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Home , Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, Ehsan Tabari, Enemy of My Enemy, Ervand Abrahamian, Hermann Axen, Iraj Eskandari

The Enemy of My Enemy The , East , and the Iranian Tudeh Party’s Support for Khomeini

✣ Jeremy Friedman

The Iranian raises two key questions for scholars, just as it did for contemporaries: Why did the fall, and why was he ultimately replaced by a theocratic regime that has proven to be remarkably resilient? The second outcome was not an automatic result of the first. The coalition that brought down the Shah ran the gamut from Maoist guerillas to secular and religious liberals to Islamists of various stripes and, perhaps most importantly, rested on a mass base without any explicit political commitments beyond the removal of the Shah. In the best-organized armed forces belonged to the Marxist Fadaiyan, which launched a guerrilla struggle against the Pahlavi regime with an attack on the Siyakhal barracks in 1971, and the Islamic Left- ist Mujahidin, which began as a militant offshoot of the Liberation Move- ment of .1 Liberals of various stripes, including the Freedom Movement led by post- Iran’s first prime minister, , and the led by , were best positioned in terms of tech- nocratic skill and international , and as a result were initially given the formal levers of power. Meanwhile, Ayatollah ’s con- ception of the Velayat-e-, or “Guardianship of the Jurist,” was opposed by many senior clerics, including some, like Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, who rivaled him in prestige and influence.2 Some scholars have

1. See , The Iranian Mojahedin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 81– 104. For more on the Fadaiyan, see Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Guerilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secu- larism, , and the Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971–1979 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010); Maziar Behrooz, “Iran’s Fadayan 1971–88: A Case Study in Iranian ,” JUSUR: The UCLA Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 6 (1990), pp. 14–27; and Maziar Behrooz, “The and the Legacy of the Guerilla Movement,” in Stephanie Cronin, ed., Reformers and in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 189–205. 2. For a discussion of Khomeini’s concept of the Velayat-e-Faqih and its early supporters, see Farhang Rajaee, and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran (Austin: University of Texas Press,

Journal of Studies Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring 2018, pp. 3–37, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00815 © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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argued that both the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic can be attributed to the same process; namely, the capture of much of the dis- course of Iranian political opposition by figures employing Islamic terminol- ogy and concepts.3 Nevertheless, for many Iranian and foreign observers, the consolidation of theocratic rule came as a surprise, and it took several tense, conflict-ridden years to occur. During these crucial years, Iranian political actors had to make strategic and tactical decisions that helped to shape Iran’s political future. This article examines the strategy of the Tudeh Party, the closest thing Iran had in 1979 to a formally aligned with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In the aftermath of the Shah’s overthrow, the Tudeh loyally supported Ayatollah Khomeini until the arrest of its leaders in February 1983, a strategy crafted at the behest of the party’s Soviet and East German patrons. This strategy reflected a broader understanding of global revolution at a time that prioritized anti-, particularly anti-Americanism, as the key factor in identifying “progressive” forces and regimes. The paradoxical result was that the Tudeh, through its actions, facilitated the consolidation of in Iran. The strategy was implemented by a splintered Tudeh whose new leader, Nuredin Kianouri, was highly dependent on Soviet and East German support for his position, given the challenges from former Tudeh leaders in Eastern Europe and a skeptical membership on the ground in Iran.4 The Tudeh Party was formed in the aftermath of the joint British-Soviet occupation of Iran in 1941. Its nucleus was composed largely of a Marxist group arrested by Pahlavi in May 1937 that came to be known

2007), pp. 110–126. See also Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1993). For more on Islamic opposition to it, see H. E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khome- ini (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 215–220. On U.S. attempts to make use of Shariatmadari’s opposition to it, see Christian Emery, US Foreign Policy and the Iranian Revolution: The Cold War Dynamics of Engagement and Strategic Alliance (: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 120–121. 3. See, for example, Mansoor Moaddel, Class Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York: Press, 1993), pp.140–163; and , Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 170–213. For more on the rise of Islamic ideologies and their relationship to Iranian political opposition, see , Theology of Dis- content: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Press, 1993); Negin Nabavi, Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse, and the Dilemma of Authenticity (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2003); Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Reli- gious Modernism; Kingshuk Chatterjee, Shariati and the Shaping of Political in Iran (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism; and Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996). 4. See Aryeh Y. Yodfat, The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Iran (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 122–125.

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as the “Fifty-Three,” but during the war it was essentially a organization.5 As the war drew to a close, the party held its first congress in 1944 with an eye toward constituting itself as a proper Marxist-Leninist or- ganization, subsequently becoming perhaps the most influential political or- ganization in Iran, with more than 25,000 members and upward of 300,000 sympathizers, including “workers, women, intellectuals, artists, military offi- cers, students, teachers, professionals, the urban underclass, and even some .”6 The Tudeh offended Iranian nationalists, as well as the British and U.S. governments, because of its support for the Soviet-backed separatists in Iranian and for Soviet claims regarding oil concessions in north- ern Iran.7 Still, the Tudeh remained the best-organized—and arguably most influential—political organization in Iran for much of the late 1940s and early 1950s, despite being officially banned in . These gains aside, the Tudeh’s early opposition to the oil policy of the National Front and to Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq discredited it in the eyes of many Iranians.8 After the 1953 coup that toppled Mossadeq and brought the Shah back to power, the Tudeh was re- pressed again, its leaders fled to the USSR and Eastern Europe, and its influ- ence in Iran was essentially broken. A quarter-century of and suppression at home by the State Information and Security Organization (SAVAK), which was created in 1956, diminished the role of the Tudeh in Iranian politics. The party’s close association with the Soviet Union became a greater liability as

5. For a detailed account of the “Fifty-Three” and the opposition under Reza Shah, see Ervand Abra- hamian, Iran between Two (Princeton, NJ: Press, 1982), pp. 154–165. See also Cosroe Chaqueri, “Iradj Eskandary and the ,” Central Asian Survey,Vol. 7, No. 4 (1988), pp. 103–104. 6. Assef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 26. 7. For more information see Jamal Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War: The Soviet American Crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, 1941–1946 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). See also Homa Katouzian, Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 57– 59. 8. For more on the Tudeh’s policy during the Mossadeq era, see Katouzian, Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran, pp. 57–59; and Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: The CIA, and the Roots of Mod- ern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: , 2013), p. 59. On the ideological divergences between the Tudeh and Mossadeq, see Farkheddin Azimi, “The Overthrow of the Government of Mossadeq Reconsidered,” , Vol. 45, No. 5 (2012), pp. 701–703. Artemy Kalinovsky describes Soviet suspicion of Mosaddeq and the skepticism with which Iosif Stalin viewed the policy of oil nationalization, although documents directly linking Soviet and Tudeh policy are still unavail- able in Moscow. See Artemy Kalinovsky, “The Soviet Union and Mosaddeq: A Research Note,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3 (2014), pp. 401–418. See also V. Grigor’yan to Molotov, report on Tudeh ac- tivity, 18 March 1952, in Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), Fond 82, Opis’ 2, Delo 1221, List 150.

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Soviet relations with the Shah improved in the 1960s and .9 Radical youth in the Fadaiyan, Mujahidin, and other organizations looked instead to Beijing and other sources of revolutionary inspiration. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Shah’s overthrow and the Tudeh’s return to Iran, the party remained important for three reasons. First, by go- ing into exile, it had not been decapitated in the way the Fadaiyan had. As a result, the Tudeh had theorists ready to speak for the left.10 Second, the prestige it had accumulated as the elder statesman of the left in Iran had not completely dissipated and ultimately led the Fadaiyan, a much larger orga- nization with perhaps half a million reliable sympathizers in , to split, with the majority faction choosing to follow the Tudeh’s policies.11 Fi- nally, as the primary Soviet-bloc-approved Marxist-Leninist organization in Iran, the Tudeh was the main conduit of information about Iranian politics to Moscow, especially because the spy network set up in Iran by the Soviet Com- mittee on State Security (KGB) had been devastated by the SAVAK and its own incompetence.12 In short, even though the Tudeh was not strong enough to unite the left in Iran under its own leadership, as was its declared objective from the beginning of the revolution, it was strong enough to scuttle anyone else’s attempt to build a coalition that could challenge clerical control of the revolution. Consequently, the Tudeh leaders’ decision to support Khomeini against all challengers up to the moment of their arrest in early 1983 aided Khomeini’s consolidation of power. Mohsen Milani argues that “had the Tudeh chosen a different path, the fundamentalists would have probably emerged victorious, albeit after more hardship and more compromises with the moderate elements which could have decelerated the revolution’s drive toward radicalism.”13 This historically fateful strategy mystified some contemporaries and has been the subject of much analysis and criticism by subsequent observers. Historians

9. For more information, see V. Ivanenko and Michael Vale, “Twenty Years of Soviet-Iranian Economic and Technical Cooperation,” Soviet and Eastern European Foreign Trade, Vol. 21, No. 1–3 (Spring–Fall 1985), pp. 135–143. Also see Roham Alvandi, “Flirting with Neutrality: The Shah, Khrushchev, and the Failed 1959 Soviet-Iranian Negotiations,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3 (2014), pp. 419–440; and Roham Alvandi, “The Shah’s Détente with Khrushchev: Iran’s 1962 Missile Base Pledge to the Soviet Union,” Cold War History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2014), pp. 423–444. 10. See Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), p. 125. 11. Ibid., p. 105. 12. See , Inside the KGB: My Life in Soviet (New York: Pantheon, 1991), pp. 147–154. 13. Mohsen M. Milani, “Harvest of Shame: Tudeh and the Bazargan Government,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (April 1993), p. 307.

