Resignation of Vosugh od-Dowleh

The British chronology of the war records under 29 May 1917 that the prime minister and foreign minister of Persia, Vosugh od-Dowleh, resigned. Persian lists of governments confirm this date: they end his first premiership on 8 Khordad 1296 in the Iranian calendar, that is, on 29 May. Other lists, which count his term of office up to the day his successor took power, give 5 June. On that day or the next, for the British chronology gives 6 June, a new government was formed by Ala al-Saltaneh. Vosugh had headed the cabinet since the end of August 1916, when he took power at a time when the Turks stood at Hamadan and the legations in Tehran were reckoning with evacuation.

For nine months his government pursued towards Britain a policy that the British general Percy Sykes called “benevolent neutrality”. According to the historian Iraj Tanhatan Nasseri, the government’s only regular income was in practice the money handed over by the Allies. In January 1917 the prime minister thanked Sykes by telegram for restoring order in the south of the country, and on 21 March the government in Tehran officially recognised the South Persia Rifles, a force recruited from Persians and commanded by British officers. For Sykes, who was building it up at Shiraz, this was a great help. In the spring the situation in western Persia also changed: after the British recaptured Kut the Turks withdrew towards Baghdad, and General Baratov’s Russians returned to Hamadan and Kermanshah.

The sources give no single clear reason for the fall of the cabinet. Persian studies point out that Vosugh, who was close to the British legation, never had good relations with the young shah, Ahmad Shah. The situation of one of the two powers that since the agreement of 1907 had divided Persia into spheres of influence was also changing. After the February Revolution the Russian troops in Persia began to fall apart. Sykes, who was in Isfahan in June, saw Cossacks there who only a year earlier had been regarded as crack troops, and who had now stopped posting sentries, saluting and obeying their officers.

The new prime minister, Ala al-Saltaneh, was an elderly diplomat, for many years minister in London, and had already headed the government once before, in 1913–1914. Sykes wrote that he himself was personally well disposed towards the British, but that his cabinet as a whole was hostile to them. As an example he gave the new government’s refusal to recognise the South Persia Rifles. Sykes considered this decision unjustified and wrote that it made his work considerably harder in the south, where in summer 1917 his forces were still weak.

Vosugh od-Dowleh did not disappear from politics. In August 1918 he became head of the government for the second time, and a year later concluded an agreement with Britain which his opponents regarded as an attempt to subordinate Persia to London.