Russian Officialdom and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1905–1911

Abstract

This article centers on tsarist Russian officials’ understandings of and approaches to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–11). Although these officials relied on fragmental information and reflected internal discoordination in their dealings with Iran over the course of the revolution, a diachronic shift marked the policies they formulated in response. Although many of them attempted to navigate the Constitutional Revolution’s complexity in its early phases, they tended toward the use of force as unrest continued, culminating in the Russian invasion of northern Iran in December 1911. Uncritically confident in their exercise of power, Russian officials proceeded without considering alternative courses of action or the potential costs of military engagement in the revolution’s final stages. This heavy-handedness reflected continuity with the tsarist government’s crackdowns on socialists in the Caucasus after the Russian Revolution of 1905, and presaged its repressive, self-defeating responses to uprisings across the Russian Empire from 1912 to 1917.

On January 1, 1912, Russian military authorities began a spate of executions in the city of Tabriz, targeting the leaders of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–11).¹ These executions, which followed Russia’s invasion into the northern Iranian border provinces in December 1911, marked the culmination of the Russian state turn against Iranian constitutionalism. In its final year, officials of the tsarist government had come to regard the Constitutional Revolution, a movement that they hardly feared or understood in its early stages, as a potentially serious threat to their country’s position in Iran. The reasons for this turn were many: the impulse to secure commercial concessions in the Iranian north, a desire to keep Iran in a sphere of influence against the German threat, fear of instability and violence on the Iranian-Russian border, and a broad antirevolutionist pivot that followed the suppression of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the assassination of Interior Minister Pyotr Stolypin (in office since 1906) in 1911.²

In the final weeks of the Constitutional Revolution, members of hard-line groups—including hundreds of socialists from the Caucasus—fought against Russian advances onto Iranian soil, but were ultimately unable to stop the offensive or the retributive executions that followed.³ The socialists’ very presence in northern Iran, much less their leadership of its armed resistance, revealed how much the Constitutional Revolution had evolved politically and programmatically since its beginnings in December 1905. Then, an alliance of merchants, dissimulating Babi-Baha’i reformists, and progressive clerics organized a series of strikes and protests in Tehran that compelled Mozaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896–1907) to authorize the formation of a majlis (parliament).⁴ Majlis delegates deliberated for months before presenting Mozaffar al-Din Shah with a draft constitution, which he signed in January 1907 in a move that codified representative government in Iran for the first time.⁵

Reactionary forces would test Iranian constitutionalism from the outset. In June 1908, soldiers of the Russian Cossack Brigade in Tehran orchestrated a coup that granted nominally unchecked authority to Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s son and successor, Mohammad ʿAli Shah (r. 1907–9).⁶ Constitutionalists in Iranian Azerbaijan and Gilan in the north, and among the Bakhtiyari tribe in the southwest, responded to this reversal by mobilizing for war.⁷ Their military efforts, coordinated with the aforementioned revolutionaries from the Russian Caucasus, culminated in the recapture of Tehran and deposition of Mohammad ʿAli Shah a year later.⁸

Some observers of the 1908 coup interpreted Cossack actions in Iran as a reflection of the antidemocratic impulses of the late tsarist empire. One of the most important early chroniclers of Iranian constitutionalism, the eminent Persianist Edward G. Browne (d. 1926), did not distinguish between the bulk of the Russian Foreign Ministry (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del) and the aggressively anticonstitutional Russian contingent in Tehran, headed by such figures as Seraya Shapshal (d. 1961) and Vladimir Li͡akhov (d. 1920), when probing the role of the tsarist government in the coup.⁹ Rather, Browne presented the coup as a reflection of the Russian state’s role as “always and everywhere that ruthless foe of freedom,” and assumed its inimical opposition to constitutionalism even outside of Russian borders.¹⁰

The tsarist government’s anticonstitutional turn reflected what Alisa Shablovskaia has termed Russian “hubris” in Iran, namely the idea that foreign ministry officials could dictate policy without regard for Iranian sovereignty.¹¹ However, as seen in the final stages of the Constitutional Revolution, the northern Iranian political landscape was more complex than Russian officials had appreciated. By the early twentieth century, the Russian state was contending with an assertive contingent of revolutionary socialists cultivated by Sergo Ordzhonikidze (d. 1937), Josef Stalin (d. 1953), and other organizers in the South Caucasus.¹² Meanwhile, national liberationist parties, led by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), advanced a modern, incorporative vision of constitutionalism that extended across ethnic boundaries.¹³ Buttressed by an uneasy alliance between these factions, and underpinned by the movement of Russian citizens southward to the Iranian north, the Constitutional Revolution in its middle (1908–9) and later (1909–11) stages embodied increasingly radical socialist and anti-imperialist ideas. This shift tested the resolve of the tsarist government, which eventually mobilized multiple ministries to suppress the threat posed by the constitutionalists’ program of economic sovereignty to the concessions held by Russian citizens in the Iranian north.

In the final years of the revolution, the Iranian constitutionalists’ international isolation in the face of Russian and British state antagonism significantly contributed to their defeat. In her study of proconstitutional Iranian elites (and anticonstitutionalists) in the period from 1909 to 1911, Mangol Bayat reinterprets both the dynamics of great power politics on the eve of the Russian invasion of the Iranian north, and relatedly the disjuncture between the Iranian majlis and cabinet in the face of Russian violations of Iranian sovereignty.¹⁴ In so doing, Bayat demonstrates the importance of economic interests to Russian calculations in Iran, and argues that a broad European consensus—including also that of the German rivals of the Anglo-Russian Entente—allowed the two powers to pursue their ambitions against the constitutional government. How then, beyond its building of a diplomatic consensus and use of its superior military, did the Russian state impose itself on northern Iran?

