Soviet Civilization through a Persian Lens: Iranian Intellectuals, Cultural Diplomacy and Socialist Modernity 1941-1955

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Iranian Studies in 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/we6vsT3NGwu953mmKegd/full The full citation is:

James Pickett, “Soviet Civilization through a Persian Lens: Iranian Intellectuals, Cultural Diplomacy and Socialist Modernity 1941–55,” Iranian Studies 48, no. 5 (September 3, 2015): 805–26.

The page numbers align with the published version, and may be cited accordingly.

James Pickett

Soviet Civilization through a Persian Lens: Iranian Intellectuals, CulturalDiplomacy and Socialist Modernity 1941–55

During the Second World War and its immediate aftermath the Soviet All-UnionSociety for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS) engaged in an aggressive campaign ofcultural outreach in Iran to promote socialist modernity amongst Iranian leftists. Iranrepresented VOKS’ first serious expansion outside Europe and one which the SovietUnion was uniquely poised to exploit. VOKS tapped into the Soviet Union’s orientalistscholarly establishment inherited from the Russian Empire to advance the argumentthat not only were Iran and the Soviet Union geographically contiguous, they wereboth inheritors of the same Persianate cultural legacy—ironically a legacy that theSoviet Union had actively displaced in favor of Turkic national SSRs. Meanwhile,Iranian leftists were not passive receivers of Soviet propaganda. They exploited VOKSresources to found the Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR andestablish regional branches throughout the country. In particular, Iranian intellectualsfixated on Soviet Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan as evidence of the abundant possibilitiesfor a specifically Persianate articulation of socialist modernity. This article uses bothRussian archival sources and Persian-language periodicals and interview transcripts toexplore this unique confluence of Soviet and Iranian ambitions.

Introduction

In December 1944, Saʿīd Nafīsī, an Iranian intellectual of the constitutionalist gener-ation, was invited to SovietUzbekistan to celebrate the republic’s twentieth anniversary.1

Nafīsī marveled at the technological progress he witnessed, such as airplane factoriestransported to the republic wholesale from the Urals during the war.2 This visit wasone small component of a much broader program of cultural exchange scaled up bythe Soviets during the Allied occupation of Iran beginning in 1941 and the elementsof socialist modernity3 promoted by the Soviet Union enjoyed substantial overlapwith a decades-old project of Iranian cultural reform. For Nafīsī and his audience theSoviet Union’s southern republics constituted a particularly intriguing prism throughwhich to view this proffered vision of modernity. After opening the article he wroteabout the visit asserting the shared Aryan roots of the two peoples, Nafīsī wrote: “it

James Pickett is an InterAsia Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University and Assistant Professor at theUniversity of Pittsburgh. The author wishes to thank Stephen Kotkin, Cyrus Schayegh, and ArtemyKalinovsky for their valuable input.

Iranian Studies, 2015Vol. 48, No. 5, 805–826, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2015.1058639

© 2015 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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has come topass that onemay count [Uzbekistan] as themost complete civilization in theworld today.”4 These were the views of neither an impartial academic nor a hardenedcommunist, and Nafīsī had no formal affiliation with the Tūdah party or any previousIranian communist organization. Rather, he personifies the convergence of a Sovietwartime initiative promoting a new vision of modernity and an Iranian intellectualclass eagerly in search of a path toward modernization that resonated with their specificcultural circumstances.

Leveraging sources from both sides of this encounter, I argue (a) that the scale andintensity of Soviet cultural diplomacy in Iran had little precedent elsewhere in theThirdWorld and was an important component of the USSR’s larger bid for geopoliticalinfluence and (b) that Iranian intellectuals selectively appropriated the resources deployedin this effort and rearticulated the Soviet message in a manner fitting Iran’s own nationalproject. The narrative focuses on the Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with theUSSR,5 an organization formed in 1942 by a group of Iranians in cooperation withthe Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS), initially consideringthe cultural activities in Iran during this period as an early case study of Soviet softpower in the Third World. Soviet cultural outreach, however, was hesitant, haphazard,and often driven by the Society’s Iranian membership and constituency. The secondpart of the essay, therefore, examines how Iranian intellectuals shaped Soviet modernityfor their own purposes, often concentrating their attention on the southern Soviet Social-istRepublics (SSRs) that shared a commonPersianhigh culturewith Iran thereby offeringa particularly poignant vision of what socialism might look like in Iran itself.

The history of Iranian leftism remains murky and fragmented between subfields.Research situated in Iranian studies has focused overwhelmingly on the Tūdah politicalparty, while scholarship emerging from Soviet history has been chiefly concerned withthe Azeri Democratic Party (ADP), though from a strictly analytical standpoint there isno basis for this institutional bifurcation.6 Geopolitically, the academic emphasis on theTūdah and the Azeri Democratic Party is entirely justified. In the mid-1940s theprimary question did not seem to be if Iran would undergo a socialist revolution, butwhether it would be as a unified state or in pieces.7 Indeed, the fact that the Soviet gov-ernment itself was divided and confused on this point played no small role in its ultimatefailure in the Iranian gambit.8 Nevertheless, the emphasis in the literature on the socialistpolitical parties in Iran obscures the broader and more enduring appeal of leftism in thecountry, a story with parallels throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. More gen-erally, therefore, this study can also be considered an early chapter in an emerging historyof Soviet engagement in the Third World during the Cold War.9 The Iranian Societyfor Cultural Relations with the USSR was no exception to the administrative disarray inSoviet policymaking, which allowed ample space for its Iranian constituency to continuea modernizing project initiated decades before the Soviet occupation.

The Cultural Relations Society as a Soviet Cultural–Political Mission

Contemporary scholars have tended to minimize the importance of Soviet culturaloutreach efforts in Iran during the 1940s and early 1950s, arguing that Soviet

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“propaganda” was far inferior to that of the British and Americans.10 However, as Iwill show in this section, the cultural struggle waged by the USSR in Iran was amuch more serious and widespread endeavor than previously believed. VOKS andits Iranian friendship society set up branches and actively recruited members acrossthe Iranian countryside to a degree only possible through the Soviet Union’s positionof regional military supremacy and—alongside the Tūdah and the ADP—constitutedanother pillar of the Soviet struggle for the Iranian political imagination.11

The Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR was formed in the firsthalf of 194212 by twenty-two Iranian leftist intellectuals13 following the Allied inva-sion of Iran and expanded its activity significantly starting in 1944 during the Sovietleadership’s renewed focus on the Iranian question.14 The organization’s dissolutionin 1955 corresponds with the consolidation of power by Muhammad Reza Shah fol-lowing the CIA–royalist coup d’état of August 1953 against Prime Minister Muham-mad Musaddiq. The shah quickly and successfully moved against the Tūdah andestablished a political climate hostile toward leftism. Just like the Soviet organizationVOKS, which was ostensibly a nongovernmental organization independent from theCommunist Party, the Society was likewise entirely Iranian and independent fromVOKS on paper. However, the Society indirectly answered to VOKS, and VOKS ulti-mately answered to a host of patrons in the Soviet government, including the Com-munist Party, Foreign Ministry, and the secret police.15

Prior to World War II, VOKS was primarily engaged with outreach to Europeancountries and its efforts in what were perceived as “eastern” countries was limited—which is not to say absent entirely.16 In 1925, for instance, VOKS hosted exhibitionsof agricultural machinery in Rasht, Bandar Pahlavi, and Tehran, an effort partlydesigned to promote foreign sales.17 During these early decades VOKS generallysent veteran diplomats directly from posts in Europe to Iran to implement programsshowcasing Soviet progress.18 Although VOKS maintained contact with individualIranian intellectuals such as Saʿīd Nafīsī in the 1930s, including official visits to theSoviet Union,19 exchange generally focused on Soviet technical exhibitions held inIran.20 In other words, in the 1920s and 1930s VOKS outreach to Iran was undiffer-entiated from its efforts elsewhere and limited both in scope and ambition.

This all changed with the coordinated Allied invasion of Iran in August of 1941,which allowed the Soviets to promote socialist modernity in Iran on a scale that pre-saged a more concerted struggle for hearts and minds in the Third World during theColdWar.21 The strategy for expansion was straightforward: Iranian leftists founded acentral association (anjuman-i markazī) of the Iranian Society for Cultural Relationswith the USSR under the sponsorship of VOKS—complete with a library, readingroom, radio broadcast, movie theater, Russian language classes, and sub-departmentsfor literature, medicine, science, inter alia22—and then expanded its activity in theyears following 1942 by creating regional branches replicating the features of themother organization in Tehran, which in turn established sub-regional branchesextending out even further into the hinterland. By 1946 there were so many branchesof the Cultural Society that the VOKS commissioner (upolnomochennyi) in Iran, G.M.

