Russians leave Enzeli

The British chronology of the war records under 1 April 1918 that the regular Russian troops left Enzeli, the Persian port on the Caspian Sea. It was here that, in May 1915 and later, the Russian soldiers who occupied northern and western Persia for three years had come ashore, and it was from here, after the army disintegrated, that they returned by ship to Baku and on home. Other sources do not give an exact day. Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, who was waiting with his mission at Hamadan, recalled that the Russian troops completed their evacuation at the end of March. Half a month earlier they had left Hamadan, and the last columns were moving through Qazvin and Rasht towards the sea. According to Dunsterville, on the road to Enzeli their lorries were constantly attacked and burnt and men were killed, right up to the departure of the last Russians.

The port did not, however, pass into the hands of the Persian government. Since December 1917 it had been ruled by a revolutionary committee of Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries under Chelyapin, the same committee that in February had detained Dunsterville’s mission at Enzeli. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the committee did not always control the Russian soldiers and competed with other revolutionary bodies in the province of Gilan. Its position was strengthened by events in Baku, where at the turn of March and April, after bloody fighting with Muslim groups, the Bolsheviks took power. According to Iranica, the number of Red Guards from Baku in Gilan then rose to about a thousand, and many of them were in fact Armenian Dashnaks.

The rest of Gilan was held by the Jangalis, the Persian revolutionary and national movement of Mirza Kuchik Khan, which cooperated with the committee in Enzeli. In the second half of March their detachments occupied the road from Rasht into the interior, dug in at the bridge near Manjil and closed it to traffic. In Rasht they arrested the British consul, Charles Maclaren, and the manager of the local branch of the Imperial Bank of Persia, Oakshott, as well as Captain Noel, who was carrying dispatches from Tiflis for Dunsterville. When on 23 March the British learnt that the Jangalis were preparing to march on Qazvin, Dunsterville sent there the Cossacks of Lieutenant-Colonel Lazar Bicherakhov, already in British pay, who arrived at the last moment.

For Dunsterville the departure of the Russians meant above all a free hand. He wrote that from the end of March he and Bicherakhov had “a clear field” to work in, although he still feared that the Cossacks, impatient to return to their homes in the North Caucasus, would abandon the British. His force grew slowly. At the end of March 30 men of the 1/4th Hampshire Regiment, a Territorial battalion, and the first aircraft from Baghdad reached Hamadan, and on 3 April General Byron brought the second party of the mission, 20 officers and as many NCOs. Dunsterville returned to Enzeli only at the end of June 1918, after Bicherakhov and the British had routed the Jangalis at Manjil. From there the Cossacks sailed to Baku, and in August the British arrested Chelyapin and his comrades and deported them to Mesopotamia.