Shadows in the Garden: Women Agents Underground and Communist Activism in Mid-20th Century Iran Part II

Occupation: Senior Researcher; Associate Professor
Affiliation:
Institute of Oriental Studies
Russian State University for the Humanities
Address: Russian Federation, Moscow

McNeer Kevin

Affiliation: Independent Researcher
Address: Russian Federation

Journal name

Vostok. Afro-Aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost

Edition

Issue 3

Pages

127-134

Abstract

The second part of this article on the clandestine activities of Iranian female communists explores the case of Zuleykha Asadi, a young woman who earned a medical degree in Moscow just before the start of the Second World War. Her story can be told with unusual immediacy thanks to the preservation of her correspondence in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, published here for the first time. Zuleykha’s father’s letters to her in Moscow chart the difficulties and decisions his daughter faced and are suffused with a parent’s anxious concern for his daughter and a deep belief in the Soviet Union and its mission. Upon returning to Iran, ostensibly to practice medicine, Zuleykha also acted as a Soviet operative, keeping her handlers in Moscow apprised of her activities in letters that are a striking mix of ciphered intelligence reporting and emotional frankness about her personal life and experiences, such as her feelings for her newborn daughter and absent husband. She gathered intelligence about the wartime mood, conditions and activity of Nazi agents in the country, liaised with Iranian communists, and planned to set up a safe house. Within two years, for reasons unstated, Moscow decided to cut her loose. The case file of this idealistic young woman is emblematic of the magnetic pull of Communist ideals for many in the working class of Iran in the first half of the 20^th Century.

Keywords

Iran, Soviet Union, World War Two, communist activism, espionage, female agents, Com-intern, Zuleykha Asadi.

Received

02.07.2023

Publication date

02.07.2023

Number of characters

22287

Cite

GOST	Ravandi-Fadai L., Kevin M. Shadows in the Garden: Women Agents Underground and Communist Activism in Mid-20th Century Iran Part II // Vostok. Afro-Aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost – 2023. – Issue 3 C. 127-134 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://vostokoriens.jes.su/S086919080025674-8-1 (circulation date: 17.05.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S086919080025674-8
MLA	Ravandi-Fadai, Lana M, Kevin, McNeer "Shadows in the Garden: Women Agents Underground and Communist Activism in Mid-20th Century Iran Part II." Vostok. Afro-Aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost 3 (2023):127-134. DOI: 10.31857/S086919080025674-8
APA	Ravandi-Fadai L., Kevin M. (2023). Shadows in the Garden: Women Agents Underground and Communist Activism in Mid-20th Century Iran Part II. Vostok. Afro-Aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost (3), pp.127-134 DOI: 10.31857/S086919080025674-8

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1	Zuleykha: the Trusting Spy
2	“You are part of a team of many millions that is creating the greatest and grandest of all that has been, and is, in the history of humankind.”
3	Abdul Kasem Asadi, Zuleykha’s father
4	The touching and intriguing case of Sharif Zuleykha Asadi can be told with an unusual immediacy because much of her correspondence with father, friends and colleagues has been preserved in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History. These letters simultaneously reveal and conceal: frank expressions of optimism, anxiety and hope share the page with ciphered intelligence reports.
5	Sharif Zuleykha Asadi was born in 1916 in Tehran. By her teens, she was dreaming of studying Orientalism in the Soviet Union and becoming a writer. She already knew Russian, as she had studied at the Soviet School in Tehran where her father, Abdul Kasem, taught. He was the driving force behind her move to Moscow and involvement in the communist cause.
6	Abdul Kasem Asadi was well acquainted with the inside of prisons both in Siberia and Iran. Before the Russian Revolution, like multitudes of Iranians, he had labored in the harsh conditions of the Baku oil fields. And as with many of his countrymen, Abdul Kasem was inspired there by new and incendiary ideas spreading through Europe and Russia about radically changing the conditions in which people worked and lived. He began participating in revolutionary activities, was caught and sent to Siberia. Just prior to the First World War, he managed to escape back to Iran, where he took part in the Gilan uprising¹. He then traveled again to Russia, now part of the Soviet Union, receiving training as a teacher. Upon returning to Iran, he was once more sent to prison, this time for about a year. Abdul Kasem had seen much of the worst that the Iranian and Russian states and economic systems had to offer laborers and dissidents in the early 20^th Century. For him, the road to revolution was an obvious one to take. After release from the latest term in his cycle of imprisonments, he became a Communist Party member and began attending party congresses [GARF, Fund 1318, Inv. 1, Case 657, p. 34].	1. The short-lived Socialist Soviet Republic of Iran established in the northern Iranian province of Gilan from 1920 to 1921.
7	The Teheran school where Abdul Kasem taught was operated primarily for the children of Soviet citizens, but he was able to enroll his daughter, and she learned excellent Russian there. In 1932, Zuleykha traveled to Moscow, staying with a former Soviet consul who had gotten to know her father in Iran. The Iranian revolutionary and poet Hesabi, now living in Moscow as a member of the Soviet Communist Party, vouched for her, opening the door for enrolment at a Soviet educational institution². Father and daughter’s dreams were becoming reality.	2. Abdol-Hossein Hesabi was a former head of Communist Party of Iran, and from 1928 a member of the Communist Party of the USSR. He had been one of the very first students at KUTV, where he later taught, and worked as an office manager at the headquarters of Tekhperiodiki [Technical Periodicals].
8	From Moscow, Zuleykha began a correspondence with her father that reveals much about her and her father’s mindset, aspirations, and concerns. The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History contains only her father’s letters to her during this period, but as Abdul Kasem is usually answering his daughter, we also learn about her letters. The typed letters seem to have been written in Russian – a sign of the enthusiasm father and daughter had for the new cause – although it’s possible they are translations of handwritten originals in Persian.
9	Zuleykha was first drawn to study Orientalism in Leningrad, with its strong scholarly tradition in classical Persian literature, or at KUTV in Moscow. But from Tehran, her father advised her to study medicine so she could better help her country:
10	Dear Zuleykha, … you are a grownup and I am not going to force my views on you but rather advise... If you are only interested in Orientalism, then the one realistic option is the Eastern Institute in Moscow. In Leningrad the weather is overcast for most of the year. Although I’ve never been to Leningrad, I know that people from the South and the Caucasus have difficulty with the Leningrad climate. Think over everything well... The choice is really between the Moscow Eastern University and the medical university... Later, if you have the desire and a gift for writing, then being a doctor armed with science and knowledge, you will better understand everyday life. I believe that in order to write, one has to know different perspectives. In a word, think this through based on reason, not a passing fancy…
11	You are for now the only [Iranian] product of the Tehran Soviet School, and you must live up to its hopes in an honorable way.
12	Love you, your father,
13	Asadi
14	Zuleykha followed her father’s advice. She was granted a stipend and space in the dormitory at the First Moscow Medical Institute. In their continuing correspondence, her father mentions sending her care packages of fruits, pistachios and almonds from Iran. He shares details about the changes occurring in the Iranian capital: “Teheran and all of Persia are taking on a new image. All the men wear caps and hats. Many of the schoolgirls have discarded the veil” [RGASPI, Fund 495, Inv. 217, Case 382, p. 42].

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