Valentina Pasquali

A pipeline deal with Turkey was taken as a step toward EU energy security, but Russia looms large.

ISTANBUL — Turkey this week celebrated the signing of a major deal on the Nabucco pipeline project as a step toward European Union membership and becoming a Eurasian energy hub.

Nabucco is expected to pump 31 billion cubic meters of natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe by 2014, bypassing Russia and thereby decreasing the dependence of the EU on Russian gas. Turkey is a Nabucco transit country, along with Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Austria.

Despite the agreement, Russia’s continued attempts to control the region’s energy resources, the lack of unified political action in the EU, and Turkey’s indecisiveness, threaten Nabucco, energy experts say.

Russia, which sits atop about 25 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves, dominates regional energy markets. To strengthen its near monopoly, Moscow buys almost all the gas produced by Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. As a result, countries including Austria, Bulgaria and Hungary have no choice but to import most of their gas from Russia.

Turkey depends on Russia for 65 percent of its domestic gas use and is also desperate to diversify its sources: “There are gas cuts every winter,” said Necdet Pamir, a former high-level official with Turkey’s state-owned oil company and a board member of the World Energy Council.

While Moscow blames the interruptions on Ukraine, “the result is that, for whatever reason, technical or geopolitical, every winter we suffer,” Pamir added.

Russia’s remarkable reach complicates diversification efforts via Nabucco. Azerbaijan — the only supplier committed to feed gas into the pipeline — recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Gazprom to export its gas to Russia for at least a year.

“But Azerbaijan cannot provide both Gazprom and Nabucco with natural gas. It’s either one of them,” said Vugar Baymarov, chairman of the Center for Economic and Social Development, an Azeri think tank.

The Azerbaijan-Russia MOU comes at a difficult time for Baku’s ties to Ankara: “Our recent move to normalize relations with Armenia has complicated Azerbaijani attitudes toward Turkey and thereby Nabucco,” said Suat Kiniklioglu, spokesman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Turkish Parliament.

Since no other supplier has yet been signed up, the Nabucco pipeline faces a major supply hurdle.

Further, in phase two of the project Turkmenistan is scheduled to supply extra gas into Nabucco via a trans-Caspian pipeline. Considering that Turkmenistan’s economy is primarily dependent on Russia, it is unlikely that Ashgabat will sell its gas to any country but Russia, at least not without Moscow’s permission.

Meantime, the two remaining options — Iraq and Iran — are effectively off the table.

Northern Iraq is thought to have large gas reserves, but it will take years to develop them, and, said Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the Istanbul-based Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, “Political instability during the past decade made it impossible to estimate how much capacity there is and how it can be channeled to Nabucco.”

While it has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas after Russia, Iran is, according to Stanislav Tkachenko of St. Petersburg State University, a “politically impossible alternative,” because it would require “radically improved relationship between Iran and the United States.”

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U.S. sanctions have crippled Iran’s energy sector and Washington continues to oppose any use of Iranian gas for Nabucco, as U.S. energy envoy Richard Morningstar reiterated Sunday.

Turkey says it will press ahead despite U.S. objections. “Turkey is an independent country and can buy its gas wherever it wants so long as conditions are right. If there is gas in Iraq, Turkey will buy it. The same with Iran,” said Kiniklioglu, the Turkish Foreign Affairs Committee spokesman, pointing to the fact that Turkey already imports Iranian gas for its domestic market.

But Turkey might not have to go behind the U.S.: “There are signals that the U.S. is changing its Iran policy toward a more accommodating approach,” said Tkachenko, noting President Barack Obama’s reaction to the aftermath of Iran’s contested elections.

In any case, Turkey’s own energy issues might complicate things further. While insisting that Ankara can maneuver independently of Moscow, Kiniklioglu admitted that Turkey has to “get along well with a country that provides you with over 60 percent of natural gas.”

Moscow is taking advantage of its position to offer Ankara alternatives to Nabucco. The two parties are discussing the construction of Blue Stream 2, an extension of the Blue Stream 1 pipeline that brings gas from Russia to Turkey. Talks are also underway for the South Stream pipeline, a direct competitor to Nabucco that would transport Russian gas via the Black Sea to Bulgaria, Austria and Italy. By joining South Stream, Turkey could become an energy hub without endangering relations with Russia.

The fact that a central dispute between Turkey and the EU over Nabucco was pushed aside with Monday’s agreement but not solved casts doubts on Turkey’s commitment to the implementation of the deal. Ankara has been asking to divert 15 percent of gas flowing through Nabucco toward its domestic grid, but the EU opposed the request.

Since Ankara’s number one priority is Turkey’s energy security and independence, it will probably try to use Nabucco as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Russia, and its relations with Gazprom as a lever in talks with the EU.

“Turkey will remain on the agenda with Nabucco, South Stream or some other projects,” Turkey’s Energy Minister Taner Yıldız told the press Tuesday. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Ankara and Moscow will negotiate energy projects during the visit of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to Turkey on Aug. 6.

