266 A Short History of the Middle East
Workers' Party came to life, with an ostensibly moderate socialist
programme. It did not originally have obvious connexions with
the Russians, but unsuccessfully sought the support of the British
Embassy; some of its leaders were, however, men who had taken
part in the shortlived Soviet Republic of Gilan twenty years before,
and had since lived in exile in the U.S.S.R. It formed trades-unions
in the principal industrial cities of Tehran, Tabriz, and Isfahan, and
obtained for the workers some concessions from their employers;
but from 1943 onwards it became openly the pro-Russian party.1
In March 1944 the Persian government rejected applications by
representatives of British and American oil-companies for con-
cessions in south-east Persia, and on 2 September the cabinet re-
solved that it would make no concessions to any foreign oil com-
pany until the foreign armies had been withdrawn from Persian
soil. Only four days afterwards the Persian Ambassador in Mos-
cow informed his government that the Assistant Commissar for
Foreign Affairs, Kavtaradze, wished to discuss with the Persian
government an old oil-concession in Khurasan, which had been
registered in 1925 as a Persian company financed by the Soviet
government; the Majlis had, however, never ratified this concession
and no oil had in fact been found. M. Kavtaradze arrived in Tehran
a week later and asked for a five-years' exploratory concession for
almost the whole of North Persia. When the Persian government
demurred, it became the object of a violent propaganda attack
from the Tudeh party, and M. Kavtaradze issued thinly-veiled
threats at his press-conferences. Weeks passed without the nego-
tiations reaching any conclusion; and on 2 December the Majlis
finally screwed up its courage, and rushed through a bill prescribing
a penalty of eight years imprisonment for any minister or official
who approved an.oil-concession to any foreign company before the
end of the foreign occupation of Persia. M. Kavtaradze had to
return to Moscow without achieving his object. During 1945 the
attitude of the Soviet military to the Persian authorities in the
northern provinces became increasingly unco-operative.2
Following the Anglo-Russian Alliance of June 1941, the two
Powers sought to reassure Turkey in August by guaranteeing their
loyalty to the Montreux Convention, declaring that they had no
1 On the combination of 'half-baked' ideologues and genuine would-be
reformers in the Tudeh membership, see A. C. Edwards, in International
Affairs, XXIII (1947), 54 f.
2 For details, see A. K. S. Lambton, International Affairs, XXII (1946). 265 ff.