Imperial wars and the violence of hunger: remembering and forgetting the Great Persian Famine 1917–1919

Abstract

The Great Persian Famine of 1917–1919 is one of the greatest calamities in the history of Iran. While some scholarly work has explored the causes and dynamics of the famine, less attention has been paid to its memorialisation. This paper aims to understand how the Great Persian Famine is remembered – or not – in public and personal spheres in Iran. Discussing the historical events that have been silenced, neglected or publicly recognised and commemorated before and after the Islamic Revolution, the paper focusses on the processes that hinder public and private memorialising of hunger violence. Drawing on existing literature, personal diaries, artistic representations, and interviews with persons whose parents or grandparents experienced the Great Persian Famine, we discuss why it has not figured prominently in the national historiography or commemorative practices, except during a brief period (2008–2013) when it found its way into the prevailing political discourse.

Keywords:

• Iran
• famine
• silenced memories
• World War I
• hunger violence
• Great Persian Famine of 1917–1919

Introduction

The Great Persian Famine (GPF) of 1917–1919 was a calamity of massive proportions. Millions of people – approximately 8–10 million, or 40–50% of Iran’s population – perished due to starvation or associated diseases (Majd 2013; Atabaki 2016; Malekzade 2015). Despite the immense number of casualties, the GPF has not figured prominently in Iran’s political, economic, demographic or gender history (Cronin 2017, 326), nor has it been the focus of official commemorative events or memorials (Majd 2013, 16). Globally, we have seen a trend towards the memorialisation of mass atrocities. Wars and other violent and painful experiences are incorporated into the history of nations and taught in schools, and their heroes are celebrated and their victims mourned. Rarely, however, are famines considered acts of mass atrocity, or treated as objects of public memorialisation, despite their vast numbers of casualties (Parashar and Orjuela 2021). Recently, scholars have pointed to the role of human agency – rather than nature – in causing famines, emphasising that mass starvation can be prevented (De Waal 2018). When considering memory and justice after mass atrocities, it is thus relevant to also look at famines (see Mani 2008). The GPF can certainly be considered a human-made famine, as its causes are closely entwined with how occupying forces during World War I, including Britain, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, pursued their interests at the expense of ordinary citizens and their survival needs.

This paper explores why mass starvation is often not officially recognised and commemorated, and yet the descendants of survivors relate to its suffering through their memories. The aim is to understand how the GPF, which took place during World War I, is remembered – or not – in public and personal spheres in Iran. The paper broadens our understanding of what hinders the memorialisation of the violence of mass hunger, and highlights the role of structural and discursive factors, as well as power relations before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, in silencing the memories of the GPF. Although it is important to focus on the silences in the narrativisation of the GPF by ordinary citizens, the paper specifically brings to the fore the role of state power (before and after the Islamic Revolution) in silencing the memory of GPF. The paper discusses why the GPF has not figured prominently in the national historiography or commemorative practices, except during a brief period (2008–2013) when it found its way into political discourse as a legitimising strategy by the powerholders. Additionally, by discussing the GPF in relation to other important events in Iran’s history, the paper helps us to see how, at different times, some memories have been mobilised and made visible, and others not.

The paper adopts a qualitative approach, drawing on available literature, personal diaries and memoirs, artistic works, and films about the famine. To include the perspective of ordinary citizens, we conducted seven interviews with next-generation famine survivors, whose parents or grandparents had shared memories of the GPF with them. The paper analyses the silencing and/or commemoration of the GPF, the violence and suffering it unleashed, its inter-generational emotional impact, and its conscious silencing by the state power.

The next section provides information about the GPF in the context of World War I and the imperial powers occupying Iran at the time. Thereafter, we relate the GPF to other important historical events in Iran, to shed light on which historical traumas become part of the nation’s collective memory and which are overlooked or forgotten. This is followed by reviewing the scholarship and writings on how the GPF has been largely forgotten, but also made use of publicly by political leaders. Thereafter, we present the voices of the next-generation famine survivors, and the few artistic commemorations of the GPF. The conclusions reflect on the findings and their implications.

The Great Persian Famine of 1917–1919

Ain-Ol-Saltaneh, a well-known Iranian chronicler, wrote in a newspaper entry of 19 April 1917 that ‘Famine and hunger prevail in all parts of Iran. Muslims and people of all faiths are dying. In Qum, in the center of Iran, currently, fifty die each day. In Hamadan, 30,000 have registered as destitute’. In this heartrending description, he further stated that people in Tehran were taking sheep’s blood from the slaughterhouse to feed themselves and their children (Zeiny 2016, 161). In fact, several Iranian newspaper reports in 1917–1919 highlighted the occupying forces’ attempts to seize food and grains and block people’s access to food (Atabaki 2016, 185).

While Iran declared its neutrality in World War I, its territory was used as a battlefield by warring armies of Britain in the south, Russia in the north, and the Ottomans in the north-west. These foreign forces confiscated large amounts of grain and food supplies, thereby contributing to a human-made famine (Pordeli et al. 2017, 297). During the last year of World War I, the Spanish Flu spread worldwide. This pandemic entered Iran in the middle of the ongoing starvation (Golshani et al. 2021, 80). The last British and Russian troops withdrew from Iran only in 1921, three years after the end of World War I (Atabaki 2016, 182).