Denis V. Volkov reconstructs Russian academic and bureaucratic expertise to probe the ways in which institutionalized knowledge underscored state power over Iran.¹⁵ Linking Orientalist ideas with Russian policy, Volkov argues that the late tsarist government invested in the academic discipline of Iranology to build a corps of experts to maintain Russia’s dominance in the Iranian north, which it had reduced to a “virtual colony.”¹⁶ Among these experts and their overseers, a limited number of anticonstitutional stalwarts, foremost among them Shapshal, sought to direct Russian policy in Iran against the revolution from its outset.¹⁷ Others, such as Vladimir Minorskiĭ, a seasoned diplomat who from 1915 to 1917 briefly served as chargé d’affaires in Tehran, believed that constitutionalism might be appropriate for part of the country. Ascribing cultural superiority to the Azerbaijani Turkish speakers in northwestern Iran, Minorskiĭ sought to implement Russian-directed reforms in Iranian Azerbaijan, and even to cleave it from Iran entirely.¹⁸

Volkov has highlighted an intermittent pattern in Russian state relations with Iran—a limited set of individuals had the potential to direct policy independent of the diktats of the Russian Foreign Ministry in St. Petersburg or the viceroyalty of the Caucasus in Tbilisi.¹⁹ And, indeed, part of the difficulty in determining the motivations behind the Russian suppression of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution stems from the discoordination between these very power centers. During the revolution, the communiqués of the Russian consulates in Iran were, in most cases, relayed not directly to the leadership of the foreign ministry, but rather to the Russian mission in Tehran, and sometimes copied to the viceroyalty. This reflected the viceroyalty’s particular security importance in the final decades of the Russian Empire. In addition to managing domestic revolutionary challenges in the Caucasus after the Russian Revolution of 1905, the viceroyalty also independently managed some of the Russian Empire’s diplomacy vis-à-vis both Iran and the Ottoman Empire.²⁰

Some scholars have argued that the Russian diplomatic apparatus executed its policy in Iran with a measure of coherence despite the generalized disorder of the late tsarist state. Janet Afary asserts that the senior echelons of the Russian state supported Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā’s attempted reclamation of the throne in 1911 by directing Russian consuls in Iran to impede the resistance of the constitutional government.²¹ Shablovskaia, by contrast, interprets the Russian intervention in northern Iran as a decision driven by resident consuls, rather than one delegated to them by St. Petersburg.²² By this interpretation, the consuls’ urging, particularly that of Consul-General Ivan Pokhitonov in Tehran, Consul Aleksandr Miller in Tabriz, and Consul Aristid Dabizha in Mashhad, partially drove the Russian Empire’s occupation of northern Iran in 1911.²³

The present article offers a new interpretation of the evolution of Russian state responses to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. To do so, it makes use of several collections from Russian archives, including some held at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyĭ arkhiv Rossiĭskoĭ Federat͡sii) and some duplicates of Russian consular records held in the Hoover Institution Archives in Stanford, California.²⁴ The records of the viceroyalty of the Caucasus, held in Tbilisi at the Central State Historical Archive of Georgia (Sakartvelos saist’orio tsent’raluri arkivi), provide another useful window into the concerns of the late tsarist state in Iran, and especially into the seeming erasure of Iranian sovereignty in the eyes of senior viceroyalty officials. Together, these collections contain a number of mission and consular reports, diplomatic exchanges, and correspondence on security matters by officials of the tsarist government both in Iran and the Russian Empire itself. When compared with Russian officials’ correspondence with their foreign counterparts, the limited internal circulation and often secret nature of these documents raises the possibility that they reflect something closer to the actual priorities, rather than the diplomatized representation, of Russian state interests in Iran.

This article demonstrates how, from 1905 to 1911, Russian officials’ mixed, cautious, and sometimes insightful readings of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution gave way to a largely de-intellectualized effort to assert the primacy of the tsarist government in northern Iran. Even those officials—limited in number and often junior in rank—who espoused a principled opposition to constitutionalism attempted to navigate the revolution’s complexity in its early stages. This article argues that in their eventual turn against Iran’s constitutional order, officials of the tsarist government reflected both limited understandings of the ideas and actors they sought to repress, and significant discoordination between the persons and institutions tasked with repressing them. Examining this pivot reveals how, by 1911, Russian officialdom could not conceive of alternatives to its own exercise of power or weigh the consequences of its military entanglement in the Iranian north.

Revolution in the semi-colony

As demonstrated by Houri Berberian, the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution were linked not only by an increasingly internationalist opposition to autocracy, but also by the movement across borders of revolutionary volunteers committed to their shared ideals.²⁵ Several months before the Iranian revolution, Russian strikers and demonstrators forced Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) to accede to demands for the establishment of a parliament (duma), marking the end of the absolute monarchy.²⁶ Although some Iranian revolutionaries took inspiration from the Russians’ success in constraining a more powerful monarch, the social classes leading the respective revolutions reflected fundamental differences between the two states. The revolution of 1905 was a largely urban, proletarian movement led by soldiers and industrial workers.²⁷ Neither of these classes were numerous or politically organized in Iran, where the revolution instead reflected the blending of religious heterodox ideas with imported and adapted conceptions of European modernity.²⁸

At the state level, relations between the Iranian and Russian crowns were marked, as argued by Moritz Deutschmann, by a performative affinity that masked the real power disparities between the two.²⁹ Although formally independent, Iran retained its sovereignty only in name, as made evident by the series of commercial, legal, and political concessions the Russians secured in the Iranian north. The 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, which divided Iran into the two signatories’ respective spheres of influence, cemented these concessions and facilitated the semi-incorporation of the Iranian north into the Russian Empire over the following decade.³⁰ In yet another threat to Iranian state sovereignty, Ottoman expansionists drew up plans for annexation of Iran’s majority Kurdish and Azerbaijani Turkish-speaking northwest, even as Russia maintained and eventually militarized its presence in certain cities within these provinces.³¹

At the beginning of the Constitutional Revolution, some senior Russian statesmen interpreted the protests as extensions of the revolution of 1905, despite the fact that Iran had little in the way of the labor mobilization characteristic of Russian industrial centers. In a 1905 report, the special section (osobyĭ otdel) of the Russian secret police (okhrana) attributed the earliest unrest in Iran primarily to the economic disturbances stemming from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5).³² Nikolaĭ Hartwig, the Russian minister (ambassador) in Iran (1906–8), further argued that the constitutionalist leaders drew inspiration from the revolution of 1905, including its socialist contingent in the South Caucasus.³³ Initially, therefore, Hartwig’s skepticism of developments in Iran reflected only his skepticisms of Russia’s own political turn:

There is no doubt that the first actions in this direction were inspired by events in Russia. And in the midst of the leadership, it is certain, there are persons who—in the interests of their homeland—wish to introduce transformations in the various branches of their government.³⁴

Hartwig’s personal prejudices, however, stymied his confidence in the revolution:

Although the agitation is driven primarily by the clergy, among the leadership have appeared various secular and sophisticated persons with European education. [Their] program is of a purely constitutional character, with a people’s assembly, equality before the law, and other such things. But we should not afford the superficial developments that have arisen in Tehran and a few other cities undue importance. In Persia, with its fanatical population, its peculiar temperament and habits, we should not expect the adoption of European constitutionalism for many decades to come.³⁵