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have attributed the strategy in large part to a combination of the Tudeh’s consciousness of its own organizational weakness and its slavish devotion to Soviet ideological direction.14 Maziar Behrooz, in the most thorough study on the subject, writes that “the Tudeh strategy . . . was based on theoretical bor- rowing from the Soviet Union as part of an ever-closer link between the party and the CPSU.”15 Specifically, the Tudeh applied Soviet-developed theories of “anti-imperialist revolution,” and the “non-capitalist path of development,” a theory of how to reach in the developing world by avoiding capital- ism that envisioned a multi-class coalition focusing initially on , state-led industrialization, and mass politics.16 Application of these theories induced the Tudeh to conclude that the path to socialism lay in collaboration with the Islamists, not in opposition to them. This interpretation puts much of the blame on Soviet misdirection, but the sources on which these claims are based have been mainly Persian, supple- mented with some published Soviet material. Although Soviet archival mate- rials, including those of the CPSU International Department, are still largely unavailable, the presence of Tudeh leaders in the German Democratic Repub- lic (GDR) and the close coordination between Moscow and East Berlin mean that the German archives offer excellent material on the views of Soviet and East German leaders and the interactions of both with the Tudeh. In partic- ular, the archives hold records of Tudeh leaders’ discussions with Boris Pono- marev, the head of the CPSU International Department, and his first deputy, Rostislav Ul’yanovskii, the most prominent Soviet official dealing with Iran at this time. Examining these East-bloc sources complicates the picture of a Tudeh leadership blindly following the line laid down by its masters in Moscow. The decision to support Khomeini seems to have been made initially by both the CPSU and the Tudeh on the basis of four considerations. The first was that this was indeed an anti-imperialist revolution, and, as a result, the foreign policy orientation of the new Iranian leaders (i.e., anti-American) was the best indication of its ideological direction. Second, they believed that the most relevant template was the experience of Salvador Allende in Chile, and consequently that the primary danger lay in a coup organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the remnants of the old regime and the military. Third, they thought the new regime would follow some sort of progressive economic policy that could lead to a “non-capitalist path of

14. See, for example, ibid., pp. 309–310; and Keddie, Modern Iran, p. 254. 15. Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, pp. 126–128. 16. For more information, see Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 57–58, 71–74.

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development.” Finally, they believed the clergy would be ultimately incapable of consolidating their regime because theocracy was simply not a viable model of government in the twentieth century. As time went on, however, senior of- ficials in the CPSU and the Socialist Unity Party (SED) began to doubt the veracity of these assumptions—especially the last two—even as the Tudeh clung ever tighter to them. Despite this, Moscow evidently never directed, or even suggested, that the Tudeh change course and oppose Khome- ini in alliance with the governments of Mehdi Bazargan or Abol Hassan Bani Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), and his Mu- jahidin allies who openly fought the IRI in the early 1980s. Instead, despite Soviet leaders’ increasing skepticism about the progressive direction of the IRI, they continued to see Khomeini as the lesser evil both domestically and inter- nationally, and so the Tudeh continued to support him until the moment of its destruction in Iran.

The February Revolution

A recapitulation of all the events that led to the flight of the Shah and return of Khomeini in early 1979 is beyond the scope of this article.17 However, cer- tain points about the process that made both of those events possible should be noted. The first is the important role played by workers in the revolution. Although the initial stages of were largely the product of liberal intel- lectuals on the one hand and Islamic organizations on the other, what made the Shah’s position untenable was a successful that began gather- ing steam in June 1978, picked up greater momentum in September after oil refinery workers in , , , , and Abadan opted to join. By late October, the strike became strong enough to paralyze much of the Ira- nian economy—including “almost all the bazaars, universities, high schools, oil installations, banks, government ministries, post offices, railways, news- papers, customs and port facilities, internal air flights, radio and television stations, state-run hospitals, paper and tobacco plants, textile mills, and other large factories.”18 As Mansoor Moaddel has argued, the participation of these workers in 1978, in addition to the coalition of ulema, , and students from the 1963 protest movement, is what made it impossible for the Shah

17. For the full story, see Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions; Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran: The Pahlavis and After (Essex, UK: Pearson Education, 2007); Keddie, Modern Iran; and Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge, MA: Press, 2005). 18. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, p. 518.

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to suppress the movement.19 Although leftist organizations were by no means dominant, they played a significant role in mobilizing workers, particularly in the all-important oil industry.20 Leftist groups, in particular the Fadaiyan, played their most crucial role in the revolution in the final confrontation between the revolutionary forces and the remaining forces loyal to the government of Shapur Bakhtiar, who had been left in charge by the departing Shah. The armed climax of the revolution in February 1979 was brief but violent. The Fadaiyan and Mujahidin were the only groups that had the organizational and military capabilities at that point to fight the remnants of the Shah’s army. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, one prominent journalist from Tehran told the East German ambassador that although Khomeini’s camp was poorly organized and unpre- pared for the takeover of power that it had expected to happen more gradually, the left comprised the most disciplined organizations in the country, with the Fadaiyan alone including some 50,000–100,000 armed fighters.21 The Soviet ambassador suspected that the army agreed so quickly to a ceasefire on 11 February 1979 only because both it and the incoming revolutionary leaders were afraid that continued fighting would lead to a seizure of power by the left.22 Both Khomeini and his chosen prime minister, Bazargan, were aware they had to build up some kind of armed force of their own and disarm the left-wing forces—and they had to do it quickly. Khomeini did not return to Iran until 1 February, more than two weeks after the Shah’s departure, in part because of Bakhtiar’s closure of the airports in order to prevent the cleric’s return. Nevertheless, as Khomeini became the acknowledged leader of the revolution from his French exile, a steady stream of Iranian political figures came to see him to plan a post-revolutionary regime— the most significant of whom was Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the recon- structed National Front, who agreed with Khomeini on establishing a regime based on .23 Upon returning, Khomeini refused to ac- knowledge or negotiate with Bakhtiar’s government. Instead, he established

19. Moaddel, Class Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution, p. 155. 20. , “The Iranian Left in International Perspective,” in Cronin, ed., Reformers and Rev- olutionaries in Modern Iran, p. 27. For the limits of the of the Fadaiyan to gain traction among workers, see Vahabzadeh, A Guerilla Odyssey, pp. 216–222. 21. “Vermerk über ein Gespräch mit dem Journalisten Fariborz Atapor am 12.3.1979,” 12 March 1979, in Archive of the German Foreign Ministry (PAAA-MfAA), ZR 1611/81. Also see Bayat, Mak- ing Islam Democratic, pp. 21–24, on the lack of an Islamic social movement before the revolution. 22. Vladimir M. Vinogradov, Diplomatiya: Lyudi i Sobytiya (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), pp. 418– 419. 23. See Keddie, Modern Iran, pp. 233–234.

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his own Revolutionary Council to oversee matters during the transitional pe- riod. On 5 February, he named a , led by Bazargan, a French-educated engineer and devout Muslim who had long been one of the most active figures in the various successor movements to Mosaddeq’s Na- tional Front.24 Bazargan and his cabinet of largely Western-educated Islamic technocrats were responsible for policy, but they had little actual power to implement anything. Real power still resided with Khomeini and the Revo- lutionary Council, which increasingly controlled the ad hoc local committees (komiteh-ha) that had come into being during the revolution, as well as the newly created Revolutionary Guards (pasdaran). The situation thus bore some resemblance to that of Russia in 1917, when the Russian Provisional Govern- ment had responsibility but little power and was at the mercy of the Petrograd Soviet, which had some power but little responsibility. Little wonder, then, that the Soviet ambassador titled the chapter in his memoir that begins with the departure of the Shah, “Dvoevlastie”—or “Dual Power,” the same term that was used in 1917.25 The Soviet Union, like most international observers, was quite late to realize the seriousness of events in Iran in 1978 and express its support for the revolution, but by the fall Soviet officials surmised that the status quo ante would not be restored and that Moscow, not to mention its protégés in the Tudeh, needed to begin planning for what came next. As the East Ger- man ambassador in Tehran, Klaus Wolf, reported in October 1978, the Shah had alienated all sectors of society—including the bourgeoisie, bazaaris, peas- ants, workers, ulema—and full reestablishment of control was impossible.26 In November, responding to requests from Tudeh leaders, the Soviet Union desperately sought to find an ally willing to resume the Tudeh radio broad- casts to Iran that the Bulgarians had stopped in 1976, even broaching the idea of broadcasting from Mongolia.27 For now, though, the weak position of the Tudeh inside Iran made any immediate attempt to seize power inconceivable. Rather, the Tudeh would need a considerable period of peace and legality to build its influence. In preparation for returning to the country and a post-Shah Iran, the Tudeh held a conference of its executive committee on 13–16 ,

24. For more on Bazargan’s background, see Dabashi, Theology of Discontent, pp. 325–337. 25. Vinogradov, Diplomatiya, p. 410. 26. Report from GDR Ambassador Klaus Wolf to Deputy Foreign Minister Klaus Willerding, 18 October 1978, in PAAA-MfAA, ZR 1603/81. 27. Report, 13 November 1978, in Foundation for Archives of Parties and Mass Organizations of the German , Federal Archive (SAPMO-BArch), DY 30/13940, pp. 12–13.

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at which was removed as First Secretary in favor of Nuredin Kianouri. Kianouri had been pushing the Tudeh’s executive committee to call for the overthrow of the Shah, and he was thought to be more “active” and “dynamic”—a reasonable description insofar as he had belonged to the Tudeh splinter group that tried to kill the Shah in 1949.28 According to , the Tudeh’s leading ideologist, Eskandari had favored an alliance with the Na- tional Front and Ayatollah Shariatmadari that would cooperate with Khome- ini on the basis of .29 Consequently, the choice of Kianouri, which was supposedly orchestrated by someone within the Soviet Union, was also a choice in favor of alliance with Khomeini.30 The fact that some veteran Tudeh members disagreed with Tudeh policy under Kianouri would remain a source of tension, and in August Kianouri asked his Soviet and East German patrons to convince Reza Radmanesh, who had been First Secretary prior to Eskan- dari, to release a statement supporting the policy.31 Nevertheless, the direction adopted at the conference was cautious, and the East Germans were worried about Kianouri’s ability to work with others.32 Soviet officials instructed the Tudeh to become more active but to be careful not to give the Shah, the , and other possible enemies the chance to attack the party or to rally support against the revolution. Moscow thus endorsed the Tudeh’s fundamentally cautious stance.33 Kianouri himself did not return to Iran un- til April, after he had received training in the Soviet Union from the CPSU International Department.34 Meanwhile, the Soviet Union tried to establish contacts with the leftist organizations that had actually played a role in the revolution—namely, the Fadaiyan and Mujahidin—but both organizations

28. On the description of Kianouri, see SED Department of International Ties (AIV) to GDR Min- istry for External Affairs (MfAA), “Lage in der Parteiführung der Volkspartei (Tudehpartei) Irans,” 31 January 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 10. For Kianouri’s position against the Shah in internal Tudeh debates, see Chaqueri, “Iradj Eskandary and the Tudeh Party of Iran,” p. 111. For more on the attempted of the Shah, see Katouzian, Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran, pp. 60–61. 29. Cited in Milani, “Harvest of Shame,” p. 2. 30. Ibid., p. 3. Eskandari blamed the Azerbaijan Communist Party rather than the SED International Department or GDR Foreign Ministry. See Chaqueri, “Iradj Eskandary and the Tudeh Party of Iran,” p. 114. 31. “Vermerk über ein Gespräch zwischen dem Ersten Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei des Iran, Genossen Kianouri, und Genossen Guttman am 3. ,” 3 August 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 93. 32. AIV, “Disposition für die Konsultations mit Genossen Ponomarjow,” 24 January 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/154, p. 11. 33. Memorandum of Conversation between Ponomarev and Axen n.d., in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/154, p. 56. 34. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, p. 285.

