Аннотация:Iran has remained one of the most effective tools in Russia’s foreign policy
towards the West for more than two hundred years. Drawing on previously
unpublished and recently declassifi ed sources which change the
established wisdom on many aspects of the history of Russia and Iran,
Denis V. Volkov examines this relationship and situates it within the
broader context of Oriental studies.
With a particular focus on the activities of scholars- diplomats, as well
as scholars involved in academia, missionary activities and the military
within their own professional domains, Volkov analyses the interaction of
intellectuals with state structures and their participation in the process of
shaping and conducting foreign policy towards Iran. This work explores
the specifi c institutional practices of Russia’s Oriental studies, including
organisation of scholarly intelligence networks, taking advantage of state
power for the promotion of institutional and individual interests, and profound
engagement with Russia’s domestic and foreign policy discourses
of its time.
Denis V. Volkov is Assistant Professor in Middle Eastern History at the
University of Manchester. He spent almost fi fteen years in Iran, working
in the fi eld of interstate economic cooperation between Russia and Iran.
His research interests include the history and the present of Russo– Iranian
relations, Russia’s Oriental studies, intellectual history, Russian and
Iranian nationalism, and, particularly, Russian émigré Orientalists. His
most recent publications are “Vladimir Minorsky (1877– 1966) and the
Iran– Iraq War (1980– 1988), or The Centenary of ‘Minorsky’s Frontier’,”
in Russians in Iran: Diplomacy and Power in Iran in the Qajar Era and
Beyond , ed. Rudolph Matthee and Elena Andreeva, and “War and Peace
in the Other and the Self: Iran through the eyes of Russian spies” Cahiers
de Studia Iranica 62 (2018): 225– 60.