Soviet Kurdish Studies and Policies: the Problem of Agents and Agency

Abstract

The modern Kurdish national movement since its inception constantly interacted with the regional and global powers and was sporadically instrumentalised by them. The Soviet state interacted especially intensively with the Kurdish political projects, e.g., by creating the Kurdish district known as ‘Red Kurdistan’ in the Caucasus in the 1920s, involvement in the establishment of the so-called ‘Mahabad republic’ in Iran in 1946, and contradictory relations with Mustafa Barzani’ movement in Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s. This policy took its roots in the early Bolsheviks’ attempts to both revise Tsarist Russia’s handling of ethnic groups inside the empire and launch a global revolution by revolutionising the ‘East’. The paper discusses the role of Kurdish and non-Kurdish experts and activists in the history of Soviet Kurdish projects, highlighting the problem of agency which could have taken many forms that avoid easy detection and assessment. The matter is additionally complicated by the interplay between Soviet state policies and the internal dynamics of Kurdish political and cultural projects. The study rests on the method of “collective biography” based on the biographies of eight Soviet experts and activists who were involved in these projects. It relies on archival records from Russia and Armenia, publications of the time, recollections of Kurdish activists, as well as documents and interviews provided by the families of these experts and activists.

Keywords:

Kurds, Caucasus, USSR, Iran, Mustafa Barzani, Red Kurdistan, Soviet nationalities policy, Mehabad republic