Welcome back to the Deep Dive. It is so great
to have you joining us today. We spend a lot
of time looking at histories, massive sweeping
events, but sometimes the most profound shifts
in the world really just come down to a single
deeply complicated human life. And today, our
mission is to explore the extraordinary, turbulent,
and ultimately tragic life of Nur Muhammad Taraki.
He's a figure whose extremely brief stint in
power forever altered the course of the Cold
War. It really is a staggering story when you
lay the whole timeline out. I mean, we're tracing
an arc from a peasant writer to the absolute
ruler of a nation, right up to a genuinely shocking
betrayal. Yeah, to do that, we're drawing on
a highly detailed biographical article on Nur
Muhammad Taraki that covers that entire trajectory.
But because of the nature of his rule and the
era he operated in, we do need to set some ground
rules for you before we get into the details.
The source material we are working with today
contains heavily politically charged content.
We're talking about radical Marxist policies,
violent government purges and mass executions.
So before we jump in. We want to make it clear
that we are simply imparting the factual content
from our source material. We are not endorsing
any of the political viewpoints, ideologies or
actions described here. We're impartially reporting
the history as our source presents it. So you
can understand the ideas that shaped this era.
It's entirely about understanding the mechanics
of history, you know, not taking sides. Right.
I get that we need to stay objective. But when
you look at the sheer scale of mechanics here,
it's hard not to be shocked by the irony of it
all. We're looking at a man who once worked as
a translator for the U .S. Embassy. Yeah. And
he would go on to lead a communist revolution,
establish a brutal regime, and then ultimately
be overthrown by his own protege. an event that
directly sparked a decade -long Soviet invasion.
It's the kind of narrative arc a fiction writer
would hesitate to pitch, honestly, because it
sounds almost too perfectly engineered. Okay,
let's unpack this. To understand The Ruler, we
really have to start with the young man. Nur
Muhammad Taraki was born in 1917 to a Gilgi Pashtun
peasant family. This was in the Nawa district
of Ghazni province in what was then the Emirate
of Afghanistan. He was the oldest of three children,
attended a village school, but his life took
a massive turn very early on. At just 15 years
old in 1932, he leaves his rural home and travels
to the port city of Bombay, India to work as
a clerk for a trading company. What's fascinating
here is how that specific move to Bombay acted
as the absolute catalyst for his political awakening.
You have a young teenager from a traditional
Afghan village suddenly thrust into a massive,
bustling urban center in the 1930s. Right. A
total culture shock. Completely. And he's confronted
with vast, visible wealth inequality. So he starts
taking night courses, and that is where he first
encounters communism. He met several members
of the Communist Party of India, and he was deeply
impressed by their discussions on social justice.
So it's the extreme contrast of his new environment
that made him so receptive to those ideas. Precisely.
And another huge influence during this time was
his encounter with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. He
was a prominent Pashtun nationalist leader in
neighboring India and crucially an admirer of
the works of Vladimir Lenin. You can really see
these seeds of radicalism taking root in Taraki's
mind, fueled by the staggering urban poverty
he was witnessing firsthand. Yeah, and he eventually
takes those seeds back home to Afghanistan. By
1937, he's working for the Minister of Economics,
meeting Russian officials, and eventually becomes
the deputy head of the state news agency. Yeah,
he's moving up quickly. But he doesn't just stick
to journalism. He becomes a literary star. Taraki
becomes known across the country as an author
and a poet. He writes a novel called Da Bang
Mo Safari, which translates to The Journey of
Bang. It's a novel that specifically highlights
the socioeconomic difficulties and struggles
of Afghan workers and peasants. And that literary
work is what puts him on the international map,
specifically the Soviet map. The Soviet government
loved his writing because it embodied socialist
realism, which is basically art and literature
designed to glorify the struggles of the working
class and promote communist ideals. The Soviets
translated his work into Russian and hailed him
as Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky. I mean, to be compared
to Maxim Gorky in the Soviet literary world is
a monumental level of recognition. Gorky essentially
created the socialist realism method. Right.
Taraki is writing so high he even visits the
Soviet Union and is greeted by the head of the
International Department of the Communist Party.
His success as a novelist literally handed him
the high -level international connections that
would later fuel his political ambitions. It
is a classic case of the pen opening doors for
the sword. Which brings us to one of the strangest
career twists in this history. In the 1950s,
the Afghan Prime Minister, Mohammad Daoud Khan,
was heavily suppressing radicals. But Taraki
had incredible language skills. So where does
the government send this emerging communist thinker?
Oh, this part is amazing. To the Afghan embassy
in the United States. Sending a Soviet -praised
Marxist to Washington during the Cold War is
quite the administrative choice. And it goes
exactly as you'd expect. He was in the U .S.
in 1952, and within months he gets fired. He
starts publicly denouncing the royal Afghan government
under King Zahir, calling it autocratic and dictatorial.
