Persia joins the Litvinov Protocol

On 3 April 1929 Persia acceded to the Litvinov Protocol, signed two months earlier in Moscow by the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Latvia and Estonia. The protocol brought the Kellogg–Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of policy, into force among its parties without waiting for all the great powers to ratify it. Persia was not among the original signatories. It made use of the fifth article, which opened the protocol to all the states of the world, and notified its accession to the Soviet government, the depositary of the document. Turkey had acceded two days earlier, and Lithuania followed two days later. For Soviet diplomacy, then in practice directed by Maxim Litvinov, this was confirmation that its initiative embraced not only the USSR’s western neighbours but its southern ones too.

A country between two empires

From the beginning of the 20th century Persia was an object of rivalry between Russia and Great Britain. The convention of 1907 divided it into a Russian sphere of influence in the north, a British one in the south-east and a neutral zone in between. During the First World War neutral Persia became a battlefield for Russian, British and Turkish troops. After the revolution in Russia the British tried to turn it into their protectorate. The agreement of 1919, which placed the country’s army and finances in their hands, was never ratified by the Persian parliament, the Majlis. In 1920 the Bolsheviks landed troops at the port of Enzeli on the Caspian Sea and supported a rising in Gilan province, where a Soviet republic was proclaimed.

On 21 February 1921 Reza Khan, an officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade, staged a coup in Tehran. Five days later, on 26 February 1921, a Soviet–Persian treaty of friendship was signed in Moscow. In it Soviet Russia renounced the tsarist treaties, debts and concessions, but in its fifth and sixth articles reserved the right to send troops into Persia should its territory be used as a base for an attack on Russia and the Persian government prove unable to prevent it. These two articles provoked a fierce debate in the Majlis, but dislike of the British prevailed and the treaty was ratified. Before the end of 1921 Soviet troops left Gilan, and the republic there collapsed.

Reza Khan became Minister of War, in 1923 Prime Minister, and in 1925 the Majlis deposed the last ruler of the Qajar dynasty, Ahmad Shah; in December that year a constituent assembly gave the throne to Reza himself. As Reza Shah Pahlavi he set about building a centralised, modernised state on the model of Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey. The Minister of Court, Abdolhossein Teymourtash, had great influence on foreign policy. In 1926 he spent two months in Moscow, and on 1 October 1927 Persia and the USSR signed a treaty of guarantee and neutrality, together with economic agreements, including one on fishing in the Caspian Sea. In 1928 Persia abolished the capitulations – the judicial privileges of foreigners – and in the dispute over the terms of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s oil concession it put ever greater pressure on the British.

Accession

Accession to the protocol fitted the policy of balance that Tehran pursued between Moscow and London. It cost Persia nothing and strengthened its position towards both neighbours: the undertaking to settle disputes peacefully was given above all by the Soviet Union, which under the 1921 treaty had the right, in certain circumstances, to send troops into Persian territory. For Moscow, which had had no relations with Great Britain since 1927, every declaration of friendship from a state lying on the road to India and the Persian Gulf had propaganda value.

The legal significance of the accession was modest. Under the protocol the Paris pact was to bind a new participant and the other parties once that country had ratified it. According to American records, Persia deposited its instruments concerning the pact itself only after 24 July 1929, when the Kellogg–Briand Pact came into force for everyone and the Moscow Protocol lost its raison d’être. Persia’s accession was therefore above all a political gesture, like that of Turkey, which since 1925 had been bound to the USSR by a treaty of friendship and neutrality, and of Lithuania, which was linked to Moscow by a non-aggression treaty of 1926.

Significance

Persia stayed on the course set in 1929. In July 1933 in London, together with the USSR, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Afghanistan, Estonia and Latvia, it signed the Convention for the Definition of Aggression prepared by Litvinov. In 1935 Reza Shah demanded that his country be called Iran abroad, and in 1937 Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Afghanistan concluded a non-aggression pact at Saadabad. Looking for a counterweight to Great Britain and the USSR, Reza Shah drew closer to Germany, which became one of Iran’s main trading partners. German firms also took part in building the Trans-Iranian Railway, which from 1938 linked the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf. Teymourtash, the architect of foreign policy in the 1920s, did not live to see this: in 1932 he fell from the Shah’s favour, and he died in prison in 1933.

In September 1939 Iran declared its neutrality. After Adolf Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Trans-Iranian Railway became the Allies’ safest route for supplying the embattled Red Army, and the presence of a few hundred Germans in Iran provided a pretext for intervention. On 25 August 1941 British and Soviet troops invaded Iran. In its note the Soviet government justified this precisely by the sixth article of the 1921 treaty, not by the obligations of 1929, which ruled out the use of force. The Iranian army’s resistance lasted a few days. On 16 September Reza Shah abdicated in favour of his son Mohammad Reza and went into exile, from which he never returned. A large share of American and British war supplies flowed to the USSR through Iran, and in November and December 1943 Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Tehran for the first Big Three conference. After the war the Soviet Union delayed the withdrawal of its troops from northern Iran and supported separatists there, which led to the Iran crisis of 1946, one of the first confrontations of the Cold War. The renunciation of war in 1929 thus did not change Persia’s position: throughout the interwar period and the war, its fate was decided by the strength of its neighbours.