information:classification, structural:summarization
Persia

Various authors connect British-Russian competition in Iran to the Great Game as well. This competition continued until the Anglo-Russian Entente in 1907 after which the British and Russian Empires largely moved together in their overtures for imperial influence in the region until the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Great Game in Iran took the form of military conquests, diplomatic intrigues, and the competition of trade goods. Russian colonists arrived in northern Iran, settling the region around Astarabad. Although Britain had a reputation for industrialization and international trade boosted by its colony of India, Russian authors saw the Russian empire as competing directly with Britain for trade in Iran and other bordering markets. Russian travelogues written between the 1870s and the turn of the 1900s seem to imply that Russian commerce had become dominant in the northern and western portions of Iran that would be officially delineated to Russia by Britain in 1907. Russia had also acquired concessions such as a monopoly on the lucrative caviar in the southern Caspian Sea, which lasted until after the First World War.

After the 1828 Treaty of Turkmanchay, Russia received territorial domination in Iran. With the Romanovs shifting to a policy of 'informal support' for the weakened Qajar dynasty —continuing to place pressure with advances in the largely nomadic Turkestan, a crucial frontier territory of the Qajars – this Russian domination of Persia continued for nearly a century. The Persian monarchy became more of a symbolic concept in which Russian diplomats were themselves powerbrokers in Iran and the monarchy was dependent on British and Russian loans for funds. In 1879, the establishment of the Cossack Brigade by Russian officers gave the Russian Empire influence over the modernization of the Qajar army. This influence was especially pronounced because the Persian monarchy's legitimacy was predicated on an image of military prowess, first Turkic and then European-influenced. By the 1890s, Russian tutors, doctors and officers were prominent at the Shah's court, influencing policy personally. Russia and Britain had competing investments in the industrialisation of Iran including roads and telegraph lines, as a way to profit and extend their influence. However, until 1907 the Great Game rivalry was so pronounced that mutual British and Russian demands to the Shah to exclude the other, blocked all railroad construction at the end of the 19th century. In 1907 the British and Russian Empires came to a mutual agreement, which provided a zone of influence in southeastern Iran to Britain and northern Iran to Russia.

Tsar Nicholas II would be a staunch supporter of the Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar against the revolutionaries, in a large scale intervention that involved both regular Russian troops and the Persian Cossacks. Failing to fully suppress the Persian Constitutional Revolution or keep Muhammad Ali Shah in power, the constitutional reforms were put in place against Russia's wishes, though the Cossack Brigade remained a major factor. An Iranian former Cossack, Reza Shah, would establish the Pahlavi dynasty.