Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

SOVIET–AFGHAN TREATY OF FRIENDSHIP (28 February 1921). This agreement between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Afghanistan (signed for the Soviet government by G. V. Chicherin and L. M. Karakhan, and for Afghanistan by Muhamed Wali Khan, Mirza Muhamed Khan, and Guliama Sidlyk Khan) was one of a series of bilateral treaties signed at this time by the Soviet government to win international recognition and thereby (it was hoped) to increase its security as the civil wars wound down. (Others included the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement and the Soviet–Turkish Treaty of Moscow, both of 16 March 1921, and the Soviet–Persian Treaty of Friendship of 26 February 1921.) Under its terms, the contracting parties offered mutual recognition and arranged for the establishment of consulates on each others’ territory and agreed upon “the freedom of Eastern nations,” including the khanates of Bokhara and Khiva (which were by then, in fact, under Soviet control), “on the basis of independence” (Articles VII and VIII), while Soviet Russia agreed to return to Afghanistan undefined “border areas” that had been occupied by imperial Russian forces in the 19th century, to allow “free and untaxed” transit of Afghan goods on Soviet territory (Article VI), and to “provide Afghanistan with financial and other material assistance” (Article X). (A separate protocol spelled out that this assistance would amount to a subsidy of one million rubles per annum, the construction of a telegraph from Kushkh to Kabul, and the provision of “technical and other specialists.”)

The Soviet government hoped that, by establishing a treaty relationship with Afghanistan, it could present itself as a friend of the colonial world; prevent attacks on Soviet territory from Basmachi fighters based across the border; and dissuade the emir, Amanullah khan, from offering aid to the Basmachi, as well as checking British influence in Kabul and profiting from Kabul’s resentment of the settlement imposed on it by the British, the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 8 August 1919 (at the end of the Third Afghan War). This was not, however, a Soviet–Afghan alliance against Britain. Rather, it was designed to protect each of the signatories from the danger of the other concluding an agreement with Britain against it; Article II of the treaty therefore bound both signatories “not to enter into any military or political agreement with a third state which might prejudice either of the contracting parties.” After the treaty had been ratified, F. F. Raskol′nikov was sent to Kabul as the first Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan.

soviet anarchists.See anarchism.

Soviet–Finnish conflict. This conflict, which can be regarded as perhaps the most serious of the so-called Kinship Wars, broke out on 6 November 1921, following a rebellion in Eastern Karelia that Soviet historians always claimed was provoked by forces that originated in Finland and were covertly supported by the Finnish government, in breach of the Treaty of Tartu (14 October 1920). Battles involved between 2,000 and 5,000 Karelian rebels, who are sometimes referred to as Forest Guerrillas (Metsäsissi in Finnish)—including perhaps 500 volunteers from Finland, who had been permitted (and even encouraged) to cross the border into Soviet Russia by the Finnish government—and 20,000 troops of the Red Army. Red forces crushed the rebels in a series of battles in January to February 1922, at which point aid to them was also cut off by Finland. The conflict ended with the signing of agreements between Finland and Soviet Russia regarding measures to maintain the viability of their common border (21 March and 1 June 1922, signed at Moscow and Helsinki, respectively). Nevertheless, some 10,000 Karelian refugees had fled into Finland by the end of 1922.