The fall of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran (SSRI) in Gilan in the autumn of 1921 forced the Communist Party of Iran (Ferghe-ye Komonist-e ‘Irän, CPI) and the Communist International (Comintern) to abandon their plans to overthrow shah by force.Footnote 1 Over the next few years, the CPI and Comintern pursued a policy of coalition-building to guide Iran along the path of bourgeois progress, although the list of potential allies gradually narrowed and the pursuit of a coup d’état came to supplant the initial democratic aspirations. Since 1927, the Comintern and СPI again concentrated on organizing agrarian revolution in Iran.Footnote 2
Shortly after the Comintern’s foundation, its leadership began the process of centralization, strengthening Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI) control over its national sections. The ECCI gradually became hierarchical and increasingly came under Bolshevik influence.Footnote 3 Revolutionary (Comintern) work in Iran was also centralized. However, Iranian communists were unable to overcome divisions in their ranks, which not only strengthened the influence of the ECCI and Bolsheviks over the CPI but also led to more frequent co-optation in the molding of the highest party leadership.Footnote 4 Moreover, the CPI Central Committee (CC CPI) faced difficulties controlling its provincial organizations. In the early 1930s, the СPI was defeated by the shah’s authorities, and ECCI Eastern Landersecretariat took control over the party’s remnants but did not succeed in reviving it.
So far, CPI activity in the first years of its existence and, above all, in Gilan in 1920–21 has been the period most studied.Footnote 5 Taline Ter Minassian, Kayhan A. Nejad, Alisa Shablovskaia, and other researchers have looked at certain aspects of the activities of the Comintern, CPI, and Bolsheviks in Iran after 1921, namely their interactions with the ulama, national minorities, and Reza Khan.Footnote 6 The history of trade unions and the labor movement in Iran has been researched in much more detail.Footnote 7 The number of comprehensive studies on CPI and Comintern activities in Iran after 1921 is quite limited. Some works were written during the Cold War, but, as such, were complicated by the inaccessibility of Soviet archives.Footnote 8 Afterwards, researchers such as Touraj Atabaki and Cosroe Chaqueri were able to give a more complete picture of communist activity in Iran.Footnote 9 However, some aspects of this activity remain insufficiently studied, especially those concerning CPI relations with the ECCI and Bolsheviks.
This article is based mainly on documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialʹno-politicheskoi istorii, RGASPI) and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii, AVPRF). RGASPI opisʹ 90 and opis’ 154 of fond 495, which contain correspondence between CPI members and Comintern representatives with the ECCI, as well as directives, party program documents, transcripts, ECCI Eastern Department/Landersecretariat meeting extracts, and other types of documents, form the main documentary sources for this article. Important information was also found in documents from the Chicherin secretariat (AVPRF, f. 04) and the Rothstein fond (AVPRF, f. 028), first of all, correspondence between Soviet plenipotentiaries and the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat po Inostrannym Delam, NKID) leadership, and papers from the Plenipotentiary Representation in Iran.
This study focuses on interrelated components: Comintern and CPI guidelines and attempted implementation, as well as the CPI’s relationship with the ECCI and Bolsheviks. In this focus, this article seeks to demonstrate the importance of these relationships and problematize the perception that they reflected only the issuing of directives from Moscow. These relationships also cannot be reduced to periodic pressures from Moscow, giving priority to its foreign policy interests.Footnote 10 Comintern activities in Iran were influenced both by international events and processes taking place in the Soviet state and, of course, in Iran itself. The Comintern’s guidelines rather followed events, taking into account the experience of previous failures (e.g., the SSRI) or to implement according to other, more successful (Mongolian) or cautionary (Chinese) experiences. However, the matter was complicated by the limitations of revolutionary experience and the specifics of processes taking place in the East. The Comintern guidelines did leave room for interpretation and implementation, demonstrating that local actors could try to pursue a more moderate policy or outpace the ECCI in its degree of radicalization.