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Kalish’ian, was not even certain of the exact count, offering a rough estimate of sixty-three branches in a report to Moscow.23

The urgency and rapidity with which the Cultural Society expanded its reach intothe countryside as the war came to a close in the mid-1940s is striking. Aggressive ter-ritorial expansion was explicitly resolved as one of the Society’s goals during the fourthmeeting of the Society’s managing committee (hayʾat-i mudīra)24 and was soon fol-lowed by the establishment of branches in at least Tabriz, Gurgān, Gīlān (August1944),25 Sāri, Rasht (August 1944),26 Bābul, and Qazvīn. In May 1946 a branchwas opened in Karaj, a major city in northern Iran; in June of the same year, theShiraz and Mashhad branches were opened; in July 1946 in Isfahan; in August1946 a branch was opened in the predominantly Turkmen northeastern city ofGunbad-i Qābūs; and in September 1947 in Kirmānshāh.27 Usually a memberfrom the Tehran branch of the Society, such as Saʿīd Nafīsī or Karīm Kishāvarz,was sent out to the provinces for the inauguration of a regional branch.28 The majorityof these locations are in the north of the country where the Society benefited from themilitary presence of the Red Army, and the few branches opened in the British zonewere generally less successful—though there were exceptions.29 For Isfahan, which layoutside the Soviet zone, reports indicated very active membership, activity, and expan-sion.30 In lieu of the military presence, the Isfahan branch benefited from the USSR’sunusually large consulate presence of more than thirty diplomats.31

The Society was careful to involve the regional civilian or military authorities asmembers on the governing board of the Society branch, which—particularly in thenorthern regions—would not have been difficult. For instance, the Gīlān branchwas formed ostensibly at the invitation of Governor-General Nādir Ārāstah;32

many of the other regional branches, such as Rasht, also seemed to have enjoyedthe favor of the Iranian governor-general.33 Prime Minister Ahmad Qavām al-Salta-nah even served as the honorary president of the Society until he cracked down onthe Tūdah during the Azeri oil crisis in 1946 and was subsequently publiclydeposed from the presidency.34

Once established, the regional branches themselves multiplied into sub-branches,which is probably why VOKS and the Tehran branch of the Society had such a diffi-cult time keeping track of them all. The Gīlān branch of the Society, for instance,inaugurated sub-branches in Lāhījān, Langarūd, Rūdsar, Fūman, and Tālish in1944–45.35 These are not large cities. Fūman’s population, for instance, was under10,000 in 1966 and presumably even smaller in the 1940s.36 The fact that VOKSand the Society nevertheless deemed it desirable to promote Soviet modernity evenin locales where there could not have been much of an intellectual class—ostensiblythe target demographic of VOKS activities—underscores an ambition on the partof both VOKS and Iranian leftists that went beyond propaganda targeted narrowlyat intelligentsia.37

The presidium of the Mashhad branch offers a sense of the sorts of individuals whoparticipated. Those in charge of actually governing the Society were not, for the mostpart, of the proletariat; organizing the working class was left to the Tūdah (whose lea-dership was also mostly intellectual and partially overlapped with that of the Society),

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though blue-collar and even rural types certainly attended the large-scale VOKSexhibitions and programs implemented by the Society for the benefit of the generalpublic and indeed a major goal of Iranian leftists was to make culture accessible tothe masses. Instead, Mashhad presidium members included a scholar, a doctor of alocal hospital, employees of the ministries of Justice and Education, a female kinder-garten teacher, a division commander of the Iranian army, two merchants, and twowriters.38 In June 1946 the Mashhad branch reported 500 Society members;39

Lāhījān, a mere sub-branch of Gīlān, boasted 101 members by November 1944 andcould attract 500 attendees to its public lectures.40 In Tehran the Society drewcrowds of over a thousand.41

VOKS’ own institutional ambiguity in the Soviet hierarchy makes untanglingpower dynamics between Moscow and the Iranian Society for Cultural Relationswith the USSR a murky endeavor. Iranian leftists certainly exerted considerableagency over Society activities and portrayed the relationship with the USSR as oneof equal partners, noting proudly that just as VOKS had a permanent representativein Tehran, the Society had a representative of its own situated in Moscow.42 Yet acloser look at the records reveals that the Society’s independence was a fiction forpublic consumption—just like VOKS’ own status as a nongovernmental body.While the Society emphasized internal financial self-sufficiency based on membershipdues in internal reports,43 internal VOKS correspondence reveals that it directly pro-vided material resources to Society branches.44 The Red Army also provided other lessquantifiable services to bolster the Soviet image, such as setting up a free ambulance inMashhad in 1944.45

There is also evidence of VOKS exerting direct authority over regional Society activi-ties. A memorandum to the VOKS chairman written in May 1946 refers to the activi-ties of four Red Army officers (of Caucasian and Central Asian descent, judging byseveral of the names) in Mashhad: Major Pikulin, Major Bahrami, CaptainUsmanov, and Captain Rizavev. According to the memo, these officers workedunder VOKS auspices to establish a permanent Soviet exhibition; organize Russianlanguage courses; set up the regional Society branch in Mashhad as well as in the neigh-boring Khurasani cities of Qūchān and Bujnūrd; organize meetings with the local intel-ligentsia; and set up the aforementioned ambulance service.46 Naturally, a VOKSofficial sitting in Moscow had an incentive to emphasize the activities of its ownagents in Iran and this does not negate the agency of local Society members and coor-dinating members sent from Tehran, on whom Soviet efforts were dependent. Never-theless, it is telling that VOKS extended a coordinating hand even to mid-level Societyactivities.

Soviet ambitions, however, outstripped their ability to control the activities of theregional branches. Beneath the surface of orderly reports and committee meetingnotes filed by the VOKS and the Society simmers a frustration with an inabilityto regulate or even keep themselves apprised of regional activities. The Society estab-lished more branches than it could effectively manage, particularly after the withdra-wal of the Red Army in May 1946. According to a central committee report,sometime before 1948 the Shiraz and Karaj branches were disbanded entirely and


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the Rasht and Bandar Pahlavi ones were in dire straits, suffering from unspecifiedvexations (tazāyuqāt) and prejudices (tabʿīzāt).47 Some of the branches, such asRasht and Bandar Pahlavi, seemed constantly in a state of crisis, and members ofthe central managing committee were forced to physically travel out to the peripheryrepeatedly to purge a dysfunctional regional directorial board and hold elections fora new one.48 Records from the regional Society boards themselves contain numerousdirectives from Tehran urging them to send more frequent updates and to expandtheir activities.49 When it became clear that there would be no Sovietization of Iranor Iranian Azerbaijan, the Society found itself spread too thin and with dwindlingsupport in both the Soviet and Iranian governments.

The atrophied Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR was officiallydisbanded in 1955—the same year that the last vestiges of the Tūdah were rounded upand imprisoned by the Iranian government or sent into domestic exile. However, theSoviet embassy launched a second cultural journal—Payām-i Navīn—three years laterin cooperation with Muhammad Reza Shah’s recently consolidated nationalist gov-ernment.50 Like its predecessor journal, Payām-i Naw, the title of the new periodicalalso meant “The New Message.” Unlike Payām-i Naw, however, the contents ofPayām-i Navīn were politically benign and perfunctory: a handful of articles abouteveryday life in the Soviet Union coupled with several pieces on Russian andIranian cultural achievements.51 The newly instated editor of Payām-i Navīn,Tīmār Siphahbad Amānallah Jahānbānī, was a member of an old royalist family instaunch support of the Bandar Pahlavis and the fourth page of the issue featured ahalf-page photograph of the shah posing regally with the Soviet ambassador.52

Clearly, Payām-i Navīn was the product of a new phase in Soviet–Iranian relations,one in which the possibility of a Soviet-backed leftist takeover was already a distantmemory and the USSR had accommodated its Iranian policy to playing secondfiddle to the United States.53

