x Prefaceborrowing from the West first in military and later in other matters.
This era marked the beginning of a prolonged crisis in Iranian society
that was characterized by discontent over foreign encroachments on
national sovereignty and uneasy concern over the conflicting pressures
of tradition and foreign-inspired change. Despite various efforts to
deal with these problems, they have continued to exist down to the
present day, as demonstrated in the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979.
The people living in the disputed territory found themselves caught
in the center of the struggle. They were brought, sometimes willingly,
sometimes not, into the Russian Empire. That resulted in marked
changes not only in local political systems but also in economic and
social structures. Some outside observers, especially among the
British, fit decades of Russian involvement in Iran into a pattern that
added up to a drive toward India.
All these developments were rooted in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, from the 1780s, when Catherine the Great
became seriously interested in having an influence in Iranian and
Georgian affairs, to 1828, when the end of the Second Russo-Iranian
War brought Russia the territorial, commercial, and political conces-
sions it had sought for so long from Iran. For all the importance of
this critical period, it has received comparatively little scholarly
attention.
Quite a few books and articles dealing with various aspects of Rus-
sian expansion in this quarter were written during the tsarist era and
by twentieth-century emigres. However, the authors shared the views
of the men who had shaped official policy. In fact, the two groups
often overlapped. One of the most important studies of Russian im-
perial history, Boris Nolde's La Formation de ['Empire Russe,^1 was
unfinished at the author's death and, therefore, covered nothing later
than Tsar Paul's decision in 1800 to annex Georgia. There are a num-
ber of Soviet treatments of various aspects of this subject that are
sometimes informative about certain particulars, but overall they
suffer from biases that closely resemble those of the tsarist expansion-
ist school. The ambivalence of Russian authors treating this subject
is reflected in the comments of V. P. Lystsov in his study of Peter
the Great's Iranian campaign during the 1720s. Lystsov explained
that, even though Russian expansion led to the colonial enslavement
of non-Russians, the harmful consequences of expansion were out-
weighed by the benefits —the Russian conquest of the Caucasian
borderlands freed the inhabitants of the area from oppression by the
Iranian and the Ottoman governments, and the natural resources of
the area encouraged Russian industrialization.^2 Modern Iranian views