The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920-1921

Book excerpt: The story of the Jangalis, noncommunist revolutionaries who battled tsarist and British occupation forces in their homeland between 1915 and 1921, is critical to an understanding of twentieth-century Iran. Yet their struggle, commanded by the legendary Kuchek Khan, has been neglected, often deliberately falsified. The Pahlavi regime imposed a curtain of silence, Soviet historians attacked the movement's noncommunist leaders, and the British generally have accepted the Soviet interpretation. Now Cosroe Chaqueri brings fresh evidence, based on recently available documents from secret Soviet archives, that sheds dramatic new light on a brief but decisive moment in modern Iranian history. In reconstructing the record of the guerrilla movement that, with Soviet Russia's help, led to the establishment of the "first Soviet Socialist Republic" in the East, Chaqueri discredits the false versions of that episode and examines the internal and neocolonial external forces that precipitated its downfall. He blames foreign intervention but also locates the roots of Iran's failure to achieve independence in the socioeconomic and mental structures that have controlled the actions of Iranian leaders from ancient times until today's neo-Islamic regime.