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asked for immediate weapons deliveries and then declined further contact.35 The Tudeh remained Moscow’s only lever on the Iranian left. However, without the prospect of an immediate seizure of power by the Tudeh, the Soviet Union and the Tudeh had to reconcile themselves to choos- ing allies among the available options. The idea that, at least in developing countries, revolution would take place through a multistage process initially led by heterogeneous forces had become enshrined as Communist doctrine as early as the 1960 Moscow meeting of the international Communist move- ment.36 In the context of revolutionary Iran, both the Tudeh and its patrons in Moscow and East Berlin saw the ulema as a progressive force and conse- quently a natural ally of the Tudeh at this stage of the revolution. In a report sent to the East Germans in January 1979, Tudeh leaders said of the ulema that “its demands for struggle against the and foreign paternalism [Bevormundung] as well as its statements for the fulfillment of the social de- mands of the broad popular masses objectively carry in the present confronta- tion over Iran’s political future a progressive character.”37 Back in East Berlin, the Near and Middle Eastern Division of the GDR Foreign Ministry, despite being somewhat confused about the nature of Shiism, of which it identified Bahai’ism as a sect, went even further:

The development of political ideas on the basis of Islamic Law, which is accepted by the broad popular masses, and the radical slogans for the elimination of the Shah’s regime are factors that show that the clerical opposition under Khomeini in the present situation plays a progressive role in the development of Iran. In furthering the struggle, the need grows for the clergy to develop ideas [Vorstel- lungen] for the further socioeconomic development of the country.38

As a consequence, the Tudeh saw Khomeini’s role as progressive, too, and embraced him as the leader of the revolution.39 In any case, trying to have the Tudeh take over leadership of the revolution immediately was not real- istic insofar as the East Germans acknowledged that, “in view of the mass terror and decades-long strong anti-Communist indoctrination of the people,

35. Ibid, p. 261. 36. Friedman, Shadow Cold War, pp. 57–58. 37. AIV to MfAA, “Zu den Auseinandersetzungen im Iran,” 26 January 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 4. 38. MfAA, Sector of Near and (NMO), “Zur Rolle des Schiismus und der schiitischen Geistlichkeit im Iran,” 1 February 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 15. 39. AIV to MfAA, “Lage in der Parteiführung der Volkspartei (Tudehpartei) Irans,” p. 11.

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the progressive and democratic forces do not have decisive influence over the movement.”40 The subordination of the Tudeh to the leadership of Khomeini and his allies was meant to be only temporary. In part, this was a built-in feature of the Communist notion of national liberation revolutions that produced what were labeled “states of national democracy.” As the revolution progressed, the ruling coalition would shift to the left, and the workers and peasants would displace the national bourgeoisie at its head. Although this had not always turned out to be the case elsewhere, leading to frustration in places like under and , in Iran the very fact that the clergy were the ones in power made this shift all the more certain. Neither the Tudeh leaders nor their European patrons imagined that the clergy could hold power for long. A senior Tudeh official explained:

the Khomeini-led petty-bourgeois forces are incapable of solving the pressing problems of the second stage of the revolution on political and above all on eco- nomic grounds, and do not have the necessary cadres. The attempts of Khomeini to achieve everything with the help of Islamic fanaticism and the religious devo- tion of the popular masses will make it objectively impossible to solve the tasks of the revolution according to the true interests of the Iranian people.41

In principle, Soviet and East German officials agreed with this position, with the caveat that Islamic rule might be viable for a short period. An East German Foreign Ministry evaluation in September 1979 concluded that “it is becom- ing ever clearer that the attempt to realize a sociopolitical concept based on early Islam in a country with relatively advanced capitalist development must fail in the long-term.”42 Soviet Ambassador Vladimir Vinogradov was some- what more cautious, remarking that “naturally, a theocratic state in Iran can have no ‘eternal duration’ [ewige Dauer]. The ability of Shiism to deflect the still-uneducated masses of poor peasants, workers, and small merchants from their class interests, though, should not be underestimated.”43 However, the Tudeh’s long-term approach was seen as the only viable one because, as the East German embassy reported in July, “confrontation with the clergy would

40. AIV to MfAA, “Zu den Auseinandersetzungen im Iran,” 26 January 1979, p. 5. 41. AIV to SED Politbüro, report based on conversation with Jila Siassi, Tudeh representative for international ties, n.d., in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 102. 42. MfAA, NMO, “Innenpolitische Lage Irans,” 18 September 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 138. 43. “Vermerk über das Gespräch mit dem Botschafter der UdSSR im Iran, Gen. W.M. Winogradow am 22.10.1979,” 22 , in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 145.

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mean confrontation with the laboring masses.”44 Consequently, despite har- boring doubts about the economic viability of Islamism, Tudeh leaders, in an open letter of 24 , clearly identified Khomeini’s agenda with that of the “urban and rural laborers, that is the workers, peasants, artisans, students, and small merchants.”45 The thinking was that, for now, Khome- ini represented the “progressive” elements of society but that he would soon lose their support, which would instead fall into the Tudeh’s lap like a ripe apple. Meanwhile, Khomeini’s anti-imperialism meant that supporting him would also pay geopolitical dividends. In a conversation with East German Politbüro member Hermann Axen on 25 January 1979, Boris Ponomarev, the long-time head of the CPSU International Department, laid out the Soviet approach to Iran.46 According to Ponomarev, events in Vietnam, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Yemen, , Cambodia, and elsewhere had shown that “socialism is on the offensive and imperialism is on the defen- sive.” Consequently, attempts to counter socialism must be getting stronger, for, as Iosif Stalin had argued in the 1930s, the approaching victory of social- ism is to produce an increase in saboteurs.47 Iran was a crucial ally of the United States, and so it stood to reason that Washington could ill afford to lose its position there. Ponomarev therefore suspected heavy U.S. involve- ment in events, attributing Bakhtiar’s airport closures (intended to prevent Khomeini’s return) to U.S. meddling. “It would be hard,” Ponomarev said, “just to kill Khomeini once he’s in the country.”48 Khomeini himself was a contradictory figure. He seemed to be in favor of positive relations with the Soviet Union, but he had also said that Marxism had no place in Iran. The biggest threat, however, as far as Ponomarev was concerned, lay elsewhere:

There is a real danger of a military coup, a military . The forces are gathering themselves. Bakhtiar is a man of the military. The opposi- tion is very strong. The military and the Americans are still afraid that with the

44. Telegram, Hucke (embassy Tehran) to NMO, AIV, 19 July 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 70. 45. Tudeh Party, open letter printed in party organ Mardom, 24 July 1979, in PAAA-MfAA, ZR 3512/82, p. 15. 46. “Information über die Gespräche zwischen Genossen B. N. Ponomarjow, Kandidat des Politbüros< und Sekretär des ZK der KPdSU, und Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, am 25. und 26. Januar 1979,” 25–26 January 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/154, pp. 43–66. 47. Ibid., p. 54. 48. Ibid., p. 56.

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construction of a military dictatorship like in Chile the opposition could turn out to be stronger than the military.49 At the time, with Bakhtiar still in power, the military still intact, and some U.S. officials were in fact considering a coup, Ponomarev’s comparison with Chile was therefore not wholly unreasonable.50 In addition, support for Khomeini seemed to promise a reorientation of Iranian foreign policy away from the United States and an exit from the Central Treaty Organization.51 However, Moscow also expected the new government in Iran to support the Communist regime in Afghanistan, an early indication that Soviet leaders did not understand the difference between their version of anti-imperialism and Khomeini’s.52 The lessons drawn by the Soviet Union from the fall of Allende strongly reinforced the case in favor of allying with Khomeini rather than other lib- eral or leftist alternatives. This analogy came up repeatedly in Soviet and Tudeh communications. Initially, the focus of Soviet blame in the wake of the September 1973 coup was the far left—in particular the Chilean , which had eagerly sought to confront the opposition instead of trying to chart a middle course, to compromise with friendly sections of the bour- geoisie represented by the Christian Democrats, and to build a electoral majority, the strategy favored by the Chilean Communist Party and pushed by Moscow.53 The importance of the Chilean episode and the force of the So- viet critique made this a political template for Soviet allies around the world. The Soviet analysis was echoed, for example, by Carlos Rocha, a senior figure in the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), who told an East German delegation visiting Angola in June 1976 that “the MPLA had

49. Ibid. 50. For more on the relationship between the United States and Bakhtiar’s government, in particular the Iranian military command, see Robert Huyser, Mission to Tehran (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). Huyser was the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe who was sent to Tehran in January 1979 to coordinate the Iranian military’s strategy during the revolution. Although Huyser seemed in favor of a coup, the Carter administration was hesitant to order one, and thus Huyser and the U.S. ambassador in Iran, William Sullivan, who was trying to make contact with Khomeini and the opposition, were working at cross-purposes. See also William H. Sullivan, Mission to Iran (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). 51. Confidential Report from CPSU International Department to SED AIV, 5 February 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/13940, pp. 16–17. 52. Vinogradov, Diplomatiya, p. 444. 53. Report prepared by Soviet scholars delivered to SED Politbüro, “Die Bedeutung und die Lehren des revolutionären Prozesses in Chile: Die nachfolgende Material ist eine erste Analyse sowjetischer Wissenschaftler, die keinen offiziellen Charakter trägt, sondern als vorläufiges Arbeitsmaterial zu be- trachten ist,” 24 October 1973, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/J IV 2/2J 4974, p.15.

