Coll 28/112A ‘Persia. Tabriz – Monthly despatches of internal situation in Azerbaijan & misc. reports.’ [‎598v] (1199/1237)

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900 men. He says that 200 policemen are not enough to keep order in a town of
220,000 inhabitants, especially in present conditions when unemployment is bad,
prices high, food not too plentiful, demagogy rife and communist ideas not far
below the surface. The robberies and pilferings so common in the autumn ha\e
now been put down by a firm round-up of all suspicious characters and known
criminals, but the Soviet Political Bureau are apparently complaining that these
include a lot of their agents and friends, and complain therefore that the Persian
police are working against them! Last week they demanded the immediate dis- J
missal of Sarhang Saif, but the governor replied that he could not dismiss him
without authority from Tehran. I am reliably informed that the night before
last a party of four armed civilians held up a couple of policemen on duty in the
outskirts of the city and took away their rifles. Tabriz itself is undoubtedly
full of illicit arms, chiefly army rifles thrown away or hidden by the defending
forces who broke up at the approach of the Russian column on the 26th August.
The price of a rifle has now risen from 1,200 to 3.000 rials. It scarcely seems the
moment to reduce the police force of the largest (and certainly potentially the
rowdiest) provincial city of Persia to such a small number as 205. As the authori
ties say, it takes 60 policemen on day and night reliefs to guard the prison alone.
I fear that if the Soviet authorities enforce these unreasonable demands the
Persian authorities, including the Governor-General, will decline responsibility
for preserving public order, and the unpleasant experiences of last September,
when the Russians refused to police the town themselves or to allow the local police
to do so efficiently, will be repeated all over again, with knifings and pickpocketing
in public in the daytime, and innumerable burglaries and citizens staying up
sleepless at night.
4. During the absence from Tabriz of Major-General Novikoff and also of
his assistant, Major-General Khrashchev, the Soviet Political Bureau, now under a
certain Major Antonoff, seem to have been giving full rein to their ideas of how a
temporarily-occupied province should be run. They made a descent on the
printing office of the only respectable Tabriz newspaper, and also searched every
room in the editor’s private house because he printed some German
news bulletins received from the Pars Press Agency An office of the East India Company and, later, of the British Raj, headed by an agent. at Tehran. The
journal (which wrote in favour of the present Government in Tehran and in the
interests of law and order generally) is now suspended, while two other irrespon
sible demagogic newspapers are free to print attacks on the present administra
tion and a good deal of nonsense about the wrongs of the Azerbaijani populace
and their historic rights to independence. The Persian authorities do not ven
ture to curb them for fear of Russian resentment. The Soviet political officers
also seized five British Movitone news-reels because one of them offended a junior
officer’s sense of propriety by showing a scene in which Hitler saw off some troops
to the front and received bouquets. The management of the cinema which showed
such alleged Fascist propaganda was arrested and kept in prison for some days.
I was not informed of the seizure of these British films, and when I suggested that
I might see them projected to have an idea of the offending parts, was told that
they had already been sent away from Tabriz. While the Russian Ogpu or
Nkvd or Politruk, or whatever it likes to call itself, can furnish a pretext for its
somewhat heavy-handed goings on, it hardly seems necessary to ransack a private
house in order to stop news bulletins in a small newspaper, or to seize five films and
clap two or three surprised individuals into gaol for a week because one film was
slightly displeasing, and it seems clear that this is a Soviet method of cowing any
independent attitude and probably of encouraging or clearing the way for their
own local creatures. But it arouses much resentment and misgiving among the
better-class Persians, official and non-official, and aids the present Gevman radio
campaign against the signing of the treaty. They point out that the only news
paper which was supporting the Tehran Government is stopped, while abusive
anti-Government and irresponsible journals can continue—and ask why the Soviet
political officers are doing the Nazis’ work for them here.
5. I have mentioned before the publication here by the Soviet authorities of
a newspaper in Azerbaijani Turkish called Vatari; of course they did not comply
at all with the Persian press laws or even consult the local authorities, but in
any case explained that the newspaper was for “ their own people,” whoever these
may be. But now I am tdd that local Persian school-teachers are being circu
larised to subscribe to this paper (which merely by being in Turkish runs counter
to the official educational policy, to say nothiiig of its communist contents), and