This talk will explore Comintern trials of the Iranian émigré poet, Abdulqasim Lahuti (1887-1957), as a way of showing how Soviet surveillance and information gathering were used to evaluate immigrants’ lives before and after their arrival to the Soviet Union. Lahuti—who had fled to the USSR in 1922 after launching a failed rebellion against the Iranian government—was immediately incorporated into Soviet politics through the Comintern bureaucracy, with which he remained connected until the institution’s dissolution in 1943. During this period, the details and narrative of Lahuti’s biography, including events of his life that took place both in Iran and the USSR, were subject of multiple controversies throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, producing special investigation committees and evaluations, and yielding a highly politicized biographical narrative. Using archives of the Comintern, the Union of Soviet Writers, and interviews with Lahuti’s surviving family members I will address such questions as: How did personal information of Comintern employees circulate and through what channels? What was at stake in the Comintern’s evaluations of an Iranian emigrant close to the leadership of the Comintern Eastern Section and the Iranian Communist Party in the mid-1930s, before the Great Purges? What do these trials and investigations tell us about the structure of Soviet power and the reach of Comintern’s transnational connections, especially in geographical regions under the purview of the Eastern Desk, and especially in Iran?