Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Specifically, the Soviet government wished to guard against attacks from Persian territory by White forces that had been driven across the border by the Red Army as it moved into Transcaucasia in 1920. Thus (under Article V of the treaty), both contracting parties agreed “to prohibit the formation or presence within their respective territories, of any organization or groups of persons . . . whose object is to engage in acts of hostility against Persia or Russia.” Furthermore, (under Article VI of the treaty), the Soviet government was granted “the right to advance its troops into the Persian interior for the purpose of carrying out the military operations necessary for its defense,” should the Persian government be unable to suppress foreign or domestic forces on its territory that were regarded as menacing by Moscow. (The USSR would use this clause as justification for its occupation of northern Iran during and after the Second World War.) The price to be paid, on the Soviet side, was the renunciation of all political and economic concessions that its tsarist predecessor had been granted in Persia (notably those detailed in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 31 August 1907); the withdrawal of Red forces from Persian territory; and the sacrifice of its ally, the separatist Soviet Republic of Gīlān. Also (under the terms of Article XI of the treaty), the Soviet and Persian navies were given “equal rights to free shipping under their own flags on the Caspian Sea,” thereby supplanting the Treaty of Tukmenchai (21 February 1828), which had forbidden Persia to base a navy on the Caspian. For Tehran, the treaty also offered some leverage in efforts to assert its economic, military, and political independence from Britain, specifically to throw off the shackles imposed on it by the Anglo–Persian Agreement of 9 August 1919 (which was formally denounced by the Persian parliament on 22 June 1921). To Moscow’s chagrin, the Persians repeatedly breached the terms of the treaty over the following years.

SOVIET–POLISH WAR. The Soviet–Polish War was just one—albeit the most prolonged, geographically extensive, studied, and perhaps internationally significant—of a series of conflicts that erupted in Eastern Europe as German forces withdrew from the region in the aftermath of the First World War. The retreat of Ober Ost and the collapse of the territorial settlement brokered through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) left a power vacuum that was contested by local nationalist forces and Soviet Russia, although the nationalists also often fought among themselves, such as in the Ukrainian–Polish War and the Polish–Lithuanian War. (Other related conflicts were the Soviet–Ukrainian War, the Estonian War of Independence, the Latvian War of Independence, the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, and the Kinship Wars.) Polish aims, broadly speaking, as articulated by the preeminent Polish leader of the era, Józef Piłsudski, were to recapture territories lost during the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century and to create a Polish-led federation, the Międzymorze (or Intermarum, “the land between the seas”) of several East-Central European states, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, as a bulwark against the reemergence of both German and Russian imperialisms. (The two aims, it is worth noting, were to some extent conflicting, because if Poland recovered the lands lost in all three partitions, it would be in possession of territories claimed by its desired allies in Ukraine, Belarussia, and Lithuania.) Soviet aims were to repulse any Polish advance (which they regarded as a branch of the Allied intervention in Russia) and, potentially, to carry the revolution west through Poland to Central Europe.