H-Diplo Article Review 20 18

Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Web and Production Editor: George Fujii @HDiplo Article Review No. 748 8 March 2018

Alexander Nicholas Shaw. “Sir Reader Bullard, Frank Roberts and the Azerbaijan Crisis of 1945–46: Bevin’s Officials, Perceptions and the Adoption of a Cold War Mentality in British Soviet Policy.” Cold War History 17:3 (2017): 279-297. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2016.1264389.

URL: http://tiny.cc/AR748

Review by Jonathan Colman, University of Central Lancashire

lexander Nicholas Shaw has produced a well-crafted and persuasive account of an important aspect of Britain’s adoption of an anti-Soviet containment policy shortly after the Second World War. This was of course a period in which Western policymakers struggled to gauge the outlook and intentions of theirA erstwhile collaborator, which demonstrated restraint in some instances and expansionist tendencies in others. Shaw maintains that Soviet efforts to secure territorial concessions in Azerbaijan were critical in leading Reader Bullard, ambassador in Tehran, and Frank K. Roberts, chargé d'affaires in Moscow, to see the Soviet Union as an expansionist power with whom peacetime collaboration was unlikely. Their views would make their mark in London, showing how the analyses of diplomats could prove influential in a fluid and somewhat ominous international context.

The case of Azerbaijan suggested that, unlike in Eastern Europe, Moscow’s foreign policy goals went beyond security concerns. A former consul-general in Moscow, Bullard was already suspicious of the Soviet Union prior to his arrival in Iran in 1939. He was surprised at the cordiality of his wartime dealings with Soviet representatives in Tehran, but Soviet pressure on the Iranian regime for oil concessions led him to argue in favour of resistance and confrontation. Late in 1945 he attempted to persuade Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that efforts were needed to impede Soviet efforts to secure control of the Tehran government and to usurp British oil interests in Iran. Shaw notes that Bullard’s concern about oil could be used to support a revisionist interpretation of the origins of the Cold War. Bullard’s views gained traction in the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, but had less of an influence on Ernest Bevin. Although early in 1946 he pursued a UN resolution demanding Soviet withdrawal from Azerbaijan, this initiative, according to Shaw, derived less from a wish to contain the Soviet Union than to support the authority of the UN. The Foreign Secretary took “a legalistic approach to the Azerbaijan crisis, focusing on Soviet breach of faith rather than the oil or geopolitical interests which preoccupied Bullard” (285). Bevin’s stance stemmed from the philosophy of the Labour Party.

Frank Roberts was only a minister at the Moscow Embassy, but he found himself in charge for much of the time, because his ambassador was often away participating in missions, and there was a gap before the H-Diplo Article Review

appointment of the next ambassador. Prior to his Moscow post, Roberts thought that Soviet foreign policy reflected genuine security concerns and that emerging tensions in the Near East could be attributed to “a vicious circle of suspicions and counter-suspicions” (a view supporting post-revisionist analyses of Cold War origins). However, Roberts’s outlook changed rapidly, placing him more in line with Bullard’s resolute stance. It was the Azerbaijan crisis that inspired this perceptual transformation. Initially, Roberts hoped for an amicable solution, but by March 1946—when the Iranian Prime Minister visited Moscow for talks with Stalin, and appealed to Roberts for help—he had lost any such hopes. A number of historians have already explored Roberts’s role in shaping British policy during the early Cold War, but Shaw argues that they have overlooked Roberts’s preoccupation with events in Iran; Soviet policy there helps to explain “the convergence of views” between Roberts and the Eastern Department (288). Roberts was responsible for sending a number of despatches to London in March 1946 that represented a cumulative equivalent to George F. Kennan’s famous ‘Long Telegram’ in February. Unlike in Kennan’s more general assessment, the Near East figured prominently in Roberts’s thinking. He thought that the Soviet Union was asserting itself in Iran and Turkey before Britain could re-establish its regional influence. Roberts believed that Soviet policies embodied both traditional great power expansionism and legitimate security concerns, although in 1947 he concluded that the Soviet Union had no real need for Iranian oil and was merely acting opportunistically.

Shaw notes that just as Bullard’s views struck home in the Eastern Department, Roberts played an important role in shaping perceptions in the Northern Department (although some officials had already reached their own pessimistic conclusions about the potential for peacetime cooperation with the Soviet Union). The result was the establishment of a Russia Committee to direct policy towards the Soviet Union and to coordinate a propaganda drive. Events in Iran also proved critical in shaping Ernest Bevin’s transition to Cold War warrior status. According to Shaw, “by the end of 1946, Bevin shared the harder-line Foreign Office understanding of the Cold War in the Near East’, and he opposed Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s willingness for Britain to withdraw from its influential position and to make an agreement with Stalin. Bevin authorised a propaganda drive in Iran, a move which for Shaw “highlights the significance of the Azerbaijan crisis in building a Cold War consensus” (291). Later in 1946, the Foreign Secretary endorsed a propaganda campaign across the Middle East. Shaw concludes that while events in Eastern Europe and Germany dominated British foreign policy concerns, the Azerbaijan crisis “was treated as more urgent by Bevin, and therefore served as a testing ground for a “containment” policy which would be later introduced in more strategically-vital areas” (296).

Shaw’s article represents an important intervention in the debate about British policies during the early Cold War, including the controversy about why and when Ernest Bevin adopted a Cold War outlook. While Bullard and Roberts were at least an indirect influence on the Foreign Secretary, it is quite feasible that the sort of arguments that they put forward merely prodded him in a direction that he had already deemed it necessary to travel. Shaw considers Roberts to be more influential than Bullard. The author would have done well to have provided a fuller discussion of Roberts’s prior views about Soviet foreign policy; after all, in 1939 he had visited Moscow in the ill-fated pursuit of an alliance, and in 1943, when working for the Central European Department of the Foreign Office, he had dealt with the discovery of the Katyn Forest massacre. He had attended the Yalta Conference, too. Nonetheless, the article represents an excellent addition to the literature of British foreign policy during a period of transition from war to uneasy peace. Undoubtedly, the promptings of Bullard and Roberts about Soviet policy in Iran helped to cast the mould: soon, the containment of Soviet influence in Europe and beyond, based on collaboration with the United States, would be at the heart of British foreign policy.

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Jonathan Colman is Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, England. He has published widely on British and U.S. foreign policies, Anglo-American relations, and diplomatic representation. His many publications include The Cuban Missile Crisis: Origins, Course and Aftermath (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which presents the confrontation as a global event with complex legacies. Colman is now busy with two projects: an intellectual history of the Cuban missile crisis, and a biography of Frank K. Roberts.