According to Yurdakul Yigitguden, Turkey’s former undersecretary of energy, Russia shouldn’t be blamed for pursuing its own interests. “The problem is that there is a lack of leadership in support of gas companies. They can’t go at it alone,” Yigitguden added, calling for stronger political support for Nabucco across the EU and Turkey.

The agreement signed Monday might be a sign of political commitment towards Nabucco. At the same time, in the last several months the Nabucco Consortium began mentioning Russia as a potential supplier of gas for the pipeline, defying the sole reason for Nabucco’s existence.

Iran and Russia have entertained a long and complex relationship for centuries, and one which goes well beyond the current contentious issues. Coexisting in the same delicate regional environment, spanning from the Caucasus to Central Asia and reaching all the way into the Middle East, Moscow and Teheran share a history of mutual engagement and have always tried to strike a difficult balance between their sometime overlapping and sometime conflicting interests.

Persian Dreams, a book by John W. Parker, unleashes an impressive wealth of details to unveil this story, thanks to first-hand interviews as well as in-depth research on primary and secondary sources. A self-described old school Sovietologist, Parker is the chief of the Division for Caucasus and Central Asia in the Office for Russian and Eurasian Analysis at the bureau of Intelligence and Research within the U.S. Department of State. Parker is also the author of the two-volume work Kremlin in Transition (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991.)

In 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Parker was assigned to follow the civil war that swept through the newly established Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan. It was then, for the first time, that Parker encountered the bilateral dealings between Russia and Iran and was surprised to discover that Moscow and Teheran were able to support opposing sides in the Tajik civil war while cooperating on a host of other issues, such as Afghanistan and arms trade.

Enticed by the complexities that characterized the Russia-Iran relationship, Parker decided to delve into its past, to the time of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and even further back to territorial disputes dating to the 1800s, before following the relation’s many twist and turns through the Islamic Revolution and well into the 21st Century, as the nuclear issue acquired increasing prominence in the post-9/11 world.

In this interview with Washington Prism, John W. Parker discusses some of the findings of his book and explains why Russia-Iran dealings deserve to be taken into more account.

Washington Prism (WP): From a reading of Persian Dreams, the Russia-Iran relation emerges as one of opposing tensions, mutual mistrust, and yet a continuous desire for engagement. Is that an accurate characterization?

John W. Parker (JP): Russia and Iran do have a long history with each other, dating back millennia. And there is a historical mistrust between them. But, at least from the Russian point of view, out of this mistrust the feeling is generated that they have to remain engaged with Iran, if only to keep Iran from doing more things that Moscow doesn’t like.

Additionally, there have been issues, particularly regional issues, where they have agreed and collaborated. Tajikistan after 1992 is an example of this. Prior to 1992, the Russians and the Iranians supported opposite sides in the civil war, and my reading is that the Iranians actually helped set the civil war in motion but then had to back down.

In any case, after the peace process started in Tajikistan, Moscow and Teheran worked together on it, in large part because of what was happening in Afghanistan. In fact, they both opposed the Taliban. Iran traditionally has felt it has a sphere of influence in Afghanistan’s western border regions, in places such as Herat.

Similarly, Russia would like the northern border regions to be fairly stable and friendly. The Taliban threatened both their interests causing Iran and Russia to support the United Front in Afghanistan in an effort to prevent the Taliban from taking over all of Afghanistan.

Another example of collaboration would be Chechnya. Despite Chechnya’s Muslim population, and in part precisely because of engagement with Russia over Afghanistan, Iran never really supported the Chechen Liberation Movement. When the first Chechen war broke out, Iran had already gambled and lost in Tajikistan and had a more realistic view of whether people inside the former Soviet Republics would support an Iranian-type of revolution. Then, by the time the second Chechen war began, the Taliban had taken over Kabul giving Iran even less of an incentive to make troubles for Russia in Chechnya, since even greater threats to Iran and Russia’s common interests were now posed by the Taliban.

This is a long way of saying that, historically, Russia and Iran have not trusted each other. However, there are issues that come along on which they have common interests and on which they work together despite their mistrust.

WP: How do you think Moscow and Teheran view their bilateral relation?

JP: I think they both look at it in a very utilitarian way.

Russia wants to continue being engaged and tries to dosage this engagement in the hope that, over the years, it will wind up with a better position that it has so far in post-Shah Iran. In my opinion this is the key to why Russia doesn’t do more on the nuclear issue: it hopes to do just enough to moderate Iran without angering it.

The Islamic Republic also seizes the engagement with Russia in a very utilitarian way. For example, when relations between Moscow and Teheran started warming up after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, during which bilateral dealings had been nearly frozen, Iran looked to Russia as a way to breaking out of what seemed to be encirclement by the rest of the world.

Basically, at all junctures both countries find a reason to deal with each other.