Over the following years, similar sentiments guided Hartwig’s interpretation of political developments in Iran, especially his belief in the concentration of progressive and constitutional ideas to a small, Westernized elite. But alongside derisive imputations of Iranian fanaticism and backwardness, Hartwig also made insightful observations on the constitutionalist leadership and its place in elite Iranian power struggles. For example, years before their rise to the forefront of Iranian politics, Hartwig correctly identified the constitutionalist proclivities of the brothers Hassan and Hosayn Pirniyā (d. 1935, d. 1948), as well as their father’s liberal leanings.³⁶ Furthermore, Hartwig shrewdly assessed that Prime Minister Mirzā Asghar ʿAli Khān ʿAmin al-Soltān (d. 1907) had supported the early protests for his own political gain, and that some of the Qajar (1794–1921) nobility sought to benefit from the unrest. Most astutely, Hartwig deduced that certain elements “hidden” among the ulama (clerics) had helped to initiate the revolutionary unrest. With this knowledge, he affixed to his initial report on the revolution not the demands submitted by the senior ulama to Mozaffar al-Din Shah, but rather the Russian translation of a proclamation, probably from mid-1906, bearing the imprint of the secret societies active in the bast (seeking of sanctuary) of senior cleric Sayyed ʿAbd-Allāh Behbahāni (d. 1910), at the British Legation in Tehran.³⁷

Indeed, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dissimulating adherents of Babism had joined the ranks or circles of the clergy, leveraging their influence to promote modernizing reforms.³⁸ In identifying the Babi influence among the revolutionaries, Hartwig displayed a remarkable acquaintance with the ideas underpinning Iranian political dissent. Certainly, Hartwig benefited from the Russian elites’ familiarity with the Babi movement, as relayed through the writings of Aleksandr Grigorʹevich Tumanskiĭ.³⁹ But even here, Hartwig’s informed reading of Babi influences also may have reflected his low estimation of Iranian political development. By assigning credit for the revolution’s progressive impulses to a marginalized minority, Hartwig only reemphasized the backwardness of the majority.

A number of officials in the foreign ministry shared Hartwig’s low estimation of Iranian political development, as well as a general disdain for Iranian (and Russian) revolutionary movements. Among them was Colonel Konstantin Smirnov (d. 1938), who served in Tehran from 1907 to 1914 to cultivate pro-Russian feelings in crown prince Ahmad Shah Qajar (d. 1930).⁴⁰ Reflecting on his assignment, Smirnov wrote that “in Tehran there are already a sufficient number of cultured Persians,” but qualified that “in the [shah’s] court there are very few, and in the suite of the crown prince—not one.” Smirnov’s assessment, however, may have been somewhat self-promotional, as he followed these remarks with the boast that “I was the only cultured individual with whom the crown prince was in daily contact.”⁴¹ Boasting aside, Smirnov’s assessment of Iranians’ “fanatical” disposition was identical to Hartwig’s, and was only underscored by his wide-eyed observations in Tehran of the Shiʿi religious commemoration of Āshurā, particularly the rituals of self-flagellation, a few months later.⁴²

Constrained by their belief in the lack of political sophistication in Iranians, some Russian officials misjudged not only the social and political underpinnings of the Constitutional Revolution, but also its potential for radicalization by the same elements that had destabilized the Caucasus during the revolution of 1905. Perhaps more than any other single incident, the assassination of ʿAmin al-Soltān highlighted Russian officialdom’s failure to anticipate the threat of cross-border revolutionary mobilization. Smirnov, who met with ʿAmin al-Soltān two days prior to his demise on August 31, 1907, reported that the assassination was met with confusion and anger among Russian officials in Iran. Upon receiving word, Li͡akhov, then the Iranian Cossack Brigade commander, erupted in rage at the head of ʿAmin al-Soltān’s personal Cossack guard, calling him a bastard (pedar sūkhteh) and stating that he should have been killed as well.⁴³ Neither Smirnov nor Li͡akhov, however, appear to have immediately connected ʿAmin al-Soltān’s death with the operation of Russian revolutionaries in Iran, likely because the assassin, ʿAbbās Āqā, was found dead immediately after the incident and could not be questioned.⁴⁴

Some scholars of the Constitutional Revolution have construed the assassination of ʿAmin al-Soltān as a turning point after which the revolution reflected less of its Iranian provenance and more influence from the socialist and socialist-aligned revolutionaries who came to its defense from the Caucasus.⁴⁵ In its aftermath, the celebration of political violence in the Iranian press and the outbreak of street-level battles between various proconstitutional and anticonstitutional factions marked a turn away from the largely peaceful protests that characterized the revolution’s earliest phases.⁴⁶ The radical turn of the Constitutional Revolution commanded the attention of tsarist state ministries, which increasingly afforded importance to developments in Iran as threats to Russian domestic security. In December 1907, a host of leading ministers in the tsarist government, including foreign minister Alexander Izvolskiĭ (served 1906–10), came together for a “special meeting” (osoboe soveshchanie) to weigh potential responses to the Constitutional Revolution.⁴⁷ The institutional affiliations of the attendees reflected Russian state attitudes toward the revolution and Iranian sovereignty more broadly; of the eight in attendance, three represented the Ministry of War (Voennoe ministerstvo). In addition to Stolypin and Izvolskiĭ, Finance Minister Vladimir Kokovt͡sov (served 1906–14), Naval Minister Ivan Dikov (1907–9), Chief of the General Staff Fëdor Palit͡syn (1905–8), Minister of Trade Dmitriĭ Filosofov (1906–7), Minister of War Alexander Roediger (1905–9), and a senior adviser to Izvolskiĭ, K. M. Argiropul, all attended the meeting.⁴⁸

The meeting minutes reveal that the ministers devoted much time to discussing military intervention in Iran, with Filosofov offering the only real alternative to these proposals.⁴⁹ Presaging the Russian entry into Tabriz, the ministers underscored the need to “impress upon the Persians” (proizvesti vpechatlenie na persov) that they would deploy the army if Russian political and economic interests in Iran were under threat. Toward this end, Palit͡syn proposed relocating Cossacks to Nakhichevan so that they might be ready to enter Tabriz at a moment’s notice.⁵⁰