Failure with a united front (1922–25)
Events in Gilan in 1920–21 remain one of the most controversial issues in the history of the modern Iranian revolutionary movement. While some researchers posit that the Bolshevik leadership’s support for the SSRI was primarily a means of applying pressure on London, others point to a combination of strategic and ideological factors in arguing that Moscow’s refusal to support the revolutionaries was accompanied by a change in revolutionary tactics.Footnote 11 In this context, Georgy Chicherin—the head of the NKID, who, during Soviet-Iranian negotiations, proposed that the Political Bureau (Politicheskoe Biuro, Politburo) of the Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) (RCP(b) Central Committee should liquidate the republic in Gilan and refocus on supporting Iranian bourgeois democracy—became one of the initiators of this change. However, the Comintern abandoned offensive tactics only in the autumn of 1921.Footnote 12
Initial experiences, including in Gilan, demonstrated to Moscow the negative consequences of transferring powers to regional structures that lacked resources and proper control from above. Therefore, as early as 1920–21, the ECCI began closing or replacing regional structures with communication points with purely technical functions and/or the institute of the ECCI representatives.Footnote 13 In terms of Iran, this resulted in the closure of the Turkestan Bureau and the reorganization of the Council for Propaganda and Action of the Peoples of the East—both regional structures of the Comintern—into a body with technical functions.Footnote 14 Moreover, this reorganizations was reflected in the transfer of power from Comintern representatives to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, head of the Caucasian Bureau of the Central Committee (CC) of the RCP (b), and the prohibition of the Azerbaijan Communist Party (ACP) Central Committee from interference in CPI affairs.Footnote 15
These changes also affected the situation in the СPI. By the autumn of 1921, the party was split into three warring factions on Soviet territory, with three central committees headed by Haidar Khan, Avetis Sultanzade, and Hamid Sultanov. Furthermore, in the internal party struggle between autumn 1920 and autumn 1921, factions that had the support of the ACP Central Committee and Caucasian Bureau, which controlled significant material and human resources, had an advantage. The aforementioned structures supported Haidar Khan’s rise to power and the formation of the Central Committee headed by Hamid Sultanov at the Congress of Iranian Communists in Baku (August 19–27, 1921). Even the ECCI decision to unite the CPI (October 7, 1921)—given the weakness of the Sultanzade faction, although supported by the ECCI, and Haidar Khan’s downfall in Gilan—aided the Sultanov faction’s dominance in the new united Central Committee.Footnote 16
However, the logic of centralization and changes in tactics made such a construction inconvenient for Moscow. In Iran, the weakness of the central government and the rise in sociopolitical activity created the conditions for the emergence of an alternative party center in the country itself. As early as autumn 1921, the group of Iranian Communists in Tehran—headed by Kerim Hasanov (Nikbin), a member of Haidar Khan’s Central Committee—entered the internal party struggle, proposing that the ECCI centralize all party work in the hands of the Organizational Bureau (Orgburo), which had been created in Tehran to organize a party congress.Footnote 17
In its bid for power, the Orgburo received Soviet diplomatic support, primarily from Chicherin as well as Comintern officials in Tehran—first Boris Mailer and later Aleksandr Laktionov.Footnote 18 Moreover, the Orgburo established ties with the Socialist Party of Iran (Hezb-e Sosiyälist-e Iran) and trade unions, which created the Central Council in Tehran and, according to their leader Seyyed Mohammad Dehghan, numbered about 20,000 in the capital and beyond in early 1922.Footnote 19 Later, Boris Shumyatsky, the Soviet plenipotentiary in Iran (1922–25), reported that many unions were in reality organizations of a guild, religious, or even personalistic nature.Footnote 20 Nevertheless, at the turn of 1921–1922, the successes of Iranian communists in Tehran contrasted favorably with the defeats in Gilan.
As a result, at the beginning of 1922, the ECCI designated Tehran as the location of the CC CPI, with Baku hosting only the CPI Foreign Bureau. All CC CPI members, except bureau members, were obliged to leave for Iran under threat of losing their posts. However, the ECCI tried to reach a compromise in the CC CPI’s formation, including seven members each from Baku and Tehran.Footnote 21 But the uncompromising struggle led to the Sultanov group being pushed out of the party’s leadership, and the bureau was replaced by the institute of the representative of the Central Committee of the CPI. The failure to unify led not only to persistent rivalry among Iranian communists, but also the relinquishing of Baku’s role as an important source of party cadres.Footnote 22
The need for centralization also raised questions around the relationship between the NKID and Comintern. On May 14, 1921, the Politburo functionally separated the legal activities of Soviet diplomats and the revolutionary activity of Comintern representatives abroad. Nonetheless, Soviet diplomats in Tehran, with Chicherin’s intervention, maintained direct contacts with the CC CPI.Footnote 23 Moreover, Shumyatsky managed to capture simultaneous leadership of trade, diplomatic, trade union, and Comintern work in Iran. However, such over-centralization caused problems and was abandoned in late 1924/early 1925.
From the autumn of 1921, both the Comintern and NKID aimed to promote Iran’s bourgeois-democratic development. The ECCI Eastern Department directed the CPI to create a new national, democratic revolutionary Majles and urged the party to avoid revolutionary upheavals in Iran.Footnote 24 Later, such attitudes were reinforced by the tactics of the United Anti-Imperialist Front, fixed in the “General Theses on the Eastern Question” (IV Comintern Congress, November 5 to December 5, 1922). The new tactics directed communists to mobilize all revolutionary elements and allowed for temporary agreements with bourgeois democracy. Simultaneously, communists had to fight for the destruction of feudal relations in the countryside and the elimination of landlordism (the theses directly pointed to the Iranian bourgeoisie’s links with large feudal and feudal-bourgeois land ownership).Footnote 25
Chicherin, however, who had previously championed unleashing the agrarian revolution in Iran, now postponed such initiatives. Instead, from the summer of 1921—influenced by the experience of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11)—he began directing Soviet diplomats in Iran to cooperate with the urban bourgeoisie, left-wing revolutionary elements, religious minorities, and tribes.Footnote 26 Chicherin emphasized the urban bourgeoisie, and Soviet diplomacy soon took a rather critical position regarding the tribes.Footnote 27 Iranian communists pushed aside federalist ideas, took a course towards the centralization of Iran, and opposed the separatist aspirations of some Iranian minorities, particularly the Kurds under Simko’s leadership, who controlled significant territories on Iran’s western borders in the early 1920s.Footnote 28 As a result, until the second half of the 1920s, the CPI ignored the atrocities against and subjugation of the tribes and did not react to the policy of linguistic Persianization.
