What Was the Russian Empire’s Treaty of Turkmenchay?
On 21 February 1828, in a square stone house in the village of Turkmenchay on the road between Tabriz and Tehran, the Russian and Persian plenipotentiaries signed the peace that ended the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828. The Russian delegation was led by General Ivan Paskevich, the conqueror of Erivan; the Persian by Crown Prince Abbas Mirza, seconded by the English-trained diplomat Mirza Masoud Farahani. The treaty would, in effect, draw the Russian-Persian border where it still runs along most of its length, and it would deliver about 200,000 Armenians, the subjects of the old Erivan and Nakhchivan khanates, into the Russian empire (see Figes, The Crimean War, 2010; Bournoutian, Russia and the Armenians, 1997).
The road to Turkmenchay
The war opened on 16 July 1826, when the Persian army of Abbas Mirza crossed the Aras River into the Russian-held khanate of Karabakh. Paskevich, the new commander of the Russian forces in the Caucasus, drove the Persians back; on 13 September 1827, after a six-week siege, his forces stormed the Erivan citadel, and the next day the Persian garrison of Tabriz surrendered. The war was, militarily, a brief one; politically, it lasted a year longer than the fighting because the Russian government wanted a settlement that committed the Qajar court to a permanent withdrawal from the Caucasus.
The negotiations were opened at the request of the Shah’s court in October 1827. The first Russian draft was too harsh for the Persian government; the second was too lenient for Paskevich. The compromise was reached at the end of January 1828, and the treaty was signed on 21 February, two days after the death of the Persian Sadr-e Azam, Amir Kabir’s patron Prince Abbas Mirza Qavam (Bournoutian, 1997).
The main provisions
The Treaty of Turkmenchay did four things:
- It transferred to Russia the Erivan and Nakhchivan khanates, plus the rest of the Aras river basin. The territory, with about 200,000 inhabitants of whom 150,000 were Armenian, became the basis of the Russian “Armenian Oblast” (later the Erivan Governorate).
- It obliged the Persian government to pay a 20-million-silver-ruble war indemnity, of which 2 million was paid in cash, and the rest was guaranteed by the cession of additional territory.
- It opened Persia to Russian traders, who were given the right to travel freely, to trade on the same terms as Persian subjects, and to be subject only to Russian consular jurisdiction — the formal beginning of the Russian capitulations in Persia.
- It required the Persian court to recognise the existing Russian-Persian border as the “fixed and inviolable” limit of the two empires.
The capitulations in Article 6 are the only real precedent for the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and the 1943 Soviet occupation of northern Iran.
The impact on the Caucasus
The treaty, with the parallel Treaty of Adrianople of the following year, gave Russia the frontier it had been seeking since the reign of Catherine the Great: a defensible southern border on the Aras, a Christian Armenian population that was a useful counter-weight to the Turkic and Kurdish majority, and a base for the eventual incorporation of the rest of the Transcaucasus (the 1801 annexation of Georgia, the 1813 Treaty of Golestan, the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, the 1878 Treaty of Berlin) (Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, 2009).
The treaty also brought an Armenian diaspora into the Russian Empire, much of which settled in the new Armenian Oblast, the new port of Poti on the Black Sea, and the new industrial city of Baku. The new Armenians were the first readers of the modern Armenian press, the first students of the Lazarian College in Moscow, and the first members of the Dashnaktsutiun, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, founded in 1890. The Dashnaktsutiun in particular would become a key player in the period of the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896 and the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
The impact on Iran
The Qajar court regarded the treaty as a national humiliation. The capitulations undermined the Persian tariff system, allowed Russian capital to dominate the Caspian fisheries, and gave Russian goods free passage to the Persian interior. The court tried to recover the lost territories in 1856 (the Anglo-Persian War of 1856-1857, the brief Russian occupation of Meshed); the effort failed, and the Turkmenchay border was formally confirmed by the Paris Peace of 1857. The treaty and the capitulations that followed it shaped the great-power politics of the Persian Empire until 1917, and the historiography of Iran until the present (Bournoutian, 1997).