Abolqasem (Abdulkasim ) Lahuti (1887-1957), Soviet Iranian-Kurdish poet and political activist in Iran and the USSR
Lotte Jacobi, Portrait of Abolqasem Lahuti, Moscow, ca. August 24, 1932
The Soviet Iranian-Kurdish Marxist poet and political activist Abolqasem Lahuti, a seminal figure in both Iran and Tajikistan, was one of the first Soviet officials Lotte Jacobi met in Moscow. On August 24, 1932, the second day that she recorded in her daybook, Jacobi photographed Lahuti and Abdurahim Hojiboyev, the first Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Tajikistan. She also saw Lahuti in Moscow at least one other time, at the railway station on September 20th, when the French communist writer Henri Barbusse arrived to attend the meeting of the Revolutionary Writers’ Guild. How opportune for Jacobi to have met, at the very beginning of her trip, these two leaders of Tajikistan, which she would visit two months later at Hojiboyev’s invitation.
Lotte Jacobi, Abdurahim Hojiboyev and Abolqasem Lahuti, Moscow, August 24, 1932
Lotte Jacobi, Bikhodzhal Hojiboyeva and Abolqasem Lahuti, Moscow, August 24, 1932
How did a poet from an impoverished background in Iran rise to prominence in the USSR—holding important administrative positions in Moscow and Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan? Though his journey might seem circuitous, it was in fact a step-by-step progression from the political activism of his youth in Iran to his avid support of communism and Joseph Stalin in the USSR. Born Mirza Abu'l Qasim in Kermanshah in western Iran on December 4, 1887, as a young man he chose “the pseudonym Lahuti (lit., ‘belonging to the world of the occult’)” (Kamyar). Lahuti was the son of a Persian cobbler and poet, and a Kurdish mother. Though he may have attended grammar school in Kermanshah, Lahuti later claimed his only early formal schooling came in 1904 when he went to Tehran to study with the support of the local Masonic society. Yet, he said the school in Iran’s capital “proved to be no place for a cobbler's son, and my stay there was short” (Lahuti 139). His childhood made him especially sensitive to the injustices and violence of poverty and class divisions (Cronin 120).
While throughout his life Lahuti remained devoted to Iran, he lived much of his life in exile, first in Turkey and then in the USSR, due to his radical political activities as a young man in his native country. Lahuti became caught up in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 in Tehran, working for the cause through writing and distributing revolutionary leaflets and songs, and other forms of resistance to British and Russian occupation forces and the Iranian regime (Cronin 121). At one point, he was captured and incarcerated in a filthy stable but escaped with the help of a Kurdish guard. As his ideas became more militant, he and other revolutionaries decided to join the Government Gendarmerie in 1911 in order to gain access to weapons (Clark 107, Lahuti 140). In 1912, he finished officer’s training school in Tehran and rose to the rank of major within a year (Cronin 122).
Around the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lahuti had contact with some Russian troops stationed in Iran and through them learned about the Revolution and Marxism (Cronin 123, Lahuti 141). Due to his ongoing political activities, several times he needed to escape to Turkey, and for a time he was homeless in Istanbul, working odd jobs while writing poetry and co-founding a Persian journal Pars (the name for ancient Persia) (Lahuti 141). When the revolution picked up in Iran once more, he rejoined his comrades in Tabriz in January 1922 (141-142). The following month, Lahuti became the leader of the revolt in Tabriz, often referred to as the Lahuti Revolt, when the revolutionaries held the city for eleven days. After they lost the city, Lahuti and his group then escaped on horseback to Soviet Azerbaijan (142).
In 1923, Lahuti arrived in Moscow, where in 1924-25 he studied at the Communist University of Toilers of the East (KUTV). KUTV was founded in 1921 to train students from Asia in Marxist-Leninist theory. The students would then work as teachers and revolutionaries who would take these ideas back to their native countries. There were a number of Iranian students and teachers at KUTV when Lahuti attended (Ravandi-Fadai 713-714). Students also worked translating Marxist and communist writings into their native languages (718). At this time, Lahuti worked as a typesetter and “literary worker” at the Central Publishing House of the Peoples of the USSR (Tsentrizdat), which was founded in 1924 to translate and publish Soviet literature into the multiple languages of the USSR (Lahuti 142). He no doubt worked on translating Soviet writings into Persian. Lahuti recorded that it was “an unforgettable day” when he joined the communist party in 1924 (142).
Although the Party usually sent graduates of KUTV back to their native countries, Lahuti could not return to Iran because he had never been pardoned for his participation in the 1922 “Lahuti” Revolt. Instead, in 1925 he was sent to Dushanbe, the new capital of the Tajikistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which had just been founded the previous year (Clark 109). In Dushanbe, the Tajiks speak a version of Farsi called Tajiki, or Tajik Persian, which is a modern form of Persian. Lahuti worked for the local government as Director of Publicity, and at a time when most of the population in Dushanbe and Tajikistan were illiterate, he served as Deputy Commissar for Education. He later became the honorary president of the Tajik Union of Writers from 1933-1946 (Clark 112, Rahman 118-119).
Lahuti’s work in developing the Tajik language came in many forms. He wrote poetry in Tajik. He was involved in developing the Tajik theater, including translating plays in other languages into Tajik. He composed revolutionary songs, the national anthem of Tajikistan, and the Tajik translation of the Soviet national anthem (Cronin 120, Kamyar, Lahuti 140). In addition, he wrote the Tajik libretto for the opera Kaveh the Blacksmith, based on a story from the epic poem Shahnameh, written in the late 10th-early 11th centuries by the Persian poet Ferdowsi. The opera had a one-day premier at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on April 15, 1941, a premier that Stalin himself attended (Clark 116-117). Due to his work in Tajikistan, Lahuti became known as the father of Soviet Tajik poetry and culture.
