Authors

Discussion

Researchers on the Cold War history have tended to set the period from the late 1940s to the early 1990s as the main period of analysis. However, the history of the Second World War and the interwar period has been frequently mentioned briefly as prehistory, and scarce attention has been paid to historical continuities (or discontinuities) between the commencement of the Cold War and the period prior to it.

The intense focus on the Cold War itself leads to the exceptionalism of the US-Soviet conflicts. Considering ideological conflict, the risk of nuclear war, and the global expansion of the US-Soviet conflict, the Cold War was undoubtedly new. On the other hand, we should also highlight the perspective of the alternation of geopolitical rivals that the Russian Empire/Soviet Union faced around its own periphery on several occasions. It is the Soviet Union that was the first opponent for the United States in its national history to be engaged in a long-term hegemonic competition with, whereas for the Soviet Union, the United States was just a new challenger after the British Empire and Nazi Germany.

From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, many of the issues that triggered the US-Soviet rivalry resulted from the recurrence of geopolitical conflicts that Imperia Russia had once had with the British and Japanese Empires since the 19th century. There were multiple epicenters of the Cold War, manifested in the Soviet Union’s vicinities: the Korean Peninsula, Iranian Azerbaijan, and the Turkish Straits. The United States regarded as no other than expansionism the Soviet’s attempts to (re)gain control of territories which Imperial Russia had incorporated (or hoped to incorporate) into its own sphere of influence.

The crisis of Azerbaijan in Northern Iran, among the above-mentioned regions, originated in the Anglo-Russian conflict from the early 19th century. Furthermore, when we examine the relations between the Russian Empire/USSR and Iran from the early 19th century to the second half of the 20th century, Iran served as an indicator of Russia’s greatest hypothetical enemy in each era: the British Empire, Nazi Germany, and the United States, all of which aimed to have a political and/or economic influence on Iran. This proposal, inspired by this feature of Iranian modern history, seeks to answer the question of how the early Cold War can be positioned within the continuum from the modern history prior to it through the lens of the history of international relations in Iranian Azerbaijan.