New Perspectives on the Iranian Coup

Scholarship about the 1953 CIA coup in Iran has evolved with the increasing availability of sources. As Malcolm Byrne, Director of the Iran‒US Relations Project at the National Security Archives has argued, because most relevant CIA records had been lost or destroyed in the early 1960s, the US narrative of the operation under the name TPAJAX was for years shaped by the heavily redacted firsthand accounts of participating CIA agents Kermit Roosevelt and Donald Wilber.Footnote ⁴ Since 2000, the story of the operation has also been fleshed out by Wilber’s Overthrow of the Premier Mosaddeq of Iran: November 1952–August 1953, a document commissioned by the CIA Historical Division which was leaked to the New York Times.Footnote ⁵ Both Roosevelt and Wilber were members of the Ivy League-educated CIA consortium that Henry Kissinger once famously described as an “aristocracy dedicated to the service of this nation.” Roosevelt, the grandson of US president Theodore Roosevelt and a Harvard-educated career intelligence officer, was chosen to head the operation. Wilber, based on his extensive experience as an intelligence agent in the region and his Princeton PhD in the architectural history of the Il Khalnid monuments in Iran, was chosen to be its principal planner and executor.Footnote ⁶ Not surprisingly, these agents’ firsthand accounts reflect the “Cold Warrior mindset” of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration and its aggressive assault against world communism. Their assessments of Soviet threats, focus on Mosaddeq, and description of his elimination from office as a blueprint for future US coups around the world have informed many later scholarly interpretations of this Cold War struggle.Footnote ⁷

As new sources related to the 1953 Coup have become available to historians, including archival collections outside the US, oral histories, memoirs, and private documents, the coup begins to appear as a more complex, international incident. Using archives of the British Foreign Office, Ervand Abrahamian has highlighted the importance of the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis and the role of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AOIC) and the British government in encouraging US officials to take a hard line with Mosaddeq.Footnote ⁸ Contributors to Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, edited by Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, have drawn on a variety of newly available American and British records, Iranian sources, and archival materials from Russian and Azerbaijani archives to further explore the dimensions and legacies of 1953.Footnote ⁹ Yet as these new factors come into focus, the operation’s Soviet features remain obscure for reasons largely related to the difficulties still involved in gaining archival access. In one recent groundbreaking study of Soviet policy makers’ views during Mosaddeq’s tenure, Artemy Kalinovsky relied on records of the Molotov Fond at the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History to paint a picture of an uninterested and suspicious Soviet leadership that badly misread Mosaddeq and his national movement.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, Kalinovsky admits that his work was still significantly constrained by difficulties in accessing relevant materials, especially those in the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (AVPRF). While the political and economic dimensions of Soviet involvement in Iran (or lack thereof) remain difficult to study, the related CIA operation against Lahuti sheds light on a significant cultural dimension of this struggle and its Soviet ramifications. Drawing on declassified documents from the Stalin Archive, the Cold War project at the Lamont Library at Harvard University, and other Soviet archival sources and interviews conducted in Russia and Tajikistan, this paper tells a story that is important to understanding the cultural Cold War outside the Euro-American theater.

Psychological Warfare and the Cultural Front of the Cold War

In his memoirs, Wilber described his work for the CIA as being almost entirely broken down into two fields: political action and psychological warfare.Footnote ¹¹ In November 1953, after the successful completion of TPAJAX, for which the CIA and British intelligence agents employed both political and psychological tactics, Wilber returned to Tehran to tie up loose ends, or, as he put it, to complete an important temporary duty travel assignment (TDY). In the memoirs, his account of this TDY “has been sanitized so that not a word remains.” As Wilber explained, the word “sanitize” was used by the CIA to refer to the excision of words, paragraphs, and pages. As a result, “publications by former agents may or may not show gaps or substitutions where original material has been deleted indicated by brackets (<<>>) that leave the text somewhat disjointed.”Footnote ¹² Significantly, the sections of his text that follow the mention of the TDY and these excisions sketch out an outline of a psychological operation. As Wilber explains, some years earlier he had become convinced that

Wilber then explains that he targeted Lahuti because sometime in 1950 he noticed that bookstores and street stalls in Tehran were flooded with the Divān-e Abul Qāsem Lāhuti, Lahuti’s Collected Works, which had been published in Persian in Moscow in 1946. These poems, according to Wilber, were “strident Marxist efforts, praising Lenin, the Red Flag, revolution to free the oppressed, etc.” Additionally, Wilber explains, he feared that Lahuti’s alleged popularity in the Soviet Republic of Tajikistan was a Soviet ploy to enhance his status and prepare him for future employment. Then, following another sanitized part of his book, he mentions that this operation was “so successful that Radio Moscow announced the death of Lahuti.”Footnote ¹⁴ Some of the gaps in Wilber’s text were subsequently filled in by other ex-CIA operatives working in Iran during this time. In interviews with Mark J. Gasiorowski, these agents recalled that it was during this time that Wilber “wrote the Lahuti book,”Footnote ¹⁵ a fraudulent Persian-language autobiography that reflected unfavorably on Lahuti’s experiences in the Soviet Union and with an account of his subsequent flight to Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁶

These sorts of “black” publications were typical tactics of CIA psychological warfare. They were part of a larger constellation of covert actions, cross-border intelligence, and destabilization campaigns in the USSR.Footnote ¹⁷ These operations increased after the 1948 coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, when President Truman signed National Security Council directive 10/2 that widened US covert operations capability to include “propaganda, … sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, … subversion … including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”Footnote ¹⁸ In line with the NSC 10/2 mandate to counter the “vicious covert activities of the USSR” in the late 1940s, the CIA set up Operation TP-BEDAMN, a wide-ranging program dedicated to undermining the communist influence in Iran.Footnote ¹⁹

Funding for these initiatives was expanded after the issue of NSC-68 in 1950, and then again in 1953, after the US State Department began to seriously consider contingencies for a Soviet takeover of Iran.Footnote ²⁰ It was at this juncture that the anti-Mosaddeq campaign was added to the CIA station’s responsibilities and the budget for the TP-BEDAMN was raised from half a million to one million dollars per year, a high percentage of the CIA’s $82 million budget.Footnote ²¹ In Tehran, US agents used this money to pay off right-wing nationalist organizations and religious figures, to hire thugs to provoke violent acts and then blame them on the communists or to break up Tudeh rallies, and to plant articles and cartoons, usually targeting the Tudeh, in local newspapers.Footnote ²² They also used their funds to translate and disseminate anticommunist books, such as the fake Lahuti autobiography, and God’s Green Acre: Moslems in the USSR, another “black” book ostensibly written by the Tudeh that accused Iran’s clergy of practicing witchcraft.Footnote ²³ Years later, former TP-BEDAMN agents continued to describe the operation against Lahuti as an example of a “particularly effective project.”Footnote ²⁴

These psychological operations were planned and executed within the wider context of the Cold War cultural competition in Iran. As one recent study by James Pickett suggests, many of the CIA agents’ fears about the Soviet “threat” in this arena were not altogether exaggerated. According to Pickett’s research, the cultural struggle waged by the USSR in Iran was a far more serious and widespread endeavor than previously believed.Footnote ²⁵ Facilitated by the wartime Red Army occupation, it extended deep into the Iranian hinterland.Footnote ²⁶ Its operations were partially coordinated by the Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union, an organization founded in 1942 with the support of the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS). The Society’s journal, Payām-e Now (New Message), was inaugurated in 1944 to strengthen the cultural connections between the people of Iran and the Soviet Union by introducing the Iranian public to Soviet culture through translations of Russian poetry, prose, and drama.Footnote ²⁷

During the 1940s, American agents monitored these Soviet operations closely and even tried to emulate some of them. Wilber recalled that as a wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer he founded an Iran‒America Society, the goal of which was to inform Americans about Iran and Iranians about the United States. Like many of the VOKS-sponsored pro-Soviet organizations, this American society was outfitted by the Division of Cultural Cooperation of the State Department with films, books, and a record player. It used these tools to organize public talks, screen color films, and counsel students planning to study at US colleges. After January 1946, it also published a propaganda magazine titled Iran and the USA, with articles in Persian and English.Footnote ²⁸ In terms of numbers, however, the American Society could not compete with its pro-Soviet counterpart; in May 1946 Wilber reported that the Iran‒America Society had well over 600 members,Footnote ²⁹ whereas in June 1946 the Mashhad branch of the pro-Soviet Society alone reported 500 members, and in Tehran it often drew crowds numbering in the thousands.Footnote ³⁰

It was in this atmosphere of cultural competition that Lahuti first popped up on Wilber’s radar as a potential threat. Midway through the war, Wilber had already grown suspicious of Soviet activities in Iran. In 1943 he reported being “disturbed” by wartime arrests and deportations of pro-government Persians who had challenged “Soviet puppets” in northern Iran. After the war, he remained skeptical of the evacuation, “or non-evacuation” as he called it, of Soviet troops from northeastern Iran.Footnote ³¹ Lahuti’s wartime poetry clearly irritated Wilber by celebrating the arrival of Soviet occupational forces and emphasizing the cultural connections between Iran and Soviet Tajikistan, a dimension of Soviet propaganda for which American agents had no reasonable answer. In his wartime poems, Lahuti referred to Iran as his motherland, to the Iranian people as his kinsmen, and to himself as an Iranian poet.Footnote ³² For example, in his 1941 poem “Irān-e man” (My Iran), he addressed the Iranian people “from afar,” describing his dreams of Iran’s freedom and warning them not to listen to libel about their Russian brothers. Such poems, along with his eloquent translations of Pushkin’s epics and Soviet hymns into Persian, introduced Iranian leftist intellectuals to Soviet culture and inspired members of the Tudeh Party.

