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Chronicles of a Calamitous Strike Foretold: Abadan, July 1946

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Chronicles of a Calamitous Strike Foretold: Abadan, July 1946 chapter 7 Chronicles of a Calamitous Strike Foretold: Abadan, July 1946 Touraj Atabaki* Introduction With the outbreak of World War ii, Iran adopted an official policy of neutrality, and for two years this policy was respected on the part of both the British and the Soviets. However, when the Germans began fighting on an Eastern front, both these major powers changed their stance towards Iran. The change in their policy was primarily an attempt to bolster the Soviet Union’s defence efforts, which were on the verge of collapse. In comparison to other routes available for shipping supplies to the Soviet Union (from San Francisco to Murmansk or Arkhangelsk), the Persian Gulf-Caucasus route was by far the most practical and convenient. Subsequently, on the pretext of indicting Reza Shah for having pro-German sympathies, the British and Soviet troops invaded Iran on 25 August 1941. Following the invasion of Iran, a Tripartite Treaty of Alliance was signed by Britain, the Soviet Union and Iran in January 1942. According to Article Five of this Treaty, ‘the Allied armed forces shall be withdrawn from Iranian ter- ritory no later than six months after all hostilities between the Allied powers and Germany and her associates have been suspended by the conclusion of an armistice or armistices or on conclusion of peace between them, whichever date is earlier’.1 Following the capitulation of the Third Reich on 8 May 1945, and the Japanese surrender on 2 September of the same year, the Allies enjoyed a six-month interval until the stipulated deadline of 2 March 1946. Whereas the United States and Britain withdrew their troops from Iran before the com- pletion of the set time limit,2 the Soviet military withdrawal from Iran was * In preparing this paper I benefitted from comments by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi. My grat- itude goes also to Robabeh Motaghedi and Abdolreza Alamdar for their valuable assistance. 1 For the text of the Tripartite Treaty, signed by Britain, ussr and Iran, see Hurewitz 1956, pp. 233–4. 2 Vail Motter 1952, pp. 281–3. For the United States’ account of the Allied Military withdrawal from Iran, see Ghobad Irani 1978, pp. 25–34. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004336391_008 94 atabaki figure 7.1 Map of Khuzestan, Iran source: national archive of iran, doc no. 293–1424 only secured following hectic negotiations with the Iranian government in the heady days of the ‘Crisis of Azerbaijan’, on 9 May of the same year.3 With some five years of clandestine activities in the southern province of Khuzestan behind it, the Labour Day of May 1946 was the first occasion for the communist Tudeh Party and its affiliated labour union, the Central Council of Federated Trade Unions – ccftu – to embark upon a show of strength in the province’s oil industry. The May Day commemoration was followed by a chain of strikes, which went on to envelop the entire industry and reached their bloody denouement on 14 July 1946. The massive involvement of the oil workers and the magnitude of violence exercised both by the military and the crowd during the short-lived general walkout, along with the repressive policy consequently pursued against the labour movement in the oil industry, might 3 For a detailed account of the ‘Azerbaijan Crisis’, see Atabaki 2000..
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