for accomplishing these projects; and British officials would supervise the collection of customs duties so as to ensure that the loan would be repaid.

According to Curzon, the agreement was designed to bolster Persian independence. He did not foresee that others would put a different construction upon it. He made no provision for the possibility that oil-conscious allies—France and the United States—might react against the apparent grant to Britain of a political monopoly. He seemed unaware, too, of the direction in which currents of opinion were flowing in Persia itself: he assumed that, as in times gone by, Persians feared Russian expansionism and would welcome protection against it. Persian fear of it instead seems to have disappeared when the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917. By 1919 Britain represented the only European threat to the autonomy of the interest groups—the local, provincial, and tribal leaderships in particular—that exercised such authority as still functioned in the chaotic Persian territory. As for public opinion: in the capital, Teheran, of the twenty-six newspapers and other periodicals published there at the time, twenty-five denounced the Anglo-Persian Agreement.
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A short time after execution of the agreement, it was discovered in London and Teheran that a provision in the Persian Constitution required that all treaties had to be ratified by the Majlis (as the legislature was called). The Majlis had not met since 1915 and had been ignored by both governments in arriving at the agreement.

In the closed world of traditional diplomacy it was not then regarded as honorable for a legislature to fail to ratify a treaty duly executed by the government; the requirement of ratification, accordingly, was regarded as a mere technicality and, as such, was easy for negotiators to overlook. Yet once the issue was raised it assumed importance. For Lord Curzon, it became important to demonstrate to his Cabinet colleagues and to critics in France and the United States that the agreement was a genuine expression of the will of the Persian nation, which only an affirmative vote of the Majlis (imperfectly representative though that body might be) could provide. But one Persian Prime Minister after another (for ministries in Teheran fell in rapid succession) delayed convoking the Majlis for fear that its members could not be controlled. As no move could be made to implement the agreement until it was ratified, Persia remained in disorder, vulnerable (British officials feared) to Bolshevik propaganda and agitation.

All along, the proclaimed policy of the Bolshevik regime with regard to Persia had provided an appealing contrast to that of Britain. At the beginning of 1918, the Soviet government renounced Russian political and military claims on Persia as inconsistent with Persia’s sovereign rights. As the summer of 1919 began, the Soviet government also gave up all economic claims belonging to Russia or Russians in Persia, annulling all Persian debts to Russia, cancelling all Russian concessions in Persia, and surrendering all Russian property in Persia. Of course it could be pointed out that the Soviet government was surrendering claims it was too weak to enforce; in that sense, it was giving away nothing. Yet its surrender of economic claims in the summer of 1919 placed in stark relief the far-reaching economic concessions that Lord Curzon demanded and received for Britain in the Anglo-Persian Agreement signed that same summer. Freed, at least temporarily, from their fears of Russia, Persian nationalists allowed themselves to resent the strong measure of foreign control central to Lord Curzon’s plan for their protection.

So nationalist opinion hardened. The winter of 1919–20 passed, and ratification of the Anglo-Persian Agreement drifted slowly, frustratingly, out of Curzon’s grasp. Then, in the spring of the year, events took a new turn.

In August of 1918 Captain David T. Norris of the Royal Navy had organized a small British naval flotilla to control the Caspian Sea for General Dunsterville’s military mission as it occupied and then retreated from Baku (see page 359). In the summer of 1919 the British government had turned the flotilla over to the White Russian forces of General Denikin for use in the Russian Civil War. When Denikin’s forces collapsed, the remains of the flotilla, some eighteen vessels, manned by anti-Bolshevik Russians, found refuge in Enzeli, the Royal Navy’s base and the principal Persian port on the Caspian Sea. There they were taken into custody by Persian officials and by the British and Indian garrison still in place. As of the spring of 1920 the British and Persian governments had not yet decided what to do with the flotilla, which still was of a size and strength sufficient to affect any contest for mastery of the Caspian.

