“ ‘My Persian tale’? There were a few hundred of us ragged Russians down there…One day we had a telegram from the Central Committee: ‘Cut your losses, revolution in Iran now off.’…But for that we would have got to Tehran.”
For a long time, those few lines that Victor Serge quotes in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary were all I had to go on in tracing Blumkin’s footsteps in Persia. Four months of combat and political intrigues summed up in just four sentences, about forty words—the only thread connecting me to him. A slender thread, but a reliable one. As far as I know, Victor Serge has never been shown to be mistaken, even after the Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s. “Blumkin then lived next door to Chicherin in a freezing room at the Metropol,” he wrote. “In 1920–21 he was sent to Persia to start a revolution in Gilan on the Caspian coast with Kuchek Khan.”
But Serge interrupted Blumkin’s account in two places, indicated by those ellipses. They covered a part of the intrigue I was trying to figure out. What could Blumkin have told him? I couldn’t imagine Serge censoring important information about the expedition to Persia. As it turned out, the reason for those cuts was purely literary. The passage was part of a long portrait, a kind of elegiac biography, a register that excludes digressions, and in which wanderings and intrigues are secondary. In writing it, Serge was concerned with just one thing, “that this powerful figure of a warrior not be forgotten.” Serge had been my ally from the very beginning of the Blumkin Project, for years the best source I had.
In Moscow, I booked a room at the Metropol. At the front desk, I didn’t ask for Blumkin’s room, since obviously no one would remember him, but for the room next to the one that had been occupied by the celebrated Georgy Chicherin. The name of the former Soviet foreign affairs commissar appears in the hotel’s guest book. I knew that Blumkin had been in the room right next to his, so I had a fifty-fifty chance of being in the right one. I could then describe the scene of the meeting between Blumkin and Serge in the Metropol’s “freezing” hotel room, and maybe even re-create snatches of their conversation.
It was a waste of effort. The hotel had been completely renovated and seemed to have lost even the memory of its revolutionary period. Walls may have ears, but rooms have no memory. It was pointless to imagine Blumkin and Serge in these luxurious, well-heated and richly furnished rooms. When the Bolsheviks first requisitioned the hotel, its rooms were open to the four winds, panes were missing from the windows, and people slept wrapped in heavy army coats. We always ascribe more to places than they can deliver. Most of the time their indifference to the past disappoints us. Like servants accustomed to changing households, they devote themselves to their new masters.
But books are less forgetful than hotels; they retain the living evidence of those they have sheltered. To track Blumkin, I would do better to rely on Serge’s Memoirs. I knew entire passages of it by heart. I had even picked up some of his language tics, along with the rhythm and construction of his sentences. At times, when I reread my old notebooks, I couldn’t tell my sentences from his. The ellipses he had inserted in the Blumkin account inspired me more than the Metropol’s drapery and Italian chandeliers. They opened (and closed) doors to barely glimpsed landscapes. They were like collapsed walls whose trace remains on an archaeological site. Broken columns whose aligned pediments let us imagine the capital they once supported.
In 1919, Persia was no longer Alexander’s or Genghis Khan’s Persia, but it hadn’t yet become Iran. Russia wasn’t quite itself either. The tsar’s empire had sunk with all hands in the shipwreck of the war, and as 1919 began, nobody gave the Bolsheviks much of a chance as they lost ground to White Armies sustained by the occupying power of fourteen nations. Great Britain was marking time. It was in the victors’ camp, of course, and its colonial empire was intact, but it doubted itself. It was threatened within by spreading strikes, and led by a government split between supporters and opponents of military intervention in Russia. It seemed “psychologically paralyzed,” as Correlli Barnett wrote in The Collapse of British Power.
The shadow cast by empires across the world map was breaking up. War had shifted the tectonic plates of power, opening faults and creating collision zones that shattered the lines of settled frontiers. The German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires had been dismembered, and their conquerors were divvying up the remains. Nations were being erased from the map as others appeared. Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan rose from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. A Jewish homeland was recognized in Palestine under British mandate. In places where the aftershocks from the upheaval of World War I were still being felt, entire zones remained unattributed, to be decided later by revolution or war. One of these was Persia.
Located at the edges of the Russian and British Empires’ zones of influence, Persia had been the theater of confrontations between the two powers since the start of the nineteenth century. The Russians coveted the road to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The British were determined to keep control of commercial land and sea routes to India. This was what Rudyard Kipling called “the Great Game” in his 1901 novel, Kim.