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taken lessons from the events in Chile, above all in view of the activities of the left-extremist groups, who in reality eased Pinochet’s way.”54 As time went on, however, emphasis was increasingly put on the ability of the revolutionary forces to defend themselves, eventually precipitating a turn in the policy of the Chilean Communist Party in exile in Moscow in favor of guerilla strug- gle back in Chile.55 Although the Tudeh initially was in no position to fight on its own, this analysis dictated that, rather than compromise with “demo- cratic” bourgeois liberals or the far left, the Tudeh should instead rally around the revolutionary coalition led by Khomeini as the best guarantee against a CIA-led coup attempt. At a Tudeh Party plenum in February, Kianouri emphasized that the main danger to the revolution lay in the attempt of the “liberal bourgeoisie” to freeze the process of transformation by installing “bourgeois democracy” and “furthering the old catastrophic capitalist development pattern” in Iran.56 He invoked Chile as an example of the danger that faced the Iranian revolution from a potential alliance of the bourgeoisie, the remnants of the old regime, and foreign imperialists if the revolutionary coalition failed to hold together. The East German Foreign Ministry, based on information obtained by its embassy in Tehran, endorsed the strategy, writing that fissures between the Islamists and the bourgeois liberals around Bazargan were already appearing, with Khomeini demanding “rapid improvement of the social position of the popular masses and criticiz[ing] the hesitant advance of Bazargan’s govern- ment against ‘Western influence.’” East German officials therefore believed that “the decisive test of power [Machtprobe] between the different political forces is still ahead,” and that foreign policy—specifically the strength of one’s anti-imperialism—would be a main indicator of whose side to take.57 In early May, a high-level report approved by Axen laid out this line of thinking in explicit terms:

54. Conversation of East German government delegation led by SED Polibüro candidate mem- ber Günter Kleiber with Carlos Rocha, 22 June 1976, in SAPMO-BArch DY 30/J IV 2/2/1621, p. 75. 55. See Olga Ulianova, “Soviet Perceptions and Analyses of the Unidad Popular Government and the Military Coup in Chile,” Estudios públicos, Vol. 79 (Winter 2000), p. 34. See also Victor Figueroa Clark, “Nicaragua, Chile, and the End of the Cold War in Latin America,” in Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, eds., The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 192–207. 56. AIV, “16. Plenum des ZK der Volkspartei (Tudehpartei) Irans,” March 1979, SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, p. 15. 57. MfAA, NMO, Embassy Tehran, “Zur Entwicklung der Lage im Iran,” 13 March 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 17.

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The polarization of the political and social forces is accelerating. Although the Leftist forces are gaining influence, they do not at the current time have suf- ficient prerequisites to take over the leadership of further social development. They are therefore concentrating on the creation of democratic conditions for the gradual preparation of a true alternative to the bourgeois forces, which are currently already established as the beneficiary of the popular uprising and are using all means to allow only those political changes that serve the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class. The conspiracy of these forces with parts of the old power structure as well as with foreign reaction cannot be excluded. Hence the progres- sive forces support all measures of Khomeini and the “Revolutionary Tribunals” that serve to smash the old state and repression apparatus.58

As Axen’s report makes clear, the official strategy of the Tudeh was to unite the left under its leadership and then ally that union with Khomeini’s forces for as long as necessary to defeat the bourgeoisie and forestall a Chilean- coup. In this context, support for Khomeini and the advocates of clerical rule was justified because bourgeois elements opposed Islamicization only to the extent “they feared that this form of society would not leave enough room for the rapid development of , for the dominating influence of the bourgeoisie and its profit-drive.”59 However, this was not the only choice. Because the small size of the Tudeh made the unification of the left under its leadership unrealistic, the party es- sentially had to act alone in support of Khomeini against Bazargan’s govern- ment. The Fadaiyan, the largest organization on the left, had begun to op- pose Khomeini in March over the issue of a called on whether to declare an Islamic republic. The Fadaiyan decided to the vote be- cause Khomeini would allow only “yes” or “no” options, essentially forcing people to vote for or against the revolution, but the Tudeh campaigned in fa- vor of declaring an Islamic republic. Alternatively, the Tudeh could have sup- ported Bazargan against Khomeini—or even joined an actual leftist union, likely dominated by the Fadaiyan, that could have thrown its weight behind either Khomeini or Bazargan. The potential for the latter option was made clear in June, when the National Front, National Democratic Front, Shariat- madari’s Muslim People’s Republican Party, the Mujahidin, and the Fadaiyan united to demand a constituent assembly rather than allow the provisional

58. Deputy Head of AIV to Axen, Report on situation in Iran, 2 , in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 44. 59. MfAA, NMO, Embassy Tehran, “Zur innenpolitischen Entwicklung in Iran,” 18 May 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 51.

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government to put its draft constitution to an immediate referendum.60 One Soviet writer criticized these leftist groups for working with the “bourgeois liberals,” ironically seeing this as an example of “left adventurism.”61 Instead, the Tudeh declined to take part in the united demonstration of these parties on 15 June, setting forth its own proposed changes that accepted the basic structure.62 The following month, the Tudeh published an open letter in its main organ, Mardom, criticizing both “left-extremist groups” for acting as an “obstacle on the way to understanding between the true religious revolution- aries and the adherents of scientific socialism” and the Bazargan government for representing the “demands of the Iranian liberal bourgeoisie” against those of the “ of Iran.”63 In the early months of the revolution, then, Moscow, Berlin, and the Tudeh saw Iran as having embarked on a revolution of a recognizable type typical of many developing and postcolonial states. This revolution would be- gin with a class coalition comprising the bulk of the nation against the rule of imperialists, their puppets, and remnants of a feudal regime, and it would be led by nationalist or religious figures who commanded popular support. An anti-imperialist foreign policy was both an immediate dividend and an indi- cation of the revolution’s progressive nature, and it was only a matter of time until the political consciousness of the working masses evolved in the direc- tion of the socialist left, after their economic demands had gone unfulfilled by ruling representatives of the bourgeoisie or petite bourgeoisie. The primary danger to avoid in the meantime was either a reactionary coup or a consoli- dation of bourgeois power and a consequent stalling of the revolution, both likely to be aided by U.S. meddling.64 At first, allying with Khomeini seemed to be the best bet for this agenda.

60. Telegram, GDR ambassador in Tehran Wolf to CC SED, NMO, 12 June 1979, in SAPMO- BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 62. 61. Mikhail Krutikhin, “Iran: Transition,” New Times, No. 29 (July 1979), p. 10. 62. Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, “Building the : The Draft Constitution of 1979 Reconsid- ered,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2013), p. 657. 63. Tudeh Party, open letter printed in party organ Mardom, 24 July 1979, pp. 11, 15. 64. The available evidence suggests that the United States was not actively supporting any groups op- posing the IRI or looking to overthrow the new government during this period. See Mark Gasiorowski, “US Covert Operations toward Iran, February–: Was the CIA Trying to Over- throw the Islamic Regime?” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2015), pp. 115–135. Elsewhere, Gasiorowski writes that the United States was not involved in the Nuzhih Plot of , though Shahpour Bakhtiar gave others the impression that he had U.S. support. See Mark Gasiorowski, “The Nuzhih Plot and Iranian Politics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Novem- ber 2002), p. 652. The Tudeh and IRI sources have often credited the party with helping the regime stop the coup attempt. See ibid., p. 656; and Farhang Jahanpour, “Iran: The Rise and Fall of the Tudeh Party,” The World Today, Vol. 40, No. 4 (April 1984), p. 158.

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First Warning Signs: May–October 1979

As the struggle over Iran’s political future intensified, the Tudeh maintained a significantly more sanguine view of Khomeini and his circle of Islamist sup- porters than its Soviet and East German interlocutors had. The latter paid more attention to the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric of Khome- ini and other religious figures, as well as the increasing anti-leftist violence of the pasdaran. They also took a much more level-headed view of events in the country at large, evidenced in particular by their analysis of the Kurdish up- rising, which the Tudeh saw strictly through the prism of Tehran politics and possible international conspiracies. Overall, however, Moscow and East Berlin still endorsed the strategy of supporting Khomeini because they continued to believe in the progressive nature of the forces behind him, as evidenced by the early economic policies and foreign policy orientation of the Islamic Republic. As early as May 1979, Soviet-bloc observers were concerned about the direction events in Iran were taking. A senior diplomat from the Czechoslovak embassy told his fellow socialist diplomats in a meeting that month that none of the capitalist countries could understand why the Tudeh was supporting Khomeini.65 The increasingly anti-Communist rhetoric of the regime and its supporters also worried the socialists. As the East German embassy reported just a few days later, just as in Western [embassies] and among representatives of nonaligned coun- tries (though these with anti-Communist motivations), but also now increas- ingly among comrades of brother embassies there are fears regarding the correctness of the TudehParty’s tactics—that is, whether the absolutely uncritical support of Khomeini really serves the revolution and does not push away poten- tial allies of the Tudeh Party in the bourgeois, intellectual, and left camps.66 The danger was compounded by the steps taken by the regime to disarm the left. The East German ambassador wrote to his superiors in East Berlin about a secret order by the Revolutionary Council to the komitehs to dis- arm the forces of the Fadaiyan and Mujahidin, and that this was supposedly part of the purpose behind the creation of the pasdaran as well as a new se- cret police organization to replace SAVAK.67 Soviet and East German officials

65. “Eingie Gedanken aus den Unterhaltungen während des Buffet Dinners beim 1.Sekretär der Botschaft der CSSR in Teheran am 17.5.79,” 17 May 1979, in PAAA-MfAA, ZR 1611/81, p. 59. 66. Telegram, Ambassador Tehran to SED Politbüro, 28 May 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 59. 67. Ibid., p. 58; and Telegram, Ambassador Tehran Wolf to Willderding, NMO, Axen, Winkelmann, Neumann, 7 May 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 49.