Shumyatsky became an active advocate of the new policy, reinforcing the new guidelines with his Mongolian experience. There, the Mongolian People’s Party, which came to power with Bolshevik support, avoided civil war and (for a while) combined anti-feudal reforms with a cautious policy towards numerous clergy.Footnote 29 In Iran, Shumyatsky’s first experience was the creation of the National Bloc, the first organization that appeared in Tehran in August 1922, and which, by the beginning of 1923—with the help of Soviet consuls—also appeared in Kermanshah, Rasht, Mashhad, Tabriz, Isfahan, and other cities. Iranian communists and the Socialist Party participated in the bloc’s creation and formed its steering committee, which included four CPI representatives and Solayman Mirza Eskandari from the Socialist Party.Footnote 30
Shumyatsky believed in the impossibility of creating a “class-homogeneous” allied force in Iran, so Soviet diplomats tried to involve various social groups, including “progressive” and “liberal” landlords, in the bloc representatives.Footnote 31 Accordingly, the bloc put forward moderate bourgeois-democratic demands: freedom of the press, the development of local self-government, the rejection of the capitulation regime, etc. On the agrarian issue, the bloc limited itself to demands of improving peasants’ legal and property status.Footnote 32
The bloc’s representation in the Majles became a motley coalition that brought Mostoufi ol-Mamalek’s cabinet to power in January–February 1923. This success was of particular importance for the left in the context of the elections to the Fifth Majles, which started in April 1923. But soon, the left faced opposition not only from conservatives but also Reza Khan and his supporters, who had previously collaborated with the bloc, but had their own plans for the future Majles. The coalition in the Majles collapsed and Mostoufi’s cabinet fell. The military and police resorted to repression, falsifications, and even limiting contacts between local residents and Soviet diplomats.Footnote 33 The bloc disintegrated as a result, burying the left’s plans to gain a significant faction in the new Majles.Footnote 34
The CPI, Socialist Party, and trade unions were under double pressure: from conservatives relying on institutions such as the bazaar and mosque, and from Reza Khan and his supporters’ creation of a centralized army and bureaucracy. Thus, conservatives created their own associations to counteract trade unions and maintained ties with some trade union representatives in the Central Council.Footnote 35 From 1923–1924, as a result of this double pressure, the number of Tehran trade unions decreased from 11,364 to 1,315 members.Footnote 36 Persecution and internal divisions weakened the Socialist Party. In Tehran, after the end of the election campaign, only 300 members of the local party organization came to be re-registered.Footnote 37 The CPI also continued to suffer from divisions within its leadership, and its membership declined from 1,000 in 1922 to 600 in 1924.Footnote 38
The left received a brief respite in the summer of 1923, taking advantage of the expulsion of Shi’a ulama from London-mandated Mesopotamia. The left actively joined the protest campaign that swept Iran, published anti-British articles, and organized religious processions, as the socialists did in Kermanshah.Footnote 39 Moreover, Shumyatsky and his allies tried to organize an all-Iranian campaign to boycott British goods.Footnote 40
A year earlier, Shumyatsky and the Iranian left had established contacts with Mohammad Khalesizade, a well-known member of the ulama who was expelled from Mesopotamia in 1922 and settled in Tehran. Their convergence was facilitated by Khalesizade’s anti-British sentiments, specific religious views (combining Islam with nationalism), and appeals such as borrowing the achievements of European science and technology, regarded by the Bolsheviks as progressive.Footnote 41 In the summer of 1923, Khalesizade and other ulama supported the boycott.Footnote 42 Nonetheless, the most prominent ulama—with prompting from the shah’s government—called on their followers to refrain from mass demonstrations.Footnote 43 The boycott failure showed the limitations of the left’s ties with ulama, which weakened even more after the failure of the republican campaign (1924), when Moscow supported Reza Khan and Khalesizade backed the opposition.
As early as first half of 1923, given the degradation of the National Bloc, the ECCI began to push Shumyatsky and the CPI to create a party that united socially and programmatically close political groupings. The new party was supposed to seek agrarian reforms.Footnote 44 However, the CPI’s leadership did not consider working with peasants to be a priority and, as such, it was only in early 1924 that the CPI created the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, which was not active in rural areas (same as the People’s Party that replaced it the same year).