The new age of oil now complicated the deal. In 1901 Russia produced 233,000 barrels a day, compared with 190,000 for the United States. With more than 3,400 wells, Baku was the planet’s principal oil-producing region, pumping half of the world’s crude. Though rich in coal, Britain totally lacked any petroleum resources at a time when oil was becoming the key to world power. It imported more Russian oil than American. If Britain wanted to maintain its dominant role in the world through its fleet, it needed to control its own oil. So Persia, where oil had just been discovered, became a major focus of British strategists. No need to launch an expensive war of conquest, they reasoned, when you could gain mastery of the oil by paying off the local authorities. In 1901, William Knox D’Arcy acquired exploration rights to a territory twice the size of Texas from the Kajars, the corrupt dynasty reigning in Tehran. The sixty-year concession was a major trump card for the Crown in its domination of Central Asia. The first wells were drilled in 1908. A year earlier, the Russians and the English had signed the Anglo-Russian Convention, which divided Iran into two zones of influence, with Russia in the north and Great Britain in the south. This ended a century of conflict, temporarily suspending the Great Game.
The October Revolution and the Russian Civil War reshuffled the deck. Russia and England, who had been allies until 1918, now clashed again. But Russia, caught in the chaos of civil war, had other concerns than conquering territories—it first had to preserve its own. So Persia became a de facto British protectorate. For the Russians, this meant starting all over again.
By early 1920, the Civil War was ending. Nikolai Yudenich, the White general who got so close to Petrograd that he could see its glittering domes and spires, was driven back to the Baltic countries, where he booked a train ticket for Paris and abandoned his army to its fate. The Whites and the English were driven out of Archangel, which they had blanketed with Churchill’s poison gas. Defeated in Siberia, Kolchak was arrested and executed by firing squad. His corpse was thrown in the Angara River, where it sank under the ice. On the same day, the Bolsheviks triumphantly entered Odessa, occupied the Don and Kuban, and signed an armistice with Estonia.
In February 1920, the Bolsheviks occupied Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan. In April, the British were driven out of Baku. On April 15, the Azerbaijan government fell to local Bolsheviks. The Revolution was going from strength to strength.
A “Red Persian Army” was assembled in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Victor Serge described it as “two to three thousand partisans chosen from among soldiers who had fought in the Russian Civil War, many of whom didn’t speak the country’s language.” It was neither an international brigade nor an army of Persians in exile; it was a Russian militia infiltrating Persian territory. In the spring, Fyodor Raskolnikov, who commanded the Volga-Caspian flotilla, was in Astrakhan, scoring a series of crucial victories north of the Caucasus. He left Astrakhan to celebrate the new Soviet republic and entered Baku on May 1. Denikin’s White Fleet fled across the Caspian with the British. The Soviet fleet pursued them, crossing the Caspian north of Persia in turn. On May 17 it encircled the port of Anzali.
Gilan lies on the border between Russia and Persia, a narrow band between the Caspian Sea and the Elburz mountain range stretching from the border of Azerbaijan in the northwest to the borders of Turkmenistan and Afghanistan in the east. One of Iran’s twelve old provinces, Gilan borders two empires, making it the Alsace-Lorraine of the Russo-Persian conflict. On a map of Iran, Gilan is shaped like a comma. But this comma is in just the right place, between the Caspian Sea and Persia, on the Tehran-Baku commercial route. In the early 1920s, that comma nearly changed the course of Iranian history.
At the time, the port of Anzali was the only access to Baku; the coastal road that would be built later didn’t exist yet. In the north, Anzali was the linchpin that opened the way to Baku’s oil. In the south, it gave access to Tehran, the capital. The linchpin was surrounded by dense beech and chestnut forests, and dominated by the high plateaus of the Elburz range, which rise to 18,250 feet. In his wartime diary British general Lionel Dunsterville marveled at the variety of plant species he encountered in Gilan, describing river-laced mountainsides with “primrose, scented violets, snowdrops, and strawberries in quantities.” When you descended toward the Caspian, he noted, the land turned boggy, and green with rice fields.
Four actors battled over this narrow strip of land: London, Moscow, Tehran, and the Jangali (“forest warriors”) liberation movement led by Kuchek Khan, who intended to rid Persia of the other three. But those actors were themselves divided.
The British government was split between the supporters of Prime Minister Lloyd George and those of his fire-breathing secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill. The first wanted to turn the page on the Civil War and sign a commercial agreement with Russia. The second hadn’t given up on confronting the Red Army, and pursued military interference on various Russian fronts.
The Soviet government was even more divided, between the supporters of a western offensive through Poland and those who wanted to consolidate the Revolution in the east. The first were led by Lenin and Stalin, the second inspired by Trotsky. The Bolsheviks on the ground were divided between “reformers,” who supported the Jangalis’ nationalist line, and “radicals,” who pushed for a true communist revolution.
Churchill feared Bolshevik contagion in Persia. Lloyd George was frightened by Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik passion. Lenin distrusted Lloyd George, who in turn doubted Lenin’s peaceful intentions. Kuchek Khan didn’t trust the Bolsheviks, who returned the favor. The Jangalis were divided among those who, like their leader, wanted to consolidate a revolution in Gilan based on an alliance between merchants and peasants, and those who wanted to make a communist revolution and march on Tehran.
In the capital, Ahmad Shah, the last sovereign of the Kajar dynasty, was in the twilight of a rule marked by the growing power of army chief Reza Khan, who would seize power in a coup d’état in the night of February 20–21, 1921.
Four actors, but with at least eight factions with opposing interests and strategies tugging every which way.
In the spring of 1920, the situation abruptly became simpler. The Soviets entered the port of Anzali and drove out the British and Denikin’s troops. A Soviet socialist republic was declared at Rasht, the capital of Gilan. The weakened central government in Tehran didn’t object. This republic would survive for a year and a half before falling apart under the combined pressure of a London-Moscow-Tehran triad. At the heart of the Persian imbroglio, two men would play a central role and influence the course of events: Yakov Blumkin and Kuchek Khan. Blumkin headed the so-called Red Persian Army assembled in Tashkent. Kuchek Khan led an army of a few hundred partisans in the Gilan forests. Coming from Azerbaijan, the Red Army crossed over the border into Persia as the partisans hurried to meet them on the Elburz plateau.
The whole affair was straight out of a Hollywood screenplay, a geopolitical mare’s nest brought to life and incarnated by two heroic figures: the secret agent and the guerrilla, archetypes that would enduringly dominate the twentieth-century imagination. Blumkin spent about four months in Iran, from the spring to mid-August 1920. Some question remains about the exact nature of his mission. Was it a simple information-gathering survey or a clandestine military operation? How often does an intelligence officer show up with a thousand-man army? What is certain is that his engagement at the side of the Gilan revolutionaries went well beyond his initial assignment.
In his autobiography, Blumkin tells how he directed the defense of Anzali while sick with typhus, running a high fever and suffering splitting headaches. Comrades described him giving orders in a typhus-induced fog, his face flushed with fever, pointing out some strategic point on the map in a kind of haze. The next day he was seen walking Anzali’s muddy streets, which were crowded with camels and decked out with yellow roses. Others saw him riding horseback through empty bazaar alleys, setting fire to merchants’ stalls and caravansary stables.
The local communists disclaimed the attack, but the identity of the man giving orders was in no doubt. Blumkin was Trotsky’s special emissary, and his instructions were clear: “No military intervention under the Russian flag. No dispatching a Russian expeditionary corps. We must absolutely stress our nonintervention, underlining Moscow’s demand that Russian troops and the Red fleet be withdrawn from Anzali, so as to avoid arousing suspicions about our ambition for conquest.” It’s not surprising that Blumkin’s assignment in Persia was surrounded by mystery. It was one of those black ops designed to leave no trace—the secret services’ stock in trade.
In short, the premises were confused and the actors conflicted, while events unfolded in their own way, defying the scriptwriter’s demands. The outcome would be a complete mess.
Confirmation of Blumkin’s mission order in Persia would await the opening of the foreign affairs commissariat archives in the 1990s. A letter by L. M. Karakhan, Chicherin’s deputy, dated July 17, 1920, states: “In response to the request by Kuchek Khan, relayed by Comrade Raskolnikov, to be sent competent revolutionaries as counselors in building socialism, we are dispatching Comrade Blumkin, in whom we have total confidence.”
So Blumkin had been sent to Gilan supposedly as an expert to help Kuchek Khan build socialism in Persia. That’s absurd, because Kuchek Khan had absolutely no intention of building socialism; quite the contrary. Nor did the Bolsheviks have any illusions about the nature of the revolution underway in Gilan. It was a democratic revolution whose sole aim was to drive out foreign invaders and establish democratic rule in Tehran. In fact, one of the heads of the Gilan operation, Comrade Sergo Ordzhonikidze, made that perfectly clear: “We knew that there was no proletariat in Persia, and the peasantry were ignorant, downtrodden, and passive.” Kuchek Khan’s was a movement of national liberation that expressed the interests of the commercial middle class.
