Nur Muhammad Taraki

Nur Muhammad Taraki (نور محمد ترکی; 14 July 1917 – 9 October 1979) was an Afghan revolutionary communist politician, journalist and writer.

Taraki was born on 14 July 1917 to a Khilji Pashtun Tarakai peasant family in the Nawa District of Ghazni Province, part of what was then the Emirate of Afghanistan.

He was the oldest of three children and attended a village school in Nawa, before leaving in 1932 what had become the Kingdom of Afghanistan, at the age of 15, to work in the port city of Bombay, India.

There he met a Kandahari merchant family who employed him as a clerk for the Pashtun Trading Company.

Taraki's first encounter with communism was during his night courses, where he met several Communist Party of India members who impressed him with their discussions on social justice and communist values.

Another important event was his encounter with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Pashtun nationalist and leader of the Red Shirt Movement in neighbouring India, who was an admirer of the works of Vladimir Lenin.

In 1937, Taraki started working for Abdul Majid Zabuli, the Minister of Economics, who introduced him to several Russians.

Later Taraki became Deputy Head of the Bakhtar News Agency and became known throughout the country as an author and poet.

His best known book, the De Bang Mosaferi, highlights the socio-economic difficulties facing Afghan workers and peasants.

His works were translated into Russian language in the Soviet Union, where his work was viewed as embodying scientific socialist themes.

He was hailed by the Soviet Government as "Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky".

On his visit to the Soviet Union Taraki was greeted by Boris Ponomarev, the Head of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and other Communist Party of the Soviet Union members.

Under Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan's prime ministership, suppression of radicals was common.

From the 1940s onward Taraki also wrote novels and short stories in the socialist realism style.

Forming the PDPA at his residence in Kabul along with Babrak Karmal, he was elected as the party's General Secretary at its first congress.

However, because of his language skills, Taraki was sent to the Afghan Embassy in the United States in 1952.

Within several months, Taraki began denouncing the Royal Afghan Government under King Zahir, and accused it of being autocratic and dictatorial.

His denunciation of the Royal Afghan Government earned him much publicity in the United States.

It also attracted unfavourable attention from authorities back home, who relieved him of his post and ordered him repatriated but stopped short of placing him under arrest.

After a short period of unemployment, Taraki started working for the United States Overseas Mission in Kabul as an interpreter.

He quit that job in 1958 and established his own translation company, the Noor Translation Bureau.

Four years later, he started working for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, but quit in 1963 to focus on the establishment of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a communist political party.

He was a founding member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) who served as its General Secretary from 1965 to 1979 and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council from 1978 to 1979.

Taraki was born in Nawa, Ghazni Province, and he got his primary and secondary education from district pishin currently in Balochistan Pakistan graduated from Kabul University, after which he started his political career as a journalist.

He ran as a candidate in the 1965 Afghan parliamentary election but failed to win a seat.

At the founding congress of the PDPA, held in his own home in Kabul's Karte Char district, Taraki won a competitive election against Babrak Karmal to the post of general secretary on 1 January 1965.

Karmal became second secretary.

In 1966 he published the Khalq, a party newspaper advocating for class struggle, but the government closed it down shortly afterward.

In 1978 he, Hafizullah Amin and Babrak Karmal initiated the Saur Revolution and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Taraki's leadership was short-lived and marked by controversies.

The government was divided between two PDPA factions: the Khalqists (led by Taraki), the majority, and the Parchamites, the minority.

Taraki along with his "protégé" Amin started a purge of the government and party that led to several high-ranking Parchamite members being sent into de facto exile by being assigned to serve overseas as ambassadors, and later started jailing domestic Parchamites.

His regime locked up dissidents and oversaw massacres of villagers, citing the necessity of Red Terror by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, that opponents of the Saur Revolution had to be eliminated.

These factors, among others, led to a popular backlash that initiated a rebellion.

Despite repeated attempts, Taraki was unable to persuade the Soviet Union to intervene in support of the restoration of civil order.

Amin initiated most of these policies behind the scenes.

Taraki's reign was marked by a cult of personality centered around him that Amin had cultivated.

The state press and subsequent propaganda started to refer to him as the "Great Leader" and "Great Teacher", and his portrait became a common sight throughout the country.

His relationship with Amin turned sour during his rule, ultimately resulting in Taraki's overthrow on 14 September 1979 and subsequent murder on 8 October, on Amin's orders, with Kabul press reporting that he died of illness.

His death was a factor that led to the Soviet intervention in December 1979.