The Rise of Red Orientalism and the Fall of the Red Orientalists

Abstract

Following the Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks refashioned the study of the Orient according to the Marxist teleological paradigm of social and political development. A new school engaged in studying the socio-political setting of the East took shape as an alternative to classical, manuscript- and archeology-based Orientalism. This Red Orientalism was infused with idealism, often tendentious, and unabashedly tied to the Soviet government and particularly the Comintern, but by founding universities and research institutions such as the Moscow (Narimanov) Institute of Oriental Studies, Institute of “Red Professorship,” and Communist University of Toilers of the East (KUTV) with curriculums that included social sciences as well as modern languages, this new school of thought broke new ground by expanding the study of the East beyond the frontiers of established academic traditions and institutions. Red Orientalism, like the communist project of which it was a part, viewed itself as an agent of facilitated self-empowerment and encouraged Eastern individuals to participate, offering free education in the Soviet Union. The present article examines the birth and initial phase (up until the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s) of this radically different Soviet form of scholarship, particularly through the lives and careers of two Iranian Comintern activists, Avetis Sultanzadeh and Abulqasim Zarreh, who in their work at KUTV and the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow contributed to the crafting of a new understanding of Iran’s past and present that influenced Soviet policy toward Iran.