Russians leave Hamadan

The British chronology of the war records under 16 March 1918 that the regular Russian troops left Hamadan in western Persia. The Russians had taken the town in December 1915, lost it to the Turks in August 1916 and retaken it in March 1917. Now, almost exactly a year later, they were leaving without a fight, because their army had ceased to exist. Other sources do not give the exact day. Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, who had been in Hamadan with his mission since 25 February, recalled that the Russian troops completed their evacuation at the end of March. This may have referred to the last columns moving on northwards, through Qazvin towards the Caspian Sea.

The withdrawal had been going on since the winter. After the Bolshevik revolution General Nikolai Baratov’s Caucasian Cavalry Corps was falling apart, and its soldiers wanted only to go home. In December 1917 the new authorities in Russia announced that they would withdraw their troops from Persia. According to F. J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, the commander in Mesopotamia, General William Marshall, reported on 13 February that the Russians in Persia were completely demoralised. The Persians greeted their departure with relief. The country had been ravaged by three years of war and by famine, and according to British accounts the retreating units sold their weapons and requisitioned whatever they could.

Dunsterville spent much time with Baratov discussing the costs of the evacuation. The Russians had no money, and everyone wanted them out of Persia as quickly as possible, so the British agreed to help finance it. The payments were managed by a local commission chaired by McMurray of the British Imperial Bank of Persia. The government in Tiflis, which was to cover the rest, did not send its share, and Baratov paid for supplies with requisition receipts. He asked the British to buy them up, appealing to the memory of what Russia had done for its allies in the first year of the war. Dunsterville remembered how the general pointed to the “dead body of Russia” and asked whether the British would not even pay for its funeral. London refused. Baratov was also in personal danger. The revolutionary committee at Enzeli let it be known through Dunsterville that it would gladly put him before a court martial. The idea, backed by Baratov, of a corps of Russian volunteers in British pay also collapsed, because the Bolsheviks deemed it counter-revolutionary.

Only the Cossacks of Lieutenant-Colonel Lazar Bicherakhov remained in western Persia. In February they covered the withdrawal as the rearguard at Hamadan, and in March their commander concluded an agreement with Dunsterville. The British were to pay the detachment and its expenses, and Bicherakhov undertook not to withdraw from Persia until British troops replaced him, and to cooperate with the British first in Persia and then in the Caucasus. For Dunsterville this was the most important force on the road from Baghdad to the Caspian, since he himself had 13 officers and 62 men at Hamadan, drivers included. He wrote that after the Russians had gone he and Bicherakhov at last had a free hand. On 23 March his mission began public works for the starving, mainly road repairs.

Baratov himself, a general without an army, stayed in Persia until the summer and at Qazvin tried to settle Persian claims for requisitions. Returning to Russia was impossible for him, so he accepted an invitation to India, and later joined the Whites. In June Bicherakhov helped Dunsterville defeat the Jangalis at Manjil and sailed to Baku.