This very well-organized volume collectively fills a huge, conspicuous lacuna in the historiographies of Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. It will serve as a powerful driver of maritime turn in global history in general and in Russian and Eurasian history in particular. It also belongs to the recent constellation of exploring the entanglements of Russia and the Middle East, where more remains to be done with the collaboration of experts on Russian and Iranian histories than that of Russian and Ottoman historians. Covering the history of the Caspian region from the sixteenth century to the 1980s, this book expands our understanding of the Caspian Sea as a Eurasian intersection facilitating the meeting of the East and the West, the interplay of restless empires and kaleidoscopic indigenous peoples, and these peoples’ aspiration for emancipation boosted by the limits of state power. Over four centuries, the Caspian Sea was consistently viewed as a pivotal link between Europe and Asia. Murat Yaşar depicts the Ottomans’ efforts in the second half of the sixteenth century to turn the Caspian Sea into another Black Sea under their control. As George Bournoutian, Guido Hausmann, and Ernest Tucker agree, Peter the First imagined that Astrakhan on the Caspian-Volga and St. Petersburg on the Baltic would serve as the main channels for commercial exchanges with Asia and military projection to secure the East–West trade pathway. The map-making was the clear embodiment of this imagination. Tucker argues that Peter’s creation of the Caspian squadron provided inspiration for Nader Shah in building an Iranian fleet with the help of John Elton (also known as Jamal Beg), the British Russia Company agent—a protagonist of Matthew P. Romaniello’s chapter. Yet this remained a small episode in the land-based enterprise of Iran’s empire-building, in Abbas Amanat’s words, due to “a dislike for seafaring, almost a cultural thalassophobia” (p. 28). After the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, the Romanov Empire turned the sea into a Russian lake, and the Soviet empire continued to overshadow it. Russia built an infrastructure of dominance: while the Transcaucasian and Transcaspian customs controls emerged with low tariffs aimed at deterring smuggling and fostering a positive image of Russia in Asia (Rustin Zarkar), the Transcaspian railroad embodied the military, technological, and artistic conquest of the region (Elena Andreeva). Meanwhile, as Layla S. Diba demonstrates, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Tiflis became gates to another modernism for Iranian artists, with Tabriz as a conduit for Russia’s cosmopolitan modernity flowing from Tiflis and Baku. Peter’s imagination outlived the revolutionary divide. A Hamburg-based trading company’s project to transit to Iran, as well as the Soviet deployment of Baku’s and Nizhnii Novgorod’s fairs to attract Eastern merchants (Iurii Demin), testify to the long-standing vision of the Volga River and the Caspian Sea as a pathway connecting Europe to Asia. In the 1960s, the Caspian State Navigation Company developed connections to northern Europe and global markets through the Volga-Baltic canal (Etienne Forestier-Peyrat). To paraphrase Forestier-Peyrat, the Caspian region is a frontier where the distinction between local and international politics is blurred. This was a place where empires collided, with their power negotiated on the ground: while empires depended on local strongmen to expand their rule and maintain order, these indigenous intermediaries were easily deserted once geopolitical circumstances and calculations changed. During the war with the Safavids, the Ottomans counted on the Shamkhāl of Tarki, the ruler of Dagestan, as a loyal vassal to ensure robust control over the North Caucasus (Yaşar). Ulfat Abdurasulov corroborates “the Turkic-centric inclination of Muscovite diplomacy in dealing with the Islamic world to the south,” identifying Tatar intermediaries in the Muscovite correspondence with the Central Asian principalities of Bukhara and Khiva (p. 78). Meanwhile, the Armenian merchants were crucial but ambiguous pilots in the Caspian Sea for the Russians and the British. Bournoutian argues that the Armenian and Georgian rulers were willing to collaborate with Peter the First and Catherine the Second, who, in turn, quickly abandoned their indigenous collaborators depending on geopolitics in the Caucasus. Romaniello shows that many British blamed Armenian merchants for interfering in their commerce by actively conspiring with Russian or Iranian authorities to expel the British from Iran. The collapse of Russia’s empire opened up a wide power vacuum straddling the Caucasus and Transcaspian frontier, which the Red, White, British, and Ottoman armies rushed to occupy. Denis V. Volkov illuminates Lieutenant-Colonel Lazar' Bicherakhov, an Ossetian officer’s scion, as a pilot for the Red, White, and British to navigate the turbulent terrain. The British, however, quickly dismissed him as an obstacle to their plan to establish independent states in the Caucasus. So did the Bolsheviks with the Jangalis and the Iranian left. Demin emphasizes that pragmatism prevailed. While the tsarist legacy, such as the Armenian Lianozovs’ fishing concession and Khoshtariya’s (a Georgian) oil concession, became issues of international negotiations, Moscow neglected the Kurds’ and Turkmens’ pleas for support of their independence, endorsing Reżā Khan’s centralized government. In the 1940s, the Soviets used Azeri and Kurdish nationalisms and the communist Tudeh Party for their domination in Iran, but consequently deserted all of them (Forestier-Peyrat). Finally, the Caspian littoral was a haven for freedom fighters who shaped restless, volatile frontiers, keeping the state at bay. Sten'ka Razin was only one of numerous episodes. Amanat argues that throughout the late medieval and early modern times, the south Caspian was a breeding ground for antinomian movements including the Safavids. An uprising erupted in Astrakhan in 1705 during Peter the First’s Northern War, and the Sunnis’ massacre of Shiʿis and assault on Russian merchants in Shamakhi triggered Peter’s Caspian expedition in 1723 (Bournoutian). A power vacuum opened by the waning Safavids and their ultimate collapse allowed Nader Shah to emerge in Khorasan, a region contested among warlords (Tucker). So did Āqā Moḥammad Khan, the founder of the Qajar dynasty, who sought commercial benefits from Russia while hampering its military presence (Kevin Gledhill). Saghar Sadeghian underscores the central significance of Mazandaran’s dense forests and high mountains to the messianic movement of the Bābi faith in its fight against the central government. By the end of the nineteenth century, new transportation technologies created new possibilities for revolutionaries to circulate weapons, supplies, and subversive literature in support of their clandestine operations (Zarkar). Learning from Russia’s alternative modernity, Iranian artists traveling between Tabriz and Tiflis resisted Russia’s imperialist encroachment on Iranian sovereignty alongside intellectuals of varying social backgrounds and nationalities (Diba). It was this transnational insurgency and anti-imperialism that molded the Soviet empire-building. The Bolsheviks attempted to reinforce these cross-border ties in Iran’s northwest and northeast. Yet Kayhan Nejad emphasizes these movements’ distinctly Iranian characteristics, which account for their failure to find common ground with the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, Alisa Shablovskaia portrays the Caspian region as a confluence of various anti-imperialist networks comprising Indians, Ottomans, and Azeris, who profoundly shaped early Soviet designs in Iran. But again, these go-betweens and the Soviets constantly calibrated their shared dreams with incongruent goals. Although in the Cold War era, the forests—the long-standing bastion of resistance in the region—rapidly disappeared, Iran, led by Mohammad Mosaddegh (a participant in the Constitutional Revolution) and by Islamic jurists, became a global pivot opposing the East-West divide in the international order (Forestier-Peyrat). This book suggests that the current strategic partnership of Russia and Iran is exceptional during the past four hundred years. It remains to be seen whether the Caspian Sea will be a hub of coexistence in the multipolar world that the two states championed or a bulwark against their common enemies. The eBook version is available in Open Access on the publisher's website.
Norihiro Naganawa (Wed,) studied this question.