Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 54 h Sergei Andreyev the publications he requested for his work. Despite his and his wife numerous requests for a fair trial it took the threat of a hunger strike to secure Vvedens- kiy’ release from jail, most likely shortly before 28 December 1919 when he was sent to Bukhara as a member of Turkestan Committee; coincidently the report bears the same date of completion. For the remaining 19 years of his life Vvedenskiy intermittently served in various consultative and teaching positions in Central Asia and Moscow be- ing frequently arrested with no meaningful charge until his final detention on 10 April 1938 at the height of Stalinist Great Terror. He was convicted for spying for the French, British, Iranian and Afghan intelligence services and executed on 15 September 1938 to be completely cleared of all charges in 1957 due to the partial de-stalinisation policy implemented at that time in the USSR 2 . The paper he authored was likely commissioned in light of the Afghan dec- laration of independence from Great Britain and subsequent Third Anglo-Af- ghan War in February-May 1919 that in late April 1919 prompted the dispatch of the Afghan legation headed by General Mohammad Wali Khan to Moscow. In turn, in May 1919 the Soviet authorities appointed Nikolay Zakharovich Bravin their diplomatic representative in Kabul to be replaced in June 1919 by a revolutionary zealot Yakov Zakharovich Surits, who unlike his predeces- sor — a career Imperial diplomat who previously served in Iran and joined the Soviets — had no diplomatic experience or knowledge of the Middle East 3 . Moreover, the Soviets annulled all previous diplomatic treatises that Russia had with foreign countries creating a clean slate to be dealt with by novice Soviet diplomats. There is a striking contrast between Vvedenskiy’s elegant and elaborate Russian bureaucratese of an Imperial civil servant marked by longwinded sentences, frequent inversion of the word order and a careless typeset of the document which is peppered with orthographic and punctuation mistakes. That clearly demonstrates a dramatic deterioration of standards in all aspects of Rus- sian life with the advent of the Soviet rule. The typed document is 112 A4 size pages long. It comprises four sections, viz., I. The Historical Section (p. 1–38), II. [The Legal Section] (p. 38–51) 4 , III. The Political Section (p. 51–80), IV. The Current Problems of the Russian-Afghan Border Question (p. 80–108) each followed by a summary and there is also a conclusion (p. 109–110). 2 Genis V. Vitse-konsul Vvedenskiy: Sluzhba v Persii i Bukharskom khanstve (1906–1920) // Rossiyskaya diplomatiya v sud’bakh. Moscow: Sotsial’no-politicheskaya mysl’, 2003. 3 Teplinskiy L. Istoriya sovetsko-afgnskikh otnosheniy 1919–1987. Moscow: Mysl’, 1988. P. 40–42. 4 No such title is provided in the text but since there is a gap on page 38 and Section Three fol- lows Section One, each concluded with a summary one may tentatively title this section that starts abruptly in midsentence and deals with legal issues as such.