What would be the sense of a proletarian revolution without a proletariat? A Soviet republic without soviets? As Blumkin wrote in his first report: “Even if Kuchek Khan and his partisans’ support for certain fundamental principles of socialism were proven, the masses that support him are either absent or at most evanescent.”
The way was wide open for intrigues: plots, official state lies, and a palace revolution.
At the other end of the spectrum from Blumkin stood Mirza Kuchek Khan (1880–1921)—a hero in spite of himself. He was the first twentieth-century guerrilla, a Persian Che Guevara whose Sierra Maestra cradle and grave were the Elburz Mountains.
Born in 1880 at Rasht, Kuchek Khan—also spelled Kouchik, Koochek, Kuchak, Kuchik, Kouchak, Koochak, and Kuçek—received a traditional religious education completed by theology studies, which he pursued until he was twenty-one. In addition to Arab and Islamic theology, he studied classical Persian poetry; he knew many poems by heart and loved Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings. Introduced to politics through the Constitutionalist movement that gave Iran its first constitution, he experienced hunger, exile, and prison. Banished from his home city of Rasht, he went underground, seeking refuge in Gilan’s mountains and forests. There, he and a few young fighters created the Jangali movement.
During World War I, Kuchek Khan launched guerrilla operations against the British, the Russians, and the corrupt Tehran authorities. The Jangalis were the first of those national liberation movements that would mark the twentieth-century history of decolonization in Africa, the Americas, and Asia.
At the head of a group equipped with a dozen rifles and a few bullets, he attacked Russian troops occupying Gilan. The operation was no more than a mosquito bite for the tsar’s soldiers, but word spread that a group of homegrown revolutionaries had gone into action. This was the spark that would fire Kuchek Khan’s popularity among a people seething at Russian oppression. All through the war, the Jangalis set multiple ambushes in the Gilan mountains. Despite their small numbers, they were able to launch lightning strikes thanks to real-time information given them by supportive peasants.
One episode of this guerrilla war has become legendary. After fresh troops landed in Anzali, the Russians decided to strike a major blow. They organized an expedition of five hundred heavily armed Cossacks against some sixty Jangalis. But the Jangalis moved through the forest the way fish move through water, and Cossacks were used to operating in the steppes. The Jangalis drew them into the forest, where they ambushed and decimated them. News of their defeat brought jubilation to Gilan inhabitants and fury to the Russians. The Russian consul fomented a plot to assassinate Kuchek Khan. It failed.
Kuchek Khan’s contemporaries described him as a tall, athletic man. His face revealed an iron will, “even when he smiled.” A biographical portrait drawn by the British intelligence services—which he harried mercilessly—described him as “inconstant” and “suspicious” but recognized his great honesty. He was noted for his courtesy and “enlightened asceticism.” An abstemious man, he used neither alcohol nor tobacco, and his secretary claimed he was so shy that he only married two years before his death at forty-one. According to the French military attaché in Tehran, he had a soft, compelling voice and incarnated “an apostolic figure beloved of the peasants, who saw him as a savior.”
The qualities in Kuchek Khan most often mentioned are loyalty, tolerance, and moderation. During his entire life, he seems to have been driven only by patriotism and a love of justice. Nothing was lacking in his legend: not courage, or the daring of his fighters in the forest, not even the role of a woman. That would be the brave and beautiful Bolour Khânon. A bold fighter from Manjil, she ambushed some British and Russian troops and relieved them of a supply of munitions, which she gave to Kuchek Khan.
Kuchek Khan hated the spirit of vengeance, and preferred to counsel rather than punish. Some thought he didn’t have the boldness required of a revolutionary leader. Victor Serge, who didn’t know him personally, was probably relying on Blumkin in describing him as “a very thin man, with glasses, who looked like a European intellectual…I have every reason to believe that he was sincere in his militant idealism. His photographs were long displayed in the museums of the Revolution.”
A lover of poetry, Kuchek Khan could recite great swaths of The Book of Kings, the longest Persian epic written by a single poet: Ferdowsi, “the reviver of the Persian language.” In a biography published in 1920 in the Revue du monde musulman, Kuchek Khan is described as “the new prophet in the land of the Jangalis,” and “a man of the north: tall, with a long black beard, bright, deep-set eyes, a steely gaze that expresses a will of iron. Kuchek Khan has always been a visionary…A nationalistic dreamer and a poet of freedom and his country.” He is said to have learned very young to disdain everything that Western oppression represented.