Some Iranian intellectuals openly praised Lahuti as a cultural mediator between the Soviet Union, Tajikistan, and Iran. For instance, in a 1946 issue of Payām-e Now the esteemed literature professor Saʿid Nafisi (1896–1966) offered some thoughts about the significance of Lahuti’s works:

Such praise for Lahuti’s literary talents, celebration of the similarities between Soviet Tajik and Iranian language and culture, and discussion of Lahuti’s previous experience as a military leader in Iran understandably alarmed American agents. Although Wilber and his collaborators disagreed about the magnitude of the Tudeh threat, they reached a consensus about Lahuti and secured approval from their superiors to print the “black” autobiography.Footnote ³⁴

The Aftermath of the CIA Operation

The goals of the CIA operation against Lahuti—to undermine his appeal by making Iranian leftists believe he had lost faith in the socialist motherland—were fairly straightforward. Yet Lahuti’s position as a mediator between the Soviet Union, Tajikistan, and Iran made its consequences more complex than Wilber and his collaborators had imagined. Shortly after the publication in Iran of the first newspaper articles and of the “black” autobiography, the poet was summoned before the Central Committee. At the time, he was living in the village of Ivanovka outside Moscow with his wife (and translator), Cecilia Banu-Lahuti (“Banu”), and their four children. As his daughter Layla recalled, the family had been subsisting in such modest conditions that her parents did not even own clothes in which they could appear presentable before the Party officials.Footnote ³⁵

Unfortunately the transcript of Lahuti’s first meeting with Vyacheslav Molotov, who had been recently appointed minister of foreign affairs after Stalin’s death in March, has not been made available to me.Footnote ³⁶ According to his son, Giv Lahuti, Molotov had assured the poet at this meeting that a Central Committee special commission on rehabilitation found that in Lahuti’s case there was nothing to redeem or pardon. Molotov also recalled that he had personally observed Stalin crossing out Lahuti’s name from multiple lists of those to be arrested and shot.Footnote ³⁷ Almost immediately after this meeting, Lahuti began to appear on Radio Moscow to declare that he was alive and well in the Soviet Union; he also denied statements made by his supposed relatives in Iran that his broadcasts had been pre-recorded.Footnote ³⁸ After his radio appearances, Lahuti went on to write rebuttals of the autobiography and of the libelous articles in the Iranian newspapers Ātash, Siāsat, and Farmān. These rebuttals were published in the Soviet Literaturnaia Gazeta and Izvestia. Using the Soviet media outlets at his disposal, he repeatedly assured his audiences that he had fled to not from the Soviet Union.

In these public rebuttals, Lahuti showed the political acumen that could be expected of a seasoned propagandist and party official. For years he had followed Iranian politics more closely than many Soviet observers, including many Iranian emigres in the Soviet Union who were mostly cut off from Iranian media.Footnote ³⁹ Yet in his statements he made no reference to the 1953 upheavals let alone any impression he may have had at the time of a Soviet failure to defend the interests of the Iranian people. He knew that during and after the coup, the front pages of Pravda and Izvestia devoted considerably more attention to the Korean War as well as events in India, Libya, and Hungary than to Iran.Footnote ⁴⁰ He was also most likely unaware of the more important Soviet political decisions such as when Stalin and Molotov had ignored the Ministry of State Security (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or “MGB”) and Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoe razvedyvatel'noe upravlenie or “GRU”) intelligence reports from Tehran that the Americans were planning to topple Mosaddeq for having refused to sign an anti-Soviet aggression pact;Footnote ⁴¹ or that as late as 3 August 1953 Molotov had reminded the Soviet ambassador in Iran that Mosaddeq had decided to liquidate British oil concessions at the behest of the United States “so as to remove from the world market the strongest competitors of the American oil monopoly.”Footnote ⁴² It was not until the end of November 1953 that Soviet intelligence experts and leaders conceded that the removal of Mosaddeq spelled the end of the special Soviet position in Iran and the beginning of a US‒Iranian alliance.Footnote ⁴³ Not surprisingly, these concessions were never publicized, and after thirty years in the Soviet Union Lahuti knew better than to criticize a decision made by Stalin (recently deceased) and Molotov (still in power). Rather, he confined his criticism to the libelous campaign being waged against “the best friend of the Iranian people, the Soviet Union” and to the reactionary plot “to distract our thoughts” from an abstract yet very real “threat.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Rather, with newfound access to Soviet media outlets and the highest echelons of the party-state, Lahuti set out to accomplish a different set of objectives. Throughout the early 1950s, when Wilber had suspected that Lahuti was being groomed for future leadership of a Soviet-backed government in Iran, the poet was actually experiencing what he believed to be systematic political, intellectual, and social marginalization. In a 3 June 1950 letter to Joseph Stalin, Lahuti described a series of alarming events. After meeting with the deputy chief of the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, Lahuti had learned of two accusations being leveled against him by the Communist Party. The first was that he had mistakenly attributed Persian literary classics such as Ferdowsi, ʿOmar Khayyām, Saʿdi, Hāfez, and others to Iran. This, he was told, had contradicted Comrade Stalin’s pronouncement that these authors “were the literary heritage not of Iran but of Tajikistan.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Stalin had indeed made such claims at a Kremlin reception for the Ten-day Celebration of Tajik Culture on 22 April 1941, at which he called Tajiks “the oldest of the peoples of Central Asia” whose intelligentsia “gave birth to the great poet Ferdowsi.” It was from Ferdowsi, Stalin claimed, that the Tajiks “derive their cultural traditions.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In his letter, Lahuti had asked Stalin to “clarify” his position in light of the importance placed on “the friendship between the exploited masses of the East with the Soviet Tajik people.” After all, he asked,

To the second accusation—that he “openly identified as Iranian and loved Iran more than Tajikistan”—Lahuti replied that he never forgot his exploited brothers, especially in difficult times, and always called upon them to free themselves from the yoke of colonialism by following the example of the Tajik people.Footnote ⁴⁸ Defending himself against both accusations, Lahuti invoked the Soviet Central Asian model of development as the basis of Soviet cultural exchanges with the Persianate world.

In 1950 Lahuti argued that the larger underlying problem was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Tajikistan, Bobojon Ghafurov. Ghafurov was a shrewd and powerful opponent. Before becoming first secretary in Tajikistan, and significantly the first Tajik to rise to this position, he had served as the secretary for propaganda (1941‒44) and then as the second secretary (1944‒46) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tajikistan. His political success was further bolstered by his academic contributions to the fields of Tajik history and archeology in which he repeatedly asserted the autochthonous status of the Tajik people.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Ghafurov’s first book, Tārikh-e Mokhtasar-e Khalq-e Tājik [A Short History of the Tajik People], published in Tajik in 1947 (in Russian in 1949, and then re-edited in Russian in 1952 and 1955), he presented a version of Tajik history and culture as something unique and separate from other ancient cultures and peoples of the Persian Empire, and in particular from the history and culture of Iran.Footnote ⁵⁰ In other words, from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, Ghafurov staked his reputation on the argument that it was the various peoples of Iran who had absorbed the creative work of the peoples of Central Asia, and not the other way around. Moreover, he argued that the writers typically considered Persian, such as Rudaki (d. 940/41) and Ferdowsi, were actually more accurately described as Persian-Tajik.Footnote ⁵¹ For these contributions, the first secretary also became the first Tajik to be awarded a Soviet doctorate.

Ghafurov’s promotion of Tajik claims to ownership over the Persian-Tajik literary heritage had a number of underlying political objectives. First, by positing the Samanid dynasty (875‒999) as the endpoint of Tajik ethnogenesis, a process he argued began in the first millennium before our era in the eastern outermost bounds of the Iranian world, Ghafurov aimed to prove the ancient presence of the Tajiks’ ancestors in Central Asia without submerging Tajik identity within a larger ensemble of symbols and narratives dominated by Iran. This allowed him to use such ancient Central Asian centers as Bactria, Sogdia, and Kh^wārazm as evidence that the stateness of the Tajik peoples had been consolidated long before that of western Iran.Footnote ⁵² Such exaltations of antiquity were fairly common in the 1930s–1940s. As Marlene Laruelle has argued, these exaltations drew legitimacy from the official Stalinist idea that a unique genius lay at the heart of each of the cultures encompassed within the Soviet Union; this idea was then projected onto the past as a historical space unified since time immemorial. Additionally, these explanations allowed non-Russian nations to reaffirm an image of a Soviet Union that had been, throughout history, at the forefront of world cultural development.Footnote ⁵³

Second, Ghafurov’s version of Tajik history was an open challenge to prominent Soviet Turkologists and contemporary Uzbek historians trying to appropriate the same antiquity.Footnote ⁵⁴ Conforming to the general bias in Soviet historiography towards settled peoples with written cultures over peoples with nomadic lifestyles who did not possess a written history, arguments about Tajik ethnogenesis placed Tajiks in a privileged position relative to Uzbeks and other Turkic-speaking republics of Central Asia. Additionally, as Mohira Suyarkulova has argued, the fact that Ghafurov’s history of the Tajiks did not conform to the geographic framework of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic but instead inscribed it across the entire Central Asian zone paved the way for claims for the return of territories not included in Tajikistan’s borders, such as Bukhara and Samarkand.Footnote ⁵⁵ Ghafurov’s interpretation of Tajik history and its relationship to the Persian literary canon must therefore be understood, first and foremost, within the context of Soviet Central Asian political and ideological competition.

Within this framework, Lahuti’s poems and other writings threatened Ghafurov’s interpretations of Tajik history by drawing on Persian literary and cultural heritage as something shared by both Iran and Soviet Tajikistan. While Ghafurov used Persianate antiquity to argue for a Tajik ethnogenesis that was separate from that of Iran, Lahuti used it to create a new future-oriented poetry that referenced Persian epics and drew on their forms to simultaneously celebrate the Soviet Union and to express a nostalgic longing for his lost homeland. In line with a more general post-1953 “historical turn” in Soviet literary and autobiographical writing, this poetry blurred the lines between Soviet/Tajik and Iranian culture and imagined its continuity as a potential basis for Soviet/Tajik‒Iranian friendship.Footnote ⁵⁶

As a result of these differences and of an accompanying personal animus, Lahuti believed that Ghafurov had made living conditions in Tajikistan so unbearable for him that that he and his wife were forced to leave to save their children from starvation.Footnote ⁵⁷ According to Lahuti, Ghafurov had tried to have the poet expelled from the Communist Party in 1943; when these efforts failed, he apparently spread libelous rumors about him.Footnote ⁵⁸ Ghafurov also had Lahuti barred from participating in the Ten-day Celebration of Tajik Culture in Moscow in 1949 for the reason, accepted by some members of the All-Union Meeting of Soviet Writers including Alexander Fadeyev, that Lahuti was “not was not a Tajik poet, but an Iranian one”; during World War II Ghafurov instructed Tajik performers traveling to Iran not to perform any of Lahuti’s works; in 1949 he pressured the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Stalinabad to replace Lahuti’s songs and operas with new productions. Once, the first secretary even publicly announced before a group of Tajik intelligentsia that “Lahuti must die for Tajikistan.” These and other pressures, claimed Lahuti, made it difficult for him to write, and forced him “to live at a remove” (vynuzhdennom otryve) from society and from his creative inspiration.Footnote ⁵⁹

It is unclear if Stalin ever read Lahuti’s letter of complaint, especially since little seems to have been done about its contents.Footnote ⁶⁰ Judging from his publication output, the poet had lost much of his inspiration. Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s he published more than twenty collections of poems in Tajik, Persian, and Russian, and continued to publish actively throughout the 1940s, from 1951 to 1954 he published only two editions of poetry.Footnote ⁶¹ For Lahuti, the CIA operation was a timely intervention. Seizing the opportunity to address high-ranking Soviet officials, he launched a new round of attacks against his enemy. In letters to Khrushchev, Suslov, Malenkov, and Molotov, Lahuti argued that his poor treatment by Ghafurov was “facilitating (sposobstvovali) hostilities by foreign agents.” He then drew their attention again to the misappropriation of Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, and other classical Persian literary figures as the exclusive cultural inheritance of Tajiks and to the persecution of Iranian immigrants in Tajikistan under the banner of combating pan-Iranism.Footnote ⁶²

By 1954, Lahuti’s list of Ghafurov’s persecutions (“travlia” as he referred to them) had grown longer. Reiterating the points he made in 1950, Lahuti added that Ghafurov had encouraged popular bourgeois-nationalist attitudes in Tajikistan, including disdain for Uzbeks, Russians, and Iranian political immigrants; abused party authority; persecuted Lahuti for refusing to attack other Iranians for insisting that Persian literary classics were part of the heritage of Iranian peoples; forbade members of the Tajik intelligentsia to socialize with him; and renamed kolkhozy (collective farms) that had previously borne Lahuti’s name.Footnote ⁶³ These actions, warned Lahuti, were especially dangerous in light of the new anti-Soviet propaganda abroad.Footnote ⁶⁴

As further information about the CIA operation was uncovered, the Central Committee had little choice but to take Lahuti’s grievances seriously. A February 1954 report from the decorated journalist and secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, Boris Polevoi, characterized the autobiography as “a typical example of American propaganda.”Footnote ⁶⁵ His assessment was based on another report and partial translation of the Persian-language text compiled by a senior researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences. The orientalist, Petrov, pointed out literary devices “often used by imperialist agents,” such as denying religious belief in the Soviet Union, and identifying the author as an agent of the Unified State Political Directorate (Ob'edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie or “OGPU”), the Comintern, and the Cominform.Footnote ⁶⁶ Certain mistakes also strongly suggested that Lahuti could not have authored the book. For instance, it confused basic Soviet geography claiming that Lahuti supposedly escaped from the Soviet Union to Afghanistan across the Amu Darya River near Kirovabad (Ganja, Azerbaijan). Lahuti would never have made such a mistake about the flow of the Amu Darya, argued the researcher. The book also demonstrated the author’s ignorance of debates about Ferdowsi and Tajik heritage when narrating a period when Lahuti had supposedly been the Commissar of Education in Tajikistan; it contained mistakes about Lahuti’s personal life and exaggerated Lahuti’s role in the Iranian Communist Party (ICP).Footnote ⁶⁷ Other obvious mistakes included the characterization of Avetis Soltanzādeh, who had been purged in 1938, as an active Soviet spy. Based on this evidence, both Petrov and Polevoi concluded that the book was a crude forgery “ordered by the political agents of one of the imperialist powers (most likely the US) for the purpose of ideological influence (ideologicheskaia obrabotka) on Muslim inhabitants of countries of the Near and Middle East, and first and foremost of Iran.”Footnote ⁶⁸

By March 1954 the Central Committee conclusively determined that Lahuti had fallen victim to an international anti-Soviet conspiracy and that Ghafurov’s biases “may have facilitated the goals of Iranian provocateurs.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Its Section of Science and Culture reported that it had reexamined the status of Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, and other Persian literary classics as well as the issue of persecution of Iranian political refugees in Stalinabad.Footnote ⁷⁰ Consequently, the Central Committee instructed the Communist Party of Tajikistan to change its relationship to Lahuti and to allow him to speak on the radio.Footnote ⁷¹ Finally, it instructed Bobojon Ghafurov personally to allow Lahuti to publish his works in Tajikistan.Footnote ⁷² In these ways, the CIA operation led to Lahuti’s rehabilitation inside the Soviet Union and empowered him to challenge an opponent who, until then, had monopolized political, ideological, and intellectual affairs inside Soviet Tajikistan and had been broadly influential in debates about Tajik and Persian culture.

