Coll 28/112A ‘Persia. Tabriz – Monthly despatches of internal situation in Azerbaijan & misc. reports.’ [‎614r] (1230/1237)

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sympathisers. Actually many middle-class Armenians are as pro-German and
Nazi-minded as the worst Persian Moslem is. One extraordinary rumour current
here is that some of the Russo-Armenian troops are buying civilian dress and
asking their local Armenian acquaintances to hide them in case of trouble
meaning when the Germans or Turks (or both) arrive. Whatever low standards
^^one may give to Armenian valour, this story is hard to believe, and is possibly
one of the pro-German efforts at causing local disquiet.
9. Public order is being preserved in a makeshift way, and the Russian
garrison authorities have few illusions about the character and abilities of the
local police. Part of the improvement is probably due to the continued presence
of the former as much as anything. The Ogpu (or rather N.K.V.D.) have now
apparently turned their chief attention to the local Georgians, Russo-Armenians
and other persons of Russian origin who have been domiciled here for perhaps
twenty years or more, and they in turn are going through the nocturnal
questionings and terroristic inquisitions by Soviet agents ferreting out every
detail of their doings for years past. Some have even been ordered to furnish
written autobiographies as quickly as possible. These also would like to escape
to Tehran and elsewhere, but are too frightened to try.
10. The question of sugar supplies is still a baffling one. Ample supplies
are in the town, but there are still unruly queues at the shops when sugar is being
sold, and many peaceful citizens or housewives have to pay twice the proper price
to the rag-tag who pass their time in these queues. I have reliable information
that the Sherkati Qand (Sugar Commission) are holding about 66,000 bags of
sugar, but are refusing to sell to the public because they do not agree with the
manner in which the Russians for their part are selling to the public. The Soviet
authorities, mistakenly in my opinion, are distributing their supplies of sugar
through three or four retailers only, which encourages queues and shortages. I
am even tempted to believe that the Persian profiteers arrange for people to buy
up the Russian sugar improperly, in order to create continuous shortage. They
think they cannot lose by laying up stocks however acquired, since one day sooner
or later there will be a shortage and they must gain. Undoubtedly many private
persons who can afford it have laid by ten or twenty bags of sugar each. All my
unremitting efforts for months past and those of a few well-intentioned persons
are thus nullified by poor Russian organisation and by the unqualified greed,
graft and complete lack of patriotism or public feeling of most of the local Persian
middle-class.
11. Supplies of wheat continue to be plentiful in Tabriz, where local
peasants are happy to bring in grain to the Government silo at a price of 900 or
even 1,000 rials per ton (as against 650 rials in August). 1 learn that many
peasants are willing to sell to local bakeries at lower prices than this—and the
reason is that their consciences tell them that the more unofficially they dispose of
their wheat, largely stolen from the village landowners’ stores, the better it may
be for them, with no questions asked and no names written down. The local silo
now holds over 2,000 tons of wheat, or about one month’s supply for Tabriz.
Part of this has been collected by Government lorries taken over by the Governor-
General. It is difficult to say whether any appreciable surplus of wheat is
available for export to other parts of Persia, because estimates of the crop vary
and much of the grain has been carried off by peasants from the village stores
and hidden. In Tabriz it is believed that the Azerbaijan crop has been a good
one this year, but in Maragha a landowner told me it was poor. In any case there
is no transport available for proper collection, whatever the size of the crop may
be. And local villages may refuse to sell their stocks because they fear partial
famines such as have occurred in past years owing to Persian maladministration
and corruption, when even seed-stocks and the necessary winter bread supplies
were carried off at disgracefully low prices by the minions of the Wheat Monopoly
unless suitable bribes were forthcoming. The memory of these things is not wiped
out by a palace revolution in Tehran and a few honeyed promises of reform on
the radio. However, I have been informed in a reasonably reliable quarter that
about 1,000 tons of wheat ought to be available for export to the southern parts
of Persia. This, of course, would not go very far.
12. The Governor-General has received promise of a gift of 2 million rials
from the new Shah for the building of a hospital at Tabriz. Presumably such
largess is meant to sweeten popular recollection of the untold millions of the