WP: Influence over Central Asia has been a key and always difficult aspect of the relation between Moscow and Teheran. Is influence in Central Asia somewhat settled for Moscow and Teheran, or what’s in store?

JP: My impression is that, for the short-term, Iran is not going to try contest with Russia in Central Asia and the Caucasus. In the long-run, however, I think Iran will always compete over those areas and Russia knows it.

It must be said that the Central Asians themselves play a fundamental role and not in favor of Iran, the intentions of which they never trust. There is a long history to this, going back the 19th Century and Sunni-Shi’a differences, even if people might not remember what were the religious origin of their dislike for Iranians.

In any case, Iranians have always been despised by the Sunni populations of Central Asia. You can see for yourself in the travel literature from the 19th Century. For example, one of my favorite is a book by Eugene Schuyler, the American Consul in St. Petersburg, who took a nine-month trip to Central Asia after Moscow conquered Tashkent and what is now known as Uzbekistan. In those decades, the 1860s and 1870s, the Turkmen’s attitude towards Iranians was that these were people to be captured and sold in the slave market.

Even in Tajikistan, although they basically speak Farsi, they are Sunni, not Shi’a. And in spite of the common cultural roots with Iranians, it didn’t take long for good feelings to wear off during the civil war of 1992-1993. In the Caucasus, the Azerbaijani are also very distrustful of Iran. Armenia, of course, has a modus vivendi with Iran and so does Georgia.

Basically they all have their unpleasant memories. For the time being, I think Iranians learned a bitter lesson in Tajikistan and they have sort of pulled back, as far as their revolutionary aspirations in Central Asia and the Caucasus are concerned. As we’ve seen, they refrained from repeating the Tajik experience in Chechnya.

In any case, this is not to say that Iran has given up. Teheran maintains a relatively long-term view of that part of the world, and it hopes to exert more influence there as Iran becomes stronger and as Russia becomes weaker.

Russians are aware of this, and some have openly commented about trend lines for Russia and Iran going into different directions from now on. They see the Russian population decreasing and the Iranian population increasing. They realize that Iran might be getting nuclear weapons and missiles, which would neutralize Russia’s trump card of nuclear weapons and missiles.

In the Middle East itself, Moscow sees Iranian influence degrading whatever strength Russia might have. Moreover, the Russians also remember that it wasn’t so long ago that they pushed Iran out of the Caucasus and Central Asia and a few ascribe to Iran ambitions to get back the “lost” territories. Indeed, on the Iranian side there is still heavy resentment over the Gulistan Treaty of 1813 (which confirmed inclusion of modern day Azerbaijan, Daghestan and Eastern Georgia into the Russian Empire,) and the Turkmenchay Treaty (signed by the Persian Empire after its defeat in the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828, which recognized Russia’s control over the Erivan khanate, Nakhchivan khanate and the remainder of the Talysh khanate, today parts of Azerbaijan).

WP: The Caspian Sea and its energy resources have also represented a key point of confrontation between Russia and Iran. What is the road ahead, especially with regard to energy?

JP: In terms of Caspian delimitations and Caspian resources strictly speaking, things are at a standstill right now, but maybe not a standstill that Iran can’t live with.

Iran claims 20% of the Caspian Sea. By this current medium delimitation, Iran would only have 13 to 14%. During the Soviet period, Iran only worked south of the Astara/Hasanqoli line which gave it about 11%. In any case, wherever you draw the line, there isn’t that much gas in what would be Iranian waters. There isn’t much of it, it’s very deep, and it’s a lot harder and more expensive to get to it. So the question is, from an Iranian point of view, is this issue worth a war? Iran has been building a big deep sea drill, it was supposed to be a three-year project, but it hasn’t been deployed yet. However, whenever it is deployed, it could become a real challenge to what other countries believe is theirs portion of the Caspian. But, again, the question is whether Iran would really push it north of the Astara/Hasanqoli line and then, maybe, even outside of what would be the medium delimitations for boundaries. It could be sort of a shoe that falls on Iranian-Azerbaijani relations especially. So far the Iranians have chosen not to let it fall.

What will happen in the future I don’t know, but I believe the Iranians have come to realize how provocative would this action be.

As far as the Nabucco pipeline (a proposed natural gas pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkey to Europe, possibly originating in the Caucuses or Central Asia and bypassing Russia) I don’t think that you can rule out that Iran may sometime feed gas into it; who knows what’s going to happen in the next five to ten years. You have to build Nabucco first anyway. Even if they did, I don’t think it would be a cause of war with Russia or anything like that.

Nevertheless, Russian policy in terms of energy out of the Caspian Sea has been to do everything in its power to exclude Iran from the European market. If Iran began to feed into Nabucco, it would cut into the Russian market share in Europe.

Overall, whatever Iran does will be secondary to what Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan do anyway. Iran feeding into Nabucco would just be part of a larger challenge to Russian domination of the gas market. One should remember that Russia’s blue stream pipeline under the Black Sea was done as a response to Iranian plans to feed gas to Turkey. Russia just wanted to shut Iranian gas south and east and keep it from going to Europe and it has been fairly successful thus far.