Persecution by the military actualized the issue of relations with Reza Khan. On May 5, 1923, Chicherin noted to Shumyatsky the possibility of maintaining “decent” (prilichnykh) relations with Reza Khan.Footnote 45 A few months later, Shumyatsky and the Iranian left began courting Reza Khan. By this point, some Iranian communists, led by Nikbin, actively supported this new course and argued over the impossibility of reconciling the British with Reza Khan’s attempts to disarm the southern tribes (British allies).Footnote 46 Semyon Brike, head of the ECCI Middle East Department, supported this thesis.Footnote 47 Thus, the idea of rapprochement received both NKID and Comintern support.
The immediate result of this rapprochement was the entry of socialists into Reza Khan’s cabinet in October 1923, providing a new respite for the Iranian left. Moscow, in turn, began to supply equipment, munitions, and weapons to the Iranian army. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik leadership, Iosif Stalin in particular, did not pin all its hopes on Reza Khan.Footnote 48 Both the NKID and Comintern considered creating a social base for Soviet policy in Iran a necessity, as the Soviet leadership was attracted by the Iranian bourgeoisie, primarily traders. Chicherin became a particularly active advocate of recruiting the bourgeoisie, considering it a class called upon to become the “gravedigger” of imperialism in the East.Footnote 49
In addition to privileges for traders from Eastern countries at the Nizhny Novgorod and Baku fairs (1922) and the introduction of free trade in certain goods with Iran (1923), Moscow initiated the creation of mixed-capital enterprises with the participation of Iranian traders. Moreover, the Bolsheviks began resorting to various methods—in particular, importing sugar into the USSR to release Soviet sugar for export—in order to increase the volume of Soviet-Iranian trade.Footnote 50 As a result, the value of Soviet exports to Iran between 1922/23 and 1924/25 increased more than one and a half times (from 73,446 thousand krans to 125,669 thousand krans), and imports from Iran increased almost four times (from 62,122 housand krans to 244,669 thousand krans).Footnote 51
Nevertheless, despite this growth, Moscow failed to make Iranian traders into reliable and influential allies. Both individual Soviet organizations and the leadership of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade gave priority to economic benefits. While Chicherin saw Soviet foreign trade as subordinate to Moscow’s foreign policy interests, the nascent Soviet bureaucracy was beginning to promote its own interests. From the Iranian side, moreover, tojjars (merchants) received the lion’s share of the benefits from trade liberalization.Footnote 52
The latter was facilitated by the post-war impoverishment of a significant portion of northern Iran’s traders and the lack of Soviet funds to credit trade. As they had capital, it was tojjars who—with Shumyatsky’s permission—took a dominant role in mixed-capital enterprises, some of which received monopoly rights (oil products, sugar, textiles). Moreover, it was easier for Soviet traders to negotiate with tojjars to sell large quantities of Soviet goods in certain areas in order to displace British goods.Footnote 53
However, tojjars preferred to invest in land and, as landowners, became interested in maintaining power that allowed them to profit from the exploitation of peasant tenants.Footnote 54 Maintaining close relations with influential members of the government—a traditional way of ensuring security and business development—proved to be more important for tojjars than promoting Soviet interests.Footnote 55 As a result, the Soviets gained a dubious ally, angering small and medium-sized traders.
Unsurprisingly, the People’s Party—created in the fall of 1924 by Tehran bazaar, CPI, and trade unions representative in order to revive the stalled republican movement and prepare for a change in the form of government—collapsed after Reza Khan’s negative reaction to the proposal to end the monarchy.Footnote 56 And, in December 1925, representatives of the trading class in the Constituent Assembly voted to establish the Pahlavi dynasty.
Meanwhile, the Iranian left continued to weaken. The alliance with Reza Khan split the Socialist Party.Footnote 57 The CC CPI, from the second half of 1924, entered a new stage of internal party struggle and actually lost control of the party.Footnote 58 Moreover, some Iranian communists were influenced by the nationalist discourse promoted by Reza Khan and his supporters. As such, Jalilzade and Bagirzade, both CC CPI members, spoke out against prioritizing the interests of the Comintern (i.e., Moscow) in CPI activities, and, after their expulsion, sided with the government.Footnote 59 The deterioration of relations between Nikbin and Shumyatsky also aggravated the situation in the party. As a result, according to ECCI Eastern Department estimates in May 1925, CPI influence hardly extended beyond Tehran.Footnote 60
Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks and CPI, influenced by the 1923 electoral failure and republican campaign fiasco, had decided to organize a republican coup d’état. To start, Shumyatsky in negotiations with Reza Khan, and then representatives of the People’s Party in negotiations with the military governor of Tehran, proposed a forceful scenario for regime change.Footnote 61 Reza Khan, however, preferred to form an agreement with conservatives and, in the autumn of 1925, openly aimed at changing the dynasty. Moscow, first via the press and then through Konstantin Yurenev, a new Soviet plenipotentiary, pointed out the desirability of establishing a republican form of government to Reza Khan, but to no avail.Footnote 62
Moreover, Reza Khan launched a campaign of repression against the left, defeating the CPI and trade unions. Significant police penetration of the party facilitated this repression, as former party members became informants (e.g., Jalilzade handed over the party’s archive to the police); party members, due to lack of finances, worked in Soviet institutions, making it easier for the Iranian authorities to spy on them; and the police controlled the legal political parties created by the CPI.Footnote 63 Reza Khan no longer needed the Iranian left to consolidate his power, although this was not immediately understood by Moscow.
