IRAN: The Rhythm Recurs

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Russia, in search of markets and warm water, has been in & out of Iran since the early 17th Century. The British were there before them. In Iran the thin, red line of British west-to-east imperialism crosses the north-to-south axis of Russian expansionism. In Peter the Great's famed "testament" (even if he did not write it, historians call it an accurate expression of Russian policy), he exhorted his countrymen to "excite continual wars in Turkey and Persia."

Iran had become a plaything of the powers through an accident of geography: now it bounced the faster between them through an accident of geology. Iran had oil.

Iran's oil was part of the greatest known oil reservoir on earth. Only in the south had part of its riches yet been tapped, by the British, but the results were impressive enough. From the oil area around Masjidi-Suleiman and the great refinery of Abadan at the head of the Persian Gulf, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. drew 350,000 barrels a day, with indicated reserves of six to seven billion barrels. Few oilmen doubted that the untapped fields north of Iran, especially round Lake Urmia and Samnan, held oil as well.

The Shah's powerful friends were thirsty for his oil. Eager applicants for concessions had been sitting around in Teheran for months. Least pressing perhaps was the U.S.: Washington's concern with declining reserves had not yet reached the stage where it called for the use of aggressive oil diplomacy in Iran. The British thirst was sharper. Dependent entirely on oil from abroad, Britain could not afford to pass up any opportunity. She had played the politics of oil longer, more successfully than anyone else. Now she was ready to play again.

Biggest thirst of all was Russia's. Until World War II her production (some 240 million barrels a year) and her reserves (some six billion barrels) had been enough to cover her prodigious economy. (Twenty years ago she had not even bothered to exploit a Russian-controlled oil concession in northern Iran.) The war had taught her a burning lesson: when she came closest to losing her oil, she came closest to losing the war. Now the Red Army was grabbing oil in Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Austria—wherever and whenever it could. At home, Russia was stepping up her own production. Abroad, she was searching for it with a determined eye. And abroad meant, currently, Iran.

The U.S.S.R. took full advantage of the peoples in its southern states whose cousins live across the border in Iran. Azerbaijan's knife-wearing Kurds and ebullient Armenians spill over into adjoining countries (see map). Its 700,000 Kurds have kin in Turkey and British-controlled Iraq. Its 65,000 Armenians identify themselves with Armenians in Turkey and in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Precept and propaganda had already aroused a strong separatist urge among Iran's Armenians. At any moment blood might call to blood across the boundaries. In skilled Soviet hands, this interplay of nationalisms would be a potent instrument of policy. Recently, in Azerbaijan, a pro-Russian Democratic Kurdish Party significantly burgeoned into being.

Possibly Russia contemplated annexing Iranian Azerbaijan to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic across the border.