Stephanie Cronin, "An Iranian Revolutionary: Abulqasim Lahuti and the Tabriz Insurrection, 1922".
Summary of a paper presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, October 28 2002
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This paper examines the early political activities and ideological formation of the communist poet, Abulqasim Lahuti, in the context of the early Iranian social-democratic movement.
For eleven days in early 1922 the red flag flew over Tabriz and power lay in the hands of a revolutionary committee and a soldiers' council, the latter headed by the poet and gendarme officer, Major Abulqasim Lahuti.
Although the rebellion to which Abulqasim Lahuti gave his name, in Tabriz in January 1922, was short-lived and easily suppressed, nonetheless both the adventure itself and Lahuti's early personal history is of considerable general interest and significance. Lahuti became the first and certainly the most outstanding communist poet Iran has produced. Although his major literary success came after he had established himself in the Soviet Union, the intellectual and political formation which cradled his poetry took place within the context of Iranian social-democracy as it was developing during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His progression from militant populist nationalism to committed communism under the impact of his experiences during the constitutional revolution and the world war, and particularly through his contacts with revolutionary soldiers in the Tsarist armies occupying Iran, was shared by many Iranians, and he may be seen as typical of the leftward evolution of the Democrat wing of the constitutional movement.
Lahuti's formative political experiences were, in certain respects, different to those of other Iranian social-democrats and proto-communists of whom we have knowledge. Lahuti is unusual in that, unlike many Iranian social-democrats and later members of the Firqah-i 'Adalat (Justice Party, later the Iranian Communist Party), he was never part of the emigre milieu in Baku and he had no direct experience of social-democracy in Tsarist Russia and Trans-Caucasia. His own exile, during and after the Great War, was rather in Ottoman territory, and he had, apparently, very little contact with those who were to become the leadership of early Iranian communism. Although the Tabriz communists spontaneously joined his revolt in 1922, his and their action was unauthorized by and, indeed, completely contrary to the general line of the nascent Communist Party of Iran.
Lahuti's seizure of power is also of interest in that it was the last in a series of provincially-based radical movements which broke out in the decade between the suppression of the Parliament and the coup of 1921, of which the most famous was the Jangali revolt. It may also be seen, in particular, as a final stage in the revolutionary constitutionalist history of Tabriz, a city emblematic of Iranian social-democracy, and an immediate sequel to the Democrat revolt led by Shaykh Khiyabani to which it was inextricably linked. The suppression of the 1922 insurrection was a watershed marking the beginning of the centralized authoritarianism of the early Pahlavi period which was to endure until another World War provided a new opportunity for a reawakened militancy in the form of Ja'afar Pishavari's Democrat Party and the Autonomous Government of Azarbayjan established under the aegis of the Soviet occupation.
After the suppression of the Tabriz insurrection, Lahuti fled to the Soviet Union where his radical but independent nationalism and his sympathies for what he understood of the Soviet Union rapidly crystallized into orthodox communism.
Lahuti's poetry clearly mirrored his ideological development, exhibiting a transition from progressive nationalist to communist themes. Only once in the Soviet Union did he acquaint himself systematically with the ideas of socialism and from then on much of his inspiration came from the radical economic and social transformation of Tajik and Soviet society, and he acquired the soubriquet, adib-i surkh, the red writer.
The Tabriz insurrection to which Lahuti has given his name seems to have been initially largely a spontaneous affair. A radical trend was imparted to the rebellion by Lahuti himself, certain tendencies among his supporters among the gendarme officers which had been encouraged by Bolshevik propaganda, and the active participation of a significant number of members of the Iranian communist party. As is clear from his public declarations, Lahuti, in January 1922, still expressed himself in typical constitutionalist and left-wing Democrat terms. However, although there was little Bolshevik content in the declared objectives of the rebellion, yet the forms which the movement took, most notably Lahuti's own description of himself as leader of the soldiers' committee, clearly derived their inspiration from, and imitated, the Russian revolutionary example. For their part, the Tabriz communists themselves displayed an astonishing indifference to the newly-adopted line of the Iranian Communist Party, which sought to accommodate itself to the "bourgeois" regime of Riza Khan. There is no evidence of Lahuti, while in Iran, having been in direct contact with the 'Adalat and Iranian Communist Party leadership, but, once settled in the Soviet Union, he became an orthodox communist of the period. He found in Soviet communism the ideal focus for his artistic and emotional energies and for the next three decades gave consistent expression, through his poetry, to the concerns and struggles both of the Soviet State and of the international communist movement.