Russians take Hamadan

On 14 December 1915, according to the British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign and the British chronology of the war, General Nikolai Baratov’s Russian troops took Hamadan in western Persia. The sources differ by a few days. Some of the British press of the time reported the capture of the town as early as 11 December. Soviet works give 3 December in the Julian calendar, that is 16 December, and the Iranian historian Iraj Nasseri writes that on 16 December the Russian flag flew again over the Russian consulate in Hamadan. Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, lay on the main road from Tehran through Kermanshah to Baghdad. Since November it had been, alongside Qom, the most important centre of the pro-German Persians.

A town in the hands of the gendarmes

In the autumn of 1915 Hamadan found itself at the centre of the crisis that broke out when Baratov’s troops moved up to Qazvin and the envoys of the Central Powers and the Persian opponents of the Entente left Tehran. The town held about 2,000 men of the Persian gendarmerie, a force trained by Swedish officers, most of which sympathised with Germany. They were commanded by Major Mohammad Taqi Khan Pessian. On the Entente side there were more than 500 Persian Cossacks in the town, and the Russian consulate was guarded by 40 Russian soldiers. According to Nasseri, during the month of Muharram the clergy in the mosques stirred up the crowds with tales of Russian atrocities. On 22 November gendarmes and mounted volunteers surrounded the Cossacks in their fortified quarters and, after a short fight in which the losses on both sides reportedly did not exceed ten men, disarmed them. The consuls and the British and Russian colonies had to leave for Qazvin, and the gendarmes seized the branch of the British Imperial Bank of Persia together with its cash.

The fight at the pass

The road from Qazvin to Hamadan ran through the mountains, and its key was the Sultan Bulagh pass, rising to about 2,400 metres, near the village of Avaj. At the end of November a small Russian detachment sent there, about 300 men strong according to Nasseri, fell back after a clash with the gendarmes and left the pass to the enemy. The Committee of National Defence in Qom celebrated this as a national victory. The British minister in Tehran, Charles Marling, sharply criticised the Russians for allowing their consul to be driven out when they had thousands of soldiers in Qazvin.

The response came quickly. By 1 December the whole 1st Caucasian Cossack Division had assembled in Qazvin. According to Allen and Muratoff’s history of the Caucasian wars, Baratov did not wait for the rest of the corps and on 3 December sent one brigade towards Hamadan. Figures for the strength of the two sides are uncertain. According to British information, on 9 December a Russian column of twelve squadrons, a battalion of infantry and six guns was about 80 kilometres from Hamadan. Nasseri even writes of 4,000 Russians. According to him the pass was defended by about 500 gendarmes and 1,200 mounted tribal volunteers, and also, according to some accounts, by 200–300 Turkish soldiers. The defenders had only the advantage of the ground. After several hard clashes, in which the Russians’ numbers and artillery prevailed, they withdrew towards Hamadan. Just outside the town they put up brief resistance once more, and then left it in two groups: one went to the pass near Asadabad on the road to Kermanshah, the other to Malayer.

Entry into the town

News of the defeat caused panic in Hamadan. Supporters of the Central Powers fled, and the town elders went out with a white flag to meet the Russian commander. Nasseri describes how those inhabitants who had recently signed a telegram calling on the government to declare war on Russia and Britain now crowded into the telegraph office to withdraw their signatures. The Russians took over the town without further fighting. The British consul returned to Hamadan on 28 December and to his surprise found the consulate’s property untouched.

Significance

The capture of Hamadan was the first real victory of Baratov’s corps in Persia and deprived the Germans of their second centre of resistance in the north of the country, alongside Qom. The Russians took Qom without a fight on 20 December. The capture of the town also mattered beyond Persia. For a week the Turks had been besieging at Kut the British division that had fallen back from Ctesiphon, and the command in India was pressing the Russians to go further, to Kermanshah or even to Baghdad. From Hamadan a direct road led towards the Turkish border, so a Russian advance threatened the rear of the Ottoman army in Mesopotamia. The Russian government replied, however, that it did not have enough troops for an expedition to Baghdad. Between 15 and 20 December the Caucasian Cavalry Division arrived in Hamadan and Baratov began to prepare to march on Kermanshah, where the Germans and Persian émigrés were gathering and towards which the first Turkish units, sent by Field Marshal von der Goltz, were heading.