Russians leave Tabriz

On 5 January 1915 Russian troops left Tabriz, the largest city of northern Persia and capital of the province of Azerbaijan. It was the last stage of an evacuation that the Russians had begun in the second half of December, when defeat at Sarikamish seemed possible. Three days earlier they had left Urmia.

Russian Tabriz

Russian troops had been stationed in Tabriz since April 1909. They entered the city during the Persian Constitutional Revolution, formally in order to break a siege in which the Shah’s forces were starving out the supporters of the constitution. At the end of 1911, after fighting with Persian volunteers, the Russians took Tabriz by force, and Russian courts martial sentenced many local constitutionalists to death. From then on the city, though formally part of neutral Persia, was in practice a Russian base, linked by road to Julfa on the Aras, where the railway from the Caucasus ended.

The evacuation

At the end of December 1914 General Alexander Myshlayevsky, who was directing the defence of the Caucasus against the army of Enver Pasha, ordered Russian units to withdraw from Persian Azerbaijan so that they would not be cut off. According to most studies the troops left Tabriz gradually, from 17 December to 6 January. The American missionary Frederick Jessup, who was in the city at the time, recorded that on Tuesday 5 January the last units left Tabriz and pitched camp outside the city, and the next day set off north towards Julfa.

The consuls of the Entente powers and most Europeans left with the army. The banks were closed, as was the station of the Indo-European Telegraph linking London with India. According to Jessup, of about 750 Armenian families in the city only about 250 remained, most of them the poorest. Many well-to-do Persian Muslims also left, for Tehran. About 400 people took refuge in the buildings of the American mission: Armenians, Assyrians, Belgian officials of the Persian customs administration, French nuns with their pupils, and even two sick German women. The city waited for the Turks and Kurds to march in.

The fate of Khoy

Not all the Russian garrisons left. When Enver’s army was defeated at Sarikamish, the order to evacuate Khoy, which lay on the road from Julfa to Turkish Van, was cancelled, and the Russians held the town. The retreat from Tabriz thus proved unnecessary, but for the Christians of northern Persia its consequences were already irreversible.