The role of the British colonial government – particularly, Winston Churchill – in causing the 1943 Bengal Famine has been the focus of intense discussions in India. A similar situation in Iran, where British officials presented themselves as saviours of the Iranian people during the GPF (Majd 2013, 26), has so far not received much attention. The diaries of officers from the occupying forces show how they denied their role in causing the GPF and blamed Iran’s government for spreading it in the country. For instance, General L. C. Dunsterville, a British military officer who served in Iran during 1918, compares the Iranian famine with that in India and claims that the British took effective measures to aid the famine victims. He contends that neither the Iranian government nor private entities did anything to relieve the suffering (Majd 2013, 81).

Highlighting the role of the occupying powers in the GPF, some scholars have pointed to the issue of ‘oil capitalism’ during the twentieth century (Atabaki 2016, 188). The financial policies adopted by Britain – for instance, their refusal to pay oil revenues to Iran in the middle of the GPF – indicates their lack of concern for Iran’s starving people. For the occupying powers, Iran was mainly a strategic military asset. The dominant consequence was a lack of access to food among large parts of the population, and what Amartya Sen (1981) has called ‘entitlement failure’ (quoted in Parashar and Orjuela 2021, 411). Thus, besides natural factors, pandemics, socio-historical context and the incapability of the central government, the GPF was also caused by the occupying forces that pursued the war at the expense of the lives of many Iranians (Zeiny 2016, 165).

As with many other famines globally, those responsible for the many millions of famine deaths in Iran have not been held accountable. The deliberate deprivation of food by the occupying forces would otherwise qualify as a severe famine crime (see De Waal 2018). Power holders during World War I operated in ways that deliberately let some people die (see Tyner 2018, 199). Some scholars compare the GPF to Stalin’s treatment of the Ukrainian people during the 1932–1933 famine, considered to be a genocide by many (see Zeiny 2016, 150). Inspired by the term Holodomor, used in Ukraine to describe this period of deliberate starvation, Zeiny termed the GPF a Holomine: ‘A Holomine is a compound of the prefix ‘Holo’ which means whole or entire, and the last four letters of ‘famine’ which can figuratively refer to the military mine (the device used for exploding and eradicating) in this context’ (Zeiny 2016, 150). Holomine thus alludes to the spread of mass hunger across the whole country and the crime of killing people intentionally.

Some Iranian historians have discussed the role of the foreign powers in the GPF. For instance, consistent with the arguments in this paper, Shahbazi (2016) in his personal blog on ‘the impact of three significant famines on Iran’s destiny’ refers to the role of foreign forces and calls the GPF an artificial famine. With this term, Shahbazi draws attention to the fact that the governments of Britain, Russia and Iran at the time did not make efforts to contain the famine; rather, they had a major role in spreading it.

Despite the severity of the GPF and the evidence that has come to light about the culpability of the powerholders – both the occupying powers and Iran’s own government – the experiences of mass starvation on the ground are not reflected in history writing and public memory in contemporary Iran. The lack of scholarship about and public acknowledgement of this painful past have caused uncertainty about the number of GPF fatalities (see Tafreshi 2014; Atabaki 2016), and much of the debate has circled around the accuracy of statistics. It appears that the memories of hunger and famine victims have been largely neglected for over a century by intellectuals and historians as well as in schoolbooks and university textbooks (Shahidi 2016).

While there are some scholarly and documentary works that analyse the effects of internal and external factors and list aggravating causes (see Malekzade 2015; Atabaki 2016), the memory politics related to the GPF has not been explored in depth. This paper therefore investigates the lack of public memorial events, memorial days, and monuments dedicated to this famine and why only a few publications and artistic works have commemorated the GPF.

Memory politics before and after the Islamic revolution

Selective remembering of the past in Iranian historiography has had powerful ideological motivations (Atabaki 2009, 3). In 1921, only a few years after the devastating GPF, a little-known military officer, Reza Khan, seized power in a coup. Although some Iranians believe that Reza Shah was set up by the British (Majd 2012, 45), some argue that he was not a mere creation of the British but only received their support to attain power (see Zirinsky 1992). Similarly, Zibakalam (2019) discusses how Reza Shah’s rise to power was influenced by Iran’s internal social, political, and economic conditions. Furthermore, Zibakalam asserts that Reza Shah’s modernisation agenda was driven by the aspirations of many educated Iranians, rather than being solely influenced by British desires. However, it cannot be overlooked that Britain was perceived as the dominant power during the Reza Shah era. The British diplomat Sir Percy Loraine also stated that Reza Shah’s strong nationalist government would protect crucial British interests in Iran (Cronin 2003, 91). Indeed, in this paper, we discuss that while he could potentially have drawn on the suffering endured by the people during the GPF to strengthen his legitimacy, it is likely that his links to Britain, and their direct involvement in causing the famine, discouraged him from official memorialisation of the GPF. Miles (2019, 253) argues that history is written by the victors and powerholders create and support narratives that reinforce the power of the dominant groups. In line with that, Bernhard and Kubik (2014, 11) explain that political entrepreneurs, such as individuals, parties and organisations, selectively emphasise or overlook certain aspects of history to gain legitimacy and maintain their hold on power. Their choices are influenced by political costs or interests associated with a particular decision, as well as cultural implications.

