Iran and Russia usually spark a diplomatic and geopolitical story. A collective of historians proposes to shift the perspective by studying two centuries of Russian-Iranian relations from the angle of legal, commercial and cultural relations: the finesse of the analyzes illustrates the importance of a regional and intersecting history.
For the contemporary observer, relations between Russia and Iran are generally seen through the prism of the curious alliance which has united the two states since the 1990s and results in intense nuclear and military cooperation. This understanding emerged at a time when the common border which had linked the two countries for two centuries, in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union. There is therefore a form of topicality to the collective work Iranian-Russian Encounters. Empires and Revolutions since 1800 published at the start of the year, which looks back on Iranian-Russian relations over the last two centuries.
At a first level, for the authors – as coordinator Stephanie Cronin explains in the introduction – it is a question of going beyond a traditional historiography which described relations between the two countries as a succession of phases of implacable animosity and tactical rapprochements. . This historiography was based on a classical diplomatic and military history approach and frequently considered relations between Persia and Russia as a simple local variable of the major geopolitical clashes between Russia and the United Kingdom and then the United States. Such overcoming requires the introduction of new objects, such as trade, legal practices, transnational networks or cultural exchanges, beyond diplomatic and military history. These new objects make it possible to conceive of the influences as reciprocal and no longer unidirectional: if Iran has strongly felt the influence of Russia, the Russian Caucasus for its part continued to interact with Iranian society and politics until the beginning of XXe century. At a second, more methodological level, the work outlines what a crossed history of the two spaces and their contact zones could be, through the meeting between two disjointed historiographies, that of specialists of Russia and that of historians of Iran.
A major contribution of the work consists of the attention paid to the regional dimension of the relationship between the two countries. Russia and Iran do not appear as monolithic entities in contact, but as spaces crossed by flows and networks. Within them, two sub-spaces appear particularly significant, Russian and then Soviet Transcaucasia and Iranian Azerbaijan. These two regions function as airlocks in trade between Russia and Iran.
A “ long XIXe century » Russian-Iranian relations
The richest and most convincing part of the work concerns the relations between Russia and Persia at the end of the XVIIIe century, when the tsarist forces penetrated in a direct and prolonged manner into Transcaucasia, in the period known as the “ constitutional revolution » Iranian (between 1905 and 1911). This revolution, which put in difficulty the Qajar dynasty, originating from Iranian Azerbaijan and installed on the imperial throne since the end of the XVIIIe century, was finally repressed by Russian troops.
In his introductory essay, Afshin Matin-Asgari emphasizes that the pivot of relations between the two countries during the XIXe century is Azerbaijan, divided by the treaties of 1813 and 1828 between an Iranian part and a Russian part. From 1804, the Qajar crown princes were governors of Iranian Azerbaijan and made its capital, Tabriz, a place of power and trade. It is in this region that, faced with tsarist expansionism, the Persian power decided to embrace reforms, starting with the creation of a new army (nezâm-e djadid), partly taking up a program tested in the Ottoman Empire. The first innovations in printing, telegraph, posts and roads were made there during the century.
This general remark on the role of Azerbaijan and Northern Iran (regions of Gilan, Mazandaran and Khorasan) as interfaces is illustrated by specific studies. Firuza I. Melville thus describes the embassy led by Prince Khosrow Mirza to Saint Petersburg between May 1829 and February 1830 to improve Russian-Persian relations strained by the assassination, on February 11, 1829, of the plenipotentiary Alexander Griboedov in Tehran. This Persian embassy is one of the first opportunities for the high dignitaries of Iranian Azerbaijan to closely observe the tsarist institutions, which remain very little known to the Qajar leaders. Stephanie Cronin, for her part, proposes avenues of research on the question of Russian deserters enlisted in the Persian forces during the 1820s-1830s, vectors of exchanges and tensions between the two States. A particularly interesting article focuses on the problems posed by the purchase of land by Russian nationals in Northern Iran between 1828 and 1911, showing that Western powers present in the region and the Persian government perceived foreign land ownership as an issue. major, on which legal and political conflicts are grafted.
1905-1911: the period of revolutions
A significant part of the work’s contributions relate to the period of revolutions which engulfed Tsarist Russia, Persia and the Ottoman Empire between 1905 and 1911. They generally aim to show that it is possible to speak of a truly transnational revolutionary space, particularly between Russian Transcaucasia and North-West Iran, due to the significant circulation of individuals, ideas and practices, facilitated by cultural references and shared languages.
