File 1341/1921 Pt 1 'Khorassan Intelligence Summaries 1921-1922' [‎427r] (501/1080)

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INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY FOR THE WEEK ENDING 24th SEPTEMBER 1921.
221. KHORASAN.
Meshed .—The situation has not changed materially since the issue of last
week’s Summary. JJsevertheiess, Muhammad Taqi Khan is strengthening,
day by day, his hold on the Province, is committing it more and more to the
prosecution of his war upon the Central Government and the loyalist tribes,
is squandering its resources in increasing degree in the futherance of his pri
vate animosities and, as a corollary to all this, is making the ultimate readjust
ment of affairs difficult in proportion to the time he pursues his career un
checked.
The restrictions imposed upon British official liberties remain unmitigated.
It is felt that Muhammad Taqi Khan gains some amount of cheap prestige
by reason of his ability and capacity thus to humiliate British subjects who
possess no instrument, no means to retaliate, no way of making this incursion
into their liberties a costly experiment or one better left untried.
It is the concensus of opinion in Meshed that the near future will see the
arrival in Khorasan of a large number of Bolsheviks from over the frontier.
There was a meeting during the week to deliberate on the removal of quaran
tine measures on the frontier as a preliminary to the initiation of trade reci
procity between Persia and Russia. This quarantine appears to have func
tioned in a very languid manner and not to have inhibited the usual desultory
traffic of returning Persian subjects of the labouring class.
It is not the official closing of the frontiers that has kept traders from
Russia away for so long. It is their inability to produce anything in coin
that has proved hitherto to be the insurmountable barrier to the exploitation
of Khorasan’s resources.
There are those who indulge in rosy speculation on the riches that will
ensue upon a revival of Russian trade. These are heedless of the fact that a
country whose resources are nil wherewith to mitigate her ow r n ruin and
bankruptcy is hardly in a position to enrich those beyond her borders.
The trade delegation under Protopopov brought with it a certain amount
of merchandise consisting of silk, velvet, and plush stuffs, also cotton piece-
goods, goloshes, Persian tea glasses, a gramophone and gramophone records..
Accounts vary as to the amount of gold and silver specie and bullion but
Khashab, one of the members of the delegation is reported to have said that
when these latter had been expended there was no more to follow.
A rumour has been propagated that in the near future many thousand
famine-stricken Russian refugees will be driven by hunger to seek food in
Persia. There is no reason to disbelieve that this rumour is prophecy in mas
querade. Bolshevik orators have so long expatiated upon Persia as a golden
granary from which all their miserable subjects are to be fed iji the near and
rosy future that it would be surprising to find that the hungry and the desti
tute do not try soon to anticipate the era of plenty. That this incursion has
been so lone delayed is a matter of considerable wonder when the absence of
all facilities on the Persian frontier to check a migratory movement is con
sidered.
Occupied as her forces are with the prosecution of civil war, Khorasan
has no machinery wherewith to stem a w r ave of migration. In the peace con
ditions of last year Persian frontier officials were hard put to it to deal with
the incursion impelled by the wish of Persians in Russia to flee from conscrip
tion by the Adalat party. The immigration of Russian subjects in large
numbers will be a question far more formidable in magnitude and more men
acing to the future of the Province as an integral part of Persia than anything
that the Adalat refugees could encompass.
Muhammad Taqi Khan is learning that w r ars even of minute conception
cannot be waged without a replete exchequer or a subjugated country to
EjslC. in II-T T ' T ii FORElG-TSf
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