During the time of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), the state selectively emphasised specific elements of tradition while excluding others, aiming to highlight the perceived compatibility of Iranian culture with modernity (Marashi 2008, 113). Additionally, after coming to power in 1941, the second Pahlavi Shah furthered the agenda of modernisation through the implementation of the White Revolution (1960–63), a comprehensive initiative that involved rapid urbanisation and westernisation of Iran (Abrahamian 1982, 168). The Pahlavi rulers used the national system of education and officially sanctioned commemorative practices to strengthen the country, emphasising the elements that were most compatible with the culture of modernity (Marashi 2008, 113; Abrahamian 1982, 140). Accordingly, during this time, Iranian history was divided into two main periods – pre-Islamic antiquity and the Islamic past – and official memory projects focussed on pride in the pre-Islamic antiquity (Ram 2000, 70). Indeed, in 1971, the Iranian King (the Shah) commemorated the 2500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy, emphasising the strength of the tradition of monarchy in Iran. The Shah also reformed the country’s calendar, replacing the lunar Hijri year, an Islamic calendar (Abrahamian 1982, 132), and national holidays directly related to Persian heritage were introduced (Kashfi 2021, 7).

Another example of how history was selectively narrated concerns the commemoration of the coup which overthrew the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. The coup was staged by the Pahlavi Shah with support from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Intelligence Service, and it was motivated by the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry by Mossadegh – something that threatened British interests in Iran (Abrahamian 1982). Thus, any public acknowledgement of the history of the coup would have been detrimental to the Pahlavi ruler’s interests in keeping the support of the West.

In post-revolutionary Iran, histography has been relatively diverse in its approaches. Aghaie uses the term ‘Islamist historiography’ to describe how certain strains of traditional Muslim historiography have been praised while some historians are harshly criticised for emulating Western historiography, and for being affected by nationalism, secularism, materialism or Marxism (2009, 233). This hegemonic approach is applied in school textbooks, publications of primary documents, and records that are aimed at constructing history in line with their ideological vision of the world (Aghaie 2009, 256).

In the post-revolutionary era, conservative Islamists became ‘memory entrepreneurs’ (Jelin 2003 quoted in Rolston 2020) with a monopoly on forming an official memory (Rolston 2020).

The role of the memory entrepreneur is to articulate an interpretation of the past which enables a society to pull together and build a common identity. On occasions, that task can be highly instrumental, involving a manipulation, even a distortion of the past. (Rolston 2020, 6)

Indeed, after the revolution, national days associated with the monarchy were removed (Kashfi 2021, 11). With Shia Islam being the official religion, commemorations focussed mostly on the martyrdom of Shiite imams and saints – especially Hoseynibn-Ali, the Prince of Martyrs (Khosronejad 2012, 3) – and historical events associated with the Islamic Revolution (Kashfi 2021).

The Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988) is a useful indication of how the ‘memory machine’ works in the formation of Iranian propaganda (Saramifar 2021). During this war at least 300,000 people died, and over 500,000 were injured out of a total population of 60 million (Khosronejad 2012, 7). This war has been framed as a defence of the motherland (mam-e vatan) and a battle between good and evil. The Islamic Republic’s discourses have linked it to Shie symbols, martyrdom and Iranian nationalist discourses (Khakpour, Khorrami, and Vatanabadi 2016, 2). Thus, the memory of the Iran–Iraq war is reproduced and maintained in diverse forms of art, literature, history, and culture (Khosronejad 2012, 7).

Despite the extensive attention to the memory of the war, its remembrance has been selective (Shams 2020, 900). Some memories have been neglected for religious and cultural reasons, while those memories that support its master narrative of martyrdom, religion and history have been reproduced (Saramifar 2021). For instance, women who were assaulted and raped by the invading Iraqi forces in the Iran–Iraq war are not remembered in post-revolutionary historiography. Maryam Kazemzadeh (1956–2022), one of the few Iranian freelance women photojournalists during the Iran–Iraq war, refers to the series of brutal rapes and killings of Iranian women that occurred in the Bostan region (near the Iraq border). In a roundtable in Tehran in 2017 about women’s experiences in the war, she stated:

In some parts of Bostan, there were some memorials for women and local people put inscriptions on the hills saying that we honor your memory. After preparing a report and publishing it in Zanan magazine, I encountered backlash from officials, and I was questioned why I was sharing those images. When I returned to that area later all the signs of commemoration had been removed. (Kazemzadeh2017)

Similarly, the memories of Iranian female prisoners of war in Iraqi custody are also largely erased from history, and female war martyrs are excluded from the signs that commemorate martyrs in different cities (Esfandiari 2019; cf. Marashi 2008). Although the Iranian women who were imprisoned in Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war later published their memoirs, these did not provide details on the physical violence that they faced (Adimi 2017). In her analysis, Adimi (2017) notes that the memoirs followed a general approach of silence towards rape and assault against women. Nonetheless, official documents have revealed that the Baghdad regime used gender and rape as a means to threaten prisoners, and to apply pressure on Iranian captives to gain privileges (Adimi 2017).