Although it did not immediately translate into actionable policy, the special meeting indicated the directions of future Russian approaches toward the Constitutional Revolution. Notably, the ministers were still unsure that their interests aligned with those of Mohammad ʿAli Shah, and were apparently not considering authorizing a promonarchical coup during the revolution’s early phases.⁵¹ Rather, they regarded the Iranian constitutionalists’ economic sovereignism as a potential threat to the concessions they sought in the country’s north. These concessions, which affected sectors as varied as logging, fishing, banking, and communications, made only a small contribution to the Russian economy, but conferred significant material benefits upon the Russian citizens who held them.⁵²

Only the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention tempered the ministers’ maximalist designs, which otherwise—as they themselves conceded—would have reduced Iran to virtual protectorate status and provoked British consternation.⁵³ Even if temporarily checked, however, the ministers’ ambitions marked a shift in Russian state approaches to and understandings of the Constitutional Revolution. Except in their early dismissals of Iranian political development, the ideas of constitutionalism—or, indeed, anticonstitutionalism—were scarcely of importance in senior Russian officials’ deliberations on Iran. Instead, these officials understood Iran in terms of its material conditions, and especially in terms of the stark power differentials between their respective states. As revolutionary Iran fell into greater instability, the tsarist government’s exercise of military power therefore came to be a more frequently used instrument for redirecting the Iranian political trajectory, and dispossessing the constitutional government of its remaining sovereignty.

Russian Officialdom and the lesser autocracy

Over the course of the years 1907 and 1908, the Iranian political elite increasingly reflected divisions across both the factions that had secured the revolution and those who had sought to stake their political claims upon its success. These tensions came to a violent head in June 1908, when Russian Cossacks under Li͡akhov’s command forced the closure of the majlis, inaugurating the Lesser Autocracy (Estebdād-e Saghir), a one-year restoration of the shah’s nominally absolutist rule. Prior to this coup, like Nicholas II, Mohammad ʿAli Shah sought to use antidemocratic mechanisms to claim the preconstitutional prerogatives his predecessors had enjoyed. Unlike Nicholas II, however, Mohammad ʿAli Shah did not have the institutional power necessary to enforce this antirepresentative turn. Now, without the limitations of the majlis, Mohammad ʿAli Shah began pursuing and executing political opponents, while also scheming to crush a coalescing constitutionalist resistance in Tabriz.⁵⁴

Despite its operational success, the organization of the coup of 1908 reflected some measure of Russian state disunity vis-à-vis Iran. Foundational histories of the coup, including Browne’s, traced its origins to the highest reaches of the Russian government.⁵⁵ However, as argued by Volkov, a small number of Russian officials led by Shapshal, rather than the Russian Foreign Ministry in St. Petersburg, likely organized the coup in Tehran before its execution by Li͡akhov.⁵⁶ The recollections of some Russian officials in Tehran support this argument. In his diaries, Smirnov reported that Hartwig initially proscribed Cossack participation in the coup, informing the displeased shah that this violated Russian law.⁵⁷ Quite evidently, Shapshal and Li͡akhov put aside such legal reservations.

As the coup of 1908 seemed poised to precipitate civil war in Iran, few within the Russian diplomatic establishment lent their full support to the autocratic restoration. Absent a direct threat to Russian interests, neither the Russian mission in Tehran, nor the viceroyalty, nor the foreign ministry in St. Petersburg were prepared to suppress the constitutionalist resistance. Even during the first phases of the brewing civil war, the foreign ministry confided to the Tehran mission that the forces of the constitutionalist commander Sattār Khān (d. 1914) were mobilized only against the shah and did not intend to harm foreign citizens in Tabriz.⁵⁸ Generally, however, the Russian diplomatic elite in Iran were aware of their unpopularity, and indeed threats to their lives. As the revolution radicalized, Shapshal left Iran for fear of assassination in 1908.⁵⁹ Smirnov, who enjoyed a more secure position at the court, remained in the country until 1914, although he did take note of criticisms of his actions in the Iranian press.⁶⁰

During the middle stages of the Constitutional Revolution, the intentions of the Russian officials were to control and manage the disorder they saw developing in Iran, rather than to restore the primacy of the monarch. But if “disorder” may have been an amorphous concept in the Russian imperial imagination, political developments in Iran certainly suggested a lack of anything that could be construed as “order.” Across the Iranian north, no one faction had the ability to assert its authority, as various provincial actors pursued their interests without regard to—or even in opposition to—the government in Tehran. In this context, Stolypin convened yet another special meeting in mid-September of 1908, this time focusing on the “ordering” (upori͡adochenie) of the Iran–Russia border.⁶¹ Perhaps overconfident in the durability of the Lesser Autocracy, the ministers who convened for the meeting focused not on cross-border revolutionism, but rather the agitation of the Shāhsevan tribes across the Iranian northwest.⁶²

In actuality, northern Iran was drifting away from either Russian or Iranian state control, as increasingly reflected in the movement of armed constitutionalist volunteers from the Russian Empire to Iran. Scornful both toward Iranians and, in some instances, their own anti-tsarist citizens, Russian officials only belatedly recognized the threat stemming from the convergence of these radical revolutionaries in the Iranian north. In October 1908, the governor of Elizavetpol (Ganja) dismissed the idea that it was any kind of ideological pull that drew these volunteers to Tabriz, stating that many of the Caucasian Muslims who enlisted with Sattār Khān were motivated by personal gain, and arguing that the commander himself, as the son of a Russian-Muslim “bandit,” had little genuine desire to promote constitutionalism.⁶³ Only moments after playing down any notion of autonomous Muslim political development, however, the governor warned:

The Muslims have awakened, not only in Turkey, but also in Persia and among us in Russia. It is true that the interest in politics has not arisen in the general masses, but all the Muslim bourgeoisie and intelligentsia are now very interested in politics. Developments in Persia and, particularly, in Turkey, have strongly captured the attention of resident (mestnye) Muslims.⁶⁴

Crucially, however, he drew a distinction between Russian Muslims’ perceptions of political reform, respectively, in Iran and Turkey:

Resident Muslims do not have faith in Persia, and they do not await from her an independent renewal (samostoi͡atel’noe obnovlenie), but they believe that Turkey and Turkey alone will provide unity for all Muslims. And thus, for this reason, it is necessary to closely monitor the mood of the Muslims of the kraǐ (governorate). Although it is still absolutely calm, the Muslim masses demand very vigilant observation.⁶⁵