“Left turn” (1926 to the early 1930s)
Reza Khan’s accession initially had little effect on Moscow’s assessment of his regime as “progressive,” despite the fact that its repression had forced the СPI underground. For legal activity, the Bolsheviks planned to create the People’s Revolutionary Party (Narodno-revoliutsionnaia partiia, NRP), the draft platform of which was developed by Fyodor Raskolnikov (Petrov), head of the ECCI Middle East Secretariat, and Chicherin in the summer of 1926.Footnote 64
Chicherin’s struggle with Soviet merchants over the methods of Soviet foreign trade policy, which the former won, preceded this platform development and seemingly influenced Chicherin’s proposals, which in some respects were more radical than Raskolnikov’s.Footnote 65 While both Raskolnikov and Chicherin made the democratization and bourgeois development of Iran the party’s aim, Chicherin focused on the lower classes of the bazaar (artisans, small traders) and intelligentsia, who were supposed to gradually involve “elements” of the peasantry (middle traders were given a secondary role).Footnote 66 However, if Shumyatsky erred with the tojjars, then Chicherin’s plans were also unrealistic. Firstly, some small and medium-sized traders also invested in land.Footnote 67 Secondly, these traders—weakened by increasing Pahlavi interference in the economy—reacted to the changes by strengthening ties with the ulama, who also lost out, especially due to reforms in the fields of law and education.Footnote 68 The same applies to artisans. In 1927, moreover, Moscow itself dealt a severe blow to the broad interests of the Iranian commercial bourgeoisie (the net balance system).
Meanwhile, Moscow, under Stalin’s influence, gradually moved away from the policy of a united anti-imperialist front, in particular in China.Footnote 69 As a result, in the final draft approved by the Politburo on November 18, 1926, the party’s social base narrowed to the working strata of cities and villages, alongside socially close groups such as the intelligentsia, with the most advanced elements of small and medium-sized merchants involved in the party’s ranks.Footnote 70 The issue of the party’s attitude towards Reza Shah was left unanswered.
In Tehran, CPI members criticized the moderate position of Soviet diplomacy and skeptically assessed the draft NRP platform.Footnote 71 Konstantin Yurenev, a new Soviet plenipotentiary, pointed out to Chicherin the support for dynasty change among the British and “reactionaries” (ulama and large landowners) and the Iranian population’s negative view of the shah.Footnote 72 One of the Shah‘s fiercest critics was Ilya Vardin (Illarion Mgeladze)—a supporter of the “left opposition” in the Bolshevik party and, temporarily, representative of the Soviet Union Telegraph Agency in Tehran—who became one of the initiators of the public discussion that unfolded in the USSR at the end of 1926. While this discussion is sometimes understood as a struggle between two schools of Soviet Marxism, we believe it presented a spectrum of opinions.
On the one hand, Mirza (Fëdor Rothstein), the former Soviet plenipotentiary in Iran (1920–21), believed that Iran was on the path of bourgeois progress and a strong central government was necessary for the development of an agrarian movement in the country.Footnote 73 In contrast, Vardin argued that the shah’s landlord regime, which kept peasant tenants in a state of dependence and poverty, was an obstacle to Iran’s capitalist development and only an agrarian revolution could change the situation.Footnote 74 Vardin’s main assessments of the shah’s Iran—the narrowness of the national market, prospects for extremely slow industrialization and capitalist development, and the reactionary nature of the regime—were in tune with the ideas of Sultanzade, a leading CPI theorist.Footnote 75
A separate group consisted of those who, to varying degrees, supported the theory of merchant (torgovyĭ) capitalism, an early form of bourgeois entrepreneurship.Footnote 76 Vladimir Gurko-Kryazhin, Iransky (Sergey Pastukhov), and Irandust (Vladimir Osetrov) emphasized the development of trade capital in Iran and saw the new regime as transitional, based on an alliance between part of the bourgeoisie and landowners engaged in commercial farming (although the three assessed the pace of capitalist development in Iran differently).Footnote 77 Chervonny (Shumyatsky), on the other hand, criticized all the aforementioned positions, arguing that the communists should instead act on two fronts: develop the agrarian movement and create a bloc of anti-imperialist forces capable of taking power.Footnote 78
The crux of such disputes lay in the specifics of the socio-economic processes taking place in Eastern countries and their differences from the Western European experience. Thus, the inclusion of Iran in the global capitalist system led, on the one hand, to the development of commodity production in agriculture and the consolidation of private ownership of land. On the other hand, this intensified production was achieved mainly through a systematic increase in the exploitation of peasant tenants and the preservation of “extra-capitalist” exploitation methods (e.g., corvee (bigar), natural duties, the institution of gifts). Consequently, where some saw the development of (merchant) capitalism, others saw the preservation or even strengthening of feudal relations.
