Page 465 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

462 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

fomenting revolutionary and nationalist discontent throughout Asia, directed
against ‘reactionary native rulers’ and ‘foreign imperialists’ alike. Stalin, as

Commissar of Nationalities, was much taken at the time with the attractions of
this ‘Eastern’ strategy, and at the twelfth congress of the Soviet communist
party in April 1923 he declared:

Two things are possible: either we succeed in stirring up and revolutionizing the far
imperialist rear - the colonial and semi-colonial countries of the East - and thereby
hasten the fall of capitalism, or we fail, and thereby strengthen imperialism and weaken
the force of our own movement.

Although Leninist dogma had it that the destruction of capitalism and imperi­
alism in Asia would be accomplished, as it had been in Russia, by the revolt of
the masses under communist leadership, the Bolsheviks in time came to realize
that the likelihood of native communist parties emerging in the states of Asia in

sufficient strength to precipitate revolution in the foreseeable future was
exceedingly remote. They fell back, therefore, upon the expedient alternative
of co-operating with any nationalist movement, whatever its origins, which
took up the struggle against Western imperialism. In the Middle East this

meant any movement which was anti-British, since Britain was the dominant
power in the area. It was with this in mind, as well as the need to stabilize the
situation in the Caucasus and Transcaspia, that the Bolsheviks set out in 1921
to conciliate the provisional nationalist government in Ankara led by Mustafa

Kemal, and the nationalist regime installed in Tehran by the military coup of
Reza Khan. Treaties were concluded by the Bolsheviks with both governments
in 1921, by which the Bolsheviks renounced the ‘criminal policy’ of their
Tsarist predecessors and cancelled all existing treaties previously concluded
with Turkey and Persia by Tsarist Russia. Further treaties of friendship and
neutrality with the Soviet Union were signed by the Turkish and Persian

governments in 1925 and 1927 respectively.
For all the fair phrases in the Soviet treaties with Persia and Turkey about
the ‘renunciation’ of Tsarist ambitions, it is difficult to detect any measurab e

difference between Soviet aims in the Middle East after 1918 and those 0
Tsarist Russia before that date - whatever doctrinaire gloss the Bolshevi'S
might care to put upon their actions. Like the Tsarist regime before them, t ey
were essentially concerned to eliminate British influence from Turkey an^

Persia, to destroy the function of these countries as barrier powers an
vanquish Britain in the ultimate innings of the ‘Great Game’ in Asia, w ene
it might be played. Hence the conclusion of treaties in the I920's W1J
unlikely partners as King Husain of the Hijaz, Ibn Saud of aj an

Yahya of the Yemen. Notwithstanding occasional spurts of in^ere^J ’ EasJ
the Soviet Union paid comparatively little attention to t e 1 sk
between the wars, the energies of her rulers being primarily engage home and
of substituting communist totalitarianism for Tsarist autocr y