The Gulag Years
Turaqul Zehni was arrested in 1945 and spent nine years in labour camps in Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. The scholarship he is remembered for, he wrote after he came back.
Two records of one life. The Tajik article moves from 1945 to 1956 without remark, and the eleven years in between are simply not there. The Russian and Uzbek articles put the arrest and the camps in the same space. The silence is not an absence of evidence. It is the thing this page is about.
1945
He was in his fifty-third year. For five years he had been teaching Persian at the university in Samarkand named for Alisher Navoi — today Samarkand State University.[2] He was one of the first authors of Tajik school textbooks, was co-author of one of the first Tajik grammars, «Сарфи забони тоҷикӣ» (1933), and made the first Tajik translation of Gogol’s The Overcoat.[1][2] Sadriddin Ayni had called him the right hand of Tajik literature.[5]
Then he was arrested. The Russian and Uzbek records agree on the essentials and give them in almost identical words: arrested in 1945 on fabricated charges, nine years in Gulag camps in Siberia and northern Kazakhstan.[2][3] The National Library of Tajikistan files him, without elaboration, under the heading Scholar — victim of the Gulag.[6]
Beyond that the record thins very quickly. No arrest date is published — not the month, not the day. No case number, no investigating body, no tribunal, no sentence length in the formal sense, no camp named. For a man who spent his working life making things countable and citable, almost nothing about the nine years is either.
Three accounts, one at odds with the others
What he was actually accused of is not settled. Three versions circulate; they are given here as they stand, in descending order of how well attested they are. No attempt is made to reconcile them.
Reported by Shahlo Abdullo for RFE/RL Ozodi in March 2022, in coverage of the memorial evening held in Dushanbe for his 130th anniversary.[4]
The formulation used by both the Russian and the Uzbek Wikipedia entries, which call the accusations fabricated but do not say what they were. The two are not independent: they draw on the same two Tajik sources.[2][3]
Appears in a Facebook post in Tajik by an individual writer. No archival or published source has been found for it. It is recorded here because it is in circulation, not because it is established.[8]
The distance between the first and third accounts matters more than it looks. One makes the offence religious instruction; the other makes it the teaching of Persian itself — which is to say, the thing he had done openly, on a state payroll, for five years — and Tajik language and literature for about ten years before that, from 1919, in two spells. The archives that would settle it are in Tashkent, Dushanbe and Moscow, and nobody has published from them.
Nine years
Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. That is the whole of the published geography, and the same bare pairing is repeated by every source that mentions the camps at all.[2][3]
There is a temptation here to reach for the general literature — to describe a camp, a barrack, a winter, and let the reader assume it was his. That would be invention. No account of Zehni's own imprisonment has been published: no memoir, no letters, no testimony from a fellow prisoner, no interview in which he described it. He wrote memoirs of Ayni, of Lohuti, of Naqibkhon Tughral, of Habib Yusufi.[1] He appears not to have written one about this.
Whether he chose that silence, or it was chosen for him, the sources do not say.
The arithmetic leaves a further loose end. Nine years from 1945 ends in 1954. The Rudaki Institute post begins in 1956.[1][2] What happened in between — release, internal exile, the wait for rehabilitation, a return to Samarkand — is not recorded anywhere consulted.
A generation, named together
A Persian-language reference work, the Dānishnāma-yi Milal, lists him in a single sentence naming Tajik writers who were arrested, tortured or exiled. Two of the names around his are not strangers: Sadriddin Ayni, whose right hand he was called, and Vadud Mahmudi, with whom he wrote the 1928 primer Omūzish.[1][4] The other ten appear nowhere in the sources consulted for this page in connection with him.
Gold: Zehni. Teal: the only two the sources place in his circle.
One complication, and it is a real one: that source places these arrests in the 1930s, while the Russian and Uzbek records date Zehni's own arrest to 1945.[2][7] The two cannot both be describing the same event. Either the list compresses two decades of repression into one sentence, or Zehni was caught up more than once. Nothing found here settles it, and it is left open.