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closely monitored the crackdown on the left and were particularly concerned when Khomeini ordered the closure of the Tudeh’s main organ, Mardom,in August.68 The Soviet and East German view of the Kurdish situation also noticeably diverged from that of the Tudeh. For Tudeh leaders, the Kurdish uprising— led by the Democratic Party of Iranian (PDKI), which had leftist sympathies—was only exacerbating the “atmosphere of religious fanaticism and anti-democratic measures” in the country, and a Tudeh representative even claimed that PDKI leader was an agent of Western intelligence services.69 In contrast, the East German Foreign Min- istry provided a curiously ambiguous analysis of the Kurdish .70 De- spite claiming that counterrevolutionary forces were making use of Kurdish activities, the ministry noted that the uprising had the support of most of the and that the PDKI was built on “peasants, workers, small merchants, and intellectuals” and had distributed feudal holdings to poor and landless peasants. The next month, the Soviet ambassador told his East Ger- man counterpart that Khomeini’s attempt to solve the Kurdish problem with military force was a mistake.71 As time went on, the divide between the CPSU and the Tudeh over the IRI’s policy toward the would only deepen, and it would parallel other divisions over the new regime’s policies toward its neighbors and national minorities, especially in the wake of the Soviet inva- sion of Afghanistan.72 Whereas the Tudeh saw Khomeini as the center of rev- olution and anything opposing him as counterrevolutionary, Soviet and East German officials believed the answer to the question of who really represented the revolution in Iran was more ambiguous.

68. Telegram, Wolf to SED Politbüro, SED AIV, and MfAA NMO, 22 August 1979, in SAPMO- BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 98. 69. AIV to SED Politbüro, “Information über die Lage in Iran und in der Tudeh-Partei Irans,” 14 September 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 103. 70. MfAA, NMO, “Zur den Auseinandersetzungen in Iranisch-Kurdistan,” 4 September 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 100. 71. “Vermerk über das Gespräch mit dem Botschafter der UdSSR im Iran, Gen. W. M. Winogradow am 22.10.1979,” 22 October 1979, p. 147. For more on Soviet reactions to the Kurdish uprising, see Yodfat, The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Iran. 72. On Afghanistan, see “Vermerk über ein Gespräch des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, mit Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, Erster Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, am 11.2.1980,” 11 , in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 42. Khomeini even asked the Tudeh to intercede with the Soviet Union on Afghanistan. See “Ver- merk über 2 Gespräche des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, mit Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, 1 Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, am 16.6 und 17.6.1980,” 17 June 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 54.

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In the summer and fall of 1979, however, the Soviet, East German, and Tudeh leaders were closer in their view of the IRI’s economic progressivism than they were on the Kurdish issue. The East German ambassador saw the nationalization of banks and large industrial concerns as evidence that the cler- ical regime was taking popular demands for socioeconomic change seriously.73 In particular, the draft of the new constitution, with its measures for limiting private property, nationalizing private capital, and talk of equality and a right to work, was seen as a demonstration by both the Tudeh and its East European patrons that the clergy was seeking to appeal to a mass base and would con- front the interests of the liberal bourgeoisie.74 This was especially significant insofar as the Soviet-bloc embassies in Tehran saw the increasing opposition of the bourgeoisie to political Islamicization as a sign that a coup attempt might be imminent. The East German embassy warned that “the bourgeoisie is of the opinion that the power question will ultimately be decided in Tehran, not in .”75 The alliance of the Tudeh with Khomeini was therefore still es- sential, though the Tudeh hoped to gain more power in the alliance by, for example, placing a Tudeh sympathizer at the head of the new security service, as Kianouri told Soviet and East German interlocutors.76 Consequently, the Soviet Union reaffirmed its continued support for the Tudeh’s strategy at the highest level. Ponomarev and Ul’yanovskii reassured Kianouri of their support in August, and the Soviet ambassador told his East German counterpart that “even though because of his [Khomeini’s] age and inexperience in state affairs these complicated tasks can only be partly fulfilled, it must be acknowledged that under the present circumstances he is the only leading personality in Iran that represents certain anti-imperialist views.”77 Brezhnev himself summed up Soviet thinking on Iran, emphasizing the inter- national angle, in a conversation with during a visit to East Berlin in October to mark the 30th anniversary of the GDR:

73. Telegram, East German Ambassador Wolf to Willerding, Winkelmann, AIV, and NMO, 12 June 1979, in SAPMO-BArch DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 62. 74. MfAA, NMO, “Zum Verfassungsentwurf der Islamischen Republik Iran,” 2 July 1979, in SAPMO-BArch DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 68. 75. Telegram, Embassy Tehran to Willerding, Konschel, NMO, Axen, Winkelmann, 19 July 1979, in SAPMO-BArch DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 71. 76. “Vermerk über ein Gespräch zwischen dem Ersten Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei des Iran, Genossen Kianouri, und Genossen Guttman am 3. August 1979,” 3 August 1979, p. 95. Kianouri informed Guttman about his recent conversation with Ponomarev and Ul’yanovskii. 77. For Ponomarev and Ul’yanovskii, see ibid., pp. 92–95. For Soviet Ambassador Vladimir Vin- gradov’s remark, see “Vermerk über das Gespräch mit dem Botschafter der UdSSR im Iran, Gen. W. M. Winogradow am 22.10.1979,” 22 October 1979, p. 145.

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In Iran, not especially positive tendencies have settled in in recent times. The leaders of the Islamic clergy have begun to persecute the progressive forces. They unsparingly suppress the actions of national minorities. . . . Our initiatives re- garding the development of good neighborly relations with Iran have thus far found no practical echo in Tehran. We see all of this. However, we also un- derstand something else: the Iranian Revolution has undermined the military- political alliance between Iran and the US.78

As Brezhnev’s statement makes clear, however, Soviet support for Khomeini was becoming increasingly pragmatic, whereas the Tudeh was ever more com- mitted ideologically to the notion of Khomeini as the leader of the revolution. Thus, as the political situation in Iran became increasingly tense and the divisions became clearer, not only between the Islamists around Khomeini and the provisional government of Bazargan but also between both groups and the left, the Tudeh found itself in a difficult and contradictory posi- tion. After speaking with Tudeh representatives in September 1979, the SED Department on International Ties reported that “despite recent political devel- opments, no pessimistic evaluation of the next period has been expressed.”79 Even with this optimism and the continuing support of Moscow, however, the Tudeh told the East Germans in the same conversation that “the Party leadership is nevertheless preparing all measures and steps, if it becomes nec- essary, to go underground.”80 Some of the East Germans might have picked up on the eerie echoes of the delusional optimism of the in 1932 as it prepared at Stalin’s behest to go underground before ’s rise to power rather than unite with the Socialists or stand and fight, which meant, as Arthur Koestler wrote, that “we lost the battle against Hitler before it was joined.”81 The Tudeh would do the German Communists one better, though: They would help Khomeini win the battle.

78. “Stenografische Niederschrift der Zusammenkunft des Generalsekretärs des ZK der SED und Vor- sitzenden des Staatsrates der DDR, Gen. Erich Honecker, sowie der weiteren Mitglieder und Kandi- daten des Politbüros des ZK der SED mit der Generalsekretär des ZK der KPdSU und Vorsitzenden des Präsidiums des Obersten Sowjets der UdSSR, Genossen Leonid Iljitsch Breschnew sowie den an- deren Mitgliedern der sowjetischen Partei und Regierungsdelegation, am Donnerstag, dem 4.Oktober 1979, im Amtssitz des Staatsrates der DDR,” 4 October 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/2378, p. 79. 79. AIV to SED Politbüro, “Information über die Lage in Iran und in der Tudeh-Partei Irans,” 14 September 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 104. 80. Ibid, p. 105. 81. Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 54.

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From the November Revolution to the Iraqi Invasion

The storming of the U.S. embassy on 4 November 1979 and the ensuing pro- longed hostage crisis broke the political stalemate that had developed between Bazargan’s government and the Islamists around Khomeini, including the Is- lamic Republican Party (IRP) led by Ayatollah Beheshti, by inducing Bazargan to resign. Though depicted at the time as a spontaneous action of students in Tehran in response to the meeting of Bazargan with in Algiers, the Soviet authorities and the Tudeh thought otherwise, and not merely because the incoming regime had not allowed the Fadaiyan to storm the U.S. embassy back in February.82 The KGB residency already claimed to know who “at the very summit of the Iranian leadership” had authorized the seizure of the embassy, which had been carried out by a trained team from the pasdaran.83 Kianouri told Axen that “Khomeini had already approved the occupation of the American Embassy before the meeting of Bazargan with Brzezinski in Algiers.”84 This defeat of the “liberal bourgeoisie” and concen- tration of power in the hands of the Islamists triggered significantly different reactions from Soviet and Tudeh leaders. In Moscow, the takeover of the U.S. embassy diminished fears of a Western-backed coup and led to a reevaluation of Khomeini’s role in the battle for political control in Iran. The Soviet Foreign Ministry told represen- tatives of the East German embassy in Moscow in a meeting on 16 Novem- ber that the recent polarization in Iran was increasingly between Khome- ini and the “left democratic forces” that were pushing for an extension of the revolution, rather than between Khomeini and the bourgeoisie as be- fore.85 Meanwhile, Soviet policymakers concluded that “one probably does not have to reckon with American military intervention,” diminishing the relevance of the Chilean scenario.86 On the contrary, they increasingly feared

82. Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, p. 106. 83. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, pp. 299–300. See also Vinogradov, Diplomatiya, pp. 466–467. The East German embassy reached the same conclusion. See Telegram, Ambassador Konschul to Axen, 22 November 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 181. 84. “Information über ein Gespräch des Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK, mit Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, 1. Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, am 8.11.1979,” n.d., in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 164. 85. GDR Embassy Moscow to Axen, 16 November 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 178. 86. Ibid.