The governor’s analysis, unlike some of the more disdainful critiques of Muslim revolutionaries by Russian officials in Iran, recognized the growth of Muslim intellectual society, but fell short of anticipating strengthening links between Iranian and Ottoman reformers, whose political vision shaped the Young Turk Revolution in 1908.⁶⁶ Instead, the governor interrogated the two groups only in relation to the Muslim intelligentsia of the South Caucasus. His ultimate assessment that only the Ottoman Empire demanded the vigilance of the tsarist government reflected, most simply, Qajar Iran’s relative weakness: whereas the Russian state exercised significant control over its Iranian counterpart, the Ottomans continued to pose a threat to the southern reaches of the Russian Empire, especially given their pursuit of alliances with several European states.⁶⁷

The governor’s report constituted one among many attempts by Russian officials to further their knowledge of Iranian and South Caucasian Muslim political movements after the start of the Lesser Autocracy. Such efforts included, for example, the translation and analysis of excerpts from constitutionalist newspapers like Habl al-Matin (The Firm Cord), including one purportedly reflecting the constitutionalists’ regional designs.⁶⁸ The choice of the excerpt reflected, more than the constitutionalists’ ambitions, the Russian bureaucracy’s understandings of those ambitions. According to the article, Turkey was unable to unite Muslims because of its internal troubles, steady loss of territory, and European influences across its remaining empire. Instead, provided it saw continued internal reform, Iran was to assume the role of “protector and guardian” (pokrovitel’ i zashchitnik) of the world’s Muslims.⁶⁹ Such grand prognostications scarcely reflected the actual limitations on Iranian power, and instead revealed Russian officials’ fixations on the (improbable) formation of a pan-Islamic front extending from the Ottoman Empire to Iran, India, and especially the southern reaches of the Russian Empire.⁷⁰

The viceroyalty monitored the Constitutional Revolution more closely during the final months of 1908 as the movement of Russian radicals to northern Iran accelerated. There, they found common cause with the constitutionalists in the struggle against Iranian monarchism, much to the alarm of Russian officials. In correspondence with the viceroy of the Caucasus, Ilarion Voront͡sov-Dashkov (1905–15), Pokhitonov reported that revolutionary fighters were traveling from the Caucasus to Tabriz and mobilizing against the governor of Iranian Azerbaijan, ʿAbd-al-Majid Mirzā ʿAyn al-Dowleh (d. 1926).⁷¹ In response, Voront͡sov-Dashkov issued an order in October 1908 to heighten security on both the Iran–Russia land border and in the Caspian ports to impede the flow of fighters and weaponry to Iran.⁷² These efforts were largely unsuccessful, and on November 5, 1908, Pokhitonov delivered another telegram to the viceroyalty, remarking with alarm that the revolutionaries had fortified themselves in Tabriz, rendering the city impenetrable to the shah and his meager army, whom he dismissed as “peasant riff-raff in soldiers’ garb” (kresti͡anskiĭ sbrod v sarbazskikh kosti͡umakh).⁷³

For much of the duration of the Lesser Autocracy, senior Russian officials’ desire to stop the movement of Russian citizens to Iran did not, counterintuitively, always translate to opposition to these revolutionaries’ political goals. To safeguard Tabriz’s population and its Russian colony, both Pokhitonov and Hartwig emphasized the importance of convincing the shah to hold elections, as representatives of the proconstitutional Anjoman (society) of Azerbaijan were seeking compromise.⁷⁴ In this conciliatory vein, Hartwig met with the British ambassador to Iran, Sir George Barclay (served 1908–12); together they resolved to broaden their demands of the shah and call for a general amnesty for all of Azerbaijan.⁷⁵ In its efforts to resolve the crisis, however, the foreign ministry could not manage the shah’s intractability, because restoring the principles of the constitution and holding a second round of elections would have obviated the very purpose of the coup. In late 1908, Mohammad ʿAli Shah turned to tribal elements in the Iranian northwest to reclaim Tabriz and the whole of Iranian Azerbaijan, escalating the crisis into a civil war.

A few factors contributed to the tsarist government’s compromise stance. First, at least some of the Russian officials, although skeptical of Iranian constitutionalism, reserved a measure of respect for constitutionalist leadership. In some cases, they also expressed their skepticism of the most reactionary elements charged with defeating them, as reflected in their dispatches on the war’s progress. Shortly after the coup, Mohammad ʿAli Shah had appointed ʿAyn al-Dowleh as governor of Azerbaijan, tasking him with eliminating constitutionalist holdouts in the province.⁷⁶ Unable to enter Tabriz proper, ʿAyn al-Dowleh encamped nearby at Bāsmenj until he was ousted in October 1908. While there, according to Miller, ʿAyn al-Dowleh spent much of his time raiding and looting, but did not commit decisively to the anticonstitutionalist war effort.⁷⁷ The monarchist forces who did engage the constitutionalists also committed many acts of rape, turning much of the Tabriz population against them and almost certainly alienating even the Russian officials who would later support the deposition of the constitutional government.⁷⁸

At the height of the Lesser Autocracy, some Russian officials seemed to recognize, or at least decided to acknowledge, that their unwillingness to support the constitutionalists placed them at odds with popular currents in Iran. Hartwig recalls that, after the monarchists’ ignominious abandonment of Bāsmenj, nearby constitutionalist forces began a spree of looting and raiding, targeting both ʿAyn al-Dowleh’s encampment and the homes of wealthy persons in Tabriz proper, including the opportunistically monarchist military commander Rahim Khān Chalabiyānlu, who would be executed by the Anjoman on September 11, 1911.⁷⁹ Hartwig stated that Sattār Khān “acted with great tact” (deĭstvui͡ushchiĭ s bolʹshim taktom) in ending this looting, garnering sympathy for the constitutionalist cause.⁸⁰

As monarchist forces surrounded and besieged Tabriz over the winter of 1908–9, the humanitarian situation in the city worsened, and certain sectors of the population began to face the risk of famine.⁸¹ By mid-1909, the governments of Britain, France, and Russia reached a consensus on the need for intervention in Tabriz, which the Russian state presented as a measure to safeguard the lives and property of European citizens.⁸² Therefore, on April 30, 1909, Russian soldiers entered Tabriz, effectively ending the siege without delivering the city to monarchical control, at least initially.⁸³ A few weeks later, an article in Novoe Vremi͡a (New Times), a leading Russian newspaper, hinted at another, perhaps more important motivation behind the entry of Russian forces into Tabriz and their expansion throughout northern Iran: the fulfillment of the provisions of the Treaty of Turkmenchai (1828), which included commercial concessions that were, in the authors’ estimation, dependent on the existence of “order” in northern Iran.⁸⁴

Months into the Russian occupation of Tabriz, a constitutionalist army defeated the monarchists in Tehran on July 13, 1909, deposing Mohammad ʿAli Shah and restoring the majlis.⁸⁵ Their victory inaugurated a new power arrangement marked by the uneasy coexistence of a constitutional government in Tehran and occupying Russian forces in the provinces to their north. Moreover, it marked a further turn toward the radical in Iranian politics. Socialist and socialist-aligned figures, who had played an important but hidden role in the crafting of the constitution, now openly occupied positions of leadership and enjoyed a parliamentary majority.⁸⁶ The expansion of the Russian occupation from the bounds of Tabriz, however, would constrict the operations of these revolutionaries. From 1909 to 1911, when the Russian Ministry of War would organize its decisive final intervention, this encroachment laid the groundwork for the Russian state to stake its claims on the Iranian north.

