In 1978 the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism changed forever the terms of the debate about the nature of western scholarship on the non-western world. Profoundly unsettling, Said's work had a transformational impact on many academic disciplines in western Europe, the Americas and across Asia. Although drawing on older ideas and research, including critiques of western scholarship formulated in the Soviet Union, Said's book, along with Said's own public persona, came to represent and symbolize a broader rejection of existing power-political relationships between the imperial metropoles and the colonial world. In Orientalism, Said was principally concerned with deconstructing a discourse, seeking to analyze the specific character of a particular ideological mission, the elaboration of Anglo-French Orientalism, through which European intellectuals made an essential contribution to the extension of western hegemonic power over the East. Taking case studies drawn from Iran and the wider Persophone region, the question is posed whether a similar intellectual construction may be discerned within nineteenth century Russian, or post-1917 Soviet, discourses on the Orient. Were tsarist Russian scholars and administrators concerned with the Persophone world Orientalists in the Saidian sense? What was the significance of the rupture of 1917 in Russian discourses on the Orient? Did Soviet Iranology continue or break with traditional imperial Orientology? What was the relationship between knowledge of the East and power over it for imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union? Most controversially, did imperial Russian or Soviet Iranology display the same predisposition as Anglo-French discourses to essentialize Orient and Occident, to impose profound ontological oppositions between them and to conclude with the inherent superiority of the latter?

This paper deals with the origins of Iranian studies in the principal centers of Oriental studies in Russia, located in Kazan, St. Petersburg and Moscow from the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. It concerns the international political situation and major social changes which created a demand in the Russian intellectual market for both academic and practical experts on the entire Muslim world. The paper also describes how, thanks to the efforts of German scholars who were invited to these centers, the different fields of modern Iranian studies, including the academic traditions, achievements and key publications were initially formed and then were developed by their Russian colleagues.

Alexander Ludvigovich Kuhn (1840–88) was a Russian Orientalist of German-Armenian descent. The most important period of his activity was his service in Central Asia where on behalf of the Turkestan Governorate-General he collected manuscripts, archives and other materials, joining the military campaigns to Kītāb of ShahriSabz, Iskanderkul, Kokand and Khiva. A large number of the manuscripts were sent back to St. Petersburg to the Imperial Public Library, but some never left Kun's possession until they were donated to the Asiatic Museum after his death. Kun was also in charge of the compilation of the famous “Turkistan Albums”—a major collection of photos testifying to the different nationalities and customs that made up the populations of Central Asia. Until now, Kun's biography has been little known to us. The article takes a look into the personal archive of Kun, and describes the man and his motivations and desires.

The article presents a systematic appraisal of the essential Russian- and English-language scholarship on Russian Oriental studies and particularly on Russia's Iranology. However, the main target of this article is to trace the discursive continuities and epistemological shifts which have existed in late imperial, Soviet and, partially, post-Soviet Russia's Oriental studies since the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the sources of the main Russian political, military and academic archives, the article offers an assessment of the question of rupture or continuity, which is based on a synthesis of the above-mentioned scholarship from an entirely new angle. Dealing with the seemingly overwhelming watershed of 1917, an analysis is provided that transcends the unhelpful continuity/change dichotomy, putting forward a new interpretation, which is informed by the Foucauldian conceptualization of the productive nature of the power/knowledge nexus.

The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV), established in Moscow in 1921 and closed in 1938, presents a unique experiment in Soviet Orientalism. KUTV was the first communist educational institution set up specifically for students from the Orient to study their own countries in their native languages through a Marxist lens. Its purpose was not only to train teachers and revolutionaries for work in their native countries but to bring about a paradigm shift in the study of the East. Orientalism was to be freed from the imperialist prejudices of the past by redistributing the tools of Orientalist scholarship to Orientals themselves and by emphasizing contemporary social and economic history over an idealized and nationalistic antiquity. Iranians made up a strong presence at KUTV among both students and teachers, some of whom returned to Iran to spread learning and revolution, while others remained in the Soviet Union as scholars of Iran, influencing the development of Soviet Orientalism and often serving simultaneously in the Soviet political apparatus. With their students, they produced research and compiled massive collections of reference materials that formed the foundation for future Soviet scholarship and foreign policy. By the second half of the 1920s, KUTV developed into one of the most important centers of Soviet Orientalism, spawning a parallel Research Institute (NIA) that offered graduate programs and published its own periodical, Revolutionary East. With its aim of empowering the oppressed while simultaneously projecting Soviet influence, its attempt to rise above nationalist conceptions while at times succumbing to them, and the repression of its faculty in the Stalinist purges, KUTV exhibits many of the contradictions of the Soviet project itself. Among other sources, this paper uses Soviet case files on Iranian students and teachers at KUTV to shed light on their motivations and backgrounds.

Russian Orientalists participated—often in a close but precarious relationship with the state—in the transformation of Central Asia from a tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an “Empire of Nations.” One of them was the former tsarist colonial clerk Aleksandr Semenov (1873–1958), who together with such prominent representatives of the region's Persian-speaking elites as Sadriddin Ayni or Bobojon Ghafurov, and with the support of his academic mentors, such as Vasilii Bartol'd and Sergei Ol'denburg, effectively—albeit somewhat reluctantly—lobbied for the official recognition of the Persian/Tajik language and of Tajikistani statehood. The study of their cooperation shows how Central Asian cultural heritage was researched and preserved, but also how it was reinvented in national terms and codified; and how these processes were negotiated between local intellectuals, scholars and the state.

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.

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.