Naturally. This gets him pressed in the U .S.,
but gets him sent packing. Back to Kabul. And
after a brief stint of unemployment, he starts
working as an interpreter for the United States
overseas mission in Kabul. He later sets up his
own translation bureau and actually works for
the U .S. embassy in Kabul until 1963. It perfectly
illustrates the strange, tangled web of Cold
War politics. But 1963 is the turning point.
He quits his translation work to focus entirely
on politics. On January 1st, 1965, a monumental
event happens literally in Taraki's own living
room in Kabul. In his living room. Yeah. He holds
the founding Congress of the People's Democratic
Party of Afghanistan, the PDPA. A living room
revolution. But right away, there is political
maneuvering. Taraki wins a competitive election
for the role of general secretary against his
rival, Babrak Karmal, who becomes second secretary.
And less than two years later, in 1967, the party
fractures completely. It was a deep ideological
split. Taraki's faction, known as Kulk or the
masses, wanted a strict Leninist -style state.
Basically, they wanted a rigid, top -down system
governed entirely by a vanguard communist party
implementing rapid revolution. In Carmel's side.
On the other side, Carmel's faction, Partium
or the Banner, favored a broad democratic front.
They preferred to build alliances and move towards
socialism gradually. This divide between Kalk
and Partium is going to define all the bloodshed
that follows. There's a massive gap here that
we need to bridge, though. They fracture in a
living room in 1967. But we know they eventually
seize power. How does a divided underground book
club gain the muscle to actually overthrow a
government 13 years later? That is the crucial
context. During that 13 -year gap, the PDPA didn't
just sit around debating theory. The Kelk faction,
in particular, recognized that they lacked broad
popular support in the rural, deeply religious
countryside, so they systematically targeted
the one institution that could give them hard
power. The Afghan military. Wow. They heavily
recruited military officers, many of whom had
been sent to the Soviet Union for training and
came back sympathetic to Marxist ideas. They
built a shadow network within the armed forces
preparing for the right moment. So they were
quietly loading a spring. And that spring finally
snaps in April 1978. The tipping point arrives
when a prominent leftist is assassinated. Massive
protests break out in Kabul. The Afghan president,
Mohammad Dawood Khan, panics and orders the arrest
of PDPA leaders, including Taraki and Carmel.
Right. Another key figure, Hafizul Amin, is placed
under house arrest. But because they had spent
over a decade infiltrating the military, house
arrest wasn't enough to stop them. Amin uses
his military contacts to initiate a coup on April
27, 1978. This is the Sauer Revolution. President
Daoud Khan and most of his family are killed
the next day. The PDPA rapidly seizes control,
and by May 1st, our former living room revolutionary...
Nur Muhammad Taraki becomes chairman of the Revolutionary
Council. He essentially holds the sweeping powers
of both president and prime minister. And this
is where the theory of his novels meets the brutal
reality of governance. Taraki and his government
immediately launch a massive radical transformation
of a deeply traditional rural society. They didn't
tiptoe into it either. I know they tried to overhaul
everything overnight, passing laws to ban traditional
practices like bride prices, usury and forced
marriage. But how did they tackle something as
foundational as the economy and land ownership?
Disastrously. They implemented a sweeping land
reform on January 1st, 1979. They put a hard
cap on how much land a family could own. If a
family owned more than that limit, the government
just seized the surface without paying a single
cent of compensation, intending to redistribute
it to poor peasants. Just took it. Just took
it. The idea was to break the power of the traditional
land -owning middle class, the bourgeoisie, and
win over the rural poor. That sounds like it
would cause absolute chaos in an agrarian society.
It caused an agricultural collapse. Seizing land
without providing the necessary seed, water rights,
or credit that the traditional landlords used
to provide meant the peasants couldn't actually
farm the land they were given. Harvests absolutely
plummeted. It backfired. Massively. Instead of
winning over the peasants he used to write about,
the reform led to rising widespread discontent.
Taraki eventually had to quietly abandon the
policy when he realized the scale of the anger.
There is another reform attempt that stands out.
I understand the previous government had a literacy
program created by UNESCO designed to eliminate
illiteracy over a realistic 20 -year time frame.
Taraki decided 20 years was too long and tried
to shrink the entire program down to just four
years. Why would he think that was even structurally
possible? This is a classic historical blind
spot. Leaders who operate purely on ideology
often mistake a rural population's poverty for
a desire for Marxist revolution. It was pure
Marxist accelerationism, the hubris of thinking
you can force historical progress through sheer
political will. They completely lacked the teachers
and the infrastructure. Right. You can't just
mandate teachers into existence. But the real
misstep was ideological. They threw out the cultural
focus of the UNESCO program and replaced basic
reading materials with left -wing Marxist pamphlets.