Lahuti’s Autobiography and Legacy

By politicizing Lahuti’s well-being in the Soviet Union, the CIA operation and Soviet responses to it transformed Lahuti into an international symbol of Soviet‒Iranian friendship. Among Lahuti’s responses to Wilber’s operation, the two that had the largest international impact included a rhymed poem mocking the CIA and a short autobiography, “About Myself,” which were published in Persian, Russian, German, and English.Footnote ⁷³ Today, this autobiography continues to be referenced as an authoritative source by English-language scholars of history and literature. In an article about Lahuti’s role in the Tabriz insurrection of 1922, Stephanie Cronin cites it as Lahuti’s “own version of his life,” with the caveat that it “was written many years after 1922 and in completely changed circumstances.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The literary scholar Kāmyār ʿĀbedi cites it repeatedly in an Encyclopedia Iranica entry about Lahuti.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although this text is not a falsification, it deliberately obscures important complexities of Lahuti’s life, including the very circumstances that led to this text’s production. In the remainder of this article, I will argue that by considering this text not only within a larger context of the Cold War struggle in Iran but also of Lahuti’s experiences inside the USSR, including his struggles over the politics of Persian culture, this artifact can tell us much more about the personality of Lahuti and his legacy.

Significantly, the often cited 1954 autobiography was not Lahuti’s first. As a bureaucrat who had worked in multiple Soviet institutions he was familiar with the Soviet art of writing about the self. Unlike the introspective, soul-searching, and confessional tone of many Soviet autobiographies and diaries, Lahuti’s compositions had explicit political aims.Footnote ⁷⁶ In an earlier autobiography preserved in his Comintern personal file from January 1932, Lahuti explicitly stated that he saw his occupation “more as a fighter than a poet (ia remeslom boets, a ne poet).” He claimed that he “never wrote poems for the sake of poetry (nikogda ne zanimalsia poeziei samoi po sebe) but always used them as one type of weapon in the revolutionary struggle.”Footnote ⁷⁷ His autobiographies served a similar function.

Both the 1932 and 1954 autobiographies functioned as political weapons that allowed Lahuti to defend himself against his enemies. The 1932 narrative served as his testimony in a dispute with members of the Iranian Communist Party about his past which surfaced during a routine Comintern purge.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Lahuti explained to Molotov and other high-level officials at the time:

To resolve this conflict, the Comintern organized a special commission to weigh Lahuti’s statements alongside accounts by soldiers who had fought beside him in the 1922 Tabriz uprising that testified to his bravery and revolutionary commitments,Footnote ⁸⁰ and ICP reports about rumors that Lahuti once held deeply anti-revolutionary viewsFootnote ⁸¹ and portrayed himself in Pravda (especially his role in the Tabriz uprising) “in a way that he had never been.”Footnote ⁸² The 1932 autobiography was intended to help defend Lahuti against his enemies before the Comintern’s International Control Commission (ICC).Footnote ⁸³ Lahuti also hoped that his descriptions of having worked with a Bolshevik cell of the Russian army in Persia in 1917 might help to push the record of his party experience back a few more years. It is unclear whether this last objective was realized, but after the hearing the Comintern International Control Commission did recommend that Iranian comrades stop spreading libelous rumors about Lahuti.Footnote ⁸⁴ This decision brought Lahuti a temporary reprieve before a new set of accusations surfaced in the late 1930s from other Iranian communists again arguing that many were offended by Lahuti’s “exaggerated, made up biography in the press.”Footnote ⁸⁵ These later reports blocked Lahuti’s Comintern promotion in the ranks of the ICP. Next to such enemies, Wilber and the CIA seemed more like friends.

The experience of having to defend his life story against so many adversaries and challenges turned Lahuti into a cautious narrator. Both these autobiographies, and others, focused on his childhood in Kermanshah, the evolution of his interests from Sufi poetry to leftist activism, and his eventual escape to the Soviet Union. Details from his subsequent Soviet life in Moscow and Tajikistan were understandably omitted so as to avoid potential ideological pitfalls. To Lahuti, such pitfalls likely seemed inevitable considering the dramatic ideological shifts that he had witnessed since his arrival in the USSR in the early 1920s.

The styles of the 1932 and the 1954 autobiographies differ significantly. The dry political narrative of the 1932 document was clearly intended for a Comintern purge commission while the more literary style of the 1954 autobiography was meant for a wider international readership. Whereas the 1932 version opened with a description of Lahuti’s father’s occupation, a convention of official Soviet autobiographies used to establish its author’s class origins, the later version opened with a sketch from Lahuti’s childhood “in feudal Iran.” In it, Lahuti described observing a young boy who was first unjustly struck by a fat merchant and then, after weeping and cursing, was cruelly beaten by the crowd.Footnote ⁸⁶ In fashioning it as a literary work modeled after diaries and in using impassioned propagandistic sketches to make documentary claims, the 1954 autobiography suggests that Lahuti was well aware of contemporary Soviet literary trends.Footnote ⁸⁷ Finally, the tone of the 1954 version was more celebratory. Lahuti recalled “feeling the power of words” just as he observed the “Iranian people’s spirits rise as they listened to the Shāhnāmeh.”Footnote ⁸⁸ He described his excitement on hearing of the creation of Soviet Tajikistan where “Ferdowsi and Saʿdi are as dear to the people as they are in my native Iran.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In asserting the popularity of Ferdowsi in both Iran and Tajikistan Lahuti was defining a new ideological orientation and implicitly demonstrating his victory over Ghafurov.