Similar disputes occurred in relation to other Eastern countries, primarily China. For example, Karl Radek argued for the development of capitalist relations in the Chinese countryside while Iosif Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin pointed to the predominance of feudal “remnants” (perezhitki).Footnote 79 The latter’s victory made their concept dominant in the Comintern guidelines and Soviet Oriental studies, including Iranian studies.Footnote 80 Only later did Soviet historians propose alternative descriptions of the processes that took place in Pahlavi Iran, in particular the concept of state capitalism.Footnote 81
The radicalization of Comintern attitudes towards the shah’s regime occurred in the spring of 1927. In early March, Vasiliev, a member of the ECCI Eastern Landersecretariat, after visiting Iran, proposed a reconsideration of the Comintern’s position on Reza Shah, who Vasiliev now considered a reactionary.Footnote 82 Problems in Soviet-Iranian relations (delaying the conclusion of a trade agreement and other issues) and Moscow’s fears of a rapprochement between Tehran and London strengthened the case for such proposals. The subsequent aggravation of the foreign policy situation, primarily the murders of Chinese communists in Shanghai and the rupture of Soviet-British diplomatic relations in April and May 1927, influenced the further radicalization of the Comintern guidelines.
Shumyatsky developed the first draft resolution for the planned CPI congress, which was supposed to confirm the party’s left turn. This resolution was adopted on June 27, 1927 by the Eastern Landersecretariat commission, which included Hossein Sharghi (Rizaev) and Sultanzade, who had returned to party affairs after an extended break.Footnote 83 The resolution called the accession of Reza Shah a “palace coup” that did not change the monarchy’s social base: the clergy, aristocracy, and landlords. The resolution expressed confidence in the withdrawal of the military elite and part of the bourgeoisie from the national liberation movement, their reorientation towards the British, and the beginning development of agrarian revolution in Iran.Footnote 84 The ECCI Political Secretariat approved the resolution on July 22, 1927, but soon the congress preparation process clashed with the interests of Soviet diplomacy.Footnote 85
First, the Eastern Intersecretariat, influenced by the progress of Soviet-Iranian negotiations, decided to postpone the congress or move it to Iran.Footnote 86 Second, the Eastern Landersecretariat significantly altered the above-mentioned resolution, contrary to the initial plans for limited changes.Footnote 87 The new version underlined the elite Iranian bourgeoisie’s role as a pillar of the new regime, stressed the danger of Iran becoming a British military foothold, and maintained the course towards agrarian revolution in the country. Meanwhile, the new version also emphasized Iranian bourgeoisie interests in the development of Soviet-Iranian economic ties and noted the pacifist sentiments of the Iranian ruling classes.Footnote 88 The new resolution was a clear attempt at compromise between the Comintern and NKID positions. By that time, Irandust had put forward the idea of Iranian trade capital and the Pahlavi regime “balancing” between Britain and the USSR.Footnote 89
This attempt was doomed, however, due to the general radicalization of the Comintern guidelines. Thus, the objections of Shumyatsky, as well as Sharghi and Seyfi (Rezagholi Abdollazade), who appealed directly to Stalin, Bukharin, and other Comintern leaders, were heard (although the CPI congress was held on Soviet soil on October 28–30, after the negotiations had concluded).Footnote 90
The final resolution, which was “in principle” adopted by the ECCI Political Secretariat on October 14, became the basis for Sultanzade’s report at the CPI II Congress and “Theses on the international and internal situation of Persia.”Footnote 91 The resolution noted British support for Reza Shah’s accession and the strengthening of landlordism in Iran (the fight against “right-wing” bias). In addition, the authors of the final resolution rejected the idea that changing the dynasty was merely a palace coup (the fight against “left” bias).Footnote 92 Taking into account the Chinese experience, the resolution postponed the construction of the Revolutionary Republican National Party (Revoliutsionno-respublikanskaia natsionalnaia partiia, RRNP), formerly the NRP, the central committee of which was established in July 1927 in Tehran alongside the adoption of a new, more radical program.Footnote 93 The Comintern resolved to fight the shah’s regime even as the same Bolshevik leaders, already in the role of state managers, continued to develop relations between Moscow and Tehran.
At this point, the CPI had not actually existed as a single entity for several years. Thus, the congress organizers tried to ensure representatives of local party organizations attended and even invited delegates from Baku. But the participants of the congress—first of all, Akhundzade and Nikbin—could not help but criticize each other, and the Baku representatives unsuccessfully tried to legitimize the past congress in Baku.Footnote 94 Nikbin was removed from the Central Committee, but new feuds were not long in coming, this time pitting Akhundzade against Sultanzade and Shargi. This feud erupted from tactical differences (as Tulsiram believes) and, likely, a power struggle, as Akhundzade lost the CC CPI representative in the ECCI post to Sultanzade and was not a member of the CC Secretariat (which included Rizaev [Shargi], Hesabi [Bina], and Pishevari) or the party’s Politburo (which included Shargi, Bina, Pishevari, Ali Shargi [Vagabov], and Hasan Hasanov).Footnote 95 These contradictions continued to corrode the CPI until its defeat.