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that Khomeini would ultimately reach some sort of rapprochement with the West. 87 For Kianouri and the Tudeh, the embassy seizure confirmed the anti- imperialist, and specifically anti-American, direction of the revolution, and the defeat of the bourgeoisie opened new horizons for socioeconomic transfor- mation, signaling a new stage of the revolution. Kianouri still saw Khomeini’s circle as representing the “progressive” elements of the revolution, comparing them to the narodniki, the Russian populist revolutionaries of the 1870s.88 The Tudeh campaigned in favor of the new constitution, a much less demo- cratic draft produced by the IRP-dominated and now opposed by forces led by Ayatollah Shariatmadari. The Tudeh leaders believed the reason Shariatmadari’s followers opposed the draft is that “they see, partic- ularly in the articles on ‘Islamic policy,’ which forbids the creation of monop- olies and creates limits on property and profit, a threat to the economic and political interests of the big bourgeoisie and foreign capital.”89 Kianouri dis- missed Khomeini’s of the left as directed not against the Tudeh or the Soviet Union, which he saw as allies, but as against “pro-American Com- munists,” meaning Maoists and other anti-Soviet leftists.90 Instead he argued that the Tudeh’s strategy was working and that its position in the country was strengthening, despite the alarmists who worried about the banning of the party’s central organs and the sacking of its headquarters. As evidence of this, Kianouri claimed that he had met with two members of the Revolu- tionary Council and that Khomeini, despite failing to agree to meet with the Tudeh leaders, had at least not formally declined.91 Meanwhile, the Tudeh still needed more breathing space, having recruited barely any qualified cadres in Azerbaijan Province, a traditional bastion of progressive politics, and none in Khuzestan, the main oil-producing province.92 Their key source of optimism was still that “the Tudeh Party is of the opinion that the class consciousness of the workers will soon break through the blinding effect [Verblendung]of religion.”93

87. Ibid., p. 179. 88. Memorandum of Conversation between Axen and Kianouri, 8 November 1979, in SAPMO- BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 158. 89. MfAA, “Innenpolitische Auseinandersetzungen in Iran,” 21 December 1979, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/369, p. 226. 90. Axen and Kianouri, record of conversation, 8 November 1979, p. 160. 91. Ibid., p. 167. 92. Ibid., p. 168. 93. Ibid.

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In the meantime, however, the Tudeh and their East European patrons also began to diverge in their evaluations of the economic progress demon- strated by the regime. Reversing the earlier optimistic appraisal of the govern- ment’s economic measures, the East German embassy in Moscow reported in May 1980 that “a year after the victory of the Islamic revolution the leader- ship around Khomeini domestically has no positive results to boast about. For socioeconomic transformation [Umgestaltung] nothing has been seriously un- dertaken and nothing achieved.”94 A few months later, on the eve of ’s invasion, the East German ambassador in Moscow consulted with Soviet leaders and wrote that “the Iranian leadership still has not proposed any social program. , inflation, difficulties in the provision for industry and the population characterize the economic situation.”95 Not only did this produce skepticism about the possibility of the current Iranian regime embarking on a “non-capitalist path of development,” but it seemed to pro- vide an explanation for the increasing attacks on leftist organizations. Diplo- mats in the Soviet-bloc embassies came to suspect that Khomeini and the IRP would eventually compromise with the bourgeoisie, producing a version of Islamic rule consonant with their class interests.96 The Tudeh, however, remained convinced that the Khomeini-led IRI was making economic progress and that transition to the “non-capitalist path” was still possible. In February 1980, while admitting that the current economic situation was “critical,” Kianouri told Axen that significant progress had been made in the nationalization of industry and land reform, particularly in the three months since Bazargan’s resignation.97 Four months later, he told Axen that the Western press’s negative appraisal of the Iranian economy was in- correct and that land reform was progressing with the help of the pasdaran, who were “anti-feudally oriented.”98 Kianouri even outlined a strategy to put

94. East German embassy in Moscow to Axen, Krolikowski, Winkelmann, Willerding, Ziebart, “In- formation über einige Fragen der Lage im Iran und der sowjetisch-iranischen Beziehungen,” 21 May 1980, in SAPMO-BArch DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 36. 95. East German Ambassador in Moscow W. Grabowski to Winkelmann, 16 September 1980, in SAPMO-BArch DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 201. 96. See East German Ambassador in Tehran Konschul to Deputy Foreign Minister Willerding, report on conversations with Communist states’ ambassadors, 21 May 1980, in SAPMO-BArch DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, pp. 48–53; and GDR Ambassador Konschel, “Zum iranisch-amerikanischen Konflikt,” n.d., in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 177. 97. “Vermerk über ein Gespräch des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, mit Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, Erster Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, am 11.2.1980,” 11 February 1980, p. 42. 98. “Vermerk über 2 Gespräche des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, mit Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, 1 Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, am 16.6 und 17.6.1980,” 16–17 June 1980, p. 59.

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flesh on the theoretical bones of the “non-capitalist path,” telling Axen that plans were afoot to create a “coordinating group” that would include repre- sentatives of Khomeini, President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, the Tudeh, and the pasdaran.99 The Tudeh sought to strengthen its economic influence within the regime by putting out a book of economic proposals and giving it to the government and so by preparing to create committees of poor and landless peasants.100 The Tudeh seemed to be following the blueprint laid out by those present at the Communist movement’s meeting in Moscow in 1960 for grad- ually shifting the ruling coalition to the left. Accordingly, the party appealed to the socialist countries to aid the Iranian economy and support its govern- ment. Kianouri told Axen that “rapid realization of agreements [with Iran] by socialist countries would signify a great boost for the progressive forces in Iran in terms of strengthening their position vis-à-vis the imperialist states.”101 He pushed the East Europeans to increase economic aid to the IRI even though the Soviet Union had become frustrated with the lack of a new economic agreement with Iran, having sent the head of the USSR State Committee on Economic Ties (GKES) on a fruitless visit to Iran in 1979.102 The Tudeh seemed ever more committed to the notion of a revolutionary transformation of Iran, initially in concert with the Islamists, and hoped for help from abroad even though the Soviet Union and East Germany were growing skeptical of the revolutionary potential of Khomeini and the IRP. Although the Tudeh’s evaluations of Khomeini and the IRP seemed to be diverging from those of the countries, they all still seemed to see Khomeini and the IRP as the better option in the growing battle between the IRP and Bani-Sadr, the newly elected president of the Islamic Republic. The landslide of Bani-Sadr as the first president of the IRI in was the somewhat unexpected result of the IRP’s failure to field a viable can- didate and Bani-Sadr’s strong personal relationship with Khomeini. The IRP, already suspicious of Bani-Sadr because he was Western-educated and not a cleric, increasingly came to worry about his political agenda, both foreign and

99. Ibid., p. 60. 100. Ibid., pp. 61–62. 101. “Vermerk über ein Gespräch des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, mit Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, Erster Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, am 11.2.1980,” 11 February 1980, p. 42. 102. East German Embassy in Moscow to Axen, Krolikowski, Winkelmann, Willerding, Ziebart, “In- formation über einige Fragen der Lage im Iran und der sowjetisch-iranischen Beziehungen,” 21 May 1980, p. 38. On GKES Chairman Skachkov’s visit, see M. J. Williams, UK Embassy in Moscow to Gorham, Middle Eastern Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, “Visit of Mr. Skachkov,” 3 June 1979, in The National Archives of the , FCO 8/3371, pp. 41–42.

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domestic, especially his attempt to preserve some form of democracy. The new cleavage in Iranian politics would then be between Bani-Sadr’s administration and the IRP, which dominated the , led by its speaker , a cleric and member of the IRP Central Committee who later on became in his own right.103 For a time, Khomeini’s position was unclear. At times he sided with Bani- Sadr and at others with the IRP. Consequently, the Tudeh’s position was am- biguous as well. The Soviet position on Bani-Sadr was also hesitant at first. Aleksanr Baranov from the CPSU International Department told his East German colleagues that, although Khomeini’s policies represented the inter- ests of the “broad laboring masses” and the peasantry, particularly the nation- alization program and housing transfers, Bani-Sadr represented the interests of the “petite bourgeoisie,” not the “big bourgeoisie” like Bazargan and Shari- atmadari, and that his idealistic program of a “classless Islamic society” had mass support.104 Bani-Sadr was not said to be pro-American, as Bazargan and Shariatmadari supposedly were, but his anti-imperialism took the same form as Khomeini’s; namely, opposition to both superpowers.105 Ultimately, Bani- Sadr did not represent a true threat because, although he was elected primar- ily with the hope of bringing economic improvement, the new constitution severely limited presidential powers in favor of the clergy. Baranov argued that Bani-Sadr’s election was just a symptom of the clergy’s failure to stabilize the country and rule on its own, and so he represented a further stage on the road to the working-class revolution that the Tudeh still envisioned.106 A month later, Kianouri’s appraisal of Bani-Sadr was less ambiguous. He called him an “Islamic Franco-Maoist” who was “pathologically egocentric, aggressive, and dangerous.”107 Despite endorsing some of Bani-Sadr’s eco- nomic measures, particularly his nationalization of foreign enterprises and

103. For more on the confrontation between President Bani-Sadr and the IRP, see Keddie, Modern Iran, pp. 249–253; Shaul Bakhash, The of the : Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 92–165; Mohsen M. Milani, “Power Shifts in Revolutionary Iran,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 1993), pp. 359–374; Mohsen M. Milani, “The Evolution of the Iranian Presidency from Bani Sadr to Rafsanjani,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1993), pp. 83–97; and Eric Rouleau, “The War and the Struggle for the State,” MERIP Reports, Vol. 11, No. 98 (July–August 1981), pp. 3–8. 104. “Zur Lage in Iran (erarbeitet auf der Grundlage eines Gesprächs mit Genossen A. Baranow, Mitarbeiter in der Int. Abteilung des ZK der KPdSU, am 1.2.1980,” 1 February 1980, in SAPMO- BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 2. 105. Ibid., p. 5. 106. Ibid. 107. “Vermerk über ein Gespräch des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, mit Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, Erster Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, am 11.2.1980,” p. 45.

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land reform, Kianouri evaluated the revolutionary standing of political ac- tors in Iran not on the basis of specific policies but on the basis of their perceived loyalty to Khomeini, consequently calling , the IRP candidate, the most progressive choice.108 In May, Soviet-bloc ambassadors dismissed the possibility of a rapprochement between Bani-Sadr and the IRP, instead forecasting that the national bourgeoisie, both secular and religious, would soon turn against the Islamic regime, likely with Bani-Sadr as a rallying point, and would seek to rebuild ties to the United States.109 Thus, although they were not optimistic about the future direction of Khomeini and the IRP, neither Kianouri nor the East Europeans believed it was sensible to abandon the Tudeh’s current strategy in favor of an alliance with an opposition led by Bani-Sadr. As the battle lines of the approaching were being drawn, the Tudeh’s support of Khomeini was rapidly becoming a far more significant factor on the Iranian political scene. In , the Revolutionary Coun- cil gave an ultimatum to the left to leave Iran’s universities. Although Bani- Sadr tried to get ahead of developments by declaring a “,” Khomeini was the one who then established a seven-person, mostly IRP, Council of the Cultural Revolution. The universities were shut down for the next three years as the Islamists purged the left from the campuses. As the bat- tles between the anti-clerical Mujahidin, with occasional support from Bani- Sadr, and the IRP were becoming more violent, the Fadaiyan was split over the question of whether to support the Mujahidin in armed confrontation with the IRP. The Fadaiyan Central Committee had already divided unofficially between a majority and minority faction at its first post-revolution plenum, held in October 1979, with many in the majority maintaining close ties with the Tudeh, to whom they disclosed an unofficial record of the meeting.110 In June 1980, the minority broke away to form its own faction, and the re- maining majority officially rejected armed struggle. Although the minority identified the IRI as a regime based on a compromise between the indus- trial and commercial bourgeoisie, and consequently one that was no longer revolutionary, the majority argued that the IRI was “petite bourgeois”—and therefore progressive and anti-imperialist. A formal process of unification with the Tudeh was not approved by the Fadaiyan Majority until March 1981, but by that point it had essentially already accepted the Tudeh’s view of Iranian

108. Ibid., p. 41. 109. Konschul report on conversations with socialist ambassadors, 21 May 1980, p. 53. 110. See Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, p. 110.

