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I translated this article two years ago, and every time I read it I too become choked with tears. It was written by the great Iranian scholar Shojaedin Shafa (http://www.sh-shafa.com/) during the St. Petersburg Jubilee (http://www.300.spb.ru/home_en.phtml) in May 2003, which celebrated the city’s founding by Peter the Great. It was published in Asre Emrooz.
By Prof. Shojaedin Shafa
Among this week’s exciting international events, the celebrations in the Russian republic marking the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg hold a special place. Forty heads of states, hundreds of renowned political and cultural figures from around the world, and countless reporters and journalists from the international press have come here for the ceremony. Although the event is very interesting in itself, it is of particular interest to me as an Iranian. As I see it, the hundreds of thousands who shall come to the city for the celebration in the future will have the opportunity during their stay to visit the world’s most beautiful museum, and to be dazzled by its treasures of pre and post Islamic Iranian art, the most extensive and the most illustrious of its kind. I’ve visited this city in the past (when it was called Leningrad), spending hours upon hours looking at the most extensive display of Sassanian ceramics or the world’s largest display of Persian handicrafts, succeeding, however, to see only but a fraction of the assortment. Perhaps the reader is herself aware of the museum’s possession of the one of a kind 2500-year-old Persian rug, the oldest rug in the world.
However, it is not the collection of Persian art in the Hermitage or St. Petersburg libraries’ huge holdings of Persian manuscripts that have inspired me to write today. I’m impelled to write by the recollection, brought forth by the present ceremonies, of an important and notable event in our own nation’s contemporary history; recollections which, although very bitter for our generation, can in retrospect bear a constructive message for Iran’s future generations.
Thirty years ago, our own nation witnessed a celebration of similar international dimensions, hosting even more heads of states, cultural and political figures, and representatives of the world press to honor an occasion designated as the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by King Cyrus the Great. Just as the founding of a large city by Peter the Great is being celebrated today, that day the founding of a vast Empire by King Cyrus the Great was honored and celebrated. However, with the important difference that if king Peter was a reformer, he was at the same time so selfish and brutal as to send thousands, including his own son, to their death, whereas Cyrus the Great, a reformist Monarch, was also so enlightened and compassionate as to found his nation’s throne, that of the world’s oldest Monarchy, upon the world’s first ever declaration of the freedoms of thought and religion. In the Torah, Cyrus is referred to as a messenger from God and the liberator of the oppressed. And Hegel, founder of the philosophy of history, considers his reign as marking the commencement of the historical period in the true sense.
This fact is reflected in all other aspects of the comparison as well. If according to the contemptuous and raging words of George Ball (an American statesman during the Persian Centennial) the host of honors Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was nothing but a low-born Cossack who hosted the ceremony in order to convey himself as a descendant of Cyrus, then by the same calculation the host of honors in St. Petersburg today is an ex-Soviet KGB agent in need of conveying himself as a follower of the Romanoffs. Needless to say, American statesmen are making no such declarations today. If according to some, Iran’s economy at that time was in such dire states that it did not allow for such commemoration, the same can be said of the Russian economy today, for the present Russian annual income is hardly any higher than the annual income in Iran thirty years ago. However, American “expertsâ€
