Shadows in the Garden: Women Agents Underground and Communist Activism in Mid-20th Century Iran Part II

Abstract

The second part of this article on the clandestine activities of Iranian female communists explores the case of Zuleykha Asadi, a young woman who earned a medical degree in Moscow just before the start of the Second World War. Her story can be told with unusual immediacy thanks to the preservation of her correspondence in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, published here for the first time. Zuleykha’s father’s letters to her in Moscow chart the difficulties and decisions his daughter faced and are suffused with a parent’s anxious concern for his daughter and a deep belief in the Soviet Union and its mission. Upon returning to Iran, ostensibly to practice medicine, Zuleykha also acted as a Soviet operative, keeping her handlers in Moscow apprised of her activities in letters that are a striking mix of ciphered intelligence reporting and emotional frankness about her personal life and experiences, such as her feelings for her newborn daughter and absent husband. She gathered intelligence about the wartime mood, conditions and activity of Nazi agents in the country, liaised with Iranian communists, and planned to set up a safe house. Within two years, for reasons unstated, Moscow decided to cut her loose. The case file of this idealistic young woman is emblematic of the magnetic pull of Communist ideals for many in the working class of Iran in the first half of the 20th Century.