Internal and Interdepartmental Discussions on Land Acquisition for Resettlement in Astarabad Province, Iran, within the Russian Empire in 1916

This article explores internal and interdepartmental discussions within the Russian imperial bureaucracy concerning land acquisition for peasant resettlement in Iran’s Astarabad and Mazandaran provinces in 1916. The colonisation of the Caspian frontier by Russian peasants formed a key part of imperial strategy in the region during the Great War. From 1914, Russian authorities at various levels became actively involved in directing and managing this process. The year 1916 marked a turning point, prompted in part by the mission of Gennady Chirkin, head of the Resettlement Department, whose official report on his journey to northern Iran catalysed bureaucratic debate. The core issue under consideration was the means of acquiring land for Russian settlers and the allocation of state funds for this purpose. Drawing on both archival and published sources, the article reconstructs these debates among officials from the Ministries of Agriculture, Foreign Affairs, and Finance. This period also coincided with a major uprising in Russian Turkestan, which by autumn had reached Astarabad, leading to a shift in state strategy. The military began to take a dominant role in regional planning and governance, significantly altering earlier approaches to integrating the borderlands into the imperial economy and administrative order.