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politics and the IRI.111 This was important because, as the TASS correspon- dent in Tehran, Mikhail Krutikhin, reported in June 1980, the Tudeh, despite having grown to perhaps 25,000–30,000 members and sympathizers, were far eclipsed by the Fadaiyan, which had some 300,000 sympathizers in the country at its peak, and the Mujahidin, which had roughly 500,000.112 The Fadaiyan consequently had penetrated the country much more thoroughly, especially among peasants, workers, and national minorities, and Krutikhin emphasized that “when one writes about this organization, one must state its very heartfelt relationship with the Soviet Union, its striving for cooperation with the international Communist movement, as well as its irreconcilability with the Beijing leadership and its accomplices in Iran.”113 Even though the inexperience and “tendency to extremism” of the Fadaiyan needed to be taken into account, its positive features and acceptance of Tudeh leadership dra- matically increased the influence of the latter and the pro-Soviet forces more broadly. As the Mujahidin—and increasingly President Bani-Sadr, on the one hand, and the IRP with the increasing support of Khomeini, on the other— fought over the political structure of the regime, the Tudeh and Fadaiyan majority sided with the IRP, seeing any opposition to the IRI, which was still holding U.S. hostages, as objectively aiding imperialism. Even if Soviet and East German officials were no longer as worried about the possibility of a Chilean-style coup and were skeptical about the possibility that the clerical regime would embark on a “non-capitalist path of development,” they con- tinued to support the Tudeh’s strategy for two reasons. One was the continued anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism of Khomeini and the IRP, especially compared to Bani-Sadr. The second was that they still believed a political vic- tory for the Islamists would be only temporary. As the East German embassy remarked in April 1980, “the utopian ideas of Khomeini of a society free from exploitation on an Islamic basis represent no useful model for a twentieth century society in Iran.”114 However, the resilience of the regime in the face of foreign threats—specifically the Iraqi invasion of September 1980—made the East Germans question the assumed fragility of clerical rule.

111. Ibid., pp. 112–113. 112. Mikhail Krutikhin, Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) correspondent in Tehran, “Die linken Kräfte in Iran,” 24 June 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, pp. 123–125. 113. Ibid., p. 125. 114. “Die Innenpolitische Lage in Iran nach der Proklamierung der Islamischen Republik,” 1 April 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 15.

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Consolidation of the Regime: From the Iraqi Invasion to Civil War

The Iraqi invasion temporarily dampened the internal conflict between Bani- Sadr and the IRP.115 The territorial conflict over the Shatt al-Arab, the wa- terway that leads to the south of Basra, dates to the era of the Ottomans and Safavids, but the Iranian regime and Soviet and East German policymakers did not see the Iraqi action as any ordinary seizure of territory. As the East German ambassador reported, this was a battle between “mutually exclusive social models with ambitions to expand to other Islamic states,” and Soviet Ambassador Vinogradov saw it as an attempt by to “weaken the Islamic regime” by employing the forces of “counterrevolution and national minorities” against it.116 Bani-Sadr therefore was not only someone clearly ide- ologically committed to the concept of Islamic revolution and its international expansion, but his technocratic skills made him seem like the best chance the IRI had to organize competent military resistance to Saddam Hussein’s forces. Early on, the GDR ambassador reported, Iran put up greater resis- tance than anticipated, the regime remained stable, and domestic and foreign “counterrevolution” failed to unite.117 Meanwhile, despite the USSR’s close re- lationship with Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis, Soviet leaders refused to take sides and supply Iraq with weapons Vinogradov even offered to arm Iran in a meeting with Prime Minister Raja’i on 4 October.118 Iran initially responded unfavorably to the Soviet offer, but the offer helped to focus Iranian ire for the invasion on Saddam’s supposed Western backers.119

115. On the initial response of the Iranian regime to the war, particularly the organization of resistance to the Iraqi invasion in the context of the domestic battle for power, see Pierre Razoux, The Iran- (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 121–134. 116. For the report of the East German ambassador, see Telegram, Konschel to Willerding, Winkel- mann, Schüssel, NMO, “Hintergründe Zuspitzung Situation Iran/Irak (auf Grundlage Consultation mit Bruderbotschaften),” 17 September 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 209. For the Soviet ambassador, see Telegram, Konschel to Willerding, Winkelmann, Schüssel, CC, NMO based on conversation with Soviet Ambassador Vinogradov, 25 September 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 213. 117. Telegram, of Konschel to Willerding, Winkelmann, Schüssel, NMO, 1 October 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, pp. 215–216. 118. CIA Special National Intelligence Estimate, “Soviet Interests, Policies, and Prospects with Respect to the Iran-Iraq War,” 24 December 1980, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom /docs/DOC_0000273317.pdf, p. 6. For more on Soviet reactions to the Iran-Iraq War, see Yodfat, The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Iran, pp. 106–110. See also Razoux, The Iran-Iraq War, pp. 82– 86. Razoux tells of specific divisions within the Soviet leadership on the decision about whether to support Iraq or Iran, but the provenance of his information is unclear. 119. See Yodfat, The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Iran, pp. 94–97.

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The dampening of internal divisions dild not last long however. Once the immediate danger was averted, the IRP began to worry about the formation of a strong military under the control of the president.120 Against the back- ground of the simultaneous cultural revolution taking place against the left, the regime cracked down against domestic elements that were real, potential, or imaginary allies of the Iraqis. This radicalization of the revolution produced a massive expansion of the pasdaran, who were under the control of the Rev- olutionary Council, not the president, and who took on an ever larger part of the burden of fighting Iraq.121 As the Islamic Republic in wartime produced institutions that made it look ever more like a functioning, powerful state, East German Ambassador Wolfgang Konschel took a fresh look at the appeal and possibilities of Islam as a program of governance—politically, economi- cally, and culturally—as well as the danger it presented for the left:

On the basis of his idealistic, utopian, social ideals, Khomeini cannot be con- sidered a revolutionary in the subjective sense. His views of Islamic justice, his advocacy for the interests of “lower strata of the exploited and poor” (that do not correspond to views of scientific classes [wissenschaftlicheklassenmässigen An- sichten]), as well as his views against monarchy, America, and exploitation by international , nevertheless formed under the objective conditions of the Iranian Revolution an important starting point for the anti-imperialist and progressive goals of the struggle of the Iranian laborers. For the laborers whose worldviews have no scientific basis the slogans of social justice and equality, the condemnation of corruption, usury, and the propagation of chastity, moral pu- rity and the development of small property are very attractive.122

Although Konschel thought the program of Islamic justice would be inef- fective, it would have enough popular support to entrench itself at first, and its ultimate failure would force it to compromise with the bourgeoisie and turn on the left. Furthermore, “Khomeini has already passed the peak of his acting as a force for domestic political integration,” and without a worthy succes- sor, the Islamic leaders would have to come up with a more concrete program that would produce new groups and leaders.123 Konschel saw the ongoing cul- tural revolution as part of an attempt to create a true intellectual center for

120. Telegram, Konschel to Willerding, Winkelmann, Schüssel, NMO, 11 November 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/20/370, p. 219. 121. For more on domestic and international developments in the IRI in this period, see Keddie, Modern Iran, pp. 250–253. 122. Konschel, “Zum iranisch-amerikanischen Konflikt,” p. 177. 123. Ibid., pp. 178–180.

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global Shiism like Al-Azhar in Cairo for Sunnis.124 Perhaps the most interest- ing element of Konschel’s report is its open-ended conclusion: “The preceding material is sent first of all for our own understanding and the advancement of acreative[schöpferischen] discussion with the [SED] department [for Interna- tional Ties] and the sector [of the Near and Middle East of the GDR Foreign Ministry].”125 At last, the East German embassy had acknowledged they were dealing with something new that needed to be understood on its own terms. The Tudeh had no such epiphany. Kianouri held a press conference in November 1980, in the face of renewed domestic conflict, supporting the IRI because of its fight against injustice, capitalism, and imperialism, even invoking Khomeini’s un-Marxist distinction between mostakbarin (rich, pow- erful) and mostaz’afin (poor, downtrodden).126 In May 1981, the Tudeh organ Mardom published an article listing the accomplishments of the IRI, even en- dorsing the ongoing crackdown as ridding the country of Western influence and the dominance of the bourgeoisie over Iran’s cultural landscape by for ex- ample, producing “progressive films whose goal is to expose imperialism and inculcate elevated human feeling that have taken the place of banal shows and films.”127 As the IRP steadily gained the upper hand (and Khomeini’s sup- port) against Bani-Sadr in early 1981, the Tudeh piled on. When Khomeini dismissed Bani-Sadr as president in June, the Tudeh released a statement bid- ding him good riddance, asserting that Bani-Sadr had been a friend of impe- rialism and that the regime was justified in removing him before he could do irreparable damage to the revolution.128 The Tudeh statement expressed the hope that the next president would be unquestioningly loyal to the “- line.”129 Bani-Sadr, then in hiding, called for an uprising, and the Mujahidin answered the call, setting off a bomb at an IRP leadership conference that same month, killing the leader of the IRP, Ayatollah Beheshti, and at least 70 others. As open war broke out between the regime and the Mujahidin,

124. Ibid., p. 181. 125. Ibid. 126. Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Auszüge aus einer Antwort des Genossen Nureddin Kianouri, 1st Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh, auf Fragen eines Moslems (Aus einer Frage-und-Antwort Veranstaltung vom November 1980,” November 1980, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, pp. 40–45. 127. Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Die Errungenschaften der iranischen Revolution (Auszüge aus einem Artikel des Zentralorgans der Tudeh-Partei, Nameh Mardom, 1981,” 26 May 1981, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, pp. 46–63. 128. Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Erklärung des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans aus Anlass der Wahl des zweiten Staatspräsidenten der IRI (Juli 1981),” 13 August 1981, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, pp. 71–72. 129. Ibid., p. 73.