Yet, Lahuti’s great passion was writing his own poetry, while also studying traditional Persian poetry, especially the Shahnameh. No matter where he lived, even during his most trying periods of revolution and exile, Lahuti wrote and published his poetry (Lahuti 141). When he was in his teens, he began writing mystical poems under the influence of his father, whom he described as "an almost illiterate” religious poet (139). Yet, Lahuti left mystical and religious content behind as he came to understand the power of poetry to reach the masses in sympathy with their lives and to raise social and political consciousness. While his early poems focused on the plight of the peasant and revolutionary themes, his later poems in the USSR were full of praise for the October Revolution, the Soviet regime, and Stalin. Known as the “red writer,” he often adapted stories from the Shahnameh to create revolutionary Marxist poetry (Cronin 141).
Lahuti’s early life was peripatetic, but he finally settled in Moscow with his second wife Cecilia Banu (1911-1998), a Ukrainian poet and scholar of Persian whom he met around 1930. In 1931, when Lahuti was a correspondent for Pravda and Izvestia, they were already spending much of their time in Moscow. They had a one-room apartment in the House of Government for Soviet elites, where Karl Radek and Mikhail Kol’tsov also lived. As their family grew, they were able to move twice, each time to obtain a larger apartment, the second with the help of Stalin (Slezkine 483). Banu’s major work was the translation of the Shahnameh with Lahuti’s help. In his 1954 article, “About Myself,” Lahuti described his final years:
“I am translating Pushkin, Gorky, Mayakovsky, and contemporary Soviet poets. I have translated Shakespeare's Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear, and the plays of Lope de Vega, for the Stalinabad Drama Theatre; recently I began work on a translation of Griboyedov's immortal comedy Wit Works Woe. My constant adviser on these translations is the Soviet poetess and translator of Persian poetry, Cecily Banou, my wife and workmate. For my part, I advise on and edit her verse translation of Firdausi's epic poem Shah Namah. The four children we have do not hinder our work at all” (Lahuti 142).
As a kind of go-between for Iran, Moscow, and Tajikistan, Lahuti's reputation extended beyond Iran and the USSR to the United States. In 1953, the CIA identified him as someone that the Soviet authorities might install as the leader of Iran, but the US government didn’t want the USSR to control the country. The CIA’s strategy to kill such a possible plan was to publish a fake Lahuti autobiography in which he denigrated the USSR. This disinformation was meant to defame Lahuti so that he wouldn’t be appointed as the new Soviet leader of Iran. However, the following year, Lahuti met with members of the Central Committee, including Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikita Khrushchev, to explain that he hadn’t written the so-called autobiography and the information attributed to him was false (Kirasirova 440). To straighten out the record, Lahuti wrote his own short autobiography, “About Myself,” which was published in Persian, Russian, German, and English (Kirasirova 450, Lahuti).
Unlike Kol’tsov and Radek, Lahuti survived Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s and even outlived his leader. As Kirasirova recounts, “Molotov also recalled that he had personally observed Stalin crossing out Lahuti’s name from multiple lists of those to be arrested and shot” (Kirasarova 445). His longevity came despite the fact that he was an Iranian nationalist who revered traditional Persian poetry—he even defended Persia as the birthplace of the Shahnameh, while some Soviet leaders, including Stalin himself, erroneously claimed that Tajikistan was the birthplace of both the Persian language and the Persian poet Ferdowsi (who wrote the Shahnameh). Lahuti nevertheless remained a staunch supporter of Stalin and the USSR, and he was one of Stalin’s favorite writers (Clark 112).
By the time he wrote his autobiographical piece “About Myself” in 1954, Lahuti, Banu, and their children were living in modest circumstances in Ivanovka outside Moscow, immersed in writing poetry and their translation work (Kirasirova 445). Lahuti never returned to Iran and died in Moscow on March 16, 1957. His wife Cecilia Banu played an important role in promoting Lahuti’s legacy, both during his life when she translated his poetry into Russian, and after his death. She died in Moscow in 1998.
Contributor: Eleanor Hight
Works Cited:
Ābedi, Kāmyār. "Lahuti, Abu'l-Qasem." Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, New York, 2009, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/lahuti-abul-qasem.
Clark, Katerina. “Revolutionary Poetry and the Persianate Tradition.” In Clark, Eurasia Without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons. Belknap Press, 2021, pp. 83-122.
Cronin, Stephanie. “Iran's Forgotten Revolutionary: Abulqasim Lahuti and the Tabriz Insurrection of 1922,” in Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left. Routledge Curzon, 2004, pp. 118- 146.
Kirasirova, Masha. "My Enemy’s Enemy: Consequences of the CIA Operation against Abulqasim Lahuti, 1953–54." Iranian Studies, vol. 50, no. 3, 2017, pp. 439-465.
Lahuti, Abdulkasim. “About Myself.” Trans. A.R. Johnstone, Soviet Literature, vol. 9, pp. 138-142.
Rahman, Munibur. “Abu’l Qasim Lahuti: Iran’s Foremost Marxist Poet.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, Fall 1992, pp. 115-134.
Ravandi-Fadai, Lana. “‘Red Mecca’—the Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV): Iranian Scholars and Students in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s.” Iranian Studies 48, no. 5, September 2015, pp. 713-727.
Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Princeton UP, 2017.