The russian state turn against the constitutional revolution

During the final stage of the Constitutional Revolution (1909–11), the government in Tehran contended with budgetary shortfalls, internal political divides, administrative devolution, and continued violations of its sovereignty by Russian soldiers in the north. The constitutional government, split along several axes both within and outside of the majlis, was hardly capable of confronting these challenges, or of forming a united front to conduct diplomacy with its Russian counterpart.⁸⁷ Iranian state weakness, in turn, configured the constitutional government’s relations with its tsarist counterpart. As demonstrated by Bayat, the Russian Foreign Ministry made use of its power imbalance vis-à-vis Iran to make more aggressive economic demands on the constitutionalists in the final stages of the revolution.⁸⁸

In Russia itself, the state quickly began to reverse the liberalizing trajectory taken after the revolution of 1905. As they progressively curtailed the powers of the duma from 1907 onward, conservative institutions in the Russian government—most notably the Ministry of the Interior (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del)—escalated their campaigns against revolutionary socialists.⁸⁹ For a time, however, the Russian state did not import these practices to those northern Iranian provinces they occupied. Instead, before 1911, the tsarist government focused its repressive efforts on those Russian citizens who had joined the Constitutional Revolution, rather than the revolutionary state itself. As the state-building challenges of the first constitutional period re-emerged, however, the Russian diplomatic elite increasingly sought to use Iranian political dysfunction and fragmentation as grounds for a full-scale occupation of northern Iran.

Russian intervention in northern Iran both stemmed from and furthered the instability that threatened the revolution’s survival. By 1911, Iran was again in the midst of war, as the deposed Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā, ʾAbu al-Fath Mirzā Sālār al-Dowleh (d. 1959), Samad Khān Shojāʿ al-Dowleh (d. 1914), and a number of their lieutenants launched a series of offensives in the Iranian north and northwest.⁹⁰ Together, their forces again attempted to take Tabriz with support from Miller, who opposed Iranian constitutionalism over the course of the revolution.⁹¹ In the face of these offensives, the burden of resistance fell to both the Iranian veterans of the Siege of Tabriz and the Caucasian socialists and social democrats who had remained in Iran after July 1909, especially those belonging to Armenian parties.⁹² Although these factions successfully forestalled the monarchist forces for the remainder of the revolution, their inability to assert total control in Iran embarrassed the constitutional government, and further opened the door to the “disorder” that featured so frequently in Russian consuls’ dispatches.

Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā’s entry into Iran from Russian territory in July 1911 and the suppression of the revolution at Russian hands only months after his invasion, suggests, perhaps misleadingly, that the two developments were somehow connected.⁹³ Although taking pains to present Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā’s return as an independent initiative, senior Russian officials in Iran scarcely contained their enthusiasm for his mission, or for the limited steps taken by the Russian state in its support. In a telegram to an unnamed recipient, the Russian minister in Iran, Stanislav Alʹfonsovich Poklevskiĭ-Kozell (served 1909–13), revealed that some of Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā’s agents had been apprehended in Baku over concerns about their passports on the eve of the rebellion, but were subsequently released and allowed to travel to Iran. Less than subtly, Poklevskiĭ-Kozell also reminded the unnamed recipient that Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā had supported the Anglo-Russian line in Iran and would coordinate his policies with the two governments if he succeeded in deposing the constitutionalists.⁹⁴

Seemingly, Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā’s invasion could have provided an opportunity for Russian forces to stamp out Iranian constitutionalism. Even in internal correspondence, however, Russian officials in Iran still did not speak of unqualified support for the ex-shah. On July 18, 1911, Poklevskiĭ-Kozell reminded all the consulates in a circular that the tsar’s government had decided to remain neutral in the fight between Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā and the constitutionalists, and once again emphasized that the former was fighting “at his own risk” (na svoĭ sobstvennyĭ risk).⁹⁵ Although Poklevskiĭ-Kozell hardly gave the impression of an impartial party, even in correspondence with other Russian officials he did not reveal Russian funding of Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā’s invasion. Given the bureaucratic thoroughness of the late tsarist state, as well as the Bolsheviks’ eagerness following the revolution of 1917 to expose imperial meddling in Asia, it is possible that such documentary evidence, if it existed, would have come to light.⁹⁶

As Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā attempted to advance on Tehran, a fault line emerged within the Russian Foreign Ministry. Although the leadership in St. Petersburg prioritized safeguarding Russian state interests under any Iranian government, some conservative Russian consuls supported the restoration of the ex-shah. From Tabriz, Miller reported on the progress of Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā’s attempted reclamation of the throne, including his distribution of gifts to win supporters and his recruitment of Turkmen tribes in Mazandaran.⁹⁷ Other consuls more confidently foresaw the ex-shah’s prospects for success. In several telegrams from Rasht, Consul Vladimir Ivanovich Nekrasov (served 1910–13) insisted to the Russian mission in Tehran that the local population supported the restoration of the monarchy and actions against the prominent constitutionalist Karim Khān Mobasser-al-Molk (d. 1947).⁹⁸ From Mashhad, in July 1911, Dabizha also relayed reports that the city’s population eagerly awaited the return of the ex-shah, speaking of a bast in his support led by the prominent cleric Ebrāhim Razavi.⁹⁹ Although possibly exaggerating the degree of popular support for Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā, Dabizha’s report relayed some truth in the existence of a powerful clerical-monarchist movement in Khorasan, but without considering the potential for the Russian state to align with this movement based on shared anticonstitutional principles.

Accounts of Russian casualties in fighting across the Iranian north provided another tool for the interventionist consuls to wield in their reports. Relevant dispatches began even before the ex-shah’s expedition and the constitutionalist resistance that marked the revolution’s final stages. Writing from Ardabil in January 1911, Vice-Consul Dmitriĭ Beli͡aev recounted an attack on workers at the Russian-owned fisheries, and proposed the deployment of additional Russian forces to the city.¹⁰⁰ Later that year, a relatively minor incident in Qazvin provided the pretext for broadening the Russian occupation of the province. In September 1911, the Qazvin consulate reported that constitutionalist forces had fired on some Cossacks and injured one of their horses. In response, some four hundred more Cossacks were dispatched to Qazvin, where they not only dissuaded further attacks by the revolutionaries (for a brief period), but also provided a show of force that, according to Gavriil Ovseenko, ensured that local authorities deferred to tsarist government representatives.¹⁰¹

Over the course of the year 1911, threats to Russian citizens featured increasingly frequently in the telegrams of Russian consuls. Although the foreign ministry does not seem to have attached significance to them until the final weeks of the Constitutional Revolution, Nekrasov’s telegrams, in particular, were intended to trigger a broad invasion of the Iranian north. In between warnings of “anarchy,” Nekrasov traced the movement of various constitutionalist and monarchist armies, and sought to convince the mission in Tehran that the people of Iran preferred the restoration of the ex-shah, and that only a monarchist victory might safeguard the Russian citizens living in Iran from massacres planned by the constitutionalists.¹⁰² To add urgency to his dispatches, Nekrasov recounted various plots to attack both Cossack forces as well as provincial Iranian and Russian officials.¹⁰³

Nekrasov’s dispatches may have raised alarm at the foreign ministry not only because they revealed real (albeit exaggerated) threats to the lives of Russian citizens in Iran, but also because they demonstrated the inability of the Iranian state to exert control within its own borders. On October 31, 1911, Poklevskiĭ-Kozell informed the government in Tehran that Russian forces would intervene if it could not rein in the armed constitutionalists in Tabriz. In this vein, Poklevskiĭ-Kozell indicated that it was desirable to afford Miller the right to make arrests of “leading terrorists” (glavnye terroristy), and to mandate their expulsion from the Tabriz city limits.¹⁰⁴

For the conservative Russian consuls, opposition to Iranian constitutionalism did not entail unqualified support for anticonstitutional political factions, as their interests often clashed with those of the tsarist government. In November 1911, for example, Dabizha noted the movement of “Caucasians”—here, shorthand for revolutionary socialists from the Russian Caucasus—to the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan. But from Dabizha’s perspective, the socialists’ mobilization against the Russian presence was less important than the agitation of the ulama of Khorasan, who had in many instances supported both the Qajar monarchy and the occupying Russian forces. In the Shah Mosque (Mosque of the Seventy-Two Martyrs, Masjed-e haftād-e dow tan) of Mashhad, the prominent mujtahid Mohammad Āqā-Zādeh Khorāsāni (d. 1937/38) held a meeting in which the Russian mission demanded the departure of American financial overseer Morgan Shuster (d. 1960), compensation for killed Russian citizens, and Russian and British appointment of advisers in the Iranian government. To Dabizha’s trepidation, Khorāsāni purportedly responded to these demands by calling the people to fight to the death against the “nonbelievers.”¹⁰⁵

Fearing the threat from both the Russian socialists and supporters of the Iranian ulama, Dabizha called in November 1911 for the dispatch of Cossacks to Mashhad. Dabizha continued to issue these calls with increasing frequency prior to the Russian invasion. In late November and December, Dabizha relayed to Poklevskiĭ-Kozell, and possibly either the foreign ministry or the viceroyalty, that Russians and other internationals had requested protection, as local newspapers were circulating calls for jihad.¹⁰⁶ Such statements reflected divisions between Russian officials on strategies for recruiting Iranian support against the revolution. Whereas Nekrasov straightforwardly saw the monarchists as allies, Dabizha feared a confluence of monarchism and clerical anti-foreignism, as well as the potential for independent monarchist mobilization without Russian oversight. In the end, even after the suppression of the Constitutional Revolution, Dabizha’s anxieties would shape the actions of Russian forces in Mashhad, culminating in the 1912 Emām Rezā Shrine massacre after months of promonarchical mobilization.¹⁰⁷

Reports from Urumiyeh testified to another Russian justification for the expansion of the occupation, centered on Iranian security and—curiously enough—sovereignty. From the summer of 1911, officials at the Russian Vice-Consulate in Urumiyeh, including Vice-Consul Sergeǐ Petrovich Golubinov, emphasized the strength of the Ottomans in the province and their alliance with local Kurdish forces.¹⁰⁸ In a series of telegrams from September and October 1911, Golubinov recounted the deteriorating security situation in urban centers such as Khoy, fighting between constitutionalist forces and Kurdish tribesmen, and the latter’s alliance with occupying Ottoman forces who had consolidated control over much of Urumiyeh province.¹⁰⁹ Although Golubinov did not end this correspondence with explicit calls for a Russian invasion, similar indictments of Iranian state weakness had been used by Nekrasov and other consuls to encourage a broader intervention in Iran.

Although both factions intersected in their opposition to Iranian constitutionalism by 1911, the records of the Russian officials in Iran and the foreign ministry in St. Petersburg revealed how the latter took the leading role in ending the revolution. The foreign ministry, which valued Russian economic interests in Iran above all else, laid the groundwork for the December invasion by drafting two ultimatums intended to force the Iranian government to surrender a significant degree of state sovereignty to its Russian counterpart. Upon its eventual materialization on November 10, 1911, the first Russian ultimatum to Iran’s government did not focus on the security situation and the concomitant disturbances caused to Russian trade and commerce in the country. Rather, it homed in on the activities of Morgan Shuster, including his targeting of properties owned by Malek Mansur Mirzā Shoʿāʿ al-Saltaneh, a younger brother of Mohammad ʿAli Mirzā and a supporter of his insurrection.¹¹⁰

In the final months of 1911, relations between Shuster and the Russian representatives in Iran were moving toward intractability. On November 3, 1911, Poklevskiĭ-Kozell delivered a telegram relaying the Russian mission’s anger over Shuster’s decision to afford financial oversight in Iranian Azerbaijan to a British citizen, identified only as (Monsieur) Lecoffre.¹¹¹ Although negotiations over the bounds of the financial assignment continued between Shuster and the mission, this appointment remained a contentious, seemingly unbridgeable issue.¹¹² On November 22, 1911, Poklevskiĭ-Kozell relayed that Shuster had indicated his willingness to work with the mission to preserve his reform project, but was not willing to rescind Lecoffre’s appointment. When informed that such a refusal might provoke a Russian invasion, Shuster reportedly stated that he had “come to Iran like one sentenced to death, and now only awaited a stronger actor to carry out the execution” (Persii prikhoditsi͡a kak prigovorennomu k smerti zhdatʹ poka pridët bolee silʹnyĭ dli͡a sovershenii͡a kazni).¹¹³