After the congress, the CC CPI dissolved some party organizations and, with ECCI help, strengthened the party by sending new cadres. By that time, taking into account the situation in Iran, USSR educational institutions—the Communist University of the Peoples of the East (Kommunisticheskiĭ universitet trudiashchikhsia Vostoka, KUTV) in particular—had become the CPI’s main source of qualified cadres.Footnote 96 As a result, by the summer of 1928, according to Sharghi, party organizations and groups existed in Abadan, Tabriz, Tehran, Qazvin, Kerman, Rasht, Isfahan, and other cities and numbered about 500 people.Footnote 97 The Iranian Komsomol, numbering about 100, worked in Tehran, Qazvin, Rasht, Pahlavi, and Tabriz.Footnote 98 Communist women organized societies in Tehran and Gilan.Footnote 99 The CPI’s achievements in the field of revolutionary activity were not as significant as Moscow had expected, however, given the assurances of the party’s leadership. Thus, in January 1928, Sharghi reported to the ECCI that every revolutionary slogan was finding sympathy and response among the masses, and that dissatisfaction with the Pahlavi regime was growing every day.Footnote 100
However, the wave of uprisings, riots, and demonstrations that swept through Iran’s cities and rural areas in 1926–27 subsided in 1928. A new outbreak occurred in 1929, primarily affecting rural residents and tribes in southern Iran, while СPI organizations were concentrated mainly in the country’s northern cities. After 1929, the uprisings in Iran began to wane.Footnote 101
The CPI itself continued to be persecuted. Thus, the party’s participation with the socialists in the VII Mejlis elections led to the arrest of a significant number of party members in 1928.Footnote 102 The ECCI called on the CPI to infiltrate the guilds and fight for the decisive role of the bazaar.Footnote 103 The party did not achieve success in this direction, however, and during the unrest in Shiraz, Isfahan, Tabriz, and other cities in 1927–28, artisans and merchants continued to be influenced by the ulama.Footnote 104
Moreover, the CPI failed in its work with peasants. The party’s members opened an evening school for peasants in Karaj, organized cells in some villages of Iranian Azerbaijan, visited villages in Khorosan under the guise of small haberdashery traders, and yet it was clearly not enough.Footnote 105 The CPI was not alone in its failures in the Middle East: Egyptian communists in the interwar period, for example, also did not succeed in their work with the peasantry.Footnote 106 The problem was of a general Comintern nature, and the ECCI was clearly unable to find a solution.Footnote 107
The CPI managed to achieve more successes in trade union activity, having some support among the workers.Footnote 108 As early as 1927–28, trade unions became active again in Tehran, Rasht, Pahlavi, Tabriz, and other cities. In 1928, Iranian communists managed to create a trade union in the oil fields of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, where a mass strike took place in May 1929.Footnote 109 Although the striking workers secured a number of economic demands, the local CPI organization and the trade union were defeated. Moreover, the CPI failed to launch an all-Iranian strike movement.
By this point, the CC CPI had come into conflict with the Eastern Landersecretariat leadership, which radicalized more rapidly, largely influenced by the struggle between the supporters of Stalin and Bukharin. At first, the secretariat leadership criticized the CC CPI for putting forward a number of bourgeois demands during the VII Majles elections, such as the creation of factories with the help of Iranian capital, protection of Iranian merchants’ rights, etc.Footnote 110 Then, at the end of 1928, Pavel Kitaygorodsky, Boris Mikhailov (Williams), and Ludwig Magyar accused the CC CPI of a “right” bias and “narodnism,” and Sultanzade personally for anti-Marxist views and weak theoretical training.Footnote 111
The fact was that the “Theses on the international and domestic situation of Persia” pointed to the absence of the “general conditions” necessary to the development of capitalism in the country due to a shortage of foreign trade, while the import of foreign capital, under the domination of the British, would turn the country into a colony (Sultanzade’s position).Footnote 112 This argument came to underline accusations that the party had ideas of leaping to socialism, bypassing capitalism (“narodnism”). Moreover, the guidelines called for the creation of a bloc of workers, peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie, i.e., the RRNP (subsequently, attitudes towards cooperation with the petty bourgeoisie became part of the CPI’s Action Program).Footnote 113 The guidelines, reflecting the ECCI position at the beginning of 1928, were transformed into a “right” bias in the autumn of the same year.
