The author of this book, an Azerbaijan scholar, professor of history and international relations at Baku University, explores the little-covered subject of the Soviet-Iran relations in the 1940s. Having studied unique and earlier unknown documents from the archives of Russia, the USA, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and having analyzed the works published abroad, the author comes to the paradoxical conclusion that the cold war began in Asia, and not in Europe. The book shows complicated peripeteias of using the national liberation movement in Iranian Azerbaijan as an instrument of the USSR foreign policy. Bibliography.