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Minus Times Minus Equals Plus. If ever a man had reason to be bewitched, bothered and bewildered by recent history's queer swerves, it was His Majesty Reza Shah Pahlavi. For 20 long years he had played with London, played with Moscow and never lost a trick. Actually he never played both ends against the middle, for he never needed to. During most of the 20 years, London and Moscow felt towards each other much as Georgia's Governor Eugene Talmadge feels towards Negro Ph.D.s and vice versa. But now, somehow, crazily, incredibly, these two irreconcilables stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the soil of his beloved Iran, using it for a meeting ground of mutual assistance. Within his lifetime the Shah has seen some strange quirks in Russo-British-Iranian relations, but never one like this.
Flashback. Scion of an Army-officer family, the Shah was born in 1876 in the Firuzkuh district east of Teheran. Iran was Persia then; and in the '80s Russia, which had steadily picked off Persia's northern provinces, conspicuously strengthened her position at Teheran by organizing under Tsarist officers the Persian Cossack Brigade, most effective military force in the country. This rough & tough outfit Reza, a youngster of 24, joined as a trooper in 1900.
While the Russians staked out their bailiwick in the north, the British did beautifully for themselves in the south. Oil had been smelled, and in 1901 for $20,000 bleak-brained Shah Muzaffar-ed-Din gave an English financial adventurer named William Knox D'Arcy a 60-year monopoly to explore and exploit all Persia for petroleum except the five northern provinces in the Russian stakeout.
Britain worried about possible Russian encroachments on India, and there was much talk about the Bear that Walks Like a Man. To lubricate diplomatic friction, in 1907 an agreement was solemnly signed which defined each country's sphere of influence in Persia. Britain was to influence in the southeast; Russia in the north. As for the poor Persians, their attitude was aptly summed up in a Punch cartoon of the period. It showed a Persian cat apprehensively sitting between a lion and a bear. "I will pat its head," says the bear, "and you shall stroke its tail." Pleads the cat: "But I have not been consulted!"
Ten years later the Tsar fell, and this ended the agreement. Britain's Foreign Secretary, the suavely arrogant Lord Curzon of Kecleston, then had a lovely dream. He dreamed of extending British control from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, thereby adding a magnificent frontier province to British India. The Mesopotamian campaign had slopped over into always neutral Persia, but in 1918 the British drove the Turks out and garrisoned Persia's strong places. The next year Shah Ahmad, even bleaker-brained than Shah Muzaffar, had no alternative but to submit to an agreement by which his country came under Britain's political and military control.
In 1920, however, Lord Curzon's lovely dream was rudely shattered. The Bolsheviks overran large chunks of northern Persia. Along the shores of the Caspian the British, assisted by the Persian Cossack Brigade, vainly tried to stop them. Those of the old Tsarist officers who were not killed, fled; the brigade started to fall apart.