Iranian Azerbaijan is in fact the nerve center of the Iranian constitutional revolution between 1905 and 1911, which Iago Gocheleishvili’s article proposes to interpret in light of the close links between Transcaucasian and Persian revolutionaries. The strong community of Persian migrants in Russian Azerbaijan from the end of the XIXe century is a crucial belt in the production of social and political ideologies shared between the Caucasus and Persia, with the founding of political parties active on both sides of the border.
The Tsarist authorities were fully aware of this revolutionary nexus, since they first attempted to establish a cordon santé with revolutionary Iran, before deciding in 1908 to intervene militarily in Iranian Azerbaijan. In this repression, the major role was played by the unit of Iranian Cossacks, created in 1879 as auxiliaries of Qajar power and led by Russian officers: from that moment on, this body embodies the reactionary forces on the Iranian political scene. Stéphanie Cronin nevertheless emphasizes that this Cossack unit, although pro-Russian, plays an autonomous role. This is an example of the diversity of actors involved in relations between Persia and Russia in the early years of the XXewhich implies for the historian a detailed analysis of the levels of interactions.
Soviets and Pahlavis
The treatment of the period after the First World War is comparatively much less developed. We can regret this, as the history of relations between the Soviet Union and Qajar and then Pahlavi Iran would have to be rewritten. The articles offered from this period are more classic and provide few new elements. An exception is the study of Oliver Bast, who examines the period 1918-1921 and the problem of the process which led to the signing of the first Soviet-Iranian treaty, on February 26, 1921. Bast shows that this treaty is often interpreted , wrongly, as the first act of Pahlavi power. Such an interpretation reinforces the idea of an absolute rupture inaugurated by Reza Khan, who would have reestablished a state dignity neglected by his predecessors. On the contrary, Bast proves that previous governments, notably that of Vosuq od-Dowle, were keen to defend Iran’s autonomy, in the very difficult post-war context. The Iranian-British treaty of August 1919 is not the act of submission to imperialism that has long been derided, but a considered diplomatic move. It was the disappointments caused by the application of this treaty that pushed Persia to secretly initiate negotiations with the Bolsheviks at the end of 1920.
The other articles presented in the last two parts of the book are less stimulating than that of Oliver Bast. That of Touraj Atabaki, which concerns the relations between the Comintern, the Soviet Union and the workers’ movement in Iran between the wars, essentially consists of a resumption of previous works by the author. Two texts devoted to cultural exchanges between Soviet Russia and Iran, through the case of the introduction of cinema and the cultural and political figure of director Abdolhosein Nushin, struggle to convince as the focus is reduced and seems to forget the more general objectives of the work. Finally, the contributions dealing with the post-Soviet period appear quite out of place. That of Muriel Atkin defends the point of view that Iran adopted a pragmatic and not ideological approach to the civil war in Tajikistan (1992-1997), favoring its state interests over a form of solidarity with the Islamist parties engaged in the conflict. The last text, by Clément Therme, emphasizes the tactical dimension of the Russo-Iranian understanding since the 1990s. Despite the respective merits of these articles, we cannot escape the impression that the coherence of the work falls apart in its second half.
What a cross story between Russia and Iran ?
The difference in level between the two parts of the work should not obscure the great programmatic interest of this collection, which offers promising avenues for a new study of relations between Russia and Iran.
The first avenue, mentioned in the introduction, is based on a critique of accepted geographical and institutional categories, with the highlighting of the role of Russian and then Soviet Transcaucasia and Iranian Azerbaijan as transition zones. Ethnic, cultural and legal identities are frequently blurred, which facilitates exchanges. A national Russian » in Persia at the end of the XIXe century is frequently a Muslim, an Armenian or a Georgian of the tsarist empire, unless he is an Iranian who received a Russian passport by consular pardon. Despite its political division between two empires, Azerbaijan continues to form up to the first third of the XXe century a relevant scale of analysis of circulations. It is the taking into account of these finer geographical articulations and their evolution that the work can invite.
The second track which runs through the collection highlights the renewal of the sources available to treat the theme. As Stephanie Cronin notes, the authors were encouraged to use sources from both sides of the border and the different scales involved as much as possible. In this region as in others, the “ taste for the archive is polyglot », which requires researchers to have the ability to handle sources in Russian, Persian, but also in the main Caucasian languages and Turkish. Conversely, Afshin Matin-Asgari warns against what he considers to be an interpretive bias caused by the systematic recourse to British sources on the Middle East and Iran.
Particular mention must be made of Iranian sources, the collection of which allows us to perceive the richness and renewal. Iranian archives remain insufficiently exploited by foreign researchers, but the historian can have recourse to a growing corpus of primary sources published by Persian publishers (memoirs, travelogues, collections of archival documents, etc.). It is ultimately this integration of traditionally disjointed sources that constitutes the book’s main appeal and its strongest commitment to an intersecting history of Russia and Iran.