The Great Persian Famine in relation to other historical events

A growing number of researchers have shed light on the contrast between popular remembering and the official presentation of nationally relevant, historical events (eg Breznik and Močnik 2022). Some authors highlight how selectively remembering particular events may induce forgetting of related historical information, and how this forgetting may influence individual and national identities (see Stone, Gkinopoulos, and Hirst 2017). Breznik and Močnik (2022, 1056) have argued that the tendency to remember through popular and everyday informal practices is motivated by a wish to preserve a past that risks being lost. On the contrary, organised, public memorialisation tends to re-produce the past in order to shape the future. In this section, we elaborate on the different dimensions of this forgetting, by referring briefly to the important historical turning points of Iranian history, as the GPF cannot be understood as an isolated event.

More than a century has passed since the GPF, and Iranian society has experienced two revolutions (the Constitutional Revolution, 1905–1911, and the Islamic Revolution, 1979); three major wars (1914–1918, 1941–1945 and 1980–1988); colonial coups (1921, 1953), geopolitical pressure of major world powers; the outbreak of epidemics; and political, religious, and ethnic uprisings (see Abrahamian 1982; Ertem 2017). Moreover, the GPF was not the only instance of mass starvation in Iran’s history. In fact, the country suffered famines in 1870–1871, 1917–1919, and 1942 (Ketabi 2011, 169). Estimated mortality rates of the 1870s famine range from 1.5 to 5 million, out of a total population of 10 million in Iran at the time. That famine and the remarkably high casualties affected Iran’s population and economy greatly (Seyf 2010, 296). Despite the high casualties, however, the 1870s famine met the same collective amnesia as the one in 1917–19. Although it claimed more lives than the 1840s Great Famine of Ireland (Amanat 2014, 1012), it has received little scholarly attention.

The same was the case for Iran’s 1942 famine, which took place during World War II. In August 1941, British and Russian forces invaded and occupied neutral Iran. Under pressure from the Allies, in September 1941, Reza Shah resigned and went into forced exile, and his 22-year-old son came to power (Dadkhah 2001, 182). This change, combined with a bad harvest in 1942, an enormous influx of European refugees, and the role of the Allied powers, contributed to the conditions leading to starvation. Together with a typhus epidemic, the famine claimed four million lives, or a quarter of Iran’s population (Majd 2013). The memories of this famine are crowded out by other historical events: the assignment of the monarchy of Reza Shah to his son, World War II, the Allied powers in Iran, and bread riots (see McFarland 1985; Dadkhah 2001).

There are no publicly known monuments for any of the famines that Iran experienced, not even in the most severely affected cities. A possible explanation might be that the victims of famines and starvation are ‘second-class victims’ compared to victims of wars and revolutions (De Waal 2018, 193). Despite the severe moral, mental, psychological and material damage, the Persian famines of 1871, 1917–19, and 1942 lack heroes and have not been considered worth remembering. In Iranian national narratives, the heroes deserving remembrance are instead victorious commanders, warriors and martyrs who defended the borders of Iran and who were imprisoned or hanged during the wars and revolutionary struggles, eg anonymous martyrs and famous commanders of the Iran–Iraq war. The archaeology of ancient history has also been neglected since the Islamic Revolution (Abdi 2001, 73). There are only a few monuments to national heroes in Iran, and many have been removed since 1979.¹

The victims of GPF have also not been hailed as heroes in schoolbooks, not even after the Islamic Revolution, when the country otherwise nurtured anti-imperialist attitudes. The struggles of ordinary civilians subject to imposed hunger have hardly been mentioned. Merely one sentence in the history book used in Iranian high schools states that Iran was hit by famine during WWI (Shahidi 2016). Although some official records about the GPF are available, Iranian official historiographies have not considered the voices of ordinary witnesses and survivors of the GPF (Shahbazi 2016). Most of the limited literature (Majd 2013; Atabaki 2016; Malekzadeh 2015) and autobiographies reflect the GPF from an elite perspective. The available autobiographies are written by members of the royal families (Saltane) and ambassadors (see Majd 2013). As Cronin (2017, 326) asserts, the elites describe the situation but do not refer to the poor people’s experiences of suffering; they are blind to their fate because it lacked significance for them. Thus, poor people’s encounter with hunger violence has been silenced, through a process in which elitist, historical autobiographies have determined what memories can be written and what should remain forgotten (Balaghi 2013, 79).

