Soviet concession policy

The largest concession offers made by foreign businessmen to the Soviet government during the «military communism» period are considered. Those concession offers are remarkable because they had been made to the Soviet government before the Decree «On the General and Legal Conditions of Concessions» was accepted in Soviet Russia. That decree was also considered as the first harbinger of the Soviet yovemment withdrawal from the «military communism» policy.

The article deals with the Soviet policy towards the former tsarist concessions in Iran in 1921-27. Despite the renunciation of the former tsarist concessions in Iran, the Soviet leadership de facto tried to control the disposal of the strategically most important of them: either through legal instruments or by force. The analysis of the existing sources on the problem demonstrates that at the heart of the policy there were the strategic interests of the Soviet state.