As a good Muslim, Kuchek Khan always started his day by praying. Awakened at dawn on May 18, 1920, by the sound of Soviet planes bombing Anzali, he invited Blumkin, who had come to inform him of the Bolsheviks’ intentions, to join him in prayers. Blumkin, who didn’t have a moment to waste, skipped the niceties. He said he never prayed, and that “if you want to be friends with the Bolsheviks you would do well to quit praying.” An exchange that didn’t augur well for future relations between the Russians and the head of the Jangali rebels.
Yet everything had started so promisingly. For the first time in the history of relations between Russians and Persians—especially in Gilan, a Russian frontier region—their interests converged. Having rid themselves of the White Armies, the Bolsheviks wanted to secure the Caspian Sea coast and the port of Anzali. The Jangalis were glad to see the Bolsheviks drive out the British troops and what was left of the White Army. An alliance of circumstance, certainly, but one that would carry the new partners much further than they could have imagined: the proclamation of an independent, socialist, Soviet republic. There wasn’t so much as the shadow of a soviet in Gilan, of course, and the Bolsheviks were under no illusion about the nature of the ongoing revolution.
For his part, Kuchek Khan distrusted the Russians, even when done up in fresh red paint and animated by the best of intentions. He had struggled against the imperial pretensions of this awkward neighbor all his life and wasn’t about to hand the reins of his revolution to some new converts. But the situation got away from him, as it got away from the Bolshevik leaders.
On May 17, 1920, the Soviet Caspian fleet commanded by Raskolnikov sailed into the port of Anzali. It had come from Baku, and its mission was to seize the ships of Denikin’s forces and secure Persia’s Caspian coast. The idea was to take control of the ships without damaging them. These were tankers that had been converted into warships, and the Bolsheviks urgently needed them to carry oil from Baku.
A group of commandos from Raskolnikov’s fleet, perhaps including his wife, Larisa Reisner, planned to steal aboard the ships and take them without firing a shot. Blumkin was part of the group.
Would the failed meeting between Yakov and Larisa suggested in the previous chapter finally happen in Anzali on May 17, 1920? The reader will remember that in June 1918, when Osip Mandelstam told Reisner about his run-in with Blumkin at the Poets’ Café, she went to Dzherjinsky to denounce the young Chekist. Nearly two years had now passed. I had been dreaming of the two of them meeting and having it out once and for all. Blumkin, whose ordeals had certainly marked him, would have apologized, blaming the incident on his immaturity. Reisner, who so admired Trotsky, would have easily forgiven his protégé. She would have appreciated Blumkin’s courage. He would have been seduced by her culture and beauty. Alas, I have to stick to the facts. Nothing like that happened. And yet the encounter might have happened, without their knowing or realizing it.
At dawn, a team of a dozen fighters with swim fins slipped into the sea and silently headed for the White fleet ships. For obvious reasons of security, the identity of the commandos participating in the operation was kept secret. In particular, no one on the swimming team would be told if Larisa Reisner was along; she would have been an invaluable hostage for the Whites and the British. Blumkin had already changed his name. On land, he had assumed the identity and nationality of one Ehsanollah Khan, a Jangali, but there is no way to know whether he participated in the operation under that name. The team members all spoke Persian, German, and English without an accent. In case of capture, nothing could connect them to Russia. They belonged to those armies without uniforms or flags, directed by shadowy forces and fighting in the name of interests that are no less shadowy. In their wet suits, Yakov Blumkin and Larisa Reisner may have swum through the waters of the port like two shadows, with neither memory nor future, daggers on their hips, preparing to board the ships.
In just one day, the Reds captured all of Denikin’s ships, four British torpedo boats, weapons, radios, and transmission material. At seven o’clock the next morning, the cruiser Rosa Luxemburg began shelling the British headquarters. Witnesses reported that when the first shells hit the building, the surprise was such that officers ran away in their underwear. They were operating on London time, and for them it was 4:30 a.m. The Brits couldn’t imagine that anyone would dare attack at such an early hour. It wasn’t even a battle; the British just retreated to the interior. Was it a rout caused by a time difference? Hard to believe. Maybe people opted for this explanation as a way of minimizing the effect of a defeat that permanently damaged the empire’s prestige in the region.