WP: To remain in the energy sector, there have been talks about the creating of an OPEC-like consortium of natural gas producers, countries such as Russia, Iran and Qatar. Is this a reality?

JP: I think it’s kind of a scare crow, I’m not an expert in those matters but my impression is that it is unworkable and it is just something that people talk about. Iranians talk about when they want the West to believe that there is a lot more cooperation on energy matter with Russia than there is.

When the Iranians really push the issue hard, you start reading the Russian press and the Russians are saying that there is not much to work with. In any case, it wouldn’t be like OPEC or anything of that sort. As said, as far as the European energy market, Russia just doesn’t want Iran in there and will do everything that it can to cut it out.

WP: The nuclear issue, instead, seems to be one where Iran can play its cards in a very successful way. What might strike one as odd, for example, is that even when its relations with the United States peaked after September 11 2001, and while Russia partially conceded on the Iran nuclear issue, Moscow never gave up Iran and kept pushing ahead with the Bushehr project. Why do you think that is?

JP: I’d qualify what you said. Russia never gave up on Bushehr. It claimed, and it still claims, that Bushehr is a civilian nuclear power plant and doesn’t have anything to do with whatever Iran is doing on the enrichment front or about the nuclear weapons program.

Russia and Iran negotiated the contract to build Bushehr when Andrey Kozyrev was Foreign Minister in the early 1990s. It goes way back. So it’s true that Moscow hasn’t abandoned Bushehr.

But on other issues, and I have the details in the book, by then Russia was already much more cautious about what it was doing with Iran in terms of allowing proliferation of nuclear expertise and nuclear components. It began tightening up on its laws; on overseeing of exports; on Iran’s weapons shopping in Russia. This caution on the part of the Russians was immediately reflected in statements by Iranians leaders, including Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani. In 2002, he said that Russia just didn’t want a strong Iran and it was not going to sell to Iran the weapons that Iran really wanted. There was much bitterness on the arms-trade front from the Iranians toward the Russians. And even if the Russians have continued to sell weapons to the Iranians, it is never quite enough for Teheran.

WP: Do you think Iran ever looks to Russia when it thinks of developing nuclear weapons? Does Russia feel that it would be directly threatened?

JP: The reason why Iran started on his nuclear program certainly wasn’t the Soviet Union or Russia. It happened at the last stages of the Iran-Iraq war. You begin seeing then statements by people such as Rafsanjani, saying that Iran needed nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the Russians immediately recognized in 1998 the potential threat posed by an Iran with a Shahab-3 missile, which can reach the southern portions of Russia on either side of the Caspian. Those in Russia that want good relations with Iran emphasize that Iran never intends to fire these missiles in Russia’s direction. On the other hand, Putin made clear that the Russians knew how far those missiles could go and were very well aware of the danger. It is no coincidence that a real jolt hit security circles in Moscow right after Iran first tested the Shahab-3 in 1998, and that a lot came out in the press on how Iranians were circumventing all laws and stealing technology from the Russians. In short, nobody’s eyes are blind to this potential threat.

WP: What is the role of the U.S. in the Russia-Iran relation?

JP: In broad historical perspectives, the U.S. was dominant in Iran during the years of the Shah, and it has been absent from Iran in the last thirty-years. Russia has more of a relationship with Iran now than it had back at the time of the Shah and it would like to preserve it.

There is a kind of historical competition. I don’t think that Russia thinks that it can replace the U.S. in Iran but it certainly would like to improve its position there. At the same time it is fearful that there will be a deal between Iran and the U.S. and all of this effort Moscow has been putting in will be for nothing.

I think there is still a lingering memory in Moscow of the Iran-Contra episode. The Soviets realized then, all of a sudden, that there were people in the Islamic Republic willing to do a deal with Washington. As a result fears remain that in spite of Russia’s efforts to improve relations with Iran, in the end Iran prefers to deal with other countries over Russia.

WP: On a more personal level, as a U.S. Government official who has spent many years working on the USSR, Russia and Central Asia, what was the motivation behind your decision to write about Russia-Iran relations from the perspective of Moscow and Teheran, treating the U.S. only as an external player?

JP: The project simply began because, as a part of my briefing duties in the State Department, I kept running up against the issue of Moscow-Teheran relations and the charges that Russia was doing proliferation in Iran. The other part of it was that, in 1992, a great portion of my time was consumed with following what was going on in Tajikistan. I was watching Iranian interests and how Russia dealt with Iran and I found it so strange, as someone who didn’t know the deep history of the engagement between Russia and Iran, that they could be arming opposite sides in the Tajik civil war on one level yet simultaneously doing deals on Bushehr on another level. I wanted to try to get into the heads of decision makers on both sides to try to understand the relation better. That was the intellectual impetus for it. And I also think this is a different perspective on the matter of Russia-Iran relations that you would normally encounter in the U.S. Here we tend to look at them separately, wondering what we should do with Iran and how we should deal with Russia. In America there are certain assumptions and stereotypes as to how Russia and Iran are dealing with each other, but they are often very off.

