The USSR recognises Rashid Ali’s government

On 12 May 1941 the Soviet Union recognised the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in Baghdad and resolved to establish diplomatic relations with Iraq. Moscow did so at a moment when Iraq had been at war with Britain for ten days and Rashid Ali’s government was recognised by neither London nor Washington. It was one of several moves by which Joseph Stalin sought, in May 1941, to convince Hitler of his goodwill.

A government no one wished to recognise

Rashid Ali had taken power at the turn of March and April 1941, when the four colonels of the “Golden Square” forced the prime minister, Taha al-Hashimi, to resign and the regent, Abd al-Ilah, fled the country. It is often written that Moscow recognised the “Government of National Defence”. That was the name of the cabinet announced over the radio on 3 April, but as early as 10 April parliament deposed Abd al-Ilah and appointed a new regent, and on 12 April Rashid Ali formed an ordinary, formally constitutional government. The Soviet recognition therefore applied to this second cabinet, although the press and diplomats still called it the Government of National Defence, and real power remained with the colonels.

From the outset Britain treated the new regime as illegitimate. The United States, Turkey and Egypt followed London’s lead; the British ambassador, Kinahan Cornwallis, did not even present his credentials. Italy and Japan sent congratulations, and the King of Saudi Arabia recognised the new government while counselling it to be cautious. Germany had had no mission in Baghdad since September 1939, when Iraq broke off relations with it.

After Indian troops landed at Basra and the Iraqis surrounded the base at Habbaniya, war broke out on 2 May. Rashid Ali at once called on Germany and Italy to make good their promises of help, and his diplomats sought support wherever they could. The Soviet Union, bound to the Reich since 1939 by a non-aggression pact, was an obvious partner for Baghdad: it was not Britain’s enemy, but neither was it well disposed towards it, and it bordered Iran and Turkey, Iraq’s immediate neighbours. According to a Soviet diplomatic dictionary of the 1940s and 1950s, Rashid Ali established relations with the USSR “in an attempt to win the sympathy of the population”.

Recognition and the exchange of notes

The sources agree on the date of the recognition itself. An American chronology of diplomatic events for 1941 and a footnote in the State Department’s published documents (FRUS) give 12 May, as did the American press of those weeks. On that same 12 May the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, in a lengthy report to Berlin, listed “the government’s decision to establish diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Iraq” as one of four signs of a new line in Soviet policy. Formally, relations were established by an exchange of notes between the two governments: according to the American chronology and Russian compilations this took place on 16 May, according to some Russian studies on 18 May. Some lists also give 3 May as the date of an earlier agreement; none of the known sources confirms it.

The decision had no practical consequences. No envoys were exchanged, because before this could be arranged British troops had taken Fallujah and by the end of May stood outside Baghdad. Rashid Ali fled to Iran, and the new government, aligned with the regent, did not consider itself bound by its predecessor’s decisions. The USSR and Iraq established permanent diplomatic relations only on 9 September 1944.

Why Stalin did it

The recognition of Iraq was not an isolated gesture. In the spring of 1941 Moscow was growing increasingly anxious. At the beginning of April Stalin had signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression with the new Yugoslav government that had emerged from the Belgrade coup; a few hours later Germany attacked Yugoslavia and within two weeks forced it to capitulate. Stalin understood that a show of independence from Berlin could end badly. On 13 April, at a Moscow railway station, seeing off the Japanese foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka after the conclusion of the neutrality pact with Japan, he embraced Schulenburg and assured him that the USSR and Germany must remain friends.

In May deeds followed. On 5 May Stalin addressed graduates of the military academies in the Kremlin, and on 6 May he took over the chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars – that is, the post of head of government – hitherto held by Vyacheslav Molotov; Molotov became his deputy and kept the commissariat for foreign affairs. On 9 May the Soviet government informed the Belgian and Norwegian envoys, and the Yugoslav envoy Milan Gavrilović, that their missions no longer had any raison d’être, since the states they represented had lost their independence. From then on Moscow ceased to recognise the Norwegian and Belgian governments-in-exile. Gavrilović, who only a month earlier had signed the treaty of friendship, had to leave. The American ambassador in Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt, noted on 10 May that his German colleague denied that Berlin had asked for this, and predicted that the Greek legation might be next. At the beginning of June it was indeed closed.

In his report of 12 May Schulenburg linked these steps into a single whole: the TASS statement denying rumours of troop concentrations on the western frontier, the restoration of traditional diplomatic ranks, the closure of the Belgian, Norwegian and Yugoslav missions, and the establishment of relations with Iraq. All of them, in his view, were meant “to relieve the tension between the Soviet Union and Germany and to create a better atmosphere for the future”. The ambassador was convinced that Stalin had taken on the premiership in order to keep the USSR out of a conflict with the Reich personally. American observers saw it in much the same way: the recognition of Iraq was meant to improve relations with Germany and avert the threat of a German strike against Ukraine and the Caucasus.

Iraq was a convenient object for such a gesture. Recognition cost Moscow nothing and pleased Berlin and Rome, which were themselves only beginning to organise help for Baghdad: the German diplomat Fritz Grobba arrived there on 11 May, and Luftwaffe aircraft were flying through Syria to Mosul. At the same time it was aimed at Britain, with which Soviet relations had been cool for months, even though its ambassador, Stafford Cripps, was warning the Kremlin of German intentions. Nor was the Middle East itself a matter of indifference to Moscow: in November 1940, replying to the German proposal that it join the Tripartite Pact, the Soviet government had demanded recognition as its sphere of influence of the area south of Batumi and Baku in the direction of the Persian Gulf. In May 1941 Stalin was also following with suspicion the fate of Rudolf Hess, who had flown to Scotland on 10 May, and feared an Anglo-German settlement behind his back.

Berlin and Rome

Hitler and Mussolini supported Rashid Ali from the start, but cautiously. Germany promised weapons it was unable to deliver, and recognition of the independence of the Arab countries once they had won it for themselves. Only after the fighting broke out did Joachim von Ribbentrop obtain Hitler’s consent, on 3 May, to send Grobba to Baghdad, and on 6 May the Luftwaffe was ordered to form a small air detachment for Iraq. Italy, which had kept its legation in Baghdad throughout, sent a dozen or so fighters at the end of May. Recognition by the USSR, a formally neutral state, lent prestige to Rashid Ali’s government but changed nothing on the battlefield.

Place in the war

The irony of the gesture soon became apparent. On 31 May the Iraqis concluded an armistice with the British, and Rashid Ali and the Grand Mufti, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, took refuge in Iran. Three weeks later, on 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, heedless of all Stalin’s May concessions, and Britain became Moscow’s ally. In the summer of 1941 the USSR restored relations with the governments-in-exile of Norway, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece, whose envoys it had expelled in the spring. In August British troops, advancing among other places from Iraq, and the Red Army jointly occupied Iran, justifying the intervention by the presence of German agents, and Rashid Ali had to flee further, to Turkey and then to Berlin. From then on a considerable share of Western war supplies flowed to the USSR through Iraq and Iran.

The May recognition of Rashid Ali’s government is today a footnote to history, but it illustrates well Stalin’s policy in the last weeks before the German attack. Convinced that he could put off war until the following year, the Soviet leader was ready to give Berlin one proof of loyalty after another: he closed the legations of countries conquered by Germany, recognised governments that Germany supported, and to the very last delivered raw materials to the Reich on schedule. None of this altered the decision Hitler had already taken in December 1940 in Directive No. 21.