Multiple Identities: Female Agents in Iran in the 1930s and 40s

This paper traces the paths of several young Iranian women who studied in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s and then engaged in clandestine work for the communist cause in Iran. These idealistic individuals represent the flip side of the “Great Game” of flamboyant master spies: they lived modest lives, secretly passing information and funds while working to improve living conditions at home. Their histories and the documentation preserved in the Russian archives, particularly personal correspondence, reveal a thirst for change, modernization and justice sometimes coupled with a longing for tradition. Zuleiha of Tehran was in her teens in the 1930s and dreamed of studying Orientalism in Moscow. She already knew Russian, as she had studied at the Soviet School in Tehran where her father taught. A veteran of the Gilan Revolution who had spent time in Iranian and tsarist prisons, Abdul Kasem convinced his daughter, in a series of fascinating and touching letters in Farsi and Russian, to study medicine in the USSR — a subject he argued would better enable her to help her country. In 1942, Zuleiha returned to Iran, where she struggled against local prejudices and a lack of resources to open her own clinic and care for her daughter, while at the same time passing information to Moscow through elaborately encoded letters. The double-layered, macaronic letters detail political activities in Iran, particularly of foreign powers, while simultaneously conveying Zuleiha’s hopes and anxieties to her friends and contacts in her studied Russian.
Ahtar also hailed from a politically active family in Tehran and was strongly influenced by her father: a celebrated revolutionary and Constitutionalist killed by the Cossack Brigade. Like Zuleiha, she studied medicine, both in Iran and the USSR. Politically active since her teens, she organized women’s organizations and student strikes in Iran while practicing as a midwife. After Reza Shah’s sweeping crackdown on Iranian communists in the early 1930s, Ahtar smuggled in much-needed cash and communist literature sewn into the lining of her suitcase. Ahtar’s family history reflects much of the evolution of political thought and internal contradictions in early 20th century Iran: Her grandfather was a well-known conservative mullah hanged by the Constitutionalists, a movement that the mullah’s son, Ahtar’s father, was later to join.
This paper presents these young women’s stories in the context of the Communist movement in Iran.