They were basically using literacy as a forced
political indoctrination tool, completely underestimating
the binding power of the local religion and traditions.
Here's where it gets really interesting. When
these reforms failed to catch on and resentment
started surging into open rebellion, Taraki regime
didn't back down or try to build consensus. They
doubled down with brutal repression. First, they
purged the rival Parchim faction from the government.
Karmal and others were exiled by being assigned
as overseas ambassadors. Right. Karmal was sent
to Czechoslovakia, but he ended up going into
hiding because he feared he'd be executed if
he returned to Afghanistan. And his fears were
entirely justified. The historical estimates
here are harrowing. And again, just reporting
the facts from our source here, the government
launched a massive campaign of oppression against
anyone opposing the Tsar Revolution. They locked
up dissidents and oversaw massacres of villagers.
Yeah. Taraki explicitly cited the necessity of
the Red Terror used by the Bolsheviks in Soviet
Russia, arguing that opponents to the revolution
simply had to be eliminated. Yeah. Up to 27 ,000
people were executed at the Policharki prison
alone between April 1978 and December 1979. It
wasn't just a political purge. It was a bloodbath.
And it was this exact brutality, the sweeping,
violent repression against deeply religious and
traditional people that triggered the massive
popular backlash. It ignited the rebellions that
would ultimately spiral into the Afghan civil
war. As these uprisings start spreading across
the country, Taraki gets desperate. His rapid
progress is collapsing. His people are revolting.
So he looks north. He literally contacts the
Soviets asking for practical and technical assistance
with men and armament. But the Soviets, the very
people who loved his novels and built his ideology,
turned him down. Why would they refuse to help
a newly established communist state? Because
the geopolitical stakes in 1978 and 1979 were
incredibly delicate, the Soviet Union was in
the middle of a fragile period of détente with
the United States, negotiating the SALT II nuclear
arms treaty. They did not want to provoke Washington.
Furthermore, the region was volatile. The Soviets
were terrified of a pan -Islamic uprising right
on their southern border that could spill over
into Soviet republics like Uzbekistan or Tajikistan.
They recognized that the PDPA was completely
alienating the Afghan population. Because he
saw the writing on the wall. Emphatically. Alexei
Kosygin, the chairman of the USSR Council of
Ministers, gave Taraki a chillingly prophetic
warning. He told him that committing ground troops
would be a fatal mistake. He warned that Soviet
troops would end up fighting the Afghan people
themselves and that the people would never forgive
such things. Even Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev
explicitly warned Taraki to ease up on his drastic
social reforms and try to get broader support.
When the Soviet Union is telling you that your
communist revolution is moving too fast and being
too harsh, you know you have lost the plot. Truly.
But Taraki couldn't see it, largely because of
a toxic dynamic developing in his own inner circle,
specifically with Hafizullah Amin. Amin was his
right -hand man, the Minister of Foreign Affairs,
and the guy who really initiated the Saar revolution
from house arrest. But Amin did something very
calculated as the country fell apart. He deliberately
built a Kim Il -sung -style personality cult
around Taraki. It was a massive propaganda campaign.
In meetings, Amin would refer to Taraki with
grandiose titles. The great leader. The star
of the East. The great thinker. He plastered
Taraki's portrait all over the country while
styling himself merely as the true disciple.
The psychological trap snaps shut on both of
them. Amin creates this cult of personality to
manipulate the situation and consolidate his
own operational control. But Taraki actually
starts believing he is a genius. He buys into
his own hype. He begins discounting Amin's advice
and even accuses Amin of nepotism after Amin
appointed family members to high -ranking jobs.
So the two architects of the revolution turn
on each other. Taraki makes a cunning move to
neutralize Amin. He vacates his post as chairman
of the Council of Ministers and hands that title
to Amin. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
you have a country in total revolt, a reluctant
superpower patron in Moscow, and at the very
top, two men locked in an ego -driven power struggle
for control of the Afghan army. Taraki's promotion
of Amin was a trap. How so? As chairman, Amin
could pick the cabinet, but every single choice
had to be approved by Taraki. More importantly,
taking the supposedly heavy responsibility, forced
Amin to relinquish his direct operational control
over the Afghan army. Taraki stripped Amin of
his real power base under the guise of a promotion.
It's a deadly game of musical chairs. And it
leads to the absolute climax of our story, the
botched assassination. Taraki allies himself
with four prominent army officers, known as the
Gang of Four, and the Soviet ambassador. They
plot to assassinate Amin to end the rivalry once
and for all. But the execution of this plot is
a staggering failure of operational security.