Sultanzade, Rizaev, and Khesabi, in turn, reminded their critics of previous Comintern attitudes toward cooperation with Reza Khan and the creation of the RRNP, as well as the ECCI’s familiarity with the content of congress resolutions.Footnote 114 Moreover, Sultanzade said that the theses implied the impossibility of a “rapid” development of capitalism and accused his opponents of poor knowledge of Marxism.Footnote 115 Thus, the СPI leadership escalated the conflict, helping it fend off the accusations, but created influential enemies in the ECCI Eastern Landersecretariat. This feud became fatal for the CC CPI in the context of the party’s defeat by the shah’s police in 1930–31 (by 1933, only about seventy to eighty party members remained at large in Iran, and the party as an organized whole ceased to exist).Footnote 116
At first, the CC CPI was accused of unsatisfactory personnel work, as an inspection of students sent to the KUTV by the CC CPI showed that they spent time discussing women’s right to wear “panties” and other inappropriate topics, attributed to the students’ petty-bourgeois origins.Footnote 117 Then, the Comintern International Women’s Secretariat and the Red International of Trade Unions criticized the party’s work with women and workers.Footnote 118 An audit of the company Purfar and Takhbaz, established in 1928 by Hasanov with CC CPI approval, revealed financial abuses (as a result, Hasanov was expelled from the Central Committee).Footnote 119 Moreover, Gdali Gelbras (Renjbar), a KUTV employee, criticized the party journal Setare-ye Sorkh (Red Star), accusing the journal of printing articles displaying political illiteracy, a departure from Lenin’s understanding of the essence of imperialism, weak analysis of the workers’ and peasants’ movement in Iran, etc.Footnote 120 Eventually, in September 1931, Sultanzade resigned from his post as CC CPI representative to the ECCI and, the following year, the ECCI ousted members of the “old” CPI Central Committee from party leadership.Footnote 121
The Eastern Landersecretariat leadership decided to directly manage the party’s work and attempted to restore its structure in Iran. Considering the persecution and danger of betrayal, the communists went to Iran separately, receiving verbal directives and an address to communicate directly with Moscow; those who arrived were allowed to contact other party members only after verification and through intermediaries.Footnote 122
The work required cadres who, given the persecution of communists in Iran, could be recruited on USSR territory, primarily Baku (especially after the situation with the KUTV). However, the ECCI employees faced a shortage of activists and an unwillingness to go to Iran. According to some reports, by the spring of 1933, eight to ten communists had been recruited in Baku, but only one of them had agreed to go to Iran.Footnote 123 The explanation for such a situation—in addition to the party’s failed unification and the dangers of working in Iran—may also lie in Moscow’s cautious diplomacy, pressure on Iranians to transfer to Soviet citizenship, and the restrictions imposed on the activities of Iranian clubs, cultural societies, and the teaching of Farsi in schools in Baku, which caused discontent among at least some Iranian communists.Footnote 124 Moreover, the case of Abolqasem Lahouti, who rose to the post of Deputy People’s Commissar of Education of the Tajik SSR (1925–30), demonstrated to immigrants the possibilities of career growth in the USSR. As a result, the EССI experienced problems with cadres, and those sent to Iran were either arrested or—acting according to the new scheme—found themselves on their own and could not recreate the party. The next phase of the communist movement in Iran was associated with a group led by Taghi Erani, recognized by the Comintern as the CPI’s successor.Footnote 125
Conclusion
CPI interactions with the Comintern and Bolsheviks were complex and contradictory. While the Bolsheviks gradually established control over the Comintern, Iranian communists could challenge high-ranking Comintern functionaries and involve the Bolsheviks in internal party struggles. The process of the ECCI’s bureaucratization and its enhanced control over national sections changed the process of developing party guidelines, shifting the center of gravity to the ECCI apparatus. Iranian communists, being part of this apparatus, took part in the decision-making process, albeit in secondary roles.
The process of centralizing Comintern activities in Iran also led to contradictory results: while the interference of regional Bolshevik structures was minimized, Baku’s role as an important supplier of party cadres was lost. At the same time, attempts to end the factional struggle that tore the party apart in 1920–21 did not achieve the desired result.
The struggle against feudalism and the allotment of peasants with land were key aspects of the Comintern’s eastern strategy and tactics. However, taking into account the unsuccessful experience in Gilan, Shumyatsky and other Iranian communists temporarily pushed the peasants’ struggle against landlords to the background, instead attempting to create a broad front (the National Bloc) and, later, focusing on attracting the Iranian bourgeoisie (bazaar) and winning over Reza Khan. After the failure of these initiatives, the Comintern and CPI refocused on igniting the agrarian revolution. However, as in 1920–21, this initiative did not succeed.
The ECCI Eastern Landersecretariat blamed the CC CPI, but the secretariat’s failures to re-establish the party demonstrated the superficiality of the Landersecretariat’s assessment of Iranian situation. By that time, heated debates and attempts to diagnose the socio-economic and political processes taking place in the East, which had previously taken place in Moscow, had already largely ended. Iranian communists played a secondary role in these theoretical debates and, in the person of Sultanzade, were stigmatized as deviators.
Iranian communists were not alone in the Middle East in their failures. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to notice the contrast between initial CPI successes (albeit controversial) and expectations—demonstrated by Sultanzade’s inclusion in the ECCI in August 1920 with the right to vote for communists of the Middle East—and its subsequent demise. Despite the relatively rich revolutionary tradition of Iranian social democracy, the CPI was unable to stand as a positive example for other parties. Instead, the Comintern tried to apply its more successful Mongolian experience in Iran, and then the Chinese experience, until the CPI’s disappearance.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the journal editors and the anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable comments and helpful guidance throughout the submission process.
Financial support
Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.
