Perhaps we can approach the first episodes of the Soviet Cold War strategy as persisting for a long time not along the Greece-Turkey-Iran line but along the Turkey-Iran-East Turkestan line. “Accounts written during the Cold War drew the Middle East into debating the origins of the US-Soviet conflict with emphasis on Greece, Turkey, Iran and Western interest in the region’s petroleum”.¹ In Greece, the Soviets wanted to create a ‘friendly’ government under its influence. But unlike Greece, Moscow had territorial interests and intentions to expand in the Turkish Straits and the eastern provinces of Turkey, within the province of Azerbaijan in northern Iran and into the geographical zone of East Turkestan in western China. The Soviets pursued the same policy, the same methods, and identical strategic goals in all three frontier areas: political and diplomatic pressure, information warfare, psychological coercion, inducement of nervous breakdowns, economic shocks, financial crises, and an underlying fear of the Soviets.

From where, from which region did the Cold War start? Until now, there is no consensus among historians on this issue. In recent years, a number of influential historians of the Cold War such as Professor Bruce Kuniholm, Professor Louise Fawcett, Dr. John W. Young, Dr. John Kent, Fernande Scheid Raine, and others came to the conclusion that the Cold War had started in the Near and Middle Eastern region, located along the southern borders of the USSR and other hotspots of the world. For example, British historian Kent writes:

This study, covering Soviet strategies of the early Cold War of 1945–1947, has been compiled using a wide range of resources and historical literature. Documents obtained from numerous archival fonds of various countries and their analysis make it possible to clarify some of the eastern episodes of the history of the Cold War and illuminate several interesting pages of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy during the early years of the Cold War. New archives identify Stalin as the main architect of the Turkish crisis, the Iranian epopee of the Cold War, and Soviet adventurer in East Turkestan. Secret decisions made on Iran, Turkey, and East Turkestan, adopted in the period 1945–1947, stimulated the implementation of Soviet expansion strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia, and Soviet South Caucasian and Central Asian republics along the borders actively participated in this first confrontation of the USSR with a Western country and with China.

A thorough analysis of documents and materials shows that the Soviet Union prioritised Turkey in its Middle East policy. It was not a mere coincidence that Turkey turned into a testing ground of the Cold War. It was in this location that the idea of border expansion towards the Near East and the Mediterranean resulted in the first confrontation between the USSR and the United States, with the direct involvement of Great Britain. Since the Cold War period, extensive literature has been published on the Turkish Crisis during the Cold War. Some of this has been written on the basis of the contents of Western archival documents.³

Another hotspot of post-war confrontation between the western allies and the USSR materialised in Iranian Azerbaijan. Southern Azerbaijan was to play a special place in the implementation of Soviet expansionist plans towards the East. The attitude of the Soviet leadership to the fate of South Azerbaijan was determined by strategic plans to penetrate deep into the East, the desire to gain control over the energy and fuel-rich source regions of Iran and Arab countries. And only opposition from Western countries prevented the implementation of these plans. It was the events in northern Iran and the attempts of the Soviet Union to gain a foothold here that inflamed the nerves of these rivals to their limits. Immediately after the end of World War II, secret documents were released in both Europe and the Soviet Union, testifying to the seriousness of expansionist intentions leading to a confrontation with the allies. It was in Azerbaijan that this open confrontation was set in motion, and because of this the former allies – the USSR, the United States, and Great Britain – turned from comrades-in-arms into rivals. Undoubtedly, the Azerbaijan crisis played a vital role in driving the British Foreign Office and US State Department to re-evaluate Soviet foreign policy intentions.⁴ The first controversial issue in the newly created UN also concerned the problem of Iranian Azerbaijan. Within the context of Iranian Azerbaijan, it was precisely those countries, those superpowers that later determined the collision of post-war international relations all over the world.

Comparing the study with the Turkish crisis, a significant interest and new trend can be observed in post-Soviet publications of historical literature relating to the Iranian crisis of the Cold War. The problem of including the issue of Iranian Azerbaijan in international discussions in the years after World War II, and the plans of the USSR and Western allies regarding the Iranian oil industry and other similar issues, have been in recent years reflected in a number of works published abroad. It should be noted that tangible successes have been achieved in studying the Iranian crisis of the Cold War. In recent years, new historical literature on the history of the Cold War has appeared, particularly concerning the crisis within Iranian Azerbaijan.⁵

From the point of view of historiography’s assessment of the Azerbaijani crisis of 1946 and Soviet-Iranian relations in the post-Soviet period, Louise Fawcett’s latest research deserves special attention. She concludes that this new work confirms that realpolitik considerations of interest, rather than communist ideology or solidarity, governed Stalin’s actions in Iranian Azerbaijan; and that the People’s Party of Iran (Tudeh) and the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan approved local autonomy from their patrons in the USSR, with fatal consequences for both. However, much about the 1946 crisis remains understudied, according to Fawcett. Just what part did Iranian statesmen like Ahmad Qavam, Sayyed Hassan Taqizadeh, and Hossein Ala play in ejecting the Soviet Union from northern Iran? How much conflict and cooperation were there between the three big powers in Iran, particularly between Britain and the United States? Much work remains to be done, even regarding Iran’s earliest Cold War crisis.⁶

Professor Geoffrey Roberts approaches this issue somewhat differently. In his opinion, in the Iranian issue “economic motives drove Stalin’s diplomacy, but his policy was complicated by Moscow’s efforts to exploit the country’s ethnic divisions and nationalist politics”. According to Roberts, the same factors also played a role in relation to Turkey, “but Moscow’s prime concern was Soviet security in the Black Sea”.⁷ However, archival documents that surfaced after the collapse of the Soviets indicate that Stalin’s Iranian diplomacy went beyond economic interests, and that of Turkey went beyond the security of the Black Sea. From the point of view of the causes and consequences of the Soviet strategy towards Iran and Turkey, Professor Vladimir Pechatnov’s explanation seems more convincing. He wrote: