From Afghan Princess to Enemy of the State

Afghan Prince Mohammad Rahim Zeyai with his daughter Uma Sultan Khan before the arrest, 1937. (Courtesy of Uma Sultan Khan)

MOSCOW—Born the daughter of an Afghan prince, Uma Sultan Khan, now 80, lives as an ordinary woman in Moscow. This is the first time she has spoken of her difficult and eventful past with any media.

Uma’s father was Mohammad Rahim Zeyai, brother to King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan who ruled from 1919-29. Amanullah Khan is famed for winning Afghanistan’s independence from the British in the third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919. He then brought Afghanistan out of its traditional isolation and established diplomatic relations with most major countries.

Her great-grandfather was King Amir Abdul Rahman Khan, ruler of the country for 21 years at the turn of the last century, 1880-1901.

Afghanistan was the first country to recognize Soviet Russia, after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Uma says that her father and King Amanullah Khan were interested in bringing communist ideas to Afghan society. The king went to Moscow to meet Lenin to discuss how to implement his revolution in Afghanistan.

King Amanullah, with his suggestions of abolishing the traditional Muslim veil for women in favor of European-style clothes and opening co-ed schools, quickly alienated many tribal and religious leaders.

Ultimately, his ideas led to failure, rejected by the country’s Islamic society ruled by tribalism and traditional customs and religious practices.

“All tribes rose in revolt. Nobody supported their ideas and they had to escape,” recalls Uma.

In 1929, the family fled. Her father went to the capital of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, where he met his love and married. The king abdicated the throne to his older brother, Inayatullah, before leaving, but the brother lasted only three days before he had to leave the country. Another king was in power for a few months until he was stoned to death.

Later in 1929, Mohammad Nadir Shah assumed the reins of power until 1933 and Uma’s father, along with his Russian wife, were invited back from exile. Uma was born in her homeland, daughter to a prince.

Trouble Again for the Royals

In royal families, Uma explains, the bridegroom is always appointed and her intended was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who later became the king of Iran. They happened to meet once when he made an official visit to Moscow, but never spoke at the time.

“I was curious to look at my intended,” she recalls.

In 1930, a deadly threat fell over Uma’s family as the king developed a fear that the nation was eager to see the family back on the throne.

“My father came to understand that they should flee the country, because all of us could have been killed, the whole family,” she says.

In Tashkent, they faced further persecution, and the family was torn apart. Her father was arrested without explanation, and his whereabouts were unknown. Her mother’s arrest soon followed.

Uma recalls the day the police came to arrest her mother. Her grandfather fell to his knees and pleaded with the policemen not to take away his daughter.

“Why are you taking her away? She is only 25 years old. She just buried her child and has quite a small daughter. Take me instead of her!” she remembers him saying.

Their home was then seized by a People’s Commissariat Internal Affairs officer and Uma was sent to an orphanage. Soon afterward, her grandfather adopted her and gave her a Russian name, Alexandra.

Meanwhile her father, an Afghan prince, was languishing in prison.

By World War II, American medical personnel were allowed to enter the camp where her father was being held since the Soviet Union and the United States had become allies. By then quite ill, he credited American doctors with saving his life.

During the war, Afghan officials sent formal requests to their Soviet counterparts asking after him and he was finally released eight years later. His wife gained her freedom the next month.

Uma remembers that when her father returned, after years of torture from hunger and back-breaking labour, he looked like a living skeleton.

”He wore strapped-on, broken pieces of tire as shoes to help him keep his balance. He had no teeth, and no hair,” she recalls.

Labeled for Life

Uma’s childhood in Russia was similar to those whose parents were persecuted and labelled “public enemies.” The label, which she says she finds amusing now, followed her all the way from school to university.

“Although, you may be nice, intelligent, and possess a golden character, nobody will marry you because of your dossier,” a fellow student once told her.

Uma had many admirers in her life, and ended up marrying Nikolay, a naval aviation colonel. However, the marriage was short-lived, despite their love for each other, because of the label she couldn’t shed.

After she gave birth to their son, her husband was dismissed from the army and behaved strangely without sharing his feelings with her for a long time.

“I love you so much, but because of your dossier, I would not have married you and neither would I have been driven out of the army,” he told her.

That was in 1961, when Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of Soviet Communist Party (1953-1964), fired about 1,200 military officers, including Nikolay.

Her husband kept complaining, “I could have been a general. But you, the daughter of a ‘public enemy’ ruined my life.” They soon divorced.

At that time, when a couple divorced, it was announced in the newspapers. “Prisoners monitored these notices and sent letters to divorcees offering their acquaintance,” she explains.

But she never remarried. Today, at 80, she still has her son and grown grandsons.

Starting out life as a princess of a royal family, Uma became an ordinary resident of Moscow. Sometimes she ruminates about why she faced such ordeals in her life, and thinks she must be repaying the debt for her father’s ideas. Her father, who was excited by communist ideology, reminds her of how Russia still suffers because of its bloody, oppressive Soviet legacy.