Iranians and the Great Purge

Josef Stalin has gone down in history as a brutal dictator who oversaw the repression, persecution, exile and murder of Soviet citizens on a grand scale. But less is known about Iranian political migrants from the left who suffered under the Stalin-era great terror, or about those who were apolitical and had simply come to the Soviet Union to work.

On April 22, MIHAN, the Manchester Iranian History Academic Network, presents No One Ages in Magadan: The Fate of the Iranian Community in the Soviet Great Terror. The talk and visual presentation, by Touraj Atabaki, professor in the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at the University of Leiden, will be live streamed on YouTube. Atabaki will look at the Iranian community in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s, and draw on accounts by survivors of Soviet labor camps and newly released materials from Russian archives, including the minutes of prisoner interrogations and trial transcripts. What was it like for Iranians during the Stalin years? Were they treated any differently than Russians or other non-Russian ethnic groups? The MIHAN event promises to highlight a unique, largely unexplored aspect of Soviet and Iranian history, and examine its place on the political landscape in modern times.

Event starts at 5pm UK time .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }