Afghan communist founder whose overthrow and murder by his protégé Amin triggered the Soviet invasion
Taraki: 'We ask you to render practical and technical assistance with men and armament.' Kosygin: 'This is a very complicated problem.' Taraki: 'While you are taking counsel Herat will fall.' (telephone conversation, 18 March 1979, during the Herat uprising)
Nur Muhammad Taraki was the founding General Secretary of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) who became the first Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan after the Saur Revolution of April 1978. Born to a Pashtun peasant family, he encountered Marxism at night school in Bombay and later wrote the first social-realist novel in Pashto, The Journey of Bang, earning the label 'Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky.' Once in power he imposed radical land reform and secularization that ignited armed uprisings across the countryside, and his repeated pleas for Soviet military intervention were rebuffed by Kosygin and Brezhnev. In September 1979 his protégé Hafizullah Amin overthrew and suffocated him, a killing that became the proximate trigger for the Soviet invasion two months later.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1932–1937Clerk for Pashtun Trading Company in Bombay; encountered Marxism at night school
- 1940s–1958Writer and journalist; published De Bang Mosaferi, the first Pashto social-realist novel
- 1952–1953Press attaché, Afghan Embassy in Washington DC
- 1965Founded PDPA at his Kabul home; elected General Secretary
- 1967Led Khalq (Masses) faction after PDPA split
- 1978.04–12Saur Revolution: Chairman of Revolutionary Council and PM; signed 20-Year Soviet Friendship Treaty
- 1979.03Herat uprising: appealed for Soviet troops; Kosygin and Brezhnev refused
- 1979.09–10Overthrown by Amin; suffocated with pillows in custody
Related historical events
From writer and journalist to party builder, 1932–1977
Before April 1978 Taraki's political record consisted mainly of literary work and party organizing. Born on 14 July 1917 to a Ghilji Pashtun Tarakai peasant family in Nawa District, Ghazni Province, the eldest of three children, he attended a village school in Nawa and then left Afghanistan in 1932 at the age of fifteen for the Indian port of Bombay. There he worked as a clerk for the Pashtun Trading Company, run by a Kandahari merchant family, and in night courses met members of the Communist Party of India who introduced him to ideas of social justice and communism. His encounter with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Pashtun nationalist who led the Red Shirt Movement across the border, was another formative experience.
From 1937 he worked for the Minister of Economics Abdul Majid Zabuli, who introduced him to Russians; he later became Deputy Head of the Bakhtar News Agency and was known across the country as an author and poet. His best-known work, De Bang Mosaferi (The Journey of Bang), dealt with the socio-economic hardship of Afghan workers and peasants, was translated into Russian in the Soviet Union as an expression of scientific socialism, and earned him the Soviet government's label 'Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky'. On a visit to the Soviet Union he was received by Boris Ponomarev, head of the CPSU International Department.
His political activity passed through repression and moves to earn a living. Suppression of radicals was common under the prime ministership of Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan, but because of his language skills Taraki was posted to the Afghan Embassy in the United States in 1952. Within months he publicly denounced the royal government of King Zahir as autocratic and dictatorial. The denunciations drew wide publicity in the United States and unfavourable attention at home: he was relieved of his post and ordered repatriated, though not arrested. After a period of unemployment he worked as an interpreter for the United States Overseas Mission in Kabul, set up his own Noor Translation Bureau in 1958, and four years later took a post at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, quitting in 1963 to concentrate on founding the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).
At the founding congress held at his home in Kabul's Karte Char district on 1 January 1965, he defeated Babrak Karmal for the post of General Secretary; Karmal became second secretary. He failed to win a seat in the September 1965 parliamentary election, and shortly afterward launched Khalq, the first major left-wing newspaper in Afghanistan, which was banned within a month of its first printing. In 1967, less than two years after its founding, the PDPA split. The largest factions were Khalq (Masses) under Taraki and Parcham (Banner) under Karmal; the main difference was ideological, with Taraki supporting a Leninist-style state built on class struggle and Karmal seeking a 'broad democratic front'. Until April 1978 he was an organizer who had failed both to enter parliament and to hold his party together, repeatedly at odds with rival factions inside it and with press bans imposed from outside.