The Cultural Relations Society as an Iranian National Project

The Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR has thus far been con-sidered purely as a case study of Soviet cultural outreach, one of many VOKSefforts worldwide. Although the wartime context allowed for an unusually aggressivescope, the Soviet-produced content was in certain respects quite similar to VOKS pro-grams elsewhere, sometimes even recycled from European operations. There was apopular saying in Moscow during the 1940s illustrating the perceived strength ofthe USSR’s position in Iran: “Kuritsa ne ptitsa, Iran ne zagranitsa,” which translatesto “A chicken is not a bird, Iran is not a foreign country.”54 Yet the Iranian contextwas in fact quite foreign to the previous experiences of most Soviet administrators inthe European arena and the reception of these efforts became immersed in a culturalmodernization project ongoing since at least the middle of the nineteenth centurywhen Iranian intellectuals first seized upon Enlightenment thought and orientalistscholarship to invent the idea of an Iranian nation.55

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As shown in the previous section, this particular encounter took place in thecontext of a serious structural power differential, particularly during the years of theSoviet occupation, which poses methodological challenges for analyzing the views ofIranian participants.56 Despite the emphasis Society documents placed on reciprocitybetween Soviet and Iranian participants, the flow of ideas and resources was a one-waystreet. The bottom line is that Iranian intellectuals had little (if any) impact on con-ceptions of socialist modernity in the USSR or other countries, but that does notmean that they were passive receivers.57 Rather, Iranian leftists were active agents inadapting socialist modernity their own preferences and “speaking Bolshevik” whennecessary to take advantage of Soviet resources.58 Having considered Soviet intentions,therefore, the remainder of this essay will explore how Iranian participants went aboutexercising this agency by identifying themes they emphasized, points they ignored, andaspects of their own program that they superimposed wholesale onto the broaderSociety agenda.

In an exhaustive interview for the Oral History Project on the Iranian Left con-ducted in 1997, an aging Buzurg ʿAlavī directly addressed the power disparitybetween the Society’s Iranian membership and their Soviet sponsors. When the inter-viewer noted that many of ʿAlavī’s views conflicted with official Soviet ideology, andasked if members of the Society ever objected to his writing, ʿAlavī responded: “Theyonly paid attention to their own work. Of course, Karīm Kishāvarz read [my work],but he never raised any controversy over it. And I never felt that those in the magazinePayām-i Naw propagandized me.”59 ʿAlavī later conceded that the pro-Soviet editor-ship partially governed the ideas he was able to express in the pages of the journal andjustified his participation: “But I should also say that while I had sincere and deep sym-pathies for this work that I did [for the Society], for me this was not [equivalent] tothe Russians and to Stalin’s atrocities. For me, the Russians were Tolstoy, Chaikovsky,Chekhov, and Dostoevsky. These were the Russians that I loved.”60 ‘Alavī taughthimself to access these works in the original Russian while in prison during RezaShah’s rule.61 Many Iranian intellectuals were well-versed in Russian literature andculture and VOKS presented Russia as “the connecting element (zveno) betweenthe cultures of the East and West, and thus between Iran and the West.”62

Despite this affinity for leftism and Russian culture, ʿAlavī was not ignorant or blaséabout the weighty strings attached to Soviet support, commenting: “Irrespective of[Soviet] atrocities, which I had witnessed since my childhood, I felt a kind of agree-ment with them.”63 Whether or not ʿAlavī was actually aware of Stalin’s purges atthe time,64 his statement, still impassioned even at the end of his life in the 1990s,reveals a deep sympathy with much of what the Soviet alternative offered.65

ʿAlavī and his colleagues had plenty of room to maneuver within the pages ofPayām-i Naw and to focus on those parts of the Soviet alternative with which theyagreed—and the common ground was substantial. In particular, Society memberslike ʿAlavī were interested in a nationalist program of cultural modernization,which was theoretically inimical to transnational socialist solidarity. However,under the VOKS platform of reaching out beyond the communist parties, and inthe context of Soviet wartime support for “national front” communist parties,66


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such an attitude was not only tolerated, but nurtured. Moreover, Iranian intellectualshad by necessity become particularly invested in the cultural component of modern-ization, even at the expense of the political. As a consolation prize for being shut out ofReza Shah’s authoritarian government, Iranians of the constitutionalist generationcontented themselves with modernizing Iranian culture.67

The first (and last) Iranian Writers’ Congress in June 1946 exemplifies the waysSociety members were able to continue their cultural modernization project underthe VOKS umbrella. The conference was organized by the Society and was massivein scale: seventy Iranian writers and an audience of 300 Iranian officials, scientists,and intellectuals attended—including Prime Minister Ahmad Qavvām—as well asVOKS representatives and the Soviet artists Vera Inbar and Alexander Surkov.68

During the opening address, the Iranian Minister of Culture commented, “Thetime has come when this skill [of literature] must be protected by the nation. Thepeople should realize that their political, social and economic life is indebted totheir language and literature.”69 Cultural modernization was felt to have an impor-tance and urgency, with thematic continuity to similar projects in the 1930s, suchas the Society for National Heritage.70 The Writers’ Congress enjoyed such resound-ing popularity among Iranian intellectuals that it was replicated in the regionalbranches such as Mashhad.71

It comes as no surprise that so many Iranian intellectuals took to the Soviet-sponsored Society with such gusto. Iranian nationalists and modernizers haddepended on foreign scholarship and philosophy from their movement’s very incep-tion, drawing liberally from Enlightenment ideals about progress and civilizationand post-Enlightenment Aryan race theory as early as the mid-nineteenth century.Many of these early Iranian nationalist intellectuals approached European thoughtthrough a Russian lens, especially via connections in the Russian Caucasus.72 More-over, there was precedent in Iran of nationalists adjusting their political bearings totake advantage of Soviet resources. During the aftermath of World War I, KūchakKhān was able to reposition his Jangali rebellion as a communist revolution to gainBolshevik military support.73 The reappearance of Soviet forces in northern Iranduring World War II therefore stands as a continuation of this interactive process.74

The advantages of Soviet collaboration went beyond the financial and organiz-ational resources provided by VOKS. In addition to reforming language andwriting, the topic of interest in the Writers’ Congress, Iranian intellectuals werekeenly interested in rearticulating the country’s Persian heritage in a manner moreuseful for the needs of a modern nation-state, an objective they pursued by integratingEuropean scholarship with the Shāhnāmah, for instance, and building new monu-ments to national heroes.75 Iranian intellectuals seized upon the Society’s connectionswith the USSR to obtain raw material in the form of Russian and Soviet orientalistscholarship, which they then discussed and rearticulated in Society publicationssuch as Payām-i Naw. In 1946, for instance, ʿAlī Lutfī requested materials topublish a work about famous Soviet orientalists, such as Barthold, Semenov, Krach-kovskii, and many others.76 In this manner Soviet orientalist scholarship found itsway into local Iranian publications such as Saʿīd Nafīsī’s exhaustive volume on the

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life and works of Rūdakī, which included references to Barthold, and a SogdiiskiiSbornik published in Leningrad.77 Payām-i Naw devoted many an article to analysesby Soviet experts of Iranian art and archaeology, thus amalgamating their scholarshipwith other works of western Iranology that Iranian intellectuals had been devoting tothe nationalist cause for decades.78

Cultural reform, therefore, constituted a domain of serendipitous overlap betweenthe respective agendas of VOKS and Iranian intellectuals. However, the connectionsSociety participants drew between the southern SSRs and Iran were not anticipated bySoviet administrators. It was not mere geographical proximity that prompted Iranianparticipants to request materials and focus Society publications on Soviet Uzbekistan,Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan. Before the twentieth century a cohesive zone of “Persia-nate” high culture stretched far beyond the boundaries of the modern Iraniannation-state and permeated vast stretches of the territory that would become theSoviet Union.79 As part of this Persianate sphere, the southern domains reconqueredby the Bolsheviks in 1919–20 (subsequently constituting the Azeri, Uzbek, Turkmen,and Tajik SSRs) were home to cultural and political traditions shared across Iran,Afghanistan, western China, and northern India. Thus when Saʿīd Nafīsī’s own ances-tor moved from his native Kirmān to serve as a doctor in Samarqand in the fifteenthcentury, he did so without crossing any meaningful cultural boundaries.80

