CSMECCA on the pages of Middle Eastern Studies
The British journal Middle Eastern Studies, a flagship journal for the study of Middle Eastern history and culture, has recently published an article by Associate Professor Denis V. Volkov entitled "Bringing democracy into Iran: a Russian project for the separation of Azerbaijan". The article presents the results of a study which is part of a major international project entitled "The Caspian World: Connections and Contentions at Modern Eurasian Crossroads", carried out under the auspices of Yale University (USA) with the participation of scholars from Britain, France and the Netherlands.
Although the history of Russian-Iranian relations remains seriously understudied, few would refute the oppressive imperialist role played by Imperial Russia in Iran during the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. However, practically nothing has been written about the conceptual shifts which began to take place in Russia’s Persian policy immediately after the February Revolution of 1917. Little is known about the large-scale projects, through which Russia was to bring ‘its own democracy’ to Iranian Azerbaijan and its other northern provinces, with further proliferation all over Iran. This was meant to facilitate Russia’s political and trade expansion down to the Persian Gulf, which had been the eventual goal for many decades. Drawing on unpublished documents from Russian, British and French archives, this article studies the relevant correspondence between the Russian, British and French missions in Tehran and their central authorities during the decade 1909-1919, including the short-lived governments of Republican Russia. In doing so, it analyses the local agency of the Russian diplomats in Iran, such as Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966), in the emergence of these projects, and investigates the manifestation of symbolic capital and the productive interaction of power/knowledge relations.