The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced hegemonic categories of “bourgeois” knowledge, notably concerning language and national identity. This becomes especially clear in the case of Soviet studies of Kurdish, a language subaltern with respect to Persian, Arabic, and, increasingly, Turkish. In the 1920s and early 1930s, native scholars like Erebê Shemo, Qanatê Kurdo, and Heciyê Cindî pioneered the creation of both an alphabet and a literature in Kurdish and of scholarly linguistic studies. Their work was shaped (and encouraged) by Nikolaj Marr's rejection of the idea of genetic links between Indo-Persian languages, and of the reification of “national characters.” Marr's “japhetic” linguistics dovetailed with Stalin's nationality policies in the 1920s and 1930s; it is rightly rejected as unscientific, but it did have positive emancipatory effects. It criticized ethnocentric and racist assumptions in contemporary Indo-European linguistics, and emphasized the value of spoken subaltern vernaculars like Ossetian and Kurdish against hegemonic written languages like Sanskrit and Persian. It also had the paradoxical effect of both countering bourgeois nationalism and encouraging national consciousness. The article concludes with a discussion of how the Soviet experience may affect our view of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and of the linguistic turn in later postcolonial studies.

This study examines the Jamshid of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and its later reception, specifically the Islamic refashioning of Jamshid in fourteenth-century Shiraz, as evidenced in the ghazals of Hāfez (d. 1389), and the lyric poetry of Khvāju-ye Kermāni (d. 1352 or 1360), and ʿObeyd-e Zākāni (d. 1371). Hāfez, Khvāju, and ʿObeyd used literary devices such as talmih (allusion) and ubi sunt to both engage with and reshape the past, and this refashioning of the past was employed to legitimize their patrons’ authority to rule from Shiraz. The article culminates in an exploration of the mytho-political dimensions of the conflation of Jamshid with Solomon and the intimate association of this composite figure with Fars in the Ilkhanid and post-Ilkhanid periods. Poetry is treated here as a productive force that both shapes and is shaped by the socio-political circumstances of its composition, performance, and reception. In order to locate the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century reconfiguration of Jamshid within its geo-mythological context, use has been made of the concept of lieu de mémoire as a means through which to unpack the trans-historical cultural impact on Shiraz of the ancient Achaemenid and Sasanian ruins that surround the Islamic city; ruins that have for more than two millennia embedded a sense of proximity to history in the land and peoples of Fars.

Azerbaijani national history theory poses a challenge to the conventional history writing of Iran. Since 1937, Azerbaijani Soviet historians in Baku have constructed an Azerbaijani national history and identity based on the territorial definition of the nation. This approach was supported by Joseph Stalin. By the 1940s, this narrative incorporated various components hitherto exclusively known as “Iranian,” such as the Medes. Meanwhile, Soviet Iranologists and Orientalists, followers of the conventional Iranian narrative, tried to avoid controversy with the Azerbaijani claims, which secured political support at the highest level. When Stalin died in 1953, the Iranologists raised their voices, which caused controversy with political connotations. Using primary source materials, this article sheds light on the first round of discussions between Azerbaijani historians, constructors of their national history, and the Soviet Iranologists, the proponents of conventional Iranian history. The article also shows the limits of the Communist Party's control over history writing and the hardships of accommodating contradictory interpretations of history within a multinational communist state.

The essay focuses on the personality and work of Olga Dmitrievna Chekhovich (1912–1982), an eminent Soviet and Uzbekistani scholar of mediaeval history whose entire academic career was spent in Tashkent. Based upon on the documents of her personal archive I try to reconstruct Chekhovich’s two facets - a Communist Party propagandist and a scholar. In doing so, I argue that the two facets of Olga Chekhovich are not oppositional but rather complementary; insofar as, taken together, they constitute a holistic image of a Soviet Oriental Studies scholar in the particular social and political space. What we see as duplicity was in fact a consistent form of the scholar’s self-presentation both within the academic community and in the social milieu beyond it. It let the scholar safely stay within the confines of the social and political system, becoming an integral part of it; and at the same time shape her or his own social and intellectual space within which she or he could advance and defend her or his positions, opinions, and views. In the larger scheme of things, this case study lets us address the question of whether one can view the Soviet school of Oriental studies as ideologically uniform, isolationist, and conforming solely to the directives of the ‘center’. The overall picture appears even more complicated if we pay more attention to the contradictory nature of Oriental studies—the various currents and struggles, the movement of scholars between center and periphery, their familiarity with scholarly works produced in the West, as well as a certain degree of autonomy from ideology.

During the Second World War and its immediate aftermath the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS) engaged in an aggressive campaign of cultural outreach in Iran to promote socialist modernity amongst Iranian leftists. Iran represented VOKS’ first serious expansion outside Europe and one which the Soviet Union was uniquely poised to exploit. VOKS tapped into the Soviet Union's orientalist scholarly establishment inherited from the Russian Empire to advance the argument that not only were Iran and the Soviet Union geographically contiguous, they were both inheritors of the same Persianate cultural legacy—ironically a legacy that the Soviet Union had actively displaced in favor of Turkic national SSRs. Meanwhile, Iranian leftists were not passive receivers of Soviet propaganda. They exploited VOKS resources to found the Iranian Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR and establish regional branches throughout the country. In particular, Iranian intellectuals fixated on Soviet Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan as evidence of the abundant possibilities for a specifically Persianate articulation of socialist modernity. This article uses both Russian archival sources and Persian-language periodicals and interview transcripts to explore this unique confluence of Soviet and Iranian ambitions.