Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran: Alexander Griboyedov and Imperial Russia's Mission to the Shah of Persia (review)

Four years older than his good friend Alexander Pushkin and dead at an even earlier age, Griboyedov (1795-1829) had the fortune to experience all that his gilded and unfree age permitted to a man of his prodigious talents. He entered Moscow University at age eleven, served as a cornet in the War of 1812, and became a brilliant pianist, linguist, duelist, and playwright (his Woe from Wit is the first great Russian comedy). When the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 took the lives and freedom of many of his friends, Griboyedov was serving on the diplomatic staff of General Yermolov, whose scorched-earth policy was "pacifying" Daghestan and Chechnya. The most exciting pages of Kelly's biography are devoted to this diplomatic career. It peaked in 1828 with the Treaty of Turkmanchai, a major victory against Persia, fixing (to Britain's anxiety) the Russian imperial presence in the Caucasus. A year later, Griboyedov was murdered and mutilated by a furious Persian mob during a raid on the Tehran embassy. Kelly's well-researched page-turner reminds us of two important facts. First, Russia versus the West was only one part of nineteenth-century Russian diplomatic history; the north-southeast axis was just as unforgiving and bloody. And second: Pushkin and Pasternak notwithstanding, great Russian poets could be, and were, brilliant servitors of the tsar.