The GPF in political discourse

When it comes to the role of political interests in the memorialisation of the GPF, there are some similarities to the memories of the Great Irish Famine (GIF) of the 1840s. In the Irish case, the model of commemoration adopted by political leaders had the potential to produce changes in attitudes about the GIF. The extent to which the GIF has been remembered or forgotten has varied over time (Ciosain 1995, 7). Shahbazi (2016) argues – on his personal website, one of very few public reflections on the GPF – that the silencing of the memories of the GPF immediately after its occurrence was a type of colonial silence. The occupying imperial powers used the humanitarian catastrophe to change the political order and impose their desired government in Iran, replacing the Qajar leader with a Pahlavi in 1921. Indeed, the coup succeeded because the society had been dismantled by the GPF. The occupying powers blocked the circulation of information about the GPF from the outset. The British tried to conceal their role in the famine by blaming Iran, Russia and the Ottoman Turks (Majd 2013, 81). Abdol Javad Okhovat (2007), in his diary (Az Tebabat ta Tejarat), explains that with the arrival of the Russians in Isfahan, all city newspapers were seized, and severe censorship was established. The Russians inspected passengers from other cities and possessing a newspaper was considered a criminal act (Rajaee 2016, 46). Furthermore, there is no evidence of protests, riots, or bread demonstrations during the GPF, which could otherwise enable the recollection of the event (Cronin 2018, 851). These political dynamics show how exclusions are made in the writing of history (Balaghi 2013, 79), how the violence of starvation dominated society, and how the possibility of collective political action was overshadowed by pitiful attempts to survive (Cronin 2018, 851). Interestingly, both Reza Shah and the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) could potentially have made use of the memories of the GPF to build their legitimacy by blaming it on outside powers. However, the fact that the Shah had benefitted from British support may have deterred him from politicising the GPF. That the IRI did not seize the opportunity to use memorialisation as a means to blame the imperial powers for the deaths of so many Iranians and demand reparations is puzzling and worth investigating further.

Although the GPF generally met collective amnesia in the post-revolution era, and there are no references to it in textbooks, monuments, and national museums, Iran’s Islamist and hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who ruled the country from 2005–2013, did revive the memories of the famine. Soon after taking power, Ahmadinejad stated that the Holocaust was a ‘myth’ (Guardian, 14 December 2005). This prompted strong condemnation from the West. In response, Ahmadinejad referred to the victims of the GPF as a tool to support his ideas. He insisted that if Israel receives compensation for the Holocaust from the West, Iran should also ask for compensation from the imperial powers who occupied Iran during World War I. As noted in a Hamshahri Online article on 22 December 2009, Ahmadinejad pointed to the prominent role of Britain in pursuing the war, seizing food, and threatening the lives of many Persians.

Following these arguments, Iran’s official strategy towards the GPF changed dramatically. For the first time since the Islamic Revolution, the government made efforts to unveil the memory of the GPF. For example, it changed its approach to the comprehensive book by Mohammad Gholi Majd entitled The Great Famine and Genocide in Iran, 1917–1919, first published in 2003. When Majd, an agricultural economist and historian, published his book, it gained little attention in Iran; five years later, it attracted the attention of the politicians in power. The book was translated into Farsi, published in Iran, and welcomed by officials of the Ahmadinejad government.

At the time, the pro-government media published several reports about the mortality of the GPF and called it a Persian Holocaust (see Mashregh News, 17 October 2012). Moreover, the first ever Iranian movie about the GPF was produced. The Orphanage of Iran (Yatim Khaneye Iran) (2014) dealt with the outbreak of World War I and the GPF, linking the British army’s occupation of Iran to the starvation and death of millions of Iranians. It was praised by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei. The movie director stated that the ‘Supreme leader was very satisfied that we had produced this movie and invited us [the agents of the film] to his office. It has been a great encouragement for us’ (Mashregh News, 26 May 2016). The head of the Islamic Revolution Document Center, Ruhollah Hosseinian, also praised the movie. Hosseinian (2016) accused intellectuals of forgetting the mortalities of the GPF:

two-thirds of Iranians perished during the GPF of 1917–19, but intellectuals are instead mourning for the victims of the entry of Islamic forces into Iran (in the seventh century). These intellectuals do not remember the victims of the Persian Great Famine because British forces were responsible for the crime of the famine.

Hosseinian thus revived and deployed the memories of the GPF to criticise the selective memorialisation of another historical event.

These examples show how historical narratives are produced, documented, and stored, or remain hidden and inaccessible as a result of power dynamics (Balaghi 2013, 79). The forgetting and remembering of the GPF shows ‘how past famine can hold political currency in contemporary politics’ (Parashar and Orjuela 2021, 414). Put simply, the memory of the GPF was revived in a particular period to gain legitimacy for the president; the famine was brought up by Iranian political powerholders through rituals, narratives and commemorations during a limited time, 2008–2013. Thereafter, the political power and dominant ‘­memory entrepreneurs’ kept silent about the famine (see Rolston 2020, 6). Indeed, the one-hundredth anniversary of the GPF in 2017 did not receive any public attention, and we could not find any statements or activities related to it.

Several political reasons were behind the pushing aside of the GPF memories again. Iran started negotiations with European countries about its nuclear programme in 2014, which resulted in a deal in July 2015 (Arms Control, January 2023). When the United States announced its withdrawal from the deal in May 2018 and introduced severe economic sanctions against Iran, this led to several economic problems. The situation was then exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In contrast, Iran’s revolutionary objective was again to present the country as strong and deny that it faced any problems with hunger. Indeed, when the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of the UK, Jeremy Hunt, in an interview in Tehran in November 2018 warned against a World War I-style catastrophe in the Middle East (Guardian, 19 November 2018), Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman immediately told the media that there was no talk about the World War I disaster and the outbreak of the Famine in Iran during the meeting between Iran’s foreign minister and his British counterpart, as noted in an Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) article on 22 November 2018. In response, the Tehran Times assured that the threat of war and famine in Iran was false (Ghaderi 2018).