According to Raskolnikov, the people of Anzali greeted the Bolsheviks as liberators. Other accounts suggest more muted enthusiasm. The people’s joy at seeing the British flee was most likely doubled by the excitement that accompanied the arrival of Kuchek Khan.
In her journal, Larisa Reisner described May 18, 1920, this way:
The first marvel that stirred the consciousnesses in Gilan was the defeat of the English. The second was Kuchek Kahn’s appearance in Anzali and his visit to the Russian battleship. He was the talk of the town long before his arrival. Merchants left their shops, devout Muslims abandoned their prayer rugs, beggars and the poor gathered, all forming a human mass of thousands. Shoeshine boys stood barefoot on their red boxes for a better view. Beggars took over street corners. Everyone knew that Kuchek Khan had arrived. Old men threw themselves in the dust at his feet to kiss his long, righteous hands. The English had put a price on his head: a bag of gold. And that esteemed head was now right in front of them.
The city was decked with red banners and tri-colored flags in the national colors. The bazaar shops had been spruced up, hung with lanterns and carpeted with Persian rugs. The Red Army orchestra played “La Marseillaise” and “The Internationale” as demonstrators shouted “Long live free Iran!” and “Long live the Soviet Union!”
Kuchek Khan crossed the city in a kind of waking dream, surrounded by the crowd, carried by the fervor of his people, who saw in him less a revolutionary than a saint or savior. At his side, Blumkin tried to shield him from the fervor of his most enthusiastic supporters, who were determined to touch the hem of his tunic or his hands and hair. He weighed the popularity of this discreet, almost shy man walking through the crowd, smiling. That evening, he wrote to Trotsky: “Given Kuchek Khan’s special situation and the glory that surrounds him, we risk dozens of Kuchek Khans popping up. Sooner or later we will have to fight them, and that will demand many sacrifices.”
They soon found themselves before the Soviet destroyer Kursk, where the Bolshevik military staff stood lining the gangway. Bowing to each member, Kuchek Khan came aboard, acclaimed by the crowd.
Raskolnikov explained that he had landed at Anzali only to recover Denikin’s Russian fleet and to clear the Caspian Sea of the White Army. That mission accomplished, the Red Army would withdraw from Anzali. Kuchek Khan stated that he had no intention of copying the model of the October Revolution in Persia. Above all, he wanted to preserve the unity of his people as they fought the British presence and the autocracy in power in Tehran. Anyone hoping for a rapid sovietization of Persia was disappointed. The Jangali leader wouldn’t even discuss the issue of land reform.
Blumkin, who had remained silent up to then, asked to speak. Intrigued, everyone turned to him, knowing that he was in regular contact with Trotsky. He suggested to Kuchek Khan that they immediately proclaim the Socialist Republic of Gilan as the only way to prove the revolution’s absolute independence in the eyes of the world. In fact, this idea hadn’t just popped into Blumkin’s head. He had previously discussed it with the progressive wing of the Jangalis, who now loudly acquiesced. Raskolnikov and Kuchek Khan exchanged a puzzled look. They didn’t seem to realize what was going on. Finally Raskolnikov added that in that case, of course nothing would be done in the name of Soviet Russia, only with its tacit support. Kuchek Khan agreed, while pondering the implications of his decision. By aligning himself with the Soviets, he might be able to contain their influence while benefiting from their military support. The proposal accelerated his timetable but took advantage of the Soviet fleet’s presence in port, which would dissuade Tehran and the English from intervening. One of his counselors present at the table stated in his memoirs that Kuchek Khan had “turned socialist” during the encounter for one simple reason: “If he had not taken the leadership of the revolution at that moment, his more radical rivals would have done so in his place. Kuchek Khan made his choice with a heavy heart.”
The people greeted the news with cheers, and the Jangalis marched the twenty-five miles south to Racht, the capital of the province, to establish the new republic and form a provisional government. Meanwhile, Trotsky suggested that Raskolnikov “grant the rebels all possible military power while giving Kuchek Khan the territories we have occupied,” but also “secretly work to establish significant Soviet propaganda and organization in Persia.”
