ソ連の環カスピ海地域に対する地理認識 ―北部イラン石油利権をめぐる1920年代の国際関係を事例に―.

How the Soviet regime handled the concessions that subjects of Imperial Russia had acquired in Iran was closely related to the transition from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union. Iran had been defeated in the war against Imperial Russia in the first half of the 19th century. Consequently, its northern area was incorporated into Imperial Russia’s sphere of influence. In Northern Iran, Russian subjects were granted various special privileges. The oil concession (Khoshtariya concession) was particularly important in that countries such as Britain and the United States were involved in the issue in the 1920s. Previous studies on the Khoshtariya concession fail to comprehensively capture the interconnectedness of many actors. Thus, there have been no attempts to study the issue from a broader perspective by combining it with the issue of oil concessions on the Soviet shore of the Caspian Sea or to incorporate it into the study of the entire Caspian Sea region. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper will address the question of what continuity or discontinuity can be seen between Soviet and Imperial Russian diplomacy by examining how the Soviet regime in the 1920s attempted to deal with the Khoshtariya concession. In seeking to answer the research question, Soviet geographical perceptions of the Caspian Sea region will be revealed. This paper will first touch on how Khoshtariya acquired the oil concession in Iran in the last years of the Russian Empire. It will then describe the process by which ownership of the concession was transferred to another actor after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. The entry of the Standard Oil Company of the U.S. into the struggle for the northern Iranian oil concession that involved the Iranian government, the Soviet government, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company is discussed in this context. Following the failure of Standard Oil to reach an agreement with the Iranian government, Sinclair Oil Corporation, which had only recently turned its attention to the northern Iranian oil, began to seek a cooperative relationship with the Soviet government. It will become clear that the Soviet government linked its negotiations with Sinclair regarding the Northern Iranian oil concession to those with Western oil companies on oil concessions on the Soviet shore of the Caspian Sea and to issues of the oil pipeline that was planned to run from Northern Iran through the Caucasus. This confirms that the Soviet Union dealt with issues of foreign concessions as issues linked to its domestic concessions and its own economic sphere, suggesting that there was an intermediate category between domestic and foreign concessions and that Soviet officials had a geographical perception of the Iranian shore of the Caspian Sea as a politically continuous region with the Soviet shore of the Caspian Sea. Thus, although the Soviet Union did not have the same territorial ambitions toward Iran as had Imperial Russia, Soviet diplomacy had a certain historical continuity with that of Imperial Russia in that the Soviet Union still considered the Caspian Sea littoral to be within its sphere of influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]