These examples show how the Iranian revolutionary regime uses the memories of the GPF as a legitimising tool but silences them when doing so serves the interest of power. The Iranian government could have deployed more memories of the GPF to vilify the West and support their anti-imperialistic stance, like Ahmadinejad’s government did. However, as Aghaie (2009) notes, only specific topics enter the revolutionary historiography in Iran, and clearly, the memories of the GFP have not been granted a permanent place in the Islamist history and public memory of Iran.

Remembering – and forgetting – from below

While the available literature sheds light on how famine memory has been both intentionally silenced and unintentionally forgotten by powerholders, our interviews show how non-elite Iranians have deliberately kept silent about the GPF based on other reasons. As the GPF took place in 1917–1918, those who experienced it firsthand are no longer alive. However, their children and grandchildren may carry memories that have been passed on within the family. For this study, we interviewed seven women (ordinary Iranian citizens) who are second- or third-generation famine survivors.² We identified them through our own networks and through snowball sampling (Parker, Scott, and Geddes 2019). Accordingly, first, we contacted three Iranian women who worked as a university teacher, school teacher and journalist, respectively. Two of them agreed to participate and recommended other potential participants whom they thought would be willing to participate. We interviewed seven women online in 2021. They were in the age group of 39–70 and living in Teheran. All interviewees belong to an educated class but have no formal affiliations to government institutions. The interviews were analysed using interpretative narrative analysis. The primary themes that emerged from the analysis of the interview data included silencing and/or commemorating the GPF, the violence and suffering the famine unleashed, the inter-generational emotional impact, and the conscious silencing by the state power. The interviewees asked to remain anonymous, and we have thus changed their names and other identity markers in this paper.

While this sample does not reflect the wide array of Iranians whose parents or grandparents may have firsthand experiences of the GPF, we argue that their stories nevertheless give us important insights into how the painful memory of the famine has been dealt with, in the family sphere. In addition to drawing attention to perhaps unintended silencing of the memories by common citizens, these interviews taught us about the official silencing by the state, and the lack of information in contemporary popular discourse.

It is clear from our interviews that silence can be a strategy of resistance against painful memories (cf. Parpart and Parashar 2019). The few personal accounts and diaries that exist from the time of the GPF reveal that the famine experience was one of immense suffering. For instance, there is evidence of people eating human flesh during the famine. Majd talks about it as a time when ‘the victim’s children were stolen from the doorsteps of their homes or snatched up haphazard[ly] in the bazaar purlieus. Mothers of young children were afraid to leave them while they went to beg for bread, lest in their absence they should be kidnapped and eaten’ (2008, xlix).

Such tragedies also appear in the narrations of the next generations of famine survivors. Our interviewees shared that people prefer not to return to those heartbreaking memories because they are like a tragedy that continues to hurt even after many years. As Cronin argues, those neglected heart-rending memories of the traumas of starvation still enter people’s minds, leading to an ongoing experience of fear and pain (2018, 858). For instance, one interviewee, Forough, a 70-year-old retired teacher, refers to her mother’s reluctance to remember the famine time. Her memories show that although many years have passed, the remembrance still hurts:

I remember when my mother narrated those days. For many years, she always asked us to be sure that we have enough bread at home. She always bought too much wheat and stored it in the house. She was afraid of hunger; she was afraid of death from hunger. She was the only survivor of a big family. She lost her siblings and many of her family members during the GPF and cholera. She did not like to refer to the memories of those days, but we could see the effects of famine in all parts of her life. (Interview, 2021)

Similarly, Sara, a 39-year-old journalist, explains that her grandmother was a child during the GPF, and the only thing that she heard was about the lack of flour during the time. Sara’s grandmother told the family about making bread by powdering date kernels. In our interview with Sara, she asked us to contact her again after a few days. She wanted to call her mother and ask her about the memories she had about the GPF in the family. After some days, she got in touch, apologising for not having anything to add. She believed that more memories exist in the family, but the family members did not want to talk about them for emotional reasons. As Fivush (2010, 89–92) argues, this silencing can be analysed as a form of resistance to a painful past. Sara’s mother, like many others, actively forgets painful experiences, even if a sympathetic listener is available. They prefer to keep silent, even two generations and a hundred years later. Deliberately referring only to a ‘lack of bread’ may be a way to handle the fact that some experiences are too hard to share even within the family (Fivush 2010, 92). Thus, the guarded silence around the tragedies of the GPF in public and collective memory could partly be associated with ‘emasculation, shame, and loss of selves’ (Parashar and Orjuela 2021, 414). Following Fivush (2010, 92), Sara’s mother and grandmother may keep silent about the painful and disturbing memories of the GPF as a coping strategy.