In late November 1911, the Russian Foreign Ministry presented a second, stronger ultimatum to the Iranian government that explicitly demanded Shuster’s dismissal.¹¹⁴ Other provisions of the ultimatum, including reserving the right for review of Iranian political appointees by the British and Russian governments and the payment of maintenance fees for the occupation of the Iranian north, reflected the enormous power disparities between Iran and Russia. Anticipating the refusal of the ultimatum demands, Russian forces expanded their occupation across the Iranian north even before the constitutional government had a chance to comply. The enlargement of the Russian presence in Gilan, in particular, aroused public anger across Iran.¹¹⁵ In December 1911, Cossack forces in Gilan secured Manjil Bridge, which would be a site of a confrontation between British and White Russian forces and the Jangalis of Mirzā Kuchek Khān (d. 1921) in 1918.¹¹⁶ In the meantime, fighting continued across the north within and beyond Gilan, and in some cases resulted in further losses to Russian forces.¹¹⁷

The lineage of the order to invade northern Iran is difficult to reconstruct with precision.¹¹⁸ Without discussing the origin of the directive, Sazonov delivered a message to Izvolskiĭ in December 1911 that effectively greenlit the Russian invasion. Although stating outright that he did not hold the Iranian government responsible for the attacks on Russian troops, Sazonov argued that the Russian military must be afforded license to take “necessary measures” against the revolutionaries in northern Iran. This entailed apprehension of all Russian citizens who had participated in attacks on Russian soldiers and their appearance before military tribunals, disarmament of all constitutionalist forces in Rasht, and arrests of their leaders and their deportation to Russia.¹¹⁹

As a prized semi-colony, Iran’s internal affairs interested not only Russia, but also Britain and secondarily Germany.¹²⁰ The foreign ministry therefore built an imperial consensus to suppress the Constitutional Revolution. As part of these efforts, Anatoliĭ Anatolʹevich Neratov (d. 1938), the intermittent acting foreign minister, sought to assuage London’s concerns over the expanding occupation in a series of exchanges with George Buchanan, the British ambassador to the Russian Empire (served 1910–17). Recounting these exchanges, Neratov preserved careful justificatory language, arguing that, in the interests of both Russia and Iran, military units could not be recalled even if the Iranian government fulfilled the conditions of the ultimatum, as unresolved issues would soon necessitate a second and larger Russian intervention.¹²¹ Neratov concluded his communiqués with Buchanan by offering to hold the Russian units at Rasht in hopes that the Iranian cabinet, then led by Najaf-Qoli Khān Bakhtiyāri Samsām al-Saltaneh (d. 1930), might be able to outmaneuver the majlis without direct Russian intervention.¹²²

By bringing pressure upon the Iranian government, the Russian state forced the closure of the majlis in late December 1911.¹²³ In so doing, the architects of the intervention made clear how Iran figured into Russia’s relations with European powers. In conversation with Edward Grey, the Russian ambassador to Britain, Alexander von Benckendorff (served 1903–17), relayed a statement from Sazonov that the alliance between the two countries depended on the safeguarding of the Anglo-Russian Convention.¹²⁴ Sazonov’s words, although perhaps hyperbolic, testified to the importance of Iran’s and Asia’s place in the global balance of power against Germany, and reflected yet another of the overlapping concerns of the Russian state in the Iranian north.

The ramifications of the Russian pivot against Iranian revolution were significant for the constitutional government, and for the trajectory of Iranian political development more generally. As Iranian sovereignty receded, the invasion of December 1911 marked the final step in this pivot, one that stemmed from Russian domestic concerns as much as foreign. Between 1908 and 1911, Iran had become a staging ground for conflict between Russian factions—both revolutionary and reactionary—that would shape its political future. Although Russian officials had employed Iranian underdevelopment, the lack of representative institutions, and state weakness to justify their occupation, they stifled Iranian efforts to redress these very issues, as a sovereign Iran would not have served Russia’s interests before its own. The constitutionalists, who sought to forestall the tsarist government’s aggression, would come to realize the difficulty of building a revolutionary state under siege.

Even after the invasion, Russian power in Iran was not absolute. In its waning final decades, the tsarist government did not fully control its own south, much less the northern Iranian border provinces. The evident limitations on Russian state power raise questions on its recourse to force in Iran. Before the end stages of the revolution, Russian officials observed Iranian political mobilization, gathering information without the competencies to process and parse it, or a concrete plan for using it. This reflected broader patterns in Russian, and indeed imperial information gathering near the turn of the twentieth century.¹²⁵ Inundated with both leading and more dispassionate reports, a conservative-reactionary turn at the end of the tsarist period, rather than deliberate anticonstitutionalism, drove the Russian state to occupy northern Iran. This belligerency, in turn, fueled a number of anti-Russian resistance movements before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.¹²⁶ From the perspective of the Russian state, such resistance could have fit into the broader pattern of, and may have been only partially distinguishable from, concomitant anti-tsarist mobilization in the Caucasus and Turkestan.¹²⁷

Notwithstanding a consistent documentary record from the Russian Foreign Ministry, questions remain about the role of Nicholas II in the decision to invade Iran in late 1911. Although more significant crises may have consumed the tsar’s energies—namely impending war in the Balkans—developments in Iran also featured prominently in the correspondence of the late tsarist government. After all, these very same crises occupied prominent personages such as Sazonov, Neratov, and Benckendorff, but all of them devoted attention to Iran at critical moments. Concerned also with domestic matters, including Russia’s instability after the assassination of Stolypin, Nicholas II may have delegated policymaking vis-à-vis Iran to his ministers. Or, in a moment of retreat for autocracy across Europe and Asia, Nicholas II’s opposition to representative government in Russia also may have translated to antagonism toward Iranian constitutionalism. These two possibilities reveal as much about the nature of late tsarist Russia as they do about its relations with Iran: however decentralized and disunited, the Russian state eventually consolidated its opposition to Iranian political remaking. This same reactionary impulse, turned inward between the Revolution of 1905 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, would soon doom the Russian Empire itself.