The disparities between Iran and the Soviet Union encountered by Nafīsī himself,however, were far more substantial than those encountered by his forebear, promptinghim to latch on to the lingering Persianate elements that remained manifest. In hisaccount of his trip to Uzbekistan, Saʿīd Nafīsī noted that everyone he encounteredon the streets of Tashkent could speak to him in Persian and that the official“Uzbek language is the same as the Turkish language Chagatai,81 which has held animportant place in Iranian literature since the 9th century… For those people whowork in Iranian literature this language is not foreign.”82 In a similar vein, BuzurgʿAlavī wrote in his travel account Uzbak-hā (“The Uzbeks”) that only in the lastseveral centuries did relations between Central Asians and Iranians become distantand that: “a spiritual, but hidden, connection between our country and the peopleof Uzbekistan was maintained through poetry and the great figures of our twopeoples and the men of science and literature of Iran have been eternally loved andrespected in this land [Uzbekistan].”83 Nafīsī articulated this connection in a morecerebral fashion, recalling for his readers the ancient Sogdian inhabitants of CentralAsia and their place amongst the larger family of Iranian peoples, then movedforward in time to describe the Sufi orders and empires such as the Samanids basedin Central Asia but extending into Iran.84

First-hand visits such as these to the southern SSRs made a tremendous impressionon Iranian delegates. Their experiences enjoyed substantial mileage back in Iran as theyspoke at public lectures held in the various Society branches, transmitted them overthe radio airwaves, and wrote about them in the local newspapers and other publi-cations disseminated more widely.85 Society participants supplemented their personalimpressions through documentaries and lecture series produced by VOKS in theSoviet Union. For instance, the House of Culture in Tehran screened films on


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topics such as “Industry and Transport in Azerbaijan after 25 Years” targeted atIranian engineers, a radio broadcast detailing the exhuming of Tamerlane’s body inUzbekistan, and an exhibition about “Architecture of the Soviet East.”86 Stalin’swartime religious concessions87 were even turned into an asset, showcasing CentralAsian Islam in documentaries to reassure Iranians that religion in some form wasnot necessarily incompatible with Soviet modernity.88 Although VOKS sent stockmaterials to Iran, it was also responsive to demands by the Iranian participants,which in turn led to an emphasis on the Persianate SSRs.89

To an Iranian audience, commonalities between the USSR and Iran between theancient buildings depicted in the aforementioned architectural exhibition, for instance,were self-evident. SaʿīdNafīsī visited Soviet Azerbaijan to celebrate the 1,000-year anni-versary of Firdawsī and during his tour of Tashkent he attended an opera of “Laylā vaMajnūn,” both of which are so ingrained in Iranian culture that they required no intro-duction.90 The realization that the Central Asian and Caucasian Soviet republics werenot so different culturally from Iran made the level of industrialization and materialadvancement they encountered there awe-inspiring, even while recognizing traces ofpoverty and backwardness that Soviet authorities could not fully conceal.91 In theminds of Iranians, Turkestan was a backwater humbled by Nadir Shah in the eight-eenth century and conquered by Russia almost effortlessly in the nineteenth century,but under the Soviet development programTashkent could be proffered to Iranian visi-tors as a showpiece of modernization little more than two decades after the OctoberRevolution. Karīm Kishāvarz summed up this revolutionary change after his visit toUzbekistan in December 1945, thus: “Uzbekistan, a backward [country] thirty yearsago, today is an advanced and civilized country.”92Wrapped up in a very particular rhe-torical guise, Society members showed that Persianate culture—to them Iranianculture—had in effect already been Sovietized with breathtaking results.

Shared Persianate civilization, therefore, provided a convenient prism throughwhich Iranian intellectuals could refract Soviet civilization into a form that seemedless foreign and more attainable to a local audience. This set the Iranian arenaapart from the Arab world, for instance, since there were no Arab Soviet republicswith similar cultural artifacts to serve this purpose.93 By 1940, however, this Persianatezone was a thing of the past and the process by which it was displaced was very muchat odds with the ways the Society opportunistically invoked it. Part and parcel of theIranian cultural modernization project entailed seizing elements of the Persianate pastand rearticulating them as something particularly Iranian, a concession that neighbor-ing Turkic and Indian states pursuing their own cultural reform projects were all toohappy to make. Logically there is a deep contradiction between using the Society toassert the Iranian-ness of Firdawsī on the one hand while simultaneously highlightingan Azeri commemoration of his birthday on the other. And yet that is precisely whatSociety participants did.

At times such inherent contradictions bubbled to the surface. During a visit toUzbekistan, Buzurg ʿAlavīmade it clear that when push came to shove Iranian nation-alism came first: “despite being drunk many evenings, I wrote and took many notes… Iremember very well that while I was in Tashkent the Uzbeks put on a play. In the play

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two Iranians in Achaemenid94 costume and language had been humiliated. I stood andwalked out.”95 The play was based on Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah, an epic revered byUzbeks and Iranians alike, which endowed the event with special relevance toʿAlavī and his colleagues.96 Nevertheless, the cultural projects invoking the Shāhnā-mah ultimately partitioned the epic’s heroes along ethnic lines, a perfect metaphorfor the emergence of nationalities in the twentieth-century Persianate space.

The ethnic conflict ʿAlavī perceived in the Shāhnāmah was not reducible to theprojections of an Iranian patriot. Rather, parallel processes of cultural reform in theSoviet Union had similarly reprocessed elements of Persianate high culture anddivided it along ethnic lines. Within mere decades an alliance of conveniencebetween Bolsheviks and Central Asian nationalist reformers (“Jadids”) had selectivelyappropriated the elements of Persianate heritage deemed adequately Turkic and jetti-soned much of the rest.97 Almost overnight the flowery language of Saʿdī and Hāfizbecame instead associated with the language of the mountainous countryside andtheir memory as national symbols allocated to the Tajik SSR.98 Nevertheless, manycultural symbols and their interpretation were contested and claimed by multipleSSRs. This cultural battleground ʿAlavī stumbled into made perfect sense from hiscontext of Iranian cultural modernization with an inverse goal to that of theTurkic republics of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and an agenda incompetition with the Tajik SSR.

Despite colorful examples such as that of ʿAlavī illustrating the apparent contradic-tions inherent in the ways the Society leveraged the Persianate SSRs, this paradoxseemed to be one Iranian intellectuals were content to live with. Nationalist culturalreform efforts are by nature complex and theirs was neither the first nor the last toignore inherent ironies when convenient.99 Emphasizing shared heritage was ameans to the more important end of developing Iranian national culture. In fact,the essence of this contradiction was even productive from the Iranian point ofview. The parallel processes of cultural reform in the Soviet Union served as a particu-larly useful and relevant model for Iranian Society participants precisely because somany individual facets of Persianate culture had already been Sovietized. True,under scrutiny such an end worked against any notion of friendship based oncommon Persianate heritage, but developing that heritage further or invoking it inany conscious sense as an alternative identity to nationalities was never part of theagenda either in Iran or the Soviet Union. In the USSR, solidarity was to be achievedthrough the Soviet content of the reform agenda, not the cultural form.100

Iranian intellectuals looked to the Soviet Union’s southern republics not only as asource of orientalist raw materials or as examples of material advancement in culturallyanalogous societies, but also as a model for how that cultural modernization—andeven Sovietization101—might be carried out. Evgenii Nikanorovich Pavlovskii, a zool-ogist and entomologist who served in the presidium of the Tajik branch of the SovietAcademy of Sciences, visited Iran under VOKS auspices and upon the urging of anIranian colleague composed a report on contemporary Tajik writers and their litera-ture as well as materials for a Soviet–Iranian journal (almost certainly Payām-i Naw),including Tajik proverbs, research on the Sogdian language, Persian manuscripts held


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in the Stalinabad (today Dushanbe) State Library, as well as details on contemporarytheater, education, and agriculture.102 While Pavlovskii’s Iranian liaison was interestedin better understanding the Soviet model of reforming culture, other Society memberswould even experiment with applying it. In 1945 one Mahmūd Muqaddam and aworking group of fifteen of his colleagues detailed a hypothetical conversion ofFarsi from the Arabic script to a new alphabet and requested historical materials onthe development of the Russian alphabet for comparison, echoing similar script con-versions in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus.103

