St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies 21 Panel One. Historiography and Sources on Afghanistan... Khan, including his son Mahmud Hotak, remains unanswered. Some authors also write about Peter the Great’s order to deport Afghans who lived in the Caucasus, but there is no reliable evidence to substantiate it, thus a further study of the materials in Russian archives is worth an effort. 3.Another very interesting topic is the first battle of Russian troops againstAfghan soldiers, led by Saydal Khan (Saldan Khan). This is about the detachment of General Levashov operating in Persia and facing the forces of the Afghan military leader Saldan Khan, who at that time dominated most of Persia. The Afghan sent Levashov a demand to vacate Gilan and return to Russia. The General, in turn, sent theAfghans a response demand —  to leave the Russian territory within a day. Levashov formed a small detachment of 250 men under the command of Major Yurlov and dispatched him against Saldan Khan. On 20 December 1728, this detachment approached Lahijan, where the first in history clash of Russians withAfghans occurred. 250 Russian infantry soldiers with shouts of “Hurray” defeated the enemy in the very first attack— the loss ofAfghans amounted to 600 people (there were about 4,000 of them). The bodyguards managed to save Saldan Khan, who was shot in a foot, in the nearest fortress of Qazvin. As for the more recent and even modern episodes of Afghan history, which have not yet been properly academically evaluated or described in detail, there is the trip of First Lieutenant Ivan Witkiewicz (Vitkevich) to Kabul in 1837–1838 and his subsequent death in St Petersburg and an equally enigmatic trip to the Russian capital of Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani in 1888. It is known that he published several articles in the Russian newspapers, met with Minister of Foreign Affairs, N. K. Giеrs and even hoped for an audience with EmperorAlexander III, but was suspected of spying for Britain and deported from Russia as a “persona non-grata”. It is worth noting that in St Petersburg Al-Afghani met with the famous Russian Muslim reformer, the future first Soviet mufti Rizaeddin Fahreddin (1859–1936); this meeting had a great influence on the latter. And finally, on the “white spots” of Afghan history and Russian / Soviet-Afghan relations of the 20th century. For example, manyAfghan researchers believe that the Loya Jirga convened in 1949 on the initiative of M. Daud, was held “on the orders from Moscow” or, at least, there was “the hand of Moscow” in it. Even nowadays, the minutes of meetings and negotiations of Soviet representatives with the then Prime Minister of Afghanistan Mohammed Daoud Khan, who arrived in Moscow in 1953 for the funeral of I. V. Stalin remain classified. According to conspiracy theories, which are very popular in Western and Afghan circles, the Soviet leaders even then tried to include the country in the sphere of their influence. Shrouded in secrecy is also the last meeting of M. Daud with Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in 1977 — there is some evidence that it culminated in a diplomatic scandal that affected Moscow’s policy towards Afghanistan. Of course, the above-mentioned problems of Afghan history, which require an in-depth study, do not exhaust the whole variety of topics that make up the subject