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Abstract
This article sheds new light on the end of the Cold War and the fate of anti-imperialism in the twentieth century by exploring how the Soviet Union and the Islamic Republic of Iran achieved a rapprochement in the late 1980s. Both the USSR and Iran had invested significant resources into presenting themselves as the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement and "the global movement of Islam," and both the Soviet and Iranian governments sought to export their models of anti-imperialist postcolonial statehood to Afghanistan. However, by the mid-1980s both the Soviet Union and revolutionary Iran were forced to confront the limits to their anti-imperialist projects amid the increasing pull of globalization. Elites in both countries responded to these challenges by walking back their commitments from world revolution and agreeing to maintain the Najibullah regime in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Islamist forces hostile to Marxism-Leninism and Iran's brand of Islamic revolution. This joint pragmatic turn, however, contributed to a drought in anti-imperialist politics throughout the Middle East, leaving the more radical voices of transnational actors as one of the only consistent champions of anti-imperialism. Drawing on new sources from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as sources from Iran, Afghanistan, and the "Afghan Arabs," the article sheds empirical and analytical light on discussions of the fate of anti-imperialism in the twilight of the Cold War.

During the twentieth century, the socialist bloc became a second home for socialists from Iran and Afghanistan. Iranian socialists almost certainly constituted the largest foreign diaspora in the USSR at the time of its dissolution, and Soviet entanglements in Afghanistan led to a large flow of Afghan soldiers, students, and socialists to the Soviet Union in the latter half of the twentieth century. The USSR also sponsored Persian socialist internationalism domestically in the form of the Tajik SSR. This paper uses sources from all three sides of the "Persianate triangle" (Tajikistan, Iran, and Afghanistan) to highlight how encounters between socialist groups often highlighted differences between these groups' understanding of socialism despite a shared Persian language. More broadly, it points to the importance of "subnational actors" in the making of Soviet foreign policy. Case studies of a Tajik translator in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan as well as Iranian socialist exiles in Kabul also show how the memory of socialist internationalism has been processed and narrated very differently within the Iranian diaspora and Tajikistan today. In conclusion, the article shows how the networks forged by Soviet internationalism have often been reworked in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and offers reflections on how scholars can engage further in the study of "subnational internationalism."

Humanitarian Invasion is the first book of its kind: a ground-level inside account of what development and humanitarianism meant for Afghanistan, a country touched by international aid like no other. Relying on Soviet, Western, and NGO archives, interviews with Soviet advisers and NGO workers, and Afghan sources, Timothy Nunan forges a vivid account of the impact of development on a country on the front lines of the Cold War. Nunan argues that Afghanistan functioned as a laboratory for the future of the Third World nation-state. If, in the 1960s, Soviets, Americans, and Germans sought to make a territorial national economy for Afghanistan, later, under military occupation, Soviet nation-builders, French and Swedish humanitarians, and Pakistani-supported guerrillas fought a transnational civil war over Afghan statehood. Covering the entire period from the Cold War to Taliban rule, Humanitarian Invasion signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of international history.

AbstractThis article explores the Soviet mission to emancipate Afghan women during the Soviet war in Afghanistan through a detailed reading of the stenogram of a 1982 seminar in Moscow designed as an exchange of ideas and experiences between leading members of the Committee for Soviet Women and the Democratic Organization of Women of Afghanistan. Approaching this episode as a moment in the quest to find new forms of modernity – Communist, Islamic, or Western – in Afghanistan, the article shows how Soviet women's representatives repeatedly played up the important of the hujum in 1930s Soviet Central Asia as a model program for Afghan and, to some extent, all Third World societies. At the same time, however, the Afghan women at the conference, while avid Communists, articulated their own vision of women's emancipation for Afghanistan which did not reject the veil, a vision at odds with that articulated by their Soviet 'teachers.'

SUMMARY:
Тимоти Нунан анализирует тенденции советской национальной политики 1930-х годов на основе выпусков иллюстрированного журнала "СССР на стройке", посвященных Таджикистану и Горному Бадахшану. Фоторепрезентация национальностей и языков в этом издании отличается непоследовательностью и противоречивостью, и Нунан расширяет интерпретационный контекст, связывая язык и стиль "СССР на стройке" с эстетикой эпохи и общей политической линией СССР в национальном вопросе. Во второй части статьи автор сравнивает репрезентацию законности, правосудия, власти и "иных" в "СССР на стройке" с языком фотографий American Farm Security Administration – проектом эпохи Нового курса, в котором также делалась ставка на описание отсталости как основания для проведения прогрессивной политики модернизации. В статье рассматриваются сходства и отличия советского и американского проектов, и автор приходит к выводу о более гуманистической в целом эстетике аме-риканских фотографий, для которых характерна большая симпатия к субъектам репрезентации. В заключении автор рассуждает о потенциале сравнительного изучения фотодокументальных проектов для транснациональной истории и намечает возможных "кандидатов" для подобного сравнения (например, кемалистскую Турцию), позволяющего лучше понять специфику советского опыта и советского варианта модерности.

This article examines the history of Soviet-Afghan encounters in northern Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Drawing on archival materials from the former Soviet Union as well as recently published memoir collections by Soviet border guards, it shows how during the 1980s, northern Afghanistan was subjected to a unique regime of degraded sovereignty. While all regions of Afghanistan were subject to military occupation by the Soviet Army, in northern Afghanistan, 62,000 Soviet Border Troops occupied the northern reaches. Their goal was not only to secure the Soviet-Afghan border, but also to eliminate mujāhidīn forces in Badakhshan, encourage peaceful and commercial cross- border interactions between Soviet and Afghan Badakhshan, and secure the entire territory inside an "antiseptic" green zone extending 100 to 120 kilometers into northern Afghanistan. As they did so, many elements of the Soviet border regime migrated into Afghanistan itself. Building on earlier work on the making of the Soviet border through areas of security inside the USSR, this piece shows the afterlives of that border as something also capable of being extended outside the USSR itself. In doing so, it not only enhances our understanding of the Soviet-Afghan War but also reveals the Soviet Union and its border forces to be transnational actors in their own right, rather than mere defenders of a statist territorial order.