WP: What was the most unexpected and important thing you learned about the Russia-Iran relation?

JP: That engagement above the table goes along with kicking each other under the table all the time. You have this tussling even while they are embraced. The fact is that they always deal with each other and they will always deal with each other. Because they are so close, they are never going to go away.

It’s not like a country in the Western Hemisphere dealing with a country in the Eastern Hemisphere where one can choose whether to deal with the other or not. Neither country has a choice in this case; they have to deal with each other.

Even now that they don’t have common borders, in their minds common borders remain and, actually, they do share the Caspian Sea. Russia and Iran have overlapping or conflicting interests in many areas: Central Asia, the Caucasus, South Asia, and the Middle East.

The other, more personal thing I had not really expected was that the title Persian Dreams attracted an audience that I hadn’t anticipated: the Iranian Diaspora and even people in Iran. This book was written by someone that had always studied Russia rather than Iran, but there’s probably less interest in the book from the Russian side than there has been from the Iranian side, at least so far.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C.- dawnofcoldwarWashington D.C.- On March 24th 1946, at 1:30 pm, a wire from the Kremlin arrives to the commander of the Soviet troops deployed in the Northwest region of Iran known as Iranian Azerbaijan. Joseph Stalin orders his soldiers to withdraw immediately. By 8:00 pm that same evening the Red Army is on its way back north, directed to Moscow.

“Normally,” says historian Jamil Hasanli, “it takes between two to four weeks for a withdrawal order to actually take place.” The directive sent by Stalin, that spring day of 1946, must have sounded of particular urgency to the troops on the ground.
Dr. Jamil Hasanli comes from Azerbaijan. He is a member of the country’s parliament and a well respected Professor of International Relations at the University of Baku in Azerbaijan.

In his latest book, At the Dawn of the Cold War, Dr. Hasanli addresses the crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan province as one of the first theaters of Soviet-American conflict, marking the beginning of the Cold War.

“As a rule, the beginning of the Cold War has been traced to Europe,” Dr. Hasanli explained recently at a conference in Washington D.C. For a long time the frontier that separated the Soviet Union and the United States ran across Europe.  Additionally, the majority of Universities and Research Centers that study the Cold War are based in Europe and the US. These factors have greatly contributed to the prevalence of a Eurocentric approach to studying the Cold War.

Dr. Hasanli, however, is convinced that the historiography on the Cold War has been missing a point. “With a degree of certainty” the Professor at Baku University says, “I can now state the Cold War originated in the East.”

The Azerbaijan province of Iran, which the Azerbaijanis prefer to call Southern Azerbaijan, is, in Dr. Hasanli’s opinion, one of the decisive grounds in the emergence of the conflict between the two superpowers. The border between Iran and Azerbaijan, which assigned this portion of territory to Teheran (or the Azerbaijan portion to the Tsarist Russian Empire,) was established in 1828 with the Treaty of Turkmanchay that put an end to the Russian – Persian War.

In the period between 1945 and1946 the delicate equilibrium of this area became threatened once again. The Soviets saw Iranian Azerbaijan province as a target with a dual potential; on one hand gaining control of the region would have helped secure better access to oil and protect Baku’s oil fields. On the other hand, and most importantly, Iranian Azerbaijan would have represented one important step in the expansionist policies pursued by Stalin.

The United States and Britain perceived such aggressive stance of the USSR as a threat of further communist expansion. For the Azeri population the possibility of reunification was a matter of national identity and common faith.

Events started unfolding in the summer of 1945. As Dr. Hasanli explains, “The Soviets Politburo made secret decisions about the Azerbaijani separatist movements in the Iranian province of Azerbaijan,” and started funding and supporting them. Such move proved to be a success, as the Soviets found an available nucleus of indigenous movements that wanted to separate from Iran and re-unite the Azeri population under one flag.

In late 1945, as tensions mounted, the United States Secretary of State James Byrnes talked to the Ambassador of Iran, trying to convince the Iranian leadership to grant more freedom to the Azeris, so as to calm down the unrest and to try discrediting the Soviet attempt at annexing the region. However, according to Dr. Hasanli the Shah did not follow through and dismissed the pressures from the Americans.

On March 2nd 1946, the USSR was to pull out of the Azerbaijan province, but failed to do so. “This had an explosive effect,” Dr. Hasanli says. In short, the Soviets’ interests in the oil fields of Baku were so significant and the border of Iran so close to that city, that Moscow was determined to make its presence felt by keeping its troops on the ground in Southern Azerbaijan.

In his book, the author asserts that after Soviet Union’s refusal to withdraw, Iranian Prime Minister Ahmad Ghavam visited Moscow and engaged in talks with Stalin and his Foreign Minister Molotov asking the Soviets to withdraw their troops from Iran. Stalin tried to convince him to overthrow the monarch instead, and declare a republic in Iran. At first Ghavam seemed intrigued by the suggestion, but soon after started backtracking and openly asked Molotov not to speak on the issue in the presence of the interpreter. He returned to Teheran empty-handed, not being able to obtain a troop withdrawal commitment from the Soviets.

The situation in Iran was growing increasingly tense. The American ambassador to Teheran had written to Washington saying that the Shah and the Prime Minister were very worried and were getting ready to flee. The United States government reacted with great concern. “They saw the situation as a realistic attempt by the Soviets to possibly gain control of the oil fields in Southern Iran, the Kurdistan region, Northern Iraq and Eastern Turkey,” Jamil Hasanli explains.

Charles Bohlen, an expert on Soviet Union and later US ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s, was still convinced that the White House had the power to block Soviet Union’s expansion plans. He advised President Truman to threat Moscow with the use of the atomic bomb.

Although currently no evidence exists in the American archives that this ever happened, but Dr. Hasanli insists that he has come into the possession of one important document from the USSR archive that proves his chronology of events.

According to him, the truth of the matter is; Soviet supplies were still pouring into the Iranian Azerbaijan province on March 24th, up until the point when the order of withdrawal was wired from Moscow. The troops started pulling out that very same night. Something major must have happened then, the Baku University historian believes.
Dr. Hasanli’s book At the Dawn of the Cold War is a thick manuscript with detailed accounts of those years, where he reviews the history of Iranian Azerbaijan’s independence movement, the Soviet struggle for oil in Iran, and the American and British reactions to these events. Hasanli delved deeply into Soviet and Azerbaijani archives as well as what he found analyzing declassified top-secret materials from American, British and Iranian sources.

The Soviets’ rigid bureaucratic organization has been Hasanli’s fortune. Because these documents dealt with Azerbaijan, as a rule the Soviets duplicated a copy for the Azerbaijan’s Communist Party leadership. Without those duplicates, most of the Scholars’ research would have probably been impossible, since most of the archives in Russia are inaccessible to this day. “This has allowed us to take a unique journey through the instances of this crisis,” Dr. Hasanli emphasizes.

Dr. Jamil Hasanli takes the Azerbaijani perspective on the issue and makes no secret of it. With his effort to re-direct the debate on the Cold War and its beginning to the East and specifically to the crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, he attempts to bring back issues of nationality and minorities’ rights into the discourse on the confrontation between the two blocks.

“Because the Cold War has always been seen as dealing with greater policy issues, often the problems of national interest and nationalities have been overlooked,” the historians points out. The day that the Soviets retreated, marking the defeat of Iranian Azeri separatist movement, he says, “was the beginning of tragedy in the lives of many Azeris.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush met for the first time in June 2001 at a summit in Slovenia. Describing the meeting, the BBC reported that “they appeared to have hit it off.” The American President even said that he had been “able to get a sense of his (Putin’s) soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

Five years later, the moods have changed drastically. Vice President Dick Cheney told a conference of Eastern European leaders in May: “In Russia today, opponents of reform are seeking to reverse the gains of the last decade. In many areas of civil society – from religion and the news media to advocacy groups and political parties – the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of the people.”

The latest G-8 summit just took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Meeting President Putin before the opening of the summit, George Bush also raised concerns about the status of democracy in Russia. “I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there’s a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same,” the US President said. Putin did not seem to take the comment to well and replied, “We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly.”

James M. Goldgeier, Senior Fellow for Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, gave an interview recently released on the organization’s website. Speaking on the state of the relations between Russia and the US, he said: “You could argue it is as poor as it has been since the end of the Cold War”.

How did a relationship that started on such friendly terms turn sour so quickly?

The widely held view in Washington is that Putin and his policies are responsible for the degradation in US-Russia relations. He is heavily criticized for having slowly and increasingly geared his choices in domestic policy towards a concentration of power in his hands as the President undermining Russia’s transition to democracy. The latest Freedom House report, which came out in 2005, downgraded Russia from a score of 5 to one of 6. The Federation was moved from being a partly free to a non free country.

Similar lines of unease over Moscow’s authoritarian turn are expressed in the newly published Another look into Putin’s Soul, by Andrei Piontkovski. The book was presented at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. last week, by the author and Senior Visiting Fellow at the think tank. The collection of essays analyzes developments in Russian politics, from 2001 to 2006. The book focuses specifically on President Putin’s supposed shift from solidarity with the U.S. after 9/11, to his comparison of America to “Comrade Wolf…[who]…knows whom to eat…and eats without listening.”