Occasionally VOKS liaisons took this process a step further and worked directlywith Iranians to apply the Soviet model of cultural reform directly to the Iraniancase. In July 1943 Leon Knipper put on a concert in Tehran involving local musiciansto great fanfare, with Iranian politicians of all stripes in attendance, including theshah’s family.104 Just as in Soviet Central Asia, “modernizing” Iranian music meantsynthesizing it with European traditions. Knipper blended Iranian musical themesinto a composition he named “Maku” performed by a European-style orchestra,noting in his correspondence with Kemenev (VOKS chairman) that “in order notto cede to the English the right of priority in the conquest [zavoevanie] of such aserious and mass part of culture for Iran, such as music, it behooves us to engageseriously with issues of Russian and Soviet influence on the development—if not tosay inception—of professional music in the country.”105 Knipper’s characterizationof the necessity for reforming music echoed Saʿīd Nafīsī’s description of similar spec-tacles in Tashkent, which Nafīsī considered as progress (pīshraft) and advancement(taraqiyyāt), but the source of Knipper’s views was wholly outside Iran.106 Knipperwas involved in cultural projects in Tajikistan during the 1930s, during which timehe collected local Pamiri folklore to compose “Tajik” national suites such as “Vanj,”“Stalinabad,” and “Bakhio Bolo,” all of which served as direct predecessors to“Maku.”107 The parallel between cultural Sovietization efforts in Iran and the Cauca-sian and Central Asian SSRs is no coincidence: Knipper explicitly conflated the two,viewing his contributions to Iranian cultural development as a continuation of thesame ongoing projects in the Soviet Union.108

Iranian participants were primarily interested in cultural reform as a component oftheir broader national project. Cultural Sovietization differed from the Iranian processof previous decades, however, in that it simultaneously integrated those nationalitiesinto something larger and distinctly Soviet. Iranian intellectuals never explicitlysigned on to a project of cultural Sovietization (and indeed even in the SovietEmpire itself the process had no “master plan”), but in practice they dabbled in cul-tural experiments that bore many of its characteristics. The leftist sympathies ofIranian intellectuals who participated in the Society ran deep and so even thenotion of integrating Iranian culture into the broader collage of Soviet nations wasviewed as compatible and even desirable, especially in the early 1940s.109 For instance,Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī, an Iranian émigré to the Tajik SSR,110 translated the poetry ofthe famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin for the pages of Payām-i Naw, therebyplacing the Russian figure alongside Iranian, Central Asian culture—all now underthe Soviet rubric.111 In February 1945 Saʿīd Nafīsī spontaneously proposed to

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compose a “Shāhnāmah for the heroes of Stalingrad” to commemorate Soviet warriorsin the classical Persian prose of Firdawsī, which stands as an even more poignantexperiment in cultural Sovietization.112

The Soviet and Iranian leftist visions of modernity overlapped more than theydiverged and Iranian intellectuals found ample room to pursue their culturalreform project. VOKS provided funds, raw materials, and a sufficiently autonomousoperating environment that Iranian participants shifted the emphasis to the southern,Persianate SSRs that seemed most familiar to them, even while simultaneously pursu-ing a nationalist agenda so similar to Soviet precedent that it at times even bled intocultural Sovietization. Ultimately, however, the attempt to integrate northern Iranpolitically and economically into the broader whole—a fate experienced previouslyby the neighboring SSRs—damaged irreparably this joint exploration of socialist mod-ernity in a Persianate context. Likewise, when Stalin revealed his true designs onIranian oil and—even more critically—the fate of southern Azerbaijan, manyIranian leftists paid heed and extricated themselves from the Soviet embrace.

Conclusion

As the post-ColdWar literature has been so eager to emphasize, the Soviet endeavor inIran was in many ways a crushing failure. The Tūdah party was driven underground,the Azeri Democratic Party was liquidated in northern Iran, and the Soviet govern-ment did not even get an oil concession for its troubles. And yet the IranianSociety for Cultural Relations with the USSR was a harbinger of a much broaderand more sustained ideological struggle for the Third World during the Cold Warthat escalated in subsequent decades. On the Iranian side, leftism established deeperroots than the immediate aftermath of World War II would suggest. The Allied occu-pation of Iran fomented the most rapid socio-political transformation the country hadseen since the Constitutional Revolution.113 As Stephanie Cronin has pointed out,ideas and values from this formative period persisted beyond 1953.114 The landreform of Muhammad Reza Shah’s White Revolution of the 1960s was designed inpart to placate and outmaneuver left-leaning segments of the population. The 1979Islamic Revolution initially constituted an alliance between the clergy and Iranian lef-tists before the former moved decisively against the latter. While the history of Iranianleftism reaches back decades earlier than the 1940s, the unprecedented political andcultural opening brought by the Allied occupation and its aftermath nurtured themto their zenith. The Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR was onlyone facet of this unique wartime conjuncture, but it was nevertheless indicative ofmuch larger processes at work.

Notes

1. Nafīsī, “Nuh rūz dar Tashkand,” 7, 61. During the 1930s Nafīsī had visited Moscow and the Cau-casus, but this was his first trip to Uzbekistan.

2. Ibid., 62.


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3. The proliferation of value-laden definitions accorded to the term “modernity” has led some scholarsto question the utility of the term altogether. “Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity.’” Thispaper takes a pluralistic approach, which has the drawback of implicitly according precedence towestern ideas of progress—industrialization, urbanization, the welfare state—but at least allowsfor the possibility of varying visions of the ideal society and multiple prescriptions for howachieve it. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 114. The Soviet Union offered just such a vision ofan alternative progressive modernity, characterized by Kotkin as “on the one hand, the deploymentof a coordinated, purposeful economy, within which small, supposedly inefficient producers werereplaced by larger and therefore mightier ones; and, on the other, the formation of a governmentof national unity that was above the seeming paralysis of parliamentary rule and unequivocally dedi-cated to the advancement of the commonwealth.” Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 20.

4. Nafīsī, “Nuh rūz dar Tashkand,” 61.5. Farsi: Anjuman-i Ravābit-i Farhangī-yi Irān bā Ittihādi Jamāhīr-i Sūsīālīstī-yi Shuravī; Russian:

Iranskoe Obshchestvo Kul’turnoi Sviazi s SSSR.6. In his Iran between Two Revolutions Ervand Abrahamian portrays the Tūdah as a leftist unity party

with an origin rooted exclusively in Iran’s unique national circumstances, not the Soviet embassy(see p. 304). Using sources from the Soviet side of the divide, Cosroe Chaqueri dissents,however, describing Tūdah as “a creation of the Soviet state, through the agency of its RedArmy, thus demolishing the thesis that this organization was a genuine party established indepen-dently by the progressive elements who had been released from Reza Shah’s jails on the morrow ofIran’s occupation by the Allies.” Chaqeuri, “Did the Soviets Play a Role,” 523. And while the Sovietrole in organizing the ADP is indisputable, it could not have been possible without genuine ethnicdiscontent with Iranian rule in southern Azerbaijan. See Gasanly, SSSR–Iran.

7. During the initial invasion the Soviets sent in 120,000 troops and 1,000 tanks, as against 37,000Iranian troops in northern Iran. Fernande Scheid Raine writes: “The size and power of theSoviet forces launched into Iran was entirely incommensurate both with the limited ‘police-action’ they claimed to be fulfilling and with the resistance they expected to encounter.” Raine,“Stalin, Bagirov, and Soviet Politics,” 100.

8. According to Raine, even the Soviet diplomatic corps in Tehran (who also, incidentally, were theofficials most intimately involved with the cultural society discussed in this paper) were not evenaware of the Soviet involvement in the Azeri separatist movement and believed that the unrestthere arose from genuine indigenous unrest.

9. In addition to reviewing this emerging body of work, David Engerman calls for “More bilateralaccounts that use Soviet archives along with published and archival documents from selectedThird World countries would be essential building blocks for a broader history of U.S.–ThirdWorld relations,” which is precisely what this article strives to do. Engerman, “The SecondWorld’s Third World,” 209.

10. Raine, “Stalin, Bagirov, and Soviet Politics,” 204–5. Raine’s source here is the composer Lev Kon-stantinovich Knipper, who was not overly enamored with Soviet society. According to SydneyMorrell, who met Knipper while in Tehran, “The invitation to dinner was accompanied by theurgent request not to mention it to anyone else as the eyes and ears of the OGPU (Obyedinyonnoyegosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye in Russian or Joint State Political Directorate in trans-lation) were everywhere and Knipper would certainly get into trouble if it became known to hisofficials that he was meeting ‘foreigners.’ Apparently Knipper had a reputation with the OGPUof deriving too much enjoyment from his trips to ‘capitalist’ countries and this was the first occasionfor some time that he had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union.” Morrell, Spheres of Influence,56–7.

11. As occupied territory, Iran during this period is in some senses comparable to the programsimplemented in Germany and elsewhere in eastern Europe, where the Soviet presence cultivateda new cadre of intellectuals who would implement Sovietization programs on their own initiative.Naimark, The Russians in Germany. While the Red Army presence did abet the Society’s efforts (seebelow), administratively the efforts of VOKS were separate from the military to the point of redun-

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dancy; the Azeri Democratic Party, on the other hand, was more closely connected to both the mili-tary and secret police and can be more comfortably juxtaposed with Soviet-occupied eastern Europe.

12. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) 5283 O 19 D 316: Otchet Gilianskogofiliala iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s sovetskim soiuzom, p. 2.

13. As will be addressed in the next section, “leftism” only inadequately captures the diversity of out-looks and ideologies encompassed by the term. Nonetheless, “Marxism and socialism, in one versionor another, were dominant among the left between the 1940s and 1970s and almost monopolizedthe axiology of the ’intellectual element.” See Gheissari, Iranian Intellectuals, 70.

14. “During 1942 and 1943… Stalin’s mind was not focused on Iran. In fact, he tried to avoid thinkingabout Iran entirely” (Raine, “Stalin, Bagirov, and Soviet Politics,” 12).

15. Michael David-Fox writes “VOKS became something of an orphan within the Soviet bureaucratichierarchy, since it was deprived of a single oversight agency.” David-Fox, Showcasing the GreatExperiment, 42.

16. The first head of VOKS, O.D. Kameneva, “consistently expressed the belief that Soviets badlyneeded a clearer picture of the outside world and especially the advanced Western countries—for even as Kameneva’s initiatives gradually became global they remained overwhelmingly orientedtoward Western Europe and the United States.” Ibid., 37.

17. GARF F 5283 O 4 D 4: Perepiska s NKID o peredache del VOKSa po voprosam organizatsii tamraboty, p 2.

18. For instance, Ol’ga Davydovna Kameneva—VOKS’ founder who also happened to be Leon Trots-ky’s sister and Lev Kamenev’s wife—wrote to Comrade Iurenev in December 1925 that having suc-cessfully completed VOKS work in Italy and Czechoslovakia he was ideally suited to replicate it inIran. GARF F 5283 O 4 D 4, p. 5.

19. GARF F 5283 O 4 D 110: Perepiska s NKID po povodu Iranskogo akademika Said Nafisa i dr.,pp. 4–5. Nafīsī was particularly interested in meeting with Russian orientalists and viewingPersian manuscripts, relationships that presaged the tenor of VOKS’ later approach to Iran.

20. GARF F 5283 O 4 D 241: Perepiska s Upolnomochennom VOKSa v Irane 1936–37.21. The decolonization of much of Africa and South Asia after World War II heralded a new era of

Soviet outreach to the Third World—one that was eventually contested by the Chinese alternative.For a discussion of the contours of the Cold War environment not reducible to Soviet–Americanrivalry, see Duara, “The Cold War as a Historical Period.”

22. The central branch of the Society in Tehran had eleven commissions in total, but they were not allnecessarily replicated in the regional branches. The full list is: literature, medicine, science, agricul-ture, teaching and upbringing (āmūzish va parvarī), chess, fine arts, music, athletics, women, and theSociety’s journal Payām-i Naw. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogoobshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR, na iranskom iazike 1948, p. 4.

23. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 320: Perepiska s Upolnomochennym VOKS v Irane 1945–46, “Zamechaniiao ottsenka po ochetu Upolnomochennogo VOKS v Irane za avgust mesiats 1946 goda,” pp. 64–5.

24. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi sSSSR, na iranskom iazike 1948, p. 24.

25. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 316: Otchet Gilianskogo filiala iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi ssovetskim soiuzom, p. 3.

26. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 307: Protokoly 1-ogo zasedaniia Pravleniia Reshtskogo filiala Iranskogoobshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR August 1944, p. 2.

27. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi sSSSR, na iranskom iazike 1948, pp. 24–9.

28. For instance, Nafisi was tasked with the establishment of the Kirmanshah branch and Kishavarz forKaraj. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazis SSSR, na iranskom iazike 1948, pp. 24–29.

29. In the southern city of Ahvāz, which was decidedly Anglophile, the Society did not bother to open abranch, though VOKS distributed English-language materials amongst the American and British


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soldiers, as well as English-speaking Iranian intellectuals. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 286: Correspon-dence with Akhvaz consulate, pp. 63–4.


31. Morrell, Spheres of Influence, 65.32. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 316: Otchet Gilianskogo filiala iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s

sovetskim soiuzom, p. 3.33. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 307: Protokoly 1-ogo zasedaniia Pravleniia Reshtskogo filiala Iranskogo

obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR August 1944, p. 2.34. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s

SSSR, na iranskom iazike 1948, p. 18; “Guzārish-i Anjuman,” Payām-i Naw 4, no. 1 (Farvardīn1327/ March 1948), pp. 117–18. The Tūdah enjoyed a tacit alliance with Qavām—includingimportant ministry posts—until he moved against them in October 1946. Qavām’s withdrawalof support from the Tūdah came just months after the Soviet withdrawal of troops in May1946. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 305–9.

35. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 316: Organizatsiia filialov Iranskogo Obshchestva Kul’turnoi Sviazi s SSSR,pp. 20–30.

36. Marcel Bazin, “Fūman,” Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 10 (2000): 227–228.37. There was even a sense of competition between the sub-regional branches. Alī Tabasemī, director of

a local school in Fūman, noted in a speech to other members of the Society that even though theFūman branch was opened later than the others he believed that his sub-branch could surpass theothers through sheer strength of effort. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 316: Otchet Gilianskogo filiala irans-kogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s sovetskim soiuzom, p. 27.

38. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 333: Prizidiumu Iranskogo Obshchestva Kul’turnoi Sviazi c SovetskimSoiuzom, p. 17.

39. Ibid., p. 18.40. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 316: Organizatsiia filialov Iranskogo Obshchestva Kul’turnoi Sviazi s SSSR,

p. 20.41. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 320: Perepiska s Upolnomochennym VOKS v Irane 1945–46, p. 55.42. In 1946 (at least) the Society’s representative in Moscow was Habīb Allah Darī. GARF F 5283 O 19

D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR, na iranskom iazike1948, p. 3.


44. For instance, VOKS purchased film projection equipment for a House of Culture in Mashhad.GARF F 5283 O 19 D 333: Perepiska s Upol’nomochennym VOKS v Irane o deiatel’nosti Mesh-khedskogo i Khorasanskogo otdelenii Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR 1946, p. 23.

45. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 333: Otchet o deiatel’nosti Meshkhedskogo Otdeleniia Obshchestva Kul’-turnoi Sviazi Irana c SSSR v period s 15.YIII.1944–I.II.1945, p. 35.

46. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 333: Perepiska s Upol’nomochennym VOKS v Irane o deiatel’nosti Mesh-khedskogo i Khorasanskogo otdelenii Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR 1946, p. 31.

47. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi sSSSR, na iranskom iazike 1948, pp. 25–6.

48. Ibid., p. 30.49. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 306: Protokoly zasedanii Pravleniia Tavriskogo filiala Iranskogo obshchestva

1944–45, p. 62.50. Jahānbānī, “Aghāz-i Payām-i Navīn.” This change coincided with the dissolution of VOKS and

reincarnation as the Soiuz sovetskikh obshchestv druzhby i kul’turnoi sviazi s zarubezhnymi stra-nami.

51. For instance: “The Celebration of 700 Years of S’adi’s Gulistan” and the poem “Salutations toPushkin,” both in the first issue of Payām-i Navīn. Payām-i Navīn 1, no. 1 (Mihr 1337/Septem-ber–October 1958).

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52. Jahānbānī, “Aghāz-i Payām-i Navīn,” 4.53. The founding of Payām-i Navīn also coincided with a rapprochement between Iran and the USSR

following the shah’s visit to the USSR in 1958 designed to put pressure on the United States.54. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 294: Materialy kompozitora L. Knipper v Irane 1943–46, p. 28.55. Marashi, Nationalizing Iran; Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation.56. The tendency in the secondary literature (particularly on the Tūdah) is to downplay the Soviet

hand in Iranian affairs and emphasize Iranian authenticity. Afshin Matin-Asgari is worthquoting at some length on this point: “In some sense, it is impossible to conceptualize Iranian mod-ernity outside the parameters shaped by both Russo-Soviet, as well as Euro-American models andinfluences. Here, I am taking issue with the nationalist commitment to Iranian authenticity…mybasic argument is that during the past two centuries, Russian and Soviet influences, including con-scious implementation of these models by elites and governments, has been much more significantin shaping modern Iranian history than what mainstream academic scholarship, influenced bynationalist and Cold War paradigms, had conceded.” Matin-Asgari, “Iran and Russia,” 1.