Lahuti’s Legacies after 1954

With the Soviet leadership’s reorientation towards the developing world and simultaneous reevaluation of 1953 in Iran as an aborted national liberation revolution, during the second half of the 1950s, Lahuti’s symbolic importance increased.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the late 1950s Soviet leaders had little choice but to normalize relations with Tehran by working on a number of bilateral issues, including unsettled boundary problems, financial claims arising out of World War II, and fishing rights in the Caspian Sea.Footnote ⁹¹ These efforts culminated in a visit to Moscow by the shah of Iran in late June‒early July 1956 during which he reassured Khrushchev that despite its entry into the Baghdad Pact, “Iran would not countenance or take part in any aggressive schemes against his country.”Footnote ⁹² Since such assurances inspired little confidence, Soviet propagandists continued to target Iran by emphasizing cultural connections between the two regions, and especially between Iran and Soviet Tajikistan.Footnote ⁹³ In 1956, the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee was created to promote Soviet relations within the Third World. Highlighting the significance of Persian culture and Iran, Tajik poet Mirzo Tursunzoda was elected its first president, its Presidium included Bobojon Ghafurov, and its first 1961 international congress was hosted in Dushanbe.Footnote ⁹⁴ These new initiatives drew upon cultural similarities in the Persianate world stretching across both sides of the Cold War divide in a way that Lahuti had always celebrated. Even Ghafurov became a proponent of using cultural connections between Soviet Central Asia and the “foreign East” to further Moscow’s engagement with the Third World. In this context, Lahuti’s prescient calls for anti-colonial liberation in Iran, legitimized by the CIA operation against him, fell more in line with the position of the Soviet establishment than ever before.

During this period, Lahuti’s standing in the wider Soviet and Tajik literary society was transformed. Whereas in 1949 he had been banned from participating in the Ten-day Celebration of Tajik Culture, by 1956 the Union of Writers of Tajikistan proposed organizing a series of celebrations to commemorate his achievements in Tajik literature.Footnote ⁹⁵ In accordance with the Central Committee’s instructions, the Union of Writers of Tajikistan invited Lahuti to Stalinabad to publicize his works in newspapers and on the radio. His death just months before the meeting turned the affair into a commemorative production replete with new biographies and public celebrations of his life and works.

The official biographies circulated at these posthumous celebrations in Tajikistan and Moscow drew heavily on earlier biographical narratives, and especially on Lahuti’s 1954 autobiography. They focused on the poet’s youth and suppressed details about his Soviet experiences. One version circulated by the Union of Writers of Tajikistan in 1957 stopped narrating the events in Lahuti’s life after 1936 and shifted instead to abstract analysis of his literary style and methods.Footnote ⁹⁶ Another version glossed over the events of his life between World War II and 1954 by focusing on his “poetic themes” heralding his “Soviet patriotism and love towards the socialist motherland and party.”Footnote ⁹⁷ It paid special attention to his 1954 poem “Answer to the Provocateurs,” which it claimed “played a particularly large role in unmasking libel against the Soviet Union.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In a high-profile article in Sovetskoe vostokovedenie (Soviet Orientalism) published in connection with these celebrations, the Soviet literary scholar Zoia Osmanova announced that “in talking about Lahuti as a poet of Iran one cannot neglect all the factors which have made him a Soviet poet, just as in talking about his role in developing Soviet Tajik literature one cannot neglect the significance of his work for the literature of modern Iran.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Osmanova’s biography also built upon Lahuti’s 1954 narrative, mentioning only major positive landmarks of his Soviet lifeFootnote ¹⁰⁰ and focusing mostly on the themes, forms, and genres of his poetry.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Her narrative barely hinted at some of Lahuti’s struggles in the Soviet Union. At one point, she disagreed with an assessment of Lahuti’s work in Ocherki istorii tadzhikskoi literatury (Outlines of the History of Tajik Literature) in which he had been criticized as having failed “to capture the image of a Tajik hero of the Soviet epoch.”Footnote ¹⁰² Significantly, one of the authors of this 1955 Otcherki who remains unidentified in Osmanova’s footnotes was Joseph Braginskii, Ghafurov’s close collaborator and co-author of The History of the Tajik People. In another hint woven into her conclusion, Osmanova celebrates Lahuti as an author and activist who preserved and enriched the tradition of Ferdowsi and Saʿdi, Khayyām and Hāfez as “equally close and dear to the Persians and the Tajiks.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Such statements again demonstrated that Lahuti’s interpretation of Ferdowsi and Saʿdi as a shared Iranian‒Tajik cultural heritage had achieved the status of authoritative ideological discourse, replacing earlier interpretations of not only Ghafurov but of Stalin himself.