At dawn on 18 May 1920, thirteen Soviet Russian warships launched a surprise attack on Enzeli. Under cover of a barrage from their ships, Soviet troops landed and cut off the British garrison in its camp at the tip of a peninsula. The trapped British commanding general, after vainly seeking instructions from his superiors in Teheran, accepted the terms dictated to him by the victorious Soviet commander: the British garrison surrendered both its military supplies and the Denikin flotilla to the Bolsheviks, and then retreated from Enzeli.

Within weeks a Persian Socialist Republic was proclaimed in Gilan, the province in which the port of Enzeli was located, and a Persian Communist Party was founded in the province to support it. Although Russians played a key role in these events, Soviet Russia was at pains to deny it. Moscow even denied having ordered the attack on Enzeli; according to Soviet spokesmen, it was undertaken by the local Russian naval commander on his own responsibility.

If there were a justification for the Anglo-Persian Agreement and for a commanding British presence in the country, it was shattered by the chain of events that began at Enzeli. Britain had undertaken to defend Persia against Russia and Bolshevism—but was visibly failing to do so. The retreat from Enzeli spurred the War Office to demand the withdrawal of the remaining British forces from Persia. As Winston Churchill wrote to George Curzon, there was something to be said for making peace with the Bolsheviks, and something to be said for making war on them, but nothing to be said for the current policy.
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According to the new Prime Minister of Persia, the Anglo-Persian Agreement was “in suspense.” The Prime Minister of Britain blamed his Foreign Secretary for what had occurred, saying that Curzon was almost entirely responsible for saddling Britain with responsibilities in Persia that should never have been assumed.
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At the end of the summer of 1920, the Russian Bolshevik representative, Lev Kamenev, came to London as chairman of a peace delegation charged with negotiating an end to the conflict between Russia and her former wartime allies. Kamenev was one of the half-dozen or so principal leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and for many years had been one of the closest political associates of Lenin. In London, Kamenev seems to have become aware of the extent to which the British government had been thrown off balance by the uprisings in Iraq, and saw a chance for his government to exploit the situation in Persia in order to increase Britain’s difficulties in Iraq. In a secret cable (decoded by British Intelligence) from London to the Soviet Foreign Minister in Moscow, Kamenev stated that “pressure on the British troops in North Persia will strengthen the position of the Mesopotamian insurgents.” A revolution along a geographical line running from Enzeli in Persia to Baghdad in Iraq, he continued, “threatens the most vital interests of the British Empire and breaks the status quo in Asia.”
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Here was the linkage between one uprising and another, in which British officials believed with superstitious fervor; but, contrary to what they believed, only the events in northern Persia (and to some extent those in Afghanistan) were directly inspired by Soviet Russia.

In the autumn of 1920 a new British commander, Major-General Edmund Ironside, arrived to take charge of the situation in northern Persia. His views about what should be done were considerably at variance with those of Lord Curzon. An overwhelming figure, six feet, four inches tall and weighing 275 pounds, Ironside did not hesitate to impose his own policy.
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Like Churchill, he thought it foolish to oppose the Bolsheviks if one were not allowed to engage in an all-out war to defeat them. The best that could be hoped for, in his opinion, was for Britain and Russia to withdraw their forces—if a Persian government could be left in place that could hold its own.

In the whole of northern Persia there was only one more-or-less indigenous force available to Ironside that was of some consequence—the Persian Cossack Division, which had been created in 1879 by the Russian Czar as a bodyguard for the Persian Shah. But it suffered from being Russian-inspired and Russian-led: its commander and a number of its commissioned and noncommissioned officers were Russian, and through the years it had been heavily subsidized by the Russian government. After the Russian revolutions, the British government had taken over the payment of the subsidy; yet in 1920 its commanding officer, a Russian colonel named Starosselski, refused nonetheless to comply with British demands and, though an anti-Bolshevik, insisted on upholding “Russian interests.”
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