A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  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.4

  Curzon was proud of the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 9 August 1919. “A great triumph,” he wrote, “and I have done it all alone.”5 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.6

  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.7 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.8

  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 Pe
rsia to Baghdad in Iraq, he continued, “threatens the most vital interests of the British Empire and breaks the status quo in Asia.”9 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.10 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.”11

  General Ironside eyed the Persian Cossacks as a vehicle for the accomplishment of his program. The Persian element in it was large and the Russian group was small: 6,000 Persian soldiers and 237 Persian officers, versus 56 Russian officers and 66 noncommissioned officers.12 The Russian commander, Starosselski, was in a vulnerable position: after scoring initial successes against the Persian Socialist Republic, he had failed dismally.

  Ironside promptly arranged to have Starosselski dismissed; later he also arranged for Starosselski’s replacement to be sent away. In their place, Ironside put Reza Khan, a tough, bullet-headed Persian colonel whom Ironside later described as “the most manly Persian” he had met.13

  Aware of War Office plans to complete the evacuation of British forces from Persia in 1921, Ironside went about arranging for Reza Khan to rule the country as Britain departed. On 12 February 1921 Ironside told Reza Khan that the remaining British forces would not oppose him if he carried out a coup d’état, so long as he would agree—as he did—not to depose the British-subsidized monarch, Ahmed Shah.*

  On 15 February Ironside met with the Shah but failed to persuade him to appoint Reza Khan to a position of power; so, on 21 February, Reza Khan marched into Teheran at the head of 3,000 Cossacks and seized power, installing himself as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. “So far so good,” Ironside commented when he heard the news. “I fancy that all the people think that I engineered the coup d’état. I suppose I did, strictly speaking.”14

  In fact, Ironside’s role in these events was quite unknown, and remained unknown until discovered and revealed by an American scholar more than half a century later.15 In London—where officials were unaware of Ironside’s involvement—the course of events in Persia was greeted first with puzzlement and then with dismay. On 26 February 1921, only five days after achieving power, the new government in Teheran formally repudiated the Anglo-Persian Agreement. The same day it directed the Persian diplomatic representative in Moscow to sign a treaty (its first treaty since taking office) with Soviet Russia. The twin events of 26 February marked a revolution in Persia’s position, as the country turned from British protection against Russia to Russian protection against Britain. These events occurred just as Russia also signed a treaty with Moslem Afghanistan, and only a month before the final conclusion of Russia’s treaty with Kemalist Turkey. In Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan—the three crucial countries that Britain had been disputing in the Great Game with Russia for more than a century—the new rulers had each negotiated a treaty with Moscow as his first move in foreign policy. Moreover, Kemalist Turkey’s first treaty with an Islamic nation was concluded with Afghanistan; it was negotiated in Moscow with Russia’s encouragement. All of Moscow’s new Islamic protégés were joining hands under Russia’s aegis against Britain. By their terms, the treaties were directed against imperialism, and their language left little doubt that it was British imperialism that they meant. Again, British officials were left with a sense that the many revolts against Britain in the East were linked together.

  Lord Curzon, who in 1918 had said that “the great power from whom we have most to fear in future is France,” claimed in 1920 that “the Russian menace in the East is incomparably greater than anything else that has happened in my time to the British Empire.”16 It was not that Russia was particularly powerful; war, revolution, and civil war had taken too great a toll for that to be true. Rather it was that the Bolsheviks were seen to be inspiring dangerous forces everywhere in the East. With Russian encouragement, Djemal Pasha, Enver’s colleague in the Young Turk government, went out to Afghanistan in 1920 to serve as a military adviser; and his mission illuminated what the British government most feared. The C.U.P., the continued influence of Germany even in defeat, pan-Islam, Bolshevism, Russia—all had come together and were poised to swoop down upon the British Empire at its greatest points of vulnerability.

  Thus the Soviets were supporting Persian nationalism against Britain. They were doing so because Kamenev believed that bringing pressure to bear on the British position in Persia might help rebel groups in neighboring Iraq to resist British rule in that country. Meanwhile Soviet-supported Turkish nationalism, led by Kemal and inspired (the British believed) by the Young Turkey movement, threatened to tear up the peace treaty that Lloyd George had imposed upon the Ottoman Empire. At the time Arab rioters in Egypt and Palestine had taken to the streets, and Ibn Saud in Arabia and Feisal in Syria had taken to the field with their armies, to contest the dispositions that Britain had made of their destinies. For Britain—flat on her back economically, and in no position to cope with foreign disturbances—the Middle Eastern troubles were overwhelming, and looked as though they had been purposefully incited by a dedicated enemy: Soviet Russia.

  PART XI

  RUSSIA RETURNS TO THE MIDDLE EAST

  53

  UNMASKING BRITAIN’S ENEMIES

  I

  It was true that the Soviets encouraged Persian nationalism, supported Turkish nationalism, and sought to aid rebellion in Iraq; but the Russians had not inspired—and did not direct—any of these movements. The growing British conviction that Bolshevik Russia was involved in a far-reaching international conspiracy that had incited rebellion throughout the Middle East was a delusion. What had occurred was a series of uncoordinated uprisings, many of them spontaneous, that were rooted in individual, local circumstances. Although the Soviets tried to make use of these local movements, neither Bolshevism nor Bolsheviks played any significant role in them. Yet there was an edge of truth to the British perception that Britain had moved into conflict with the new Russian state and that the Bolsheviks—hoping to exploit local opposition to British rule—viewed the Middle East as a theater of operations in that conflict.

  Among British and other Allied officials, it had been a common belief that aiding the German war effort was not a mere incidental effect of the Bolshevik coup d’état, but its driving purpose. The Germans, urged on by Alexander Helphand, had financed the Bolsheviks and had sent Lenin back to lead them. It may have been a matter of indifference to Lenin whether the achievement of his program helped or harmed either of the contending capitalist alliances; but to many Allied officials at the time, the evidence of German financial involvement demonstrated that helping Germany was Lenin’s desire and his
intention. Such officials therefore viewed Bolsheviks as enemy agents, and regarded the Bolsheviks’ communist theories as mere camouflage, or propaganda, or as an irrelevance. In turn, this view of Bolshevism fitted in with suspicions that had been formed and harbored by British officials, especially in the Middle East, since long before the war—suspicions that placed German-inspired Bolshevism in the context of an older conspiracy theory: a pro-German international Jewish plot.

  Confirmation that Jews were pro-German seemed to be provided by events in the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the twentieth century. As seen earlier (see pages 41–3), Gerald FitzMaurice had reported to his government that the Young Turks were tools in Jewish hands; and though FitzMaurice’s report, as historians now know, was false, it was believed at the time to be true. When the C.U.P., once in power, moved the Ottoman Empire into the German orbit, its policy was seen as an example of the effectiveness of the Jewish alliance with Germany.

  The Middle Eastern old hands who subscribed to this view—men like Wingate and Clayton—believed that Islam was a weapon that could be wielded at will by the Sultan-Caliph of Constantinople. When the supposedly Jewish Young Turks took control of the Sublime Porte, British officialdom therefore assumed that Islam, as well as the Ottoman Empire and the pan-Turkish movement, had passed into the hands of the German-Jewish combine.

  It was in this context that the second Russian Revolution was seen by British officials as the latest manifestation of a bigger conspiracy. Jews were prominent among the Bolshevik leaders; so the Bolshevik seizure of power was viewed by many within the British government as not merely German-inspired but as Jewish-directed.

  When the uprisings in the Middle East after the war occurred, it was natural for British officials to explain that they formed part of a sinister design woven by the long-time conspirators. Bolshevism and international finance, pan-Arabs and pan-Turks, Islam and Russia were pictured by British Intelligence as agents of international Jewry and Prussian Germany, the managing partners of the great conspiracy. In the mind of British officialdom, bitter enemies such as Enver and Kemal were playing on the same side; and so, they believed, were Arabs and Jews.