Even such subtle hints were courageous in light of the fact that Ghafurov maintained not only much of his former influence, but also an interest in Persian literary culture and a kind of “archeological patriotism” well into the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Ghafurov’s continued opposition to Lahuti manifested itself most clearly in the former’s organized resistance to the project that Lahuti commenced at the end of his life. Together with his wife Banu, the poet spent his last years working on a Russian translation of Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh. As Banu recalled, this intellectual goal helped to sustain them during their “time of troubles” at a time when Lahuti had told her: “What we do now no longer matters. Why hurt ourselves? (Chto kromsat’ zhivoe telo?) If we do not have the opportunity to publish a full translation it should not stop us from working on it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Some of the strongest resistance to the publication of this work came from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, which Ghafurov directed from 1956 to 1977. Some members of the Institute apparently favored a prose translation instead of the rhymed one being prepared by the Lahutis; others claimed there was not enough paper to print important new works in physics and chemistry so “why waste it on [Ferdowsi’s] discussions about God and the soul?”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ According to Banu, the first volume of the Shāhnāmeh was published only as a result of “a miracle,” when during his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1955 Jawaharlal Nehru expressed his surprise that there was no Russian translation of the Indian Mahabharata, or of the Persian Shāhnāmeh. Again, Lahuti’s work was saved by foreign intervention.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

After his death, Banu’s efforts to publish the remaining volumes of the Shāhnāmeh continued to meet with resistance from the Institute for Oriental Studies. The second volume was published only after the intervention of Khrushchev’s wife, Nina Petrovna, with whom Banu had once shared a hospital room and remained on friendly terms. After the publication of the fourth volume in 1969, another group of orientalists argued that further publications were unnecessary because Ferdowsi “wrote nothing more than boring instructions toward the end of his life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1972, in an introduction to another edition of the Shāhnāmeh, Bobojon Ghafurov, in sharing his memories of people reading the Shāhnāmeh in Tajikistan, added that it “has not been translated into Russian in its entirety although separate previously translated segments (otdel’nye, ranee perevedennye otryvki) are popular with Soviet lovers of literature.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Neither Banu’s name nor the fact that she and Lahuti had already translated and published more than half the epic were mentioned, an omission that suggested Ghafurov remained unwilling to acknowledge Lahuti’s contributions to Persian literature in the Soviet Union long after the poet’s death.

Despite such resistance, as director of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, Ghafurov’s power was significantly diminished from what it had been as first secretary of the Communist Party of Tajikistan. In Dushanbe, Lahuti continued to be commemorated and celebrated. From 1960 to 1963, a six-volume collection of his complete works was published in Tajik, and the 1967 public celebrations of his eightieth birthday held in Dushanbe and Moscow attracted intellectuals from across the USSR, Iran, and Afghanistan.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In Dushanbe, guests included the chairman of the Council of Ministers of Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) Abdulahad Qahhorov, who described Lahuti as a successor (vorisoni) to Perso-Tajik poetry whose influence was felt not only in the Soviet East but in other countries of Asia as well.Footnote ¹¹¹ Speaking on behalf of the Soviet Union of Writers, Anatoly Safronov concluded that “Lahuti would have been happy if he saw what has happened in the last ten years … in our Soviet country, on the Asian and African continent, in Latin America, and in the entire world.”Footnote ¹¹² Many of the guests in Dushanbe stressed Lahuti’s importance to Soviet Central Asia. Kazakh writer Khamza Ikhsanuly Esenjhanov spoke about his popularity in Kazakhstan and the inclusion of his poems in the Kazakh school curriculum. Other delegates emphasized Lahuti’s importance to Tajik nation-building, calling him a “son of Tajikistan” and praising his “contributions to Tajik national heritage.”Footnote ¹¹³

In Moscow, the guests more often emphasized Lahuti’s role as a mediator between the Soviet Union and Iran. The Soviet writer Nikolai Tikhonov described him as a founder “of Tajik and New Iranian poetry … [whose] name has entered the history of Iran and that of the revolutionary movement of the East.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Azerbaijani writer Mammad Rahim called Lahuti a “great poet of the Tajik and Iranian peoples.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Mumin Qanoat called him a “new classic” who, like Hafez before him, managed to unite the Tajiks, Iranians, and Afghanis.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Iranian Parviz Khānlari described Lahuti as “one of our countrymen (hamvatanoni mo)” who was “like an ambassador of Persian literature sent to the Soviet country, and especially to Tajikistan, to help create ties of Persian literature and to the foreign world (ba Tojikistan firistoda shudaast, baroi in ki ba she’ri forsi va ba ravobiti she’iri forsi ba dunia horich kumak bikunad).”Footnote ¹¹⁷

In both Moscow and Dushanbe, Banu played an active role in maintaining her deceased husband’s legacy. In Dushanbe, she told the audience that if anyone wanted to know more about Lahuti they should read his poetry “because Lahuti the poet and Lahuti the person are one inseparable whole.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Such deliberate blurring of Lahuti’s life and art was consistent with ideas about literature as an instrument of socialist culture widely held in the Soviet Writers’ Union.Footnote ¹¹⁹ For Lahuti, literary production demanded ideological content (ideiinost’), a high level of artistic form (vysokaia khudozhestvennost’ formy), knowledge of reality and audience (znanie deistvitel’nosti, chitatel’skoi audistorii), and creative assimilation of the tradition of classical heritage (tvorcheskoe osvoenie traditsii klassicheskogo naslediia).Footnote ¹²⁰ In his poems he often switched voices, writing at times as a Tajik peasant, at other times as an Iranian from Kermanshah.Footnote ¹²¹ Like his poems, his much cited 1954 autobiography also served an explicit political function: to conceal the political struggles and grievances that shaped much of his Soviet life. This goal made it easy for others to turn him into a lasting symbol of Soviet transformation of the East and of Soviet‒Tajik‒Iranian friendship.Footnote ¹²²