57. This section takes Cyrus Schayegh’s approach from the context of the Iranian appropriation ofwestern medical science as a model: “Thus, it is argued that Western sciences were not simply intro-duced willy-nilly into colonial areas, but assumed forms that emerged in interplay with a ‘receiver,’who was not a ‘passive recipient, but rather an active transformer’.” Schayegh,Who is Knowledgeableis Strong, 4.

58. As Stephen Kotkin has shown, even seemingly distinct paradigms, such as nationality, were articu-lated through the prism of socialism in the Soviet Union; Iranian leftists did the same, though underless scrutiny and with greater room to maneuver. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 221–2.

59. Ahmadī, Khātirāt-i Buzurg ʿAlavī, 264.60. “This magazine [Payām-i Naw] was the sort that sometimes did not match exactly my own predi-

lections, but we published it for the benefit of the managing board and for the benefit of theSoviets.” Ahmadi, Khātirāt-i Buzurg ʿAlavī, 266.

61. Ahmadi, Khātirāt-i Buzurg ʿAlavī, 266.62. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 316: Otchet o rabote filiala Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi v

Giliane, p. 1. This affinity for Russian literature dates at least back to Mīrzā Fath ʿAlī Ākhūndzādah(1812–78), was so enamored with the poetry of Alexander Pushkin that he wrote an elegy in Persianupon the Russian littérateur’s death. Marashi, Nationalizing Iran, 66–7.

63. Ahmadī, Khātirāt-i Buzurg ʿAlavī, 267.64. Iranian communist refugees from the Bandar Pahlavi crackdown were among the victims of the

purges of the 1930s. According to Chaqueri, the Soviet Union made an active effort to prevent sur-viving Iranian communists from returning to Iran for fear that they might inform leftists there ofthe first-hand realities of life in the USSR and the disappearance of their comrades. Chaqueri, “Didthe Soviets Play a Role,” 512, 524.

65. Western scholars have often viewed the Iranian leftists’ alliance with the Soviet Union as the causeof its “failure.” See, for instance: Halliday, “The Iranian Left in International Perspective,” 20, 34.However, Soviet illiberalism is more of a problem for western scholars than it was for Iranian lef-tists. As Stephen Kotkin writes, “Like Nazism (and to a lesser extent, Italian fascism), the SovietUnion offered an internationally popular form of illiberal modernity that claimed to transcend par-liamentarism.” Kotkin, “Modern Times,” 160.

66. The nationalist, uniquely Iranian element of the Tūdah, for instance, in fact fit perfectly withStalin’s decision to promote broad national coalitions between workers, the petit bourgeoisie, intel-lectuals, and peasants, to secure international support for the Soviet war effort. This policy emergedin 1941 and constituted a sharp break with that of the 1930s, which emphasized stricter socialistinternationalism. Mark, “Revolution by Degrees.”

67. Grigor, “Recultivating ‘Good Taste,’” 18.68. ‘Alavī, “The First Iranian Writers Congress, 1946,” 8. Originally published in Payam-i Naw.69. Ibid., 8.


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70. Grigor, “Recultivating ‘Good Taste.’” For instance, later in the conference, ʿAlavī interjected in frus-tration: “Most important of all is that the Congress must reach a conclusion about the future ofpoetry and prose, specifying the goals of Iranian literature. Since the world situation has changedand most readers of poets’ and writers’ works are people from the oppressed classes, literarypeople should have more contact with them and understand their lives.” ‘Alavī, “The FirstIranian Writers Congress, 1946,” 21.

71. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 333: Perepiska s Upol’nomochennym VOKS v Irane o deiatel’nosti Mesh-khedskogo i Khorasanskogo otdelenii Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR 1946, Infor-matsiia o pervoi konferentsii poetov i pisatelei Khorasana, p. 10.

72. In the nineteenth century the pioneering nationalist Mīrzā Fath ʿAlī Ākhūnd’zādah approached allEuropean scholarship solely through Russian, and in the twentieth century Hasan Pīrnāyā was edu-cated in Russia before going on to write histories valorizing classical “Iranian” dynasties. Vaziri, Iranas Imagined Nation, 157; Marashi, Nationalizing Iran, 68.

73. Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran.74. The Jangali rebellion is never explicitly referenced or invoked in Iranian or Soviet sources con-

sidered for this article, even in files specifically relating to Gīlān. This omission is probably aresult of the Stalinist portrayal of Kuchek Khan as a bourgeois foreign stooge, an interpretationemerging from the ultimate Soviet military withdrawal from Iran and accommodation with thenationalist government. Ibid., 120.

75. Grigor, “Recultivating ‘Good Taste.’” As Mostafa Vaziri has demonstrated, there was nothingnatural about attaching classical empires such as the Achaemenids or Sasanians to either themodern territory of Iran or the idea of an Iranian people. Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation.

76. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 320: Perepiska s Upolnomochennym VOKS v Irane 1945–46, p. 89.77. In a sense, then, the Soviet–Iranian cultural exchange came full circle since Rūdakī stands as the only

“great” Iranian poet to be born on the soil of what is now Tajikistan (in a village not far from Pen-jikent, though he soon migrated to Bukhara). Nafīsī, Muhīt-i zindagī va ahvāl va ashʿār-i Rūdakī.Soviet orientalists also used VOKS’ connections with the Iranian academic establishment as anopportunity to obtain rare and new Iranian publications and data on cultural developments suchas a proposed reform to the Iranian calendar by the parliament (the Majlis) in 1946. F 5283 O19 D 333: Perepiska s Upol’nomochennym VOKS v Irane o deiatel’nosti Meshkhedskogo i Khor-asanskogo otdelenii Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR, 10 July 1946 letter from assistantdirector of VOKS eastern bureau to Kalish’ian, p. 24. Soviet orientalists requested, for instance, anedition of the history of Bayhaqi, a Persian translation of Tabari, various versions of the Shāhnāmah,etc. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 303: Perepiska s Iranskimobshchestvom kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR, p. 16.

78. “Kungrah-i Sanāʿī-yi Īrān dar Linīngrād” [The Congress of Iranian Art Works in Leningrad],Payām-i Naw 1, no. 2 (Azar Māh 1324/November–December 1945): 107. In the previouscentury, Iranian intellectuals delved into European orientalist scholarship to inform their projectsof national cultural reform. Marashi, Nationalizing Iran, 55.

79. “Persianate” is a term coined by Marshall Hodgson to untie the concept from the Iranian statebecause many of the contributors to this culture did not live in Iran and were not ethnicallyIranian. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. Robert Canfield prefers the term “ecumene” to “culturalarea” when describing the Persianate space, arguing that “‘ecumene’ suggests a historically perpetu-ated complex of meaningful forms—a ‘world’ … of shared understandings.” Canfield, Turko-Persiain Historical Perspective, xiii.

80. Burhān al-Dīn Nafīs was invited to Samarqand by the Timurid ruler Ulugh Bīk. Giunashvili, “SaidNafisi,” 52.

81. By referring to Chagatai as “old Uzbek”Nafīsī adopted the Soviet party line in this regard; Chagataiwas the literary Turkic language of the Chaghatai khanate and was distinct from the colloquialdialect of Turki that was eventually standardized into Uzbek. However, Nafīsī ‘s broader pitchremains valid.

82. Nafīsī, “Nuh rūz dar Tashkand,” 61. Naturally, Nafīsī’s claim should be treated with some skepti-cism. Nevertheless, even today some elderly individuals educated in the madrasas still functioning in

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the 1920s can quote Persian poetry from their youth, so authorities would certainly not have had towork overtime to find Persian speakers to send in Nafīsī’s direction.

83. Buzurg ʿAlavī, read Uzbak-hā: ravandī dar farhang va jāmi ʿahshināsī-yi mardum-i Ittihad-iJamāhīr-i Shuravī-yi Sūsīyālīstī (publication information not listed, but concerns his 1948 visitto Uzbekistan), 1.

84. Despite his emphasis on history, Nafīsī, like ʿAlavī, intimated a connection between Uzbeks andIranians that amounted to something more, insisting upon a natural and effortless mutual under-standing pervading even chance meetings between the Iranian delegation and Uzbeks. Nafīsī, “Nuhrūz dar Tashkand,” 6, 61.

85. Not all of the Persianate SSRs were equally accessible to Iranians, however, at least for official visits.Noticeably absent are references to any Iranian intellectuals visiting Tajikistan, the Soviet SSRwhose official language and culture remained most similar to that of Iran (excluding, of course,Iranian Azerbaijan). Tashkent, in contrast, was self-consciously developed in part to serve as a show-piece and capital of Soviet Central Asia. Stronski, Tashkent.

86. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 312: Perepiska s Upolnomochennym VOKS v Irane o ego deiatel’nosti i1944–46, pp. 5, 26.

87. During World War II Orthodox churches spontaneously joined the war effort by morally con-demning the Nazis, raising funds, etc., prompting Stalin to cease anti-religious campaigns andallow the establishment of Soviet religious institutions, including the Central Asian Muftiate(SADUM). Fletcher, “The Soviet Bible Belt.”

88. In March 1945 there was a radio program titled “Musul’manskoe dukhovenstvo v SSSR” [TheMuslim Clergy in the USSR] (GARF F 5283 O 19 D 354: Stenogrammy zasedaniia Iranskogoobshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR 1946, p. 6. In April 1946 VOKS showed a film about a con-ference of Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims by Comrade Ermolov of the central-eastern div-ision of Sovintorgkino, which was condemned by Kalish’ian for being long, boring, and having badmusic (GARF F 5283 O 19 D 333: Perepiska s Upol’nomochennym VOKS v Irane o deiatel’nostiMeshkhedskogo i Khorasanskogo otdelenii Iranskogo obshchestva kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR 1946,p. 137). During his trip to Uzbekistan Saʿīd Nafīsī met with Bābākhān Abd al-Majīdkhān, therecently installed grand mufti of Soviet Central Asia. Nafīsī, “Nuh rūz dar Tashkand,” 63.

89. In a letter to the VOKS chairman in April 1944 L. Knipper noted that Iranians were requesting inparticular information on the Central Asian and Caucasian SSRs. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 294:Materialy kompozitora L. Knipper v Irane 1943–46, p. 47.

90. Nafīsī, “Nuh rūz dar Tashkand,” 7, 63. Firdawsī wrote the Shāhnāmah, an epic of the pre-IslamicIranian kings. Laylā va Majnūn is a story of star-crossed lovers sometimes compared to Romeo andJuliet and has been treated by numerous Persianate poets, most famously by Nizāmī, though theopera Nafīsī attended was based on a rendition by ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī.

91. “Chand rūz dar Tashkand” [Several Days in Tashkent]—a summary of a speech given in Tehran byDr. Sīyāsī, president of Tehran University, Payām-i Naw 2, no. 2 (Dī Māh 1324/December–January 1945): 12.

92. Kishāvarz, “Safar-i Tashkand,” 23.93. Nevertheless, in the decades after World War II Soviet foreign policy extended the use of Central

Asia as a showpiece to the Third World more generally, collapsing Central Asia and its southernneighbors into the much broader, totalizing category of “the East.” Kirasirova, “‘Sons ofMuslims’ in Moscow,” 110–11. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that there is a direct con-nection between the Iranian precedent in the 1940s and the prominence in cultural diplomacyCentral Asia achieved in later decades, though it seems plausible that the feedback of IranianSociety participants prompted Soviet officials to consider Central Asia’s potential utility in thisregard.

94. The Achaemenid Empire, ruling from 550 to 330 BC, was the only pre-Islamic Persian empire thatcontrolled both Iran and Central Asian territories east of Marv for any extended period of time.Frye, “Ethnic Identity in Iran.”

95. Ahmadī, Khātirāt-i Buzurg ʿAlavī, 265.


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96. Even by Firdawsi’s time in the eleventh century the Turanians depicted in the Shāhnāmah hadcome to be equated with Turks (and hence Uzbeks in the twentieth century context), but theoriginal Turanians were in all likelihood of Indo-European descent just like their Iranian rivals.Kowalski, “The Turks in the Shāh-Nāma,” 126.

97. The Jadids had much in common with their Iranian modernizer contemporaries, even grapplingpublicly with the same post-Enlightenment Aryan racial theories imported from Europe, forinstance, before rearticulating the national project in a Soviet guise. “Zabān-i Īraʾī yā Ārīn,”Bukhārā-yi Sharīf, no. 26, Vtornik 10-go Aprelia 1912 g.

98. Adeeb Khalid argues in his forthcoming monograph that Tajiks appear in the national delimitationdebates of the early 1920s not as the inheritors of the vast sedentary civilization of Transoxiana, butas rural peasants. For the Jadids, who were fascinated by ideas of Turkism drawn from Azerbaijan,Tatarstan, and the Ottoman Empire, Uzbek was the language of progress. Khalid, MakingUzbekistan.

99. The Jadids in Central Asia, for instance, were not particularly troubled by the fact that the dynastyof the national hero they selected for Uzbekistan—Tamerlane—was driven out of the region by thevery Uzbek tribes from which modern Uzbeks are ostensibly descended. While it is true thatTamerlane’s legacy as a legendary hero in the region endured (see Sela, The Legendary Biographiesof Tamerlane), the Soviet emphasis on the importance on the ethnic component of nationalitieswould seem at odds with this selection.

100. Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 434.101. Scholars have discussed the process of “Sovietization”—i.e. the replication of the Soviet monopoly

of the state, economy, and public sphere—most often with regard to the establishment of “geo-graphically contiguous replica-regimes” in eastern Europe. Gross, “War as Revolution,” 18. Herethe term is considered more selectively with regard to the cultural component of the publicsphere—particularly in Soviet nationalities policies.

102. GARF F 5283 O 18 D 293: Perepiska s sovetskim akademikom E.I. Pavlovskim o ego prebyvanii vIrane 1945.

103. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 320: Zam. Zav. Vostochnym Otdelom VOKS tov. Levinsonu G.I. otI. Salpina Upolnomochennyi VOKS v Irane 14 Iuliia 1945, p. 196. The notion of script reformenjoyed precedent amongst Iranian intellectuals even into the nineteenth century. Mīrzā FathʿAlī Ākhūnd’zādah proposed substituting the Arabic script of Persian and Ottoman for Latin.Marashi, Nationalizing Iran, 66.

104. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 294: Materialy kompozitora L. Knipper v Irane 1943–46, p. 18.105. Ibid., p. 79.106. Nafīsī, “Nuh rūz dar Tashkand,” 61. For an in-depth examination of the Soviet reform of Central

Asian music, see Levin, The Hundred Thousand Fools of God.107. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 294: Materialy kompozitora L. Knipper v Irane 1943–46, p. 55.108. Ibid., p. 44.109. The Iranian fascination with cultural modernization and nationalism did not come at the expense of

belief in communism.Many articles in Payām-i Naw showcased facets of the USSR that had nothingto dowith culture or nations, such as “Mazraʿah-i Ishtirākī-yi Rūsī-yi Kūlkhūz” [TheRussianKolkhozCollective Farm], Payām-i Naw 1, no. 5 (Mihr Māh (?) 1323/September–October 1944): 28.

110. Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī served as an important liaison between the Iranian and Soviet worlds. Thoughhe was never allowed to return to his native land, he nonetheless committed his pen to the Sovietcause from afar by serving as a spokesman for Tajikistan and conveying the progress there in waysaccessible to Iranians: “Life is hard for a poet when he is cut off from his country, from the peoplewho speak his language. On hearing of the creation of Soviet Tajikistan, where Firdawsī and Saʿdīare as dear to the people as they are in my native Iran, I went and took a job there. It is a joy to lookupon the charming city of Stalinabad today, when one remembers the mud-walled villages of Dush-anbe which stood there some thirty years ago when I arrived.” Lahuti, “About Myself,” 377.

111. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 303: Perepiska s Iranskim obshchestvom kul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR, pp. 181–2.Although integrating Pushkin into a broader pantheon of Iranian and Soviet literary heroes was

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unique to this period, Iran enjoyed a much longer history of translating Russian literature into Farsidating into the early nineteenth century.

112. “Shāhnāmah” is usually translated as “Book of Kings,” but the translation “Kniga Geroev” was usedto refer to Nafīsī’s proposed work. GARF F 5283 O 19 D 303: Perepiska s Iranskim obshchestvomkul’turnoi sviazi s SSSR, correspondence from Vera Inber to Saʿīd Nafīsī, p. 62.

113. “For Iranians, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in August 1941 was more than simply the end ofsixteen years of autocratic rule by Reza Shah… the rapid politicization which took place from 1941was unlike anything Iranian society had experienced since the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–9.” Atabaki, Azerbaijan, 4.

114. Cronin, “Introduction,” 6.

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Soviet Civilization through a Persian Lens: Iranian Intellectuals, Cultural Diplomacy and Socialist Modernity 1941-1955

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