فتادگان در گردبا: گفتاری درباره سرگذشت و سرنوشت قربانیان ایرانی سرکوب‌های فراگیر استالینی در شوروی

Fallen in the Whirlwind: The Odyssey and Destiny of Iranian Victims of Stalinist Great Repression in the Soviet Union

Sunday, May 18, 2025 | 11:30 am – 1:30 pm

Zoom Registration:

https://ucla.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rBjt0ANzRrSrmOOM7chltg

This talk introduces a new monograph that explores the lives of Iranian political activists and migrant workers who sought refuge in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, only to become victims of the Stalinist purges. Drawing from unpublished documentary sources, the presentation examines the roles these individuals played in the international communist movement, as well as their contributions within industrial labor, political activism, and literary circles. It addresses significant gaps in the historical narratives of Stalinism, the international communist movement, and Iranian-Soviet relations, offering fresh insights into this critical chapter of history.

About the Speakers

Touraj Atabaki is a Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History and Professor Emeritus, holding the Chair of the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University. He has coordinated several major projects, including Practicing Modernization in Turkey and Iran and Social History of Labor in the Iranian Oil Industry, 1908-2008. He has also contributed to the international project The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labor Relations, 1500-2000 and participated in research on Migration and Repression in Iran and the Soviet Union as well as Soviet Political Migrants in Iran in the 1920s and 1930s. Atabaki’s extensive body of work includes numerous authored and edited volumes, such as Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and Autonomy in 20th Century Iran; Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah; Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers; The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran; and Central Asia and the Caucasus: Transnationalism and Diaspora. His most recent books are Fallen in the Whirlwind: The Odyssey and Destiny of Iranian Victims of Stalinist Great Repression in the Soviet Union and Toiling for Oil: A Social History of Petroleum in Iran (Cambridge University Press).

Lana (Svetlana) Ravandi-Fadai, Ph.D., is a senior researcher and the Head of the Eastern Cultural Center at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and a senior researcher at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Lana grew up in Baku, in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, during the relatively quiet Brezhnev years of the 1970s. As it has been for centuries, Baku was a cosmopolitan city, a cultural crossroads of which she was very much a part, her father having immigrated from Iran. This environment sparked her interest in the different ethnicities and religions of the Persianate world, their syncretic culture and interaction with modernity, in particular with ideologies such as Communism. Dr. Ravandi-Fadai’s book, Political Parties and Organizations of Iran (2010), traces the formation of modern political parties in Iran from the early 20th century to the present, and was chosen out of 700 new publications as runner-up for Best Book of the Year on Political Science and the Middle East by the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was a contributor to the quadralingual book Storied Land: Kurdish Culture Through the Eyes of Russian Scholars (2014) and co-authored The Past and Present of Religious Mentoring in Shia Islam (2017) about the institution of marja’ taqlid. Her upcoming book, Victims of Their Faith, co-authored with Dr. Touraj Atabaki, traces the fates of Iranian communist revolutionaries in the first half of the 20th century.