The Council of Foreign Relations also published, in the spring of 2006, an Independent Task Force Report entitled Russia’s wrong direction: what the United States can and should do.  The study found undeniable signs of rising corruption and of the increasing concentration of power in the hand of the executive branch.  As examples, the report cites how the lower house of Russia’s parliament is now entirely controlled by United Russia, the president’s party, while the upper house is composed of presidential appointees that have come to substitute the older system of regional governors. The judiciary system has been restructured to further subordinate Russia’s courts to the executive power. At the same time, control of the electoral process has been tightened, making it more difficult for any opposition to effectively run for office. The state of the media system also induces widespread concerns, as the CFR report points out; “While the print media retain some diversity, the Kremlin limits political debate and competition by carefully controlling the broadcast media on which most Russians rely for news and entertainment.”

These represent elements for concerns over the direction Russia is taking, especially as far as human rights and democratic governance. “The biggest issues right now have to do with the climate of intimidation, particularly in the political sphere: the lack of a real opposition in Russia,” says Goldgeier of CFR.

However, under Putin’s presidency, Russia has also made significant steps forward, especially in the economy, regaining a status much closer to that of a major player in the international system that it has had since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The latest version of the OECD factbook, annually tracking economic performances of OECD countries and of a few other key economies, shows that the evolution of the Russian Federation GDP since the election of Putin has been consistently positive. Growth rates went from 5.1% in 2001 to 7.3% and 7.2% respectively in 2004 and 2005. The CFR task force also reports that, “Since 1999, the average annual growth of Russia’s GDP has exceeded 6.5 percent—a record that, by the end of 2006, will have produced a cumulative economic expansion of 65 percent.”

Many observers tend to explain such record as a simple result of the high world prices for oil. Yet Russia not only produces a commodity that commands a higher price than ever; it also produces much more of it than it has for over a decade. In the past five years, the increase in Russian oil production has amounted to almost 50 percent of the worldwide increase. At the same time, Russia’s other exports revenues have also increased; that of metals rose 61 percent in the last two years; of chemicals, 28 percent; of machinery and equipment, over 12 percent.

The fiscal performance of the Russian government is also very solid: “A government that was unable to manage its finances in the 1990s has now recorded five annual budget surpluses in a row. In 2005, government revenues exceeded spending by approximately 7 percent of GDP,” the CFR report found.

Such strong economic performance has triggered a cascade of spillover effects: foreign direct investment in Russia, which totaled a mere $20 billion in the 1990s, was at least $16 billion in 2005 alone. Russian companies have increased their own foreign investments. Lukoil, to take the best-known example, now owns more than two thousand retail and wholesale outlets selling gasoline in the United States. Six Russian stocks are now listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and more than thirty on the London exchange.

Society, also, has benefited from improved economic performances. Between 2000 and 2004, the number of Russians living below the government’s poverty line dropped from forty-two million to twenty-six million. The national unemployment rate—over 10 percent in 2000—is now about 7 percent. By 2000, Russia had 50 percent more college students than in 1992. Twenty percent of Russians are regular Internet users.

Russians also seem to show a high level of political consciousness. The Levada Center, a well-respect Russian non-governmental organization that carries out market research and opinion polls, has conducted a study that found that 66% of Russians feel the country needs an effective political opposition. Finally, the CFR report found that although “nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) remain vulnerable, their numbers—in the hundreds of thousands, by some estimates—testify to a nascent civic consciousness that Russia has rarely known in the past”.

In sum, the CFR Independent Task Force concluded that “Russia’s record of economic growth in the last half-decade provides some grounds for optimism about its long-term prospects. Nothing has done more to create a sense of confidence, normalcy, and new national possibilities”.

This is not to say that Russia under Putin is overcoming all of the problems that have afflicted its economy and its society in the past decade. Stephen Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University, recently wrote in the weekly magazine The Nation; “More fundamental realities indicate that Russia remains in an unprecedented state of peacetime demodernization and depopulation”.

However, these numbers might shed a different light on the actual effectiveness of Putin’s choices in domestic politics and as such cast doubts on the fact that American concerns over him are only based on an evaluation of his presidency. Professor Cohen writes: “The extraordinarily anti-Russian nature of US policies casts serious doubt on two American official and media axioms: that the recent ‘chill’ in US-Russian relations has been caused by Putin’s behavior at home and abroad and that the cold war ended fifteen years ago. The first axiom is false, the second only half true; the cold war ended in Moscow, but not in Washington.”

The fact is that those years of great cooperation, which many American analysts look back on with nostalgia, were characterized by a relationship between Moscow and Washington that saw Russia heavily dependent on the US. “It was still a time in which the United States was providing economic assistance to Russia. And Moscow was really looking to support a number of American initiatives, even ones they were not happy with, in order to maintain a close relationship” says James M. Goldgeier. Speaking this week at a conference organized jointly by the Washington DC and Moscow centers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Andrew Kuchins, Director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at Carnegie, also said: “The line from Moscow is not that we liked Boris Yeltsin because he was democratic, but because he quickly gave into American interests because of Russia’s relative weak position.”

