The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  Russia’s old commercial connections with Great Britain were again activated, despite the challenges involved: Arctic convoys taking provisions and resources to Murmansk and northern Russia had been treacherous enough in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Doing so within range of U-boats and heavily armoured cruisers like Tirpitz and Bismarck, which treated the North Sea coast of Norway as their stamping ground, required tremendous resilience and bravery. Sometimes, less than half the number of ships that set out made it to their destination and back – and many of the servicemen who travelled this route were not given medals for their service or their bravery for decades after the end of the war.82

  Slowly but surely the tide turned as German forces were squeezed out of the centre of the world. For a moment, it had looked as though Hitler’s gamble would pay off: already master of Europe in all but name, his effort to open up Central Asia from the north and from the south seemed to be working when his troops reached the banks of the Volga. But, one by one, the gains slipped away as the German army was relentlessly and brutally driven back to Berlin.

  Hitler plunged into despair as the realisation of what was happening dawned on him. A classified British report revealed that in a speech given on 26 April 1942, despite the apparent successes in the east, the German leader was betraying clear signs of paranoia and fatalism, together with growing evidence of what was termed a Messiah complex.83 From a psychological perspective, Hitler was an astonishing risk-taker, a man who fitted the profile of a compulsive gambler.84 His luck was finally starting to run out.

  The tide began to turn during the summer of 1942. Rommel had been halted at El Alamein, putting paid to the plans of Muammad al-usaynī, who had told the inhabitants of Cairo to prepare lists of homes and workplaces of Jewish residents so they could be rounded up and exterminated in gas vans developed by a fanatical German officer who had been stationed locally.85

  The entry of the US into the war also took time to make a difference. Shocked into action by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans geared up for war on two fronts. By the middle of 1942, victory at the epic battle of Midway enabled the US to move on to the offensive in the Pacific, while major troop deployments from the start of the following year in North Africa, Sicily and southern Italy and later elsewhere in Europe too promised to turn the course of the war.86

  Then there was the situation at Stalingrad. In the spring of 1942, Hitler had approved a proposal codenamed Operation Blue that involved German forces swinging through southern Russia to secure the oilfields in the Caucasus that had become central to the Third Reich’s war planning. The offensive was ambitious and risky – and victory depended on it, as senior generals and Hitler himself realised: ‘if I do not get to the oil of Maikop and Grozny,’ the German leader declared, ‘then I must end the war’.87

  Stalingrad represented a major problem. It was not essential to capture the city, despite the prestige associated with its name. Although it was an important industrial centre, its significance lay in its strategic location on a bend in the Volga: neutralising Stalingrad was vital to protect the gains the Germans envisaged making in the Caucasus. By the autumn of 1942, it was clear that things had gone badly wrong. The German offensive had begun late, and soon ran into trouble. Manpower, ordnance and increasingly precious fuel – resources Berlin could ill afford to spare – were expended in huge quantities at Stalingrad, which was bad enough. Worse was the fact that attention was diverted away from the campaign’s primary strategic goal: oil. Some within Hitler’s inner circle, such as Albert Speer, had understood what delays would mean. Germany had to win the war ‘by the end of October, before the Russian winter begins, or we have lost it once and for all’.88

  While there was still much to do in terms of planning how to uproot German troops from the east and the west, and how to co-ordinate the pincers that would close in on Berlin, by the end of 1942 the thoughts of the new Allies – Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union – were turning to the future. When the leaders of the three countries met at Teheran in 1943, at Yalta in the spring of 1945 and finally at Potsdam a few months later, it was clear that the effort, expense and trauma of another massive confrontation had exhausted western Europe.

  It was already obvious that old empires had to be wound down; it was simply a matter of how best to manage this process. In a sign of the pervasive moral fatigue, the question at hand was how to make the least bad decision – and even that was not done successfully. In October 1944, Churchill returned home from a visit to Moscow ‘refreshed and fortified’, he told Stalin, thanks to the ‘Russian hospitality which is renowned, excel[ing] itself’. Minutes record the performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, the opportunities for some ‘light shopping’ alongside a host of conclusions reached during the meetings. They do not record the discussions about the fate of post-war Europe, which were excised from the official reports.89

  The territorial integrity of Poland that the House of Commons had sworn to protect in 1939 was surrendered, its borders crudely altered when Winston Churchill decided the moment was ‘apt for business’ and used a blue pencil to mark a map that moved a third of the country into German territory and gifted a third to the Soviet Union; he also proposed divisions across scores of other countries in central and eastern Europe that might be mutually satisfactory – such as a 90:10 split in Rumania in favour of the USSR’s influence over that of Britain, and the opposite in the case of Greece; in Bulgaria, Rumania and Yugoslavia, a 50:50 division would apply. Even Churchill recognised that the ‘offhand manner’ in which the fates of ‘millions of people’ had been decided might be considered ‘rather cynical’. The price of keeping Stalin sweet involved the sacrifice of the freedom of half of the continent of Europe. ‘Let us burn the paper’, Churchill told the Soviet supremo; ‘No’, replied Stalin, ‘you keep it.’90

  Churchill realised the true situation too late. In his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946 that warned of an Iron Curtain falling across Europe, he observed that ‘all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe, Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia’, now lay within the sphere of the Soviet Union.91 All but Vienna and half of Berlin would stay there. The Second World War had been fought to stop the dark shadow of tyranny falling across Europe; in the end, nothing could, or would, be done to stop the Iron Curtain descending.

  And so Europe was cleaved in two at the end of the Second World War. The western half had fought bravely and heroically; and for decades afterwards congratulated itself on its achievement in taking on the evil of Nazism, without paying the price of recognising its role in its genesis. Nor could it spare much thought for the part of the continent that had been surrendered in a new set of post-war settlements. The defeat of Germany had resulted in chronic war fatigue, the exhaustion of the economies of Britain and France and the collapse of those of Holland, Belgium, Italy and the Scandinavian countries. Coupled with the dislocation was the fear not only of an arms race that was likely to involve extensive research into nuclear weapons, but of direct confrontation. With Soviet troops in Europe enjoying a 4:1 numerical superiority over those of the other Allies, supported by advantages in tank deployment, there were real fears that further hostilities might break out following the German surrender. As a result, Churchill ordered contingency plans to be drawn up that were based on a hypothesis that Hitler’s defeat simply marked the end of a chapter, rather than an end point in itself. The name given to these plans concealed the reason why they had been prepared in the first place: Operation Unthinkable was eminently thinkable in the minds of British planners.92

  The need to prepare for contingencies was firmly based in the reality of a fast-changing situation as Germany crumbled. Stalin had taken up an increasingly uncompromising position, no doubt driven by the sense of betrayal arising out of his catastrophic alliance with Hitler in 1939, but also as a result of the astonishing price that the Soviet Union had had to pay – above
all at Stalingrad and Leningrad – to survive the German onslaught.93 From Moscow’s point of view it became important to build a system of buffer zones and client states, as well as to create and reinforce the fear that direct action could be taken if the Soviet Union felt threatened. In the circumstances, crippling countries to the west by targeting and even removing their industrial bases was a logical step to take – as was providing financial and logistical support for nascent Communist parties. As history shows, attack is often the best form of defence.94

  One result of this was that Hitler’s oppression was deemed worse than that of Stalin. The narrative of the war as a triumph over tyranny was selective, singling out one political enemy while glossing over the faults and failings of recent friends. Many in central and eastern Europe would beg to differ with this story of the triumph of democracy, pointing out the price that was paid over subsequent decades by those who found themselves on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. Western Europe had its history to protect, however, and that meant emphasising successes – and keeping quiet about mistakes and about decisions that could be explained as realpolitik.

  This was typified by the European Union being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012: how wonderful that Europe, which had been responsible for almost continuous warfare not just in its own continent but across the world for centuries, had managed to avoid conflict for several decades. In late antiquity, the equivalent would have been giving the prize to Rome a century after its sack by the Goths, or perhaps to the Crusaders after the loss of Acre for toning down anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Christian world. The silence of the guns, perhaps, owed more to the reality that there was nothing left to fight for than to the foresight of a succession of supposedly brilliant peace-makers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, or to the wonders of an unwieldy international organisation of European states whose accounts have not been signed off by its own auditors for years.

  A new world had started to emerge in 1914 as the sun began to set on western Europe. The process accelerated with the hostilities of 1939–45, and continued after they had finally ended. The question now was who would control the great trading networks of Eurasia. And there was good reason to ponder this carefully, for it had turned out that there was more to the fertile earth and golden sands of the heart of the world and to the waters of the Caspian Sea than met the eye.

  21

  The Road of Cold Warfare

  Before the Second World War had drawn to a close, the fight to control the heart of Asia was well under way. In a grandly named ‘Tripartite Treaty’ signed in January 1942, Britain and the Soviet Union solemnly undertook ‘to safeguard the Iranian people against the privations and difficulties arising as a result of the present war’, and to ensure that they received enough food and clothing. In fact, as the treaty went on to make clear, the issue had little to do with the security of Iran – and everything to do with commandeering its infrastructure: the treaty therefore declared that Britain and the Soviet Union would be able to use the country’s roads, rivers, pipelines, airfields and telegraph stations as they pleased.1 This was not an occupation, stated the treaty; it was a case of help being given to an ally. Fine words – but rather creative ones.

  Ostensibly, the treaty was designed to prevent German expansion into Iran and to enable resources to be brought through the Gulf to help the Allies. Some, however, reckoned that the British also had an eye on the long term. The American minister in Teheran, Louis G. Dreyfus, for example, sent regular cables back to Washington commenting on the increasingly aggressive demands made of the Shah and on the accusations that there was a fifth column in Iran working against British interests. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote in August 1941, ‘that the British are using [the situation] as a pretext for the eventual occupation of Iran and are deliberately exaggerating [the] potency’ of the current circumstances.2

  Britain’s aims of maintaining – and strengthening – its position in Iran were not made more attainable by the way its officials and troops treated the local population. A full decade before the war, one journalist had written a withering critique of Britain’s behaviour, arguing that Iranians were treated as badly ‘as the East India Company was said to have treated the Indians two hundred years ago’.3 Animosities were intensified by the way British officers insisted that Iranian officers should salute their counterparts when they passed them – without this being reciprocated. There were widespread complaints that the British behave as ‘the Sahibs, the White Men, and treat [the Iranians] like a colonised people’. This was in sharp contrast to Soviet officers who kept to themselves, rarely went out and did not demand salutes – at least according to one German intelligence officer stationed in the region.4

  The attitudes of Sir Reader Bullard, the British ambassador at this delicate time, were typical. Food shortages and inflation during the latter part of the war had nothing to do with the failures of the occupying forces, or with the logistical difficulties of maintaining the Persian Corridor to take weapons and other goods north from the Gulf. The fault, wrote Bullard, lay with the Iranians themselves: ‘the Persian now has a double pleasure in stealing, raising prices to famine level, and so on; he always blames the British’.5 Remarking on ‘the low opinion that I have formed of the Iranians’, he flippantly added in one of his missives to London that ‘most Persians will surely become blowflies in their next incarnation’.6 Dispatches such as these caught the attention of Winston Churchill. ‘However natural Sir Reader Bullard’s contempt for all Persians’, wrote the Prime Minister, it ‘is detrimental to his efficiency and our interests’.7

  What made things worse was that such deeply ingrained views of entitlement and superiority were out of kilter with the realities of the situation – where it was increasingly clear that the dominant position built by the British was at risk. Ugly scenes broke out in Teheran in 1944 when the Russians discovered that negotiations were under way to grant a concession in the north of Iran to an American consortium of oil producers. Flames were fanned by the Tudeh party, a collection of left-wing militants whose message of reform, redistribution of wealth and modernism was given considerable support from Moscow. Such was the Soviet Union’s commitment to derailing discussions that at the height of these tensions Russian troops took to the streets alongside thousands of demonstrators, ostensibly to guard the protesters. To many, it looked uncomfortably as though force would be used to enable the Soviets to get their way and have the agreement cancelled. This was emphasised by the thuggish Sergei Kavtaradze, Assistant Foreign Commissar, whom Stalin had sent to Teheran to warn that there would be consequences for angering the Soviet Union.8

  In a denouement that dripped with high drama, it was left to Mohammed Mossadegh, a canny, articulate and consummate politician who had the knack of capturing the zeitgeist. He was a man, wrote one British official, who looks ‘rather like a cab horse and is slightly deaf so that he listens with a strained but otherwise expressionless look on his face. He conducts conversations at a distance of about six inches at which range he diffuses a slight reek of opium. His remarks tend to prolixity and he gives the impression of being impervious to argument.’9 Mossadegh was a ‘Persian of the old school’, according to a profile in the Observer that was added to Foreign Office files, ‘polite, prodigal of bows and handclaspings’.10 In fact, as it proved, the British seriously underestimated him.

  Mossadegh began to expound a vision, first set out in parliament at the end of 1944, that Iran could not and should not allow itself to be manipulated and terrorised by outside powers. The Knox D’Arcy concession and the way that Anglo-Iranian (previously Anglo-Persian) behaved provided object lessons in what happened if leadership was not robust enough. Time and again, he said, Iran had been taken advantage of and used as a pawn by rival interests that brought little benefit to the country’s people. It was simply wrong that choices should be made as to whom Iran should do business with: ‘let us negotiate with every state’, he declared, which ‘wishes to buy o
il, and get to work to liberate the country’.11

  Mossadegh was saying what many people had long felt – that it was invidious that the fruits lying under the soil brought limited benefits for Iran. It was hard to argue with the logic. In 1942, for example, the British government received £6.6 million in tax receipts from Anglo-Iranian’s activities; Iran received barely 60 per cent of this figure as a royalty payment. In 1945, the difference was even more stark. Where the exchequer in London benefited to the tune of £16 million in taxes from the business, Teheran took £6 million – in other words, only just over a third.12 It was not just about the money; as one well-informed British observer noted, the problem was that ‘no material benefits could compensate for personal degradation and loss of dignity’.13

  Such insight was unusual, as the author went on to admit. Laurence Elwell-Sutton had studied Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies before working for Anglo-Iranian in Iran before the Second World War. A gifted linguist who developed a passion for Persian culture, Elwell-Sutton was flabbergasted by the clumsy way Anglo-Iranian employees treated the local population. ‘Too few Europeans took the trouble to find out’ about Persians, finding it easier to ‘look on the “natives” . . . as dirty savages with peculiar habits that were of no interest to anybody, except perhaps anthropologists’. This ‘racial antipathy’ was bound to end in disaster; ‘unless it goes’, he concluded, ‘this company will’.14

  In the circumstances, it was not hard to see how momentum built behind reformers like Mossadegh. The age of European empire had long since started to erode – as had been evident in Iraq when Gertrude Bell was reminded that independence was not in Britain’s gift to give. It was inevitable in Iran, and elsewhere, that there would be growing demand for countries subjected to domination and heavy influence from abroad to take control of their own destinies – and a pattern quickly emerged and accelerated as the war went on. As it did so, Britain became an empire literally in retreat as its Silk Roads collapsed.