Iranian Exiles and Stalin’s Great Terror

Touraj Atabaki is Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History and Professor Emeritus of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University. Atabaki first studied theoretical physics before switching to history at the University of London and Utrecht University. Following positions at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, he joined Leiden University where he held the Chair of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia. Atabaki’s research spans historiography, labour and subaltern studies in twentieth-century Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia. His forthcoming publications is Toiling for Oil. A Social History of Petroleum in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Lana Ravandi-Fadai is Associate Professor of the Contemporary East and Africa at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Head of the Eastern Cultural Centre of the Institute of Oriental Studies. She is the author of numerous scholarly publications including Political Parties and Organizations of Iran, which was selected as one of the Best Scholarly Book of the Year (2010) at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. Lana Ravandi-Fadai has taught and researched at number of universities and research institutes including the Virginia Military Institute in the United States and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her works examine political and social developments in contemporary Iran - political parties and factions, government institutions, educational policy, and ethnic and women’s issues.

• List of FiguresList of MapsList of TablesNote on TransliterationPreface and AcknowledgementsIntroduction: From Internationalism to Inquisition: An Iranian Journey Through Soviet CommunismI. Iranians in the Soviet Shadow: Labour, Politics, and Cross-Border Influence1. Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Migrant Labour on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire2. Russia’s Southern Frontiers in Turmoil: Revolution and Counter-Revolution3. The Comintern and Soviet Foreign Policy: Revolution and Reaction in Iran4. The Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV): Red Orientalism and IranII. The Great Terror5. Genesis of the Great Terror6. Margins Under Siege: The Great Terror in Transcaucasia and Central Asia7. Displaced by Design: The Soviet Purge of Iranians and Other Ethnicities8. Footprints of the Vanished: Lives Interrupted by Stalin’s PurgesEpilogue: The Ethics of Memory and the Shadows of Totalitarian ViolenceNotesBibliographyIndexAppendix: Revolutionary Posters

Iranian Exiles and Stalin’s Great Terror is a groundbreaking work. In their well-written and carefully documented reconstruction, Touraj Atabaki and Lana Ravandi-Fadai show not only the hopeful beginnings of cooperation between Soviet and Iranian communists, but also the subsequent violent and disillusioning repression of the 1930s. This book is a milestone in the political historiography of Stalinism.