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Shadows in the Garden: Women Agents Underground and Communist Activism in Mid-20th Century Iran
 
Код статьиS086919080023316-4-1
DOI10.31857/S086919080023316-4
Тип публикации Статья
Статус публикации Опубликовано
Авторы
Раванди-Фадаи Лана Меджидовна 
Должность: старший научный сотрудник; доцент
Аффилиация:
Институт востоковедения РАН (ИВ РАН)
РГГУ
Адрес: Российская Федерация, Москва
Макнир Кевин
Аффилиация: независимый исследователь
Адрес: Российская Федерация
Название журналаВосток. Афро-Азиатские общества: история и современность
ВыпускВыпуск 6
Страницы88-100
Аннотация

This article traces the careers and fates of several Iranian female communists who were not professional intelligence agents but engaged in clandestine activities. They are presented primarily through their own writings – memoirs and letters – and documents preserved in Russian archives. Socialist ideas resonated strongly in early 20th century Iran, and the women examined here were driven by a zeal to improve the hard lot faced by many of their fellow Iranians. They hailed from diverse family backgrounds: Mariam Firuz’s roots lay in the aristocracy; Zuleykhah Asadi came from the working class; and Akhtar Kiānuri’s family had been prominent in the clergy. Their husbands or fathers were also communists and spent time in jail. All of the women traveled to the Soviet Union to study, drawn to the Communist University for Laborers of the East in Moscow, known by its acronym of KUTV and called a “Red Mecca” by some Iranian students. Upon returning to Iran, these women were forced to work underground as the communist party was banned in the country for much of the 20th century, with members and sympathizers harassed, arrested and accused of espionage. These women’s accounts were produced for different readers: some feel romanticized at times, while others are brutally honest. Their fates were also very different. The wave of revolution both raised individuals to new heights and tossed them to the shore as it churned onward. While Mariam Firuz became a living legend, Akhtar and others faded into obscurity, and Zuleykha and countless others were never known.

Ключевые словаIran, communist activism, women, Tudeh Party, Akhtar Kiānuri, Mariam Firuz, Sharif Zuleykha Asadi
Получено22.12.2022
Дата публикации31.12.2022
Кол-во символов39137
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Оглавление

AKHTAR: THE MULLAH’S GRANDDAUGHTER
MARIAM FIRUZ: THE “RED PRINCESS
1 Twentieth century Iran was often a hotbed of espionage, sabotage, and illegal activism fueled both by great games between geopolitical powerhouses and by internal pressure for social change. At various times, Germans, British, Soviets, Americans, and of course Iranians were working underground. Soviet encouragement of progressive Iranian movements played a large role. An internal SAVAK publication from the 1950s, a book called Communism in Iran1, written by General Ali Zibayi, chief interrogator in the Tudeh trials following Mosaddeq’s overthrow, captures the atmosphere, painting a harrowing and perhaps exaggerated picture of subterfuge and sabotage, in which members of the communist Tudeh Party 1. The book became widely available only in the 1980s.
2 … read and distributed Marxist books, wrote in secret codes, kept tabs on right-wing officers, made hand grenades, stored arms, smuggled people out of the country, embezzled money from state banks, provided firearms to party members and the Fedayan-e Islam, and, most serious of all, helped a pro-Mosaddeq revolt among the Qashqayis by disabling some planes and sending arms and ammunition to the tribesmen [Abrahamian, 1999, p. 94].
3 This article will concentrate on a handful of Iranian female activists and agents aligned with the Soviet Union. Two hailed from Iranian aristocracy, while others came from the working class. Many had experienced hardship and were motivated by an honest desire to improve living conditions in their home country. Some worked in concert with their husbands, and some were inspired by politically active fathers. Several were doctors, having received medical training in the Soviet Union. A few became famous, while others remain unknown and unsung, having left only scant paper trails in the archives.
4 In some cases, these activists’ own accounts have been preserved, and their voices offer different degrees of access to the author. Underground operatives had multiple identities: how much of their “self” were they able to show, how much were they able to preserve, and what do these texts show about the relationship between writer and reader? The texts presented here run the gamut between limited and greater access to the experiences and feelings of their authors, from the more polished accounts of a celebrity secret agent and a political legend to the raw honesty – although in coded language – of a young intelligence operative, never intended for publication.
5 Much of the primary source material leveraged has not been previously published and comes from The Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI).
6 The “Smithy of Cadres” in Moscow
7 “In Moscow there is a Red Mecca.”
8 Iranian student at KUTV
9 One of the primary institutions in the Soviet Union for training not only educators but operatives from the Muslim East and Asia was KUTV — The Communist University for Toilers of the East — established in 1921 for “Eastern” students to learn about their own countries from a communist perspective. While not all of the women agents considered here studied at KUTV, all were connected to it or influenced by it in some way. Every year, the KUTV student body included several young Iranian women. At the end of the first year, three out of the 21 Iranian students were women; yet Iranian intelligence seems to have overlooked or lacked interest in many: the list of Iranian KUTV students in General Zibayi’s Communism in Iran is long but leaves out most of the females [Zibāyi, 1964, p. 145‒148].
10 Some of these idealistic individuals represent the flip side of the “Great Game” of flamboyant master spies: they lived modest lives, secretly passing information or smuggled documents while working to improve living conditions at home. While some may have followed their husbands to the Soviet Union, or taken advantage of free schooling, others were possessed of a thirst for change, modernization and justice.
11 At one of KUTV’s student gatherings, a young Iranian woman from Tehran stood up and declared:
12 When I heard from my comrades about KUTV in Moscow, I didn’t believe them. Now that I’m actually studying at KUTV, I wrote to my comrades about it, and they wrote back to me from Persia about what an incredible impression my description had made on them, “to know that in Moscow there is a Red Mecca” [Ravandi-Fadai, 2015, p. 718].
13 Another Iranian woman, a 22-year-old from Astara going by the Russified name of Kumeeva, began studying at KUTV in 1929. She came from a peasant family and was a member of the Iranian Komsomol, or Communist Youth Organization. After a brief stint at KUTV, she returned to Iran to join her husband Iskander as an agent provocateur in Tabriz, and there her trail goes cold [Ravandi-Fadai, 2015, p. 718‒719].
14 Jamileh Rushdi studied at KUTV from 1926 to 1929. The Russian archives preserve very little about her past, except that she had worked at a women’s educational association in Tehran before enrolling at KUTV. The SAVAK “History of Communism” lists a “bānu-ye Jamile” from Tehran, the wife of Ali Akbar Kaveh, as having studied at KUTV. She may or may not be the same young woman [Zibāyi, 1964, p. 147]. In a 1929 critique of her KUTV thesis paper, “The Agrarian Question in Persia”, lecturer Gdalii Gel’bras2 praises her analysis of the feudal system in contemporary Persia but criticizes her incomplete understanding of the “class nature” of Reza Shah’s government [Zibāyi, 1964, p. 147]. It is not known when or even whether she returned to Iran, but if SAVAK was aware she had studied at KUTV, her return and activities in Iran would presumably have been watched. 2. A former Soviet trade representative in Iran who often used the pseudonym of Ranjbar.

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