Forgotten in the euphoria of declaring the Republic of Gilan was the fact that the revolutionary movement comprised a mosaic of divergent interests sharpened by ambition and divided between reformers and revolutionaries. This was due to the movement’s history and sociology. Some of the militants had grown up in exile among the thousands of migrant Persian workers in the Russian Caucasus. They joined local Georgians and Azerbaijanis in founding the Hemmat (Determination) Party, which would give rise to the Iranian Communist Party in June 1920. Those Marxist militants had little in common with the Jangalis. Neither side agreed on the nature or pace of reforms, or on the important question of extending the revolution to the whole country. The Jangali leader planned to first unify the entire Persian people before launching an attack on Tehran and undertaking social reforms, which would start with land reform. Persia had a huge number of agricultural workers. His opponents wanted to reverse those priorities and start with social reform, which would enlarge the movement’s social base, while military victories would swell the ranks of the Persian Red Army.
The arrival of the Soviets in Gilan had forced a fusion of those two currents. The divergences had been papered over in order to form a government, but the disagreements quickly became visible. It didn’t take more than two weeks for cracks to start to appear in the beautiful facade of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Gilan.
The notes that Blumkin sent Trotsky were unambiguous. “When I got word of the government manifesto that accompanied the proclamation of the Soviet Republic of Persia, I tore my hair out,” he wrote.
I gathered my comrades and we started thinking about what we should do. If Kuchek Khan took his inspiration from this manifesto to govern Persia, it could only collapse. We spent three hours with Kuchek Khan, and I tried to prove to him that you couldn’t have a revolution without fighting the ruling class and the feudal powers. Kuchek Khan answered by saying, “You are forgetting that in Persia many people, revolutionaries but also merchants and religious figures, have fought the Shah. Why should we turn away from them?” I demonstrated point by point that those landowners had opposed the Shah because he taxed them too heavily. I proved that the Shah and the imperialists were allies. It was hopeless! Finally, I made one last try. “Put out a resolution in support of unions!” I said. “What good would that do?” he asked. I tried to explain that the workers needed a union to defend their interests as a class. His answer convinced me that we would never understand each other: “If a worker needs something, he should come see me, I will be happy to help him.”
In the following weeks, occasions for conflict multiplied. Land reform, repression of religious figures, taxation of merchants, military offensives against Tehran, all were stumbling blocks in the government factions’ path. Everything was a pretext for conflict. Each measure taken became a provocation. Kuchek Khan’s political line and authority were challenged. His rivals considered him a Persian Kerensky. So as not to further poison the situation and divide the movement, the Jangali leader decided to retire to the Gilan forest.
The republic had been proclaimed, and the Russian fleet left Anzali, as promised. But the government had lost its titular figure, and the essence of its legitimacy. Power was vacant. In Moscow the leadership worried about the developing situation. On the ground, communists planned a coup d’état. The date was set for July 31, and its execution entrusted to Blumkin, the only one of the conspirators with real military experience.
At one o’clock in the morning Blumkin led the insurrection with about a hundred men, and occupied the city’s military and civilian administration buildings, starting with that of the republic’s government. They met no resistance. In the morning, shops opened as if nothing had happened. “When we woke up yesterday morning, power had changed hands,” wrote an inhabitant in his diary. “Kuchek Khan had been overthrown and a new government formed without his supporters. Otherwise, everything went on as usual.” In the afternoon a communiqué was broadcast from Anzali on all radio frequencies, announcing the successful coup d’état. “The provisional government of Kuchek Khan proved itself incapable of leading the revolutionary movement in Persia. It was unable to successfully fight the English imperialists or to satisfy the urgent needs of the working masses.” Kuchek Khan, who had been praised by the Bolsheviks a few days earlier, had become an “enemy” and a “traitor” overnight.
The flip-flops of Soviet politics in Persia can’t be understood without taking into account the Anglo-Russian negotiations in progress at the same time in London. At stake in those negotiations was the suspension of the blockade that had been strangling Soviet Russia for the previous two years. For the blockade to be lifted, the Bolsheviks had to agree to give up their military operations against the shah in Persia, and generally stop fomenting anti-British rebellion in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and India.
On August 3, Chicherin wired his instructions to the Soviet representative in London: “The pace and intensity of our policies in the Middle East are subject to our English policy. In the course of a conversation, try to get the English to understand that besides a few pinpricks on the margins, we could severely damage all the English positions in the world if we deployed the means at our disposal in the Middle East. They can’t fail to understand this, given their shock at our thrusts in the Middle East.”
In a telegram dated June 4, the very day that the Soviet Republic of Gilan was proclaimed, Trotsky made the Bolshevik strategic position perfectly clear. A Soviet coup d’état in Persia and the other Middle Eastern countries bordering Russia would cause the Bolsheviks “the greatest possible difficulties,” he wrote. “Even in Azerbaijan, the Soviet republic is not able to stand on its own feet.” It had been sustained by Red Army bayonets, if not occupied. Trotsky concluded that “the main interest of a Russian revolution in the Middle East is as a diplomatic bargaining chip to play against England.”