During our interviews, we were often confronted with long silences. For instance, one of our interviewees, Samaneh, a 63-year-old woman, fell silent in the middle of our conversation for some minutes and then referred to her father’s memories of forced migration from the Soviet Union to Iran after World War I. Another interviewee, Maryam, a 66-year-old human rights activist, argued that the time of the GPF is a period which is taboo in Iran: ‘I’m not sure that they [my parents] wanted me to talk about their memories’. She referred to some general aspects of Iran’s famine, and then she excused herself from continuing the interview. Similarly, Faezeh, a 59-year-old university teacher, kept quiet several times during the interview. She became very emotional when talking about her mother’s and grandmother’s memories. After one of the many silent moments, she decided to share parts of her mother’s memory:

My mother remembered the family’s memories of the famine of 1917. She had suffered a lot from those memories because three of her siblings and some of her family members died of famine during 1917–1919. She knew about what happened to her family through her parents’ memories. I feel disappointed now that we did not record her voice; that we did not even write down her memories. We should have documented those memories, although they are so painful. (Interview 2021)

Parpart and Parashar contend that it is crucial to avoid the simplistic notion that speech equates with power and silence equates with weakness, when analysing the meaning of silences (2019, 87). Despite the prevailing belief that women’s silence is generally associated with disempowerment and lack of agency (Parpart 2013), the agency of individuals, particularly when it comes to speaking about injustices and moral dilemmas, should be considered in more nuanced ways (Parpart and Parashar 2019). Indeed, the silences of the women in this study, we believe, were choices motivated by several factors, including emotional.

Some interviewees also commented on the official silence that prevails around the tragic famine. Maryam said:

One day in Iran, we will have a Museum of the Voice of Iran. This museum will have many parts for neglected and unheard voices; the voice of the people in different parts of our history who have not ever been heard. Mothers of dead and eaten children speak loudly there. Nobody gave a voice to those mothers throughout our history, not even to their traumas. Nobody dares to listen to those stories. We just ignore them by different justifications. Sometimes by the force of colonial power, sometimes by the force of shame and fear, and sometimes in the name of national security. Like different aspects of Iranian life, this is also political. (Interview, 2021)

Maryam, like other interviewees, linked the silence about the GPF to the Iranian state’s contemporary approaches to memory. She believed that remembering the historical happenings is valuable, since it lets societies learn from past events, which, in turn, gives them the ability to take appropriate action on contemporary issues (see also Ciosain 1995 in the context of Irish famine). Fatima, a 56-year-old schoolteacher, criticised the lack of information in schools about all of Iran’s famines. She explained that even in Persian literature, there is a lack of descriptions of these famines. She referred to a poem by Mohammed Taghi Bahar (1886–1951) about the GPF as one of very few pieces of literary work about the Persian famines. Bahar refers briefly to the famine, describing the catastrophic hunger, and identifying the role of the British in instigating it. Fatima says:

Those days are not in our books and written historiographies. All of us heard about painful memories of those days from our parents and grandparents. Those veiled memories are with us unless we can talk about them and narrate them. Why have our children not heard about those memories? Who has erased these parts of our memories from arts, novels, and history books? Yes, it is heartbreaking, but it should be in our history books. We have many things about [what happened] a thousand years ago in our schoolbooks, but nothing about this famine. (Interview, 2021)

A more recent artistic commemoration of the GPF is also worth mentioning. In 2014, Tehran hosted an exhibition entitled ‘The Famine of 1917 from the Perspective of Hossein Behzad’s Miniature’ (Rabie 2021). The exhibition was organised by a public entity at Behzad Museum in the Sa’dabad Museum Complex in Tehran. Behzad (1894–1968), an acclaimed Iranian painter, worked in the old Persian tradition of miniatures, and often represented social and political issues such as oil and poverty in his works (Bombardier 2017, 161). He was 22 years old during the outbreak of the GPF and reflected on his memories of it 40 years later, in 1960–61. His artwork was exhibited in public in Teheran for the first time long after – in 2014. The paintings depict the anger and desperation of the people trapped in famine; they show dead children around their mother, mass graves, and animals eating from human corpses. His work has been described as emotional and indications of the artist’s own confrontation with the horrors of famine (Rabie 2021, 64). Except for the news of the event and one article, we could not find any reactions to or analysis of Behzad’s GPF exhibition. As is clear from pictures of the artwork, Behzad could not finish his paintings. The article suggests that:

An artist like Behzad could not complete these artworks probably because of the cultural situation that does not know how to deal with these kinds of works. In these types of situations, all the time there is a risk that the artist is accused of having compromised the dignity of Iran and tarnished the facts. (Rabie 2021, 65)

When we visited the Behzad Museum in Tehran in July 2022, we could not find any artwork depicting the GPF. The museum’s curator told us that the GPF miniatures were gifted to the museum by Behzad’s family and had been moved to a warehouse after the one-time public exhibition. The curator did not offer an explanation as to why they were not on public display. At the time of writing this paper, we have no knowledge of any other publicly displayed artwork on the GPF, and even the Iranian art community has not engaged with Behzad’s works on the GPF (Rabie 2021, 65).

