XII
THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN WAR OF 1918-’20
HOW MR. LLOYD GEORGE TRIED TO IMPOSE ALONE UPON ISLAM THAT FATE WHICH GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA HAD AGREED TO IMPOSE TOGETHER IN 1907—THE ANGLO-PERSIAN AGREEMENT—THE “CENTRAL ASIAN FEDERATION”—THE AMERICAN MANDATE IN TRANS-CAUCASIA—THE RETURN OF SOVIET RUSSIA.
The war now began in bitter earnest.
Czarist Russia had been a weight upon Islam which had increased until 1907 when, in agreement with Great Britain, the two Powers began grinding to pieces the last of the independent Islamic States. Russia’s collapse in 1917 and the resultant abrogation of the 1907 Treaty, coinciding with Germany’s collapse, afforded the British Government a marvelous opportunity to reconsider its policy toward Islam. The British had no great enemy left in the East, but apparently the fact did not occur to Mr. Lloyd George. In the Anglo-Russian war of 1918-’20, the British Government took over the business of crushing Islam which Czarist Russia had begun, while attempting to overthrow the Soviet Government and re-instate in office a Russian Government which should concur in the fate which the British alone now sought to impose on the last of the Islamic States. With Constantinople occupied, the Ottoman Sultans could be reduced to simple Amirs of Anatolia whenever Mr. Lloyd George chose. In the meantime, what happened in Turkey hardly mattered. What happened in Russia did matter.
The little Dunsterforce which had been thrown back into Persia by the Turkish capture of Baku, was quickly reinforced from Bagdad and became the British North Persia Force with its base at Kasvin, not far from Teheran. Here it stood in the heart of the old Russian zone, despite a small body of Czarist die-hards who still clung to the old Russian zone in Teheran. Meanwhile the old British zone in the southern half of Persia had been occupied by the South Persia Rifles whose officer personnel was British, and early in 1918 the Government of India had dispatched the East Persia Cordon from Quetta along the Nushki Railway to the new railhead of Duzdap in the Seistan, whence it ran a lorry road north through Persia to Meshed in the old Russian zone and flung out detachments to occupy Askabad and the Merv oasis on the Russian Trans-Caspian Railway.
Late in 1918, the Mudros armistice enabled the North Persia Force to re-occupy Baku in Trans-Caucasia (where it left the Turkish Federalist Party in power) and General Milne occupied Batum from Constantinople. Ostensibly to hold Denikin’s rear, the British occupation of Trans-Caucasia was rapidly completed, the Turco-German forces being evacuated into the eastern provinces and the remnants of the Czarist forces being rounded up and dismissed to Denikin’s front. At Baku, the Czarist Caspian Fleet was maneuvred into British hands and removed to British keeping at Enzeli on the Persian coast. Opposite Baku on the eastern coast of the Caspian, the East Persia Cordon detached from Askabad a small garrison for Krasnovodsk, and Persia was now not only held by British and Indian forces but all its approaches, from north, south, east and west, were in the same hands.
In Denikin’s rear, General Milne at Constantinople now commanded a single British front which crossed Trans-Caucasia from Batum to Baku, which made a British lake of the Caspian, and which extended into Central Asia from Krasnovodsk to Askabad and the Merv oasis. Over all of it, the double-headed eagle of Czarist Russia had waved only a year before. Behind this truly remarkable front, railway projects were speedily envisaged by which the new British Arabia, British Persia and British Trans-Caucasia were to be firmly bound to each other and to British India, a Bagdad-Teheran-Enzeli line to develop Enzeli into a British naval base which should command the Caspian, and a Batum-Kars-Tabriz-Duzdap line to fetch the frontiers of British India to the Black Sea as they had already been fetched to Haifa on the Mediterranean. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle had not only been made good, but the collapse of Czarist Russia had made the British a present of the Constantinople-Kabul line in addition. British officers were glum with expectation.
Sir Percy Cox, chief political officer of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, was dispatched to Teheran as British Minister as soon as the Mudros armistice brought the war to an end on the Mesopotamia front, and began formulating the Anglo-Persian Agreement at once. Persia had then been swallowed whole by the British. The North Persia Force was paying 350,000 tomans a month (roughly $800,000) to keep the Persian Government in being and 100,000 tomans a month to keep the old Cossack Division quiet. Under these conditions, Sir Percy Cox began negotiations in January, 1919, with three Persian grandees and by June the Agreement was ready to be signed. It provided for a British loan of £2,000,000 to the Persian Government and for British advisers in the Persian Ministries. Briefly, it had the effect of reducing Persia to another of the British Indian frontier States. It was finally approved by the British Foreign Office and was signed by the three Persians on August 9. It had been drawn up secretly and no public announcement of its signature was made until August 15, when it was announced simultaneously that the Shah had left for a prolonged tour in Europe. It was to take effect as soon as the Persian Parliament ratified it. At the moment the Parliament was not in session, the deputies having left Teheran in 1915, intending to re-assemble at Kum to follow the Ottoman Empire into war against the Anglo-Russian entente.
Meanwhile the East Persia Cordon regularized the position of its garrisons in Meshed and Merv by styling them “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.” It will be recalled that the Amir Habibullah Khan of Afghanistan, a wild country which tilts up to the roof of the world above the north-west frontier of India, had stuck loyally to the British despite a fiery nationalist party which sought to carry him into the war against the Anglo-Russian entente. He was still sticking loyally to the British when Czarist Russia fell in 1917 and all of Central Asia fell with it into the most complete confusion. North of him, Bokhara, a smaller country which adjoins the Afghan frontier for nearly half its length, had been nominally independent under the rule of its Emir, Said Mir Alim Khan, in Old Bokhara City, but actually ruled by the Czarist Resident in the Russian cantonment of New Bokhara. The Kerensky Cabinet at Petrograd continued this regime, but Soviet Russia recalled the Resident and left the Emir in control. The mutual abrogation of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 had the effect of leaving both Bokhara and Afghanistan in enjoyment of actual independence. The Young Uzbeg Party in Bokhara immediately began an agitation for the introduction of Parliamentary government, but the Emir Said Mir Alim lost no time in discovering new friends at Merv where the Government of India’s East Persia Cordon had set up one of its “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.”