In London the Bolsheviks had been negotiating their economic survival since the spring. “That scoundrel Lloyd George is fooling you in the most vile and shameless manner,” Lenin wired his negotiators. “Don’t believe a word, and fool him threefold.”
On July 7 the foreign affairs commissar let it be known that to achieve peace quickly, Moscow was prepared to “abstain from any military action or propaganda susceptible to encourage the peoples of Asia to act against British interests.” Yet three weeks later Blumkin would occupy the capital of Gilan and overthrow Kuchek Khan’s government.
Had Blumkin acted on his own initiative, against instructions for Moscow? Was there a divergence of a line or a lack of coordination between Bolsheviks? It’s possible, but hard to believe. For Gilan to be a bargaining chip in negotiations with the British, the Bolsheviks would have preserved and if possible helped it prosper, so as to be able to use it at the right time. Thus the “double blind” of Soviet policy in Persia: official nonintervention in Persian affairs, but hidden support to local communists who wanted to march on Tehran.
Radek answered the Iranian regime’s protests against Russian activities in Persia in the pages of Izvestia on June 10, 1920: “There are no Soviet ground forces in Persia. But Russian ideas, and the ideas of communism, have entered Persia.” Radek failed to add that along with “ideas of communism,” Soviet forces led by Blumkin, Trotsky’s closest collaborator, had entered Iran. Yakov Blumkin—that disciplined artisan of Soviet foreign policy—was one of the two irons that the Bolsheviks kept in the fire throughout their difficult negotiations with the English. Victor Serge outlined the chain of command that the Blumkin operation in Persia depended on: “Blumkin and his commissars obeyed orders directly from Moscow. Not those from the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which theoretically was the only competent authority, but from the Central Committee of the Russian Party, of which they were faithful members.”
Before leaving Persia, Blumkin wrote Trotsky: “The Persian problem must be settled one way or another: either attack them or make peace with the Shah’s government and abandon Anzali.”
With the negotiations in London on the point of succeeding, the Central Committee decided to pull out of Gilan. Blumkin was recalled to Moscow. “The insurrection ended the way it began,” wrote Serge. “The Russian partisans re-crossed the border or boarded feluccas and sailed back to Baku. Kuchek Khan and his Persian friends refused to obey, and the question of killing them was discussed. I actually don’t know how Kuchek Khan ended up, but Blumkin told me that the decision was taken to kill him if he persisted in his refusal to disband the movement.”
That turned out not to be necessary. Kuchek Khan, who had not capitulated and took refuge in the forests with a few dozen fighters, died of cold in the mountains in December 1921. The Persian Che Guevara was forty-one years old. His body was decapitated, and his main comrade in arms brought his head to the authorities. He was awarded a colonel’s epaulets by the minister of war, the future dictator Reza Shah Pahlavi. Kuchek Khan’s head was displayed as a trophy in the Gilan capital.
Despite the efforts made under the shah’s dictatorship to erase Kuchek Khan from Iranians’ memory, he remains a patriotic fighter for them, and the Gilanis continue to revere him as a “rare example of honesty” among Iranian politicians. The new regime in Iran has managed to graft a religious dimension onto the mythologies surrounding the Jangali movement. Followers of Khomeini saw Kuchek Khan as a martyr who had raised the banner of Islam against the West, and who died fighting monarchists and communists. Iranian television produced a fourteen-hour miniseries honoring the “revolutionary mullah.” But Kuchek Khan was no mullah. He had simply studied theology, as all students did in those days. The Islamic Republic has honored him with stamps and posters, and school-books devote whole chapters to him. Streets have been named and statues of him raised in parks in his honor.
The Soviet Republic of Gilan has long been misunderstood. Its history belongs to the domain of rumors and legends, but not only to “the romantic mythology that shrouds the deserts of the Arabian peninsula,” in the words of Fred Halliday, an old Mideast hand. Attempts to install workers in power in Berlin, Munich, and Budapest in 1919, and in the Turin soviets in 1919–20, have left a deep mark on collective memory. The same can’t be said of the insurgent republic created in Gilan province in northern Iran in June 1920. Blumkin was one of its founders. The official history of this republic, which lasted a year and a half before being dismantled by the joint efforts of the London-Moscow-Tehran triad, was written by the very people with an interest in making it disappear.