The leader of the gang of four selects his own
nephew to be the assassin. But incredibly, he
fails to tell his nephew that this is a top secret
assassination mission. I cannot get over that
detail. He doesn't tell the assassin it's a secret.
So what does the nephew do? He blabs about it
to his contacts at the Soviet embassy. Right.
And the embassy personnel, perhaps not fully
in the loop on their own ambassador's secret
plot. Turn around and accidentally warn Amin?
Yeah. They literally tipped off the target? It
is a failure of communication that changes the
course of world history. Amin now knows for a
fact that Taraki is trying to kill him. Fast
forward to September 1979. Taraki is returning
to Kabul from a summit in Havana with a stop
in Moscow. Amin is supposed to greet him at the
airport. The flight is scheduled to land at 2
.30, but Amin forces the landing to be delayed
by a full hour. He deliberately leaves the chairman's
plane, circling the airport, a very public, very
deliberate display of who actually controlled
the country at that moment. The tension is absolute.
Shortly after they finally land, Taraki tries
to play his hand again. He tries to dismiss Amin,
telling him to step down and go be an ambassador
overseas. Amin flat out refuses. The psychological
break is complete. Amin shouts at Taraki, quote,
You are the one who should quit. Because of drink
and old age, you have taken leave of your senses.
The very next day, September 14th, the showdown
happens at the ARG, the presidential palace.
The Soviet ambassador convinces Amin to visit
the palace. Amin arrives with his chief of police.
As they get inside, bodyguards open fire. An
ambush. The chief of police is killed, but Amin
only sustains injuries. He escapes, runs to his
car, and speeds off to the Ministry of Defense.
And once Amin is at the Ministry of Defense,
the tables turn completely. He places the army
on high alert. That evening, tanks roll into
the city and surround government positions. Amin
returns to the presidential palace, but this
time with a contingent of army officers, and
he places Taraki under arrest. The gang of four
literally run away and hide in the Soviet embassy.
The Soviets try to talk Amin down, but he refuses.
Now Taraki is a prisoner. After arresting Taraki,
Amin reportedly speaks with Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev and asks him, Taraki is still around,
what should I do with him? Brezhnev, who had
just met with Taraki and vowed to protect him,
replies that it is Amin's choice. Amin takes
that as a green light. Believing he has Soviet
support, he orders the death of his former great
leader. The fate of Nur Muhammad Taraki is grim
and claustrophobic. On October 9, 1979, Taraki
is ordered to lie down on a bed. He doesn't resist.
He doesn't say a word. The history describes
how he is quietly suffocated with pillows by
three men acting on Amin's orders. He is secretly
buried at night. Two days later, the Afghan media
tells the public that their chairman died of,
quote, serious illness. The aftermath of that
quiet murder is deafening. The news completely
shocked Brezhnev. Despite what he told a man
on the phone, the outright assassination of a
leader the Soviets had backed was a bridge too
far. Taraki's death was a major factor in the
Soviet Union's fateful decision to intervene
in Afghanistan just two months later, in December
1979, overriding all their previous geopolitical
fears. So what does this all mean? When you look
at the life of Nurmuhammed Taraki, you're looking
at a deeply cautionary tale for you, for anyone
studying history. It shows how easily a genuine
thirst for rapid progress, when it gets mixed
with unchecked ego, a refusal to listen to reality
and immense brutality can spiral entirely out
of control. He wanted to leapfrog his country
into the future, but his methods dragged it into
a nightmare. To synthesize it, Taraki was a man
caught between the pen and the sword. He could
write eloquently about the struggles of the Afghan
peasant, but when he took power, he fundamentally
failed to understand those same people. His story
is a masterclass in the hubris of believing your
own propaganda. He let the great leader myth
obscure the reality that his country was fracturing
beneath his feet. It's a tragic paradox. And
this raises an important question, something
for you to really think about as we wrap up.
Consider the immense, tragic irony of the Soviet
Union's role here. For months, Moscow desperately
tried to avoid a military quagmire in Afghanistan.
You heard Kosygin warning Taraki that intervention
would be a fatal mistake. They knew the risks
to their own empire. Yet it was the internal
betrayal, the botched assassination, the bruised
egos, and the suffocation of this one man by
his own protege that finally tipped the scale.
It drew the USSR into a grueling, decade -long
conflict that would ultimately contribute to
the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. How
often does history pivot not on grand, overarching
strategies, but on a botched assassination and
the fragile egos of the men in power? That is
a fascinating thought to end on. Thank you so
much for joining us on this custom -tailored
deep dive into the life of Nur Muhammad Taraki.
Keep asking questions, keep looking past the
headlines, and keep exploring the forces that
shape our world. We'll catch you next time.