Today Russia enjoys a much stronger position, mainly thanks to its economic growth. It does not feel anymore the need to go along with the Americans independently of what is in Russia’s best interest.

The shift in Russia’s foreign policy line is well exemplified by the history of the recent bilateral dealings between Russia and the United States laid out in the CFR report.

The relationship between the two countries was very fruitful starting right after September 11. The American campaign in Afghanistan benefited from the sharing of Russian intelligence information as well as from access to Central Asian military airfields, which Russia did not seek to block. During those same month, Russia also accepted to become part of the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative, a multinational network joining together to prevent proliferation of dangerous, especially fissionable, materials. Moscow joined multilateral talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and in 2002 was very critical when it was discovered that Iran was secretly attempting to develop nuclear technology. Russia offered its support for the efforts of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to negotiate a suspension of such nuclear activities with Teheran. At the height of the interaction between Moscow and Washington, in June 2002, Presidents Bush and Putin launched a ‘‘strategic energy dialogue,’’ with the aim of increasing coordination and contact among energy officials as well as companies.

However, as Russia’s economy improved and Putin’s support at home increased and became more stable, Moscow’s approach to bilateral relations started going down a very different path.  In 2005, Russian officials sought to curtail access by the United States and NATO to Central Asian air bases. For the first time since 2001, acting in the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (the other members of which are Central Asian states), Russia and China saw an opportunity to reverse the growing American presence in the region.

Seen from the perspective of Moscow, this change in direction is due to the fact that “US policy has been a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia’s 1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington’s approach to Soviet Communist Russia”, says Cohen.

The problem stems, according to the NYU professor, to two misunderstanding in Washington about Russia: “One was the assumption that the United States had the right, wisdom and power to remake post-Communist Russia into a political and economic replica of America […] The other was the presumption that Russia should be America’s junior partner in foreign policy with no interests except those of the United States”.

With Russia developing economically and regaining the status of a major player in international politics, the interests of the United States will have to be balanced against those of Moscow, and cooperation sought where feasible and mutually beneficial.  But Washington cannot expect Russia to go along with every American decision. Russia is a Eurasian state with 20-25 million Muslim citizens. Its neighbors are, to the East, countries such as Iran and China. For such reasons, Russia does not want to be overly involved with the US expanding conflict with the Islamic world. At the same time it also has a different approach to Iran’s nuclear weapon program or to the rise of China. Similarly, Moscow cannot be asked to vacate its traditional political and military positions in former Soviet republics so the United States and NATO can occupy them. It is like “Washington is saying that Russia not only has no Monroe Doctrine-like rights in its own neighborhood but no legitimate security rights at all” writes Stephen Cohen.

As the CFR Independent Task Force concludes: “U.S.-Russian cooperation can help the United States to handle some of the most difficult challenges it faces: terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, tight energy markets, climate change, the drug trade, infectious diseases, and human trafficking. These problems are more manageable when the United States has Russia on its side rather than aligned against it.”

Russia can significantly help the US in the successful pursuit of its goals in foreign policy. However there are divergences of interests. What should Washington do then? Cohen’s advice is: “Do no harm! Do nothing to undermine its fragile stability, nothing to dissuade the Kremlin from giving first priority to repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructures, nothing to cause it to rely more heavily on its stockpiles of superpower weapons instead of reducing them, nothing to make Moscow uncooperative with the West in those joint pursuits. Everything else in that savaged country is of far less consequence”.

At the conference held at Carnegie this week, Andrew Kuchins expressed the hope that, “rather than looking into each other’s souls, the two Presidents can take some clear steps in Saint Petersburg to reverse the negative events and cease what to me is a childish war of words that has been gathering steam in the last few months of the relationship”.

The G8 closed on Sunday without any significant agreement being reached among the participants. Most of the talks were overshadowed by the worsening crisis in the Middle East. The round talks and the bilateral meeting between Putin and Bush also do not seem to have produced particularly positive outcomes for the US-Russia relation.

However, U.S. and Russian relations were already at a rocky stage prior to the G-8.  Rose Gottemoeller – director of the Carnegie Endowment Center in Moscow – tells Washington Prism that “the summit did not make the relations worse, and it may have provided some means to make them better”. Two joint statements were signed by Bush and Putin, one on cooperation over civil nuclear technology and the other on the fight against nuclear terrorism. Without overestimating their value, these agreements must be taken as a step forward.  “These are two areas where the U.S. and Russia might enjoy some pragmatic success, which in turn might improve the overall environment of the relationship—over time”, says Gottemoeller.

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington D.C., David Kramer, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, expressed mixed feelings about the meeting between Bush and Putin; “We feel we made significant progress on some areas but of course less than hoped for in other areas. But there is no doubt, we would argue, that going to St. Petersburg was the right decision,” he said. Russia’s accession to the WTO and democracy remain contentious issues and the main hurdles in what Kramer defines “a realistic partnership” with the Russians.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism