The Role of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union in the Iranian Famine of the First World War I

During the First World War, British policies in central and southern Iran dragged the nation into a destructive and unwanted war. But the same would happen in the north. There forces of Tsarist Russia, which had occupied parts of Iran since 1909, engaged in an even more aggressive and highly destructive set of policies. Russian forces plundered farmlands, destroyed homes, brutally mistreated and raped the population and starved the public. Their goal was to intimidate the population and provide Russian troops with food and other necessities of life. Their actions caused severe disruption in the daily lives of the people who resided in the east, north, and northwestern parts of the country and eventually brought about a widespread famine. What has not been explored in any detail until now is that this pillage and plunder continued after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and under the new Soviet regime, even though the USSR officially withdrew from the war. This great historical omission might be due to the fact that there was great sympathy for the Soviet Union among Iranian intellectuals, including many leftist historians of the 20th century, and hence reluctance to divulge the atrocities that were committed under the Soviet regime, known as a “friend” of the Iranian people, while there was no such hesitance to speak of plunders committed under the Tsarist regime, long known as an enemy of Iran. The present study is based on unpublished documents located at the Iranian National Archives, the Archives of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, and the Archives of the Iranian parliament for the years 1914-1921. The paper examines how the Tsarist regime and the Soviet Union contributed to a large-scale famine in the nation and caused great devastation. Ultimately the paper also tries to explain the relative ease with which the Iranian nation accepted the subsequent military regime, which brought a modicum of security to the nation in the years 1921-24.