Thus, in addition to the role of the state and politics in silencing the memories of GPF, it appears that the silence around the GPF has other sides also. For artists such as Behzad, as well as for ordinary citizens, the silence regarding famine memory is also because of its many associated traumas. As Ciosain (2014, 7) discusses, these traumas may be connected to ‘guilt of those who survived at the expense of others’ lives’. Behzad and many other artists, poets and writers may have remained silent for so long about the tragedies of the GPF because they felt that bringing it up would cause a sense of humiliation (see Glenn 2002, 270). In his analysis of the rhetorical aspects of silence, Glenn contends that it is important to consider whether silence is a forced position or a tactical choice (2002, 263). Behzad seems to have been confronted with difficult emotions in face of the moral breakdowns during the famine and decided not to finish his artworks. One striking example is a primary sketch illustrating a mother whose children were eaten by animals. His inability to complete this work could perhaps be seen as a tactic for self-censorship or self­-protection (see Amanat 2014, 1012) – a way to avoid having to fully take in the stories of famine violence (Fivush 2010, 88). A major lesson that can be drawn from analysing Behzad’s work on the GPF and the stories of our interviewees is that the famine survivors and their descendants have played an important role in veiling the memories of the famine. At the same time, some memories are preserved and carried forward by the subsequent generations. The suffering and trauma of starvation continue to cause fear and pain (Cronin 2018, 858).

It is worth mentioning that recently a few artistic works have also endeavoured to address historical occurrences and simultaneously invoke memories of the famine. A noteworthy example is the 2021 Iranian TV series Khatoon, which examines the events of World War II and interweaves a narrative pertaining to the recollection of the experiences of the famine of 1942. This work faced criticism from Keyhan, one of the most conservative newspapers in Iran. Significantly, the criticism levelled against the TV series was not focussed on its depiction of the famine violence. Rather, it took issue with the portrayal of foreign powers, particularly Russia, as a causal factor in its emergence. Additionally, the critics accused the series of promoting nationalism and inciting the young generation to resist the government (Aftab News, 2 January 2023). This suggests that the remembering or forgetting of the GPF in Iran needs to be understood in relation to other historical events: in some instances, famine memories have served political purposes of promoting anti-imperialistic attitudes, while in others the display of the famine is considered problematic as it connects to other topics that are taboo.

As discussed in this paper, the silencing or remembering of the GPF has also always been influenced by power relations and class hierarchies, both before and after the Islamic Revolution. The dominant political power has played a role in shaping the memories in the public sphere in Iran, so that those who have not belonged to a particular class or ethnicity were hindered from shaping official memorialisation. In that sense, the political system in Iran typically promotes certain memories, making those who have political power the all-dominant memory entrepreneurs, who legitimately can tell the story of the famine – or refrain from doing so.

Conclusions

This paper aimed to understand how the GPF is remembered – or not – in public and personal spheres in Iran. To investigate when, how, and by whom this famine has been remembered and forgotten, we adopted a qualitative approach and an interpretative narrative analysis, using available literature, diaries, memoirs, and artistic works as well as interviews with second- and third-generation famine survivors.

It is clear from our study that the official history writing and commemorative practices in Iran have not focussed on the World War I famine, nor on other severe famines. Despite its casualties being counted in the millions, other dramatic events have overshadowed the GPF. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a watershed when it comes to how Iran’s official history has been narrated and which traumas of the past have been recognised and commemorated. While official memorialisation had a vastly different focus before and after the revolution, the GPF was written out of official history during both periods. In the pre-revolution period, powerholders had an interest in maintaining good relations with the former imperial powers, who had been instrumental in causing the GPF. After the revolution, leaders instead wanted to frame Iran as a strong and independent country. A devastating famine was not a useful past to evoke for this purpose. Rather, commemorative practices focussed more on the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war. Briefly, however, the GPF entered public discourse when President Ahmadinejad brought up this past and the culpability of Western powers, in support of his own foreign policy discourse. During this period (2008–2013), we also saw an upsurge of writings and the production of a film on the topic, illustrating the space that opened for talking publicly about the GPF.

Also, among ordinary citizens, the memories of GPF have largely been buried. Such memories are painful, and for many, not remembering or talking about the trauma serves as a coping strategy. The memory of the famine evokes fear and may also be connected to shame. Not only the generation that experienced the famine themselves but also their children and grandchildren have been reluctant to talk about it. While there are hardly any initiatives by civil society or artists to remember this famine, the paper highlights a 2014 art exhibition by Behzad, which shows that the memory of starvation can indeed be publicly displayed. However, as illustrated by Behzad’s unfinished drawing of a starving mother and her children and by the long delay in his artworks becoming public, there is a reluctance to deal openly with this heartbreaking historical experience. By analysing the memorialisation of GPF in Iran, this paper has added important insights into why and how historical mass starvation tends to be overlooked, both in public discourse and in the private sphere.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Camilla Orjuela and Swati Parashar for their support, to our interviewees, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zahra Edalati

Zahra Edalati is a doctoral researcher at Tampere University. Her research focuses on feminist peace, memory politics and diaspora mobilisation.

Majid Imani

Majid Imani is a doctoral researcher at Tampere University. His research focuses on social and digital anthropology, ethnography, and identity politics.

Notes

1 The monument of Mirza Kuchak Khan Jangali, who was a fighter in the Constitutional Revolution and leader of the Jangal movement in the city of Rasht, is one of the few exceptions.

2 We have followed the ethics regulations of Tampere University and informed consent was obtained orally.