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supported by the Fadaiyan minority, the Tudeh publicly condemned both of them as “adventurist” and “counterrevolutionary.”130 Tudeh support for the regime was more than just rhetorical. Intimately familiar with the workings of the Mujahidin and Fadaiyan, the Tudeh helped the regime physically exter- minate them by revealing their safe houses, according to KGB reports.131

The Crushing of the Tudeh

During the period after the bombing of IRP headquarters, the archival trail in Berlin narrows, and so it is harder to determine exactly what sorts of discus- sions were taking place, if any, between the Tudeh leaders and their CPSU and SED counterparts, as well as what guidance was given. However, Ul’yanovskii published a major article on Iran in the main theoretical journal of the Soviet Communist Party, Kommunist, in July 1982 that is as close to an authoritative statement of policy as can be expected in a public source. In the article, he writes that some of the clergy are “aware of the need for carrying on a con- sistent struggle against the united front of international imperialism headed by the USA and for implementing profound social and economic reforms in the interest of the working people.” He then urges leftist forces to unite to further the revolution in this direction.132 Behrooz construes this as a So- viet directive to maintain the alliance with at least part of the clergy, in the hope that this could lead to a “non-capitalist path.” Given the setting of open conflict between the regime and the left and the imminent suppression of the Tudeh, Behrooz depicts the article as evidence of Soviet culpability for the disastrous results of the Tudeh’s strategy.133 Most likely, a concrete di- rective from Moscow would have been conveyed through secure channels, and so it is impossible to say definitively what policy Moscow wanted the Tudeh to follow at this point. It is extremely unlikely that such a high-level Soviet official would have openly called for insurrection against a govern- ment with which Moscow was trying to maintain friendly relations. With that context in mind, a closer reading of the article makes it far from clear that what Ul’yanovskii intended was a continuation of the Tudeh’s alliance

130. Memorandum to Politbüro, “Auszüge aus einer Erklärung der Tudeh-Partei Irans ‘Zur Herstel- lung einer auf dem Gesetz und auf sozialer Gerechtigkeit beruhenden Ordnung,” 5 October 1981, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, p. 80. 131. Kuzichkin, Inside the KGB, p. 291. See also Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, p. 126. 132. Quoted in Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, p. 127. 133. Ibid., p. 128.

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with Khomeini. Ul’yanovskii includes a damning critique of the economic theory of eqtesad-e-towhid (monotheistic economy) put forward by the leftist clergy. He writes that “the understanding of ‘Islamic’ or ‘Monotheistic’ econ- omy turns out to be a combination of principles directed toward the defense of petty-bourgeois interests from the perspective of Islam.”134 Ul’yanovskiiHe then delineates a typology of the clergy, including the more progressively minded clergy, before talking about the divisions among the “left democratic forces.” Finally, he calls for a united front of the left progressive forces that may or may not include the clergy (he does not mention the IRP or Khomeini specifically).135 It is far from clear, then, that Ul’yanovskii or other Soviet offi- cials at this point either wanted the Tudeh to continue to support Khomeini unequivocally (though it may have been too late to choose otherwise) or saw any possibility for the Islamists to lead Iran down the “non-capitalist path,” as Behrooz claims. By the time Khomeini finally sought to eliminate the Tudeh leaders, in February 1983, few were left to speak up for them. Amazingly, even though the party had been preparing to go underground almost since its return to Iran in 1979, with Kianouri telling the Tudeh leaders in July 1982 that the party would soon be banned despite its support for the regime, the arrests came as a total surprise, and roughly 6,000 party members, including almost all of the top leaders, were imprisoned.136 Tudeh leaders, including Kianouri, were then tortured and forced to confess on Iranian television to being So- viet spies, a spectacle that went on throughout much of 1983 and 1984.137 The Tudeh was now led by a committee in exile directed by Ali Khavari. The initial party plenum under his direction in December 1983 concluded that “the policy of the Tudeh in view of the domestic development of Iran was in principle correct, although on questions of organization and security there were some serious mistakes and weaknesses.”138 More broadly, however,

134. Rostislav Ul’yanovskii, “Iranskaia Revoliutsiia i ee Osobennosti,” Kommunist, No. 10 (July 1982), p. 115. 135. Ibid., p. 116. 136. On the situation in July 1982, see Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Über die gegenwärtige Lage der Tudeh-Partei Irans,” 20 July 1982, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, p. 87. On the reaction of the Tudeh to the arrests, see Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Zur Lage in der Tudeh-Partei Irans (TPI),” 9 January 1984, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, p. 88. 137. See Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 138. Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Zur Lage in der Tudeh-Partei Irans (TPI),” 9 January 1984, p. 90.

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the Tudeh leaders still did not understand what they were confronting in the Islamic Republic. Meeting with Ul’yanovskii in Moscow soon after the ar- rests, Khavari laid out three possible scenarios for the trajectory of events in Iran: the return of imperialist dominance, all-out civil war, or the resurrection of a liberal bourgeois regime under someone like Bazargan.139 Somehow the idea that an anti-imperialist, populist theocracy might turn out to be a viable, durable model of statecraft in the 20th and even 21st centuries still had not occurred to him. The Tudeh’s erstwhile socialist allies in Moscow and Berlin, however, were no longer buying it. Iran was anti-American and was a lot more strategically important than the remnants of the Tudeh. When Khavari met with Axen in Berlin in February 1984, he tried to tell him that the “big bourgeoisie” had finally succeeded in stopping the Iranian revolution and that a rapprochement with imperialism was coming. He also insisted that popular dissatisfaction was growing with the tendency toward “medieval fanatical .”140 This time, Axen retorted that Iran might be capitalist but it was definitely not imperialist, and the Warsaw Pact countries would continue to pursue a policy of with it.141 Then he spoke about the Tudeh itself: “The SED would like to express its deepest sympathy for the Tudeh Party for the loss it has suffered. It deeply regrets that not only illusions and false evaluations led to this setback (Rückschlag), but even that certain leading comrades have openly capitulated.”142 Because of these capitulations, the GDR, perched as it was on the forefront of the Cold War battle lines and locked in a competition with West Germany, could no longer afford to host an organization that could potentially be vulnerable to penetration by Western intelligence services. After speaking with Ponomarev and Ul’yanovskii, Axen told Khavari hat the Tudeh would have to leave East Germany.143

139. “Information über ein Gespräch mit dem Genossen Khavari, Mitglied des Politbüros der Tudeh- Partei Irans, am 12.2.1983,” 12 February 1983, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV 2/2.035/142, pp. 55– 57. 140. Axen to Honecker, “Vermerk über ein Gespräch des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretär des ZK der SED, mit dem 1. Sekretär des ZK der Tudeh-Partei Irans, Genossen Ali Khavari, am 2.2.1984 im Hause des ZK,” 9 February 1984, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV 2/2.035/142, p. 63. 141. Ibid., pp. 66–67. 142. Ibid., p. 67. 143. Ibid., p. 68.

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Conclusion

In June 1985, a majority of the Tudeh and Fadaiyan finally called for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, a regime they characterized as a “medieval theocracy.”144 The following year a Tudeh Party conference, its largest gather- ing since 1948, determined that the Khomeini regime had turned from rev- olutionary to reactionary back in 1981.145 Despite this, Tudeh leaders still believed they lacked what Khavari described to Axen in 1984 as a “funda- mental class-based evaluation of the clergy.”146 All the talk about medieval indicates that the party had still not fully assimilated the lessons of the Iranian Revolution. Presenting the Islamic Republic in this way reflected a view of history in which societies could move either backward or forward. What had happened, though, was that something new had been born: a theoc- racy that saw itself as progressive, committed to anti-imperialism, at least in the anti-American form also advocated by the Tudeh, which retained a com- mitment to economic development and justice, albeit more often honored in the breach than in practice.147 Although Soviet officials seemed to have come somewhat further in their understanding of the ways in which the Islamic Republic did not fit their preconceived revolutionary models, this realization came too late to do much about the consolidation of clerical rule in Iran. Soviet conceptions of politi- cal dynamics in the developing world and the instigation of socialist revolu- tions there, including the “anti-imperialist revolution,” the “state of national democracy,” and the “non-capitalist path,” along with views about the dangers faced by revolutionary forces, contributed to the Tudeh’s fateful choice to sup- port Khomeini. These conceptions obscured the possibilities of a path that led to “neither East nor West” and reconfigured the popular desires for national self-assertion, justice, and development into a durable theocratic alternative. Even after Moscow dismissed the possibility of a CIA-led coup, discounted the likelihood that the IRI would follow a “non-capitalist path,” and began to

144. Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Zur Politik der Tudeh-Partei Irans,” 24 July 1985, in SAPMO- BArch, DY 30/11537, p. 95. 145. Memorandum to SED Politbüro, “Zur Lage in der Volkspartei Irans (Tudeh),” 30 March 1987, in SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/11537, p. 101. 146. Axen to Honecker on the conversation between Axen and Khavari, 2 February 1984, in SAPMO- BArch, DY 30/IV 2/2.035/142, p. 64. 147. See for example Khadija V. Frings-Hessami, “The Islamic Debate about Land Reform in the Iranian , 1981–1986,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October 2001), pp. 136– 181; and Evaleila Pesaran, “Towards an Anti-Western Stance: The Economic Discourse of Iran’s 1979 Revolution,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 41, No. 5 (December 2008), pp. 693–718.

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appreciate the potential resilience of clerical rule, Soviet leaders’ geopolitical priorities—namely, an anti-American Iran—induced them to determine that Khomeini still represented the lesser of two evils, at least when compared with Bani-Sadr and the Mujahidin. Although both Moscow and the Tudeh thought that what the latter needed more than anything was a period of legality un- der democratic rule in order to build its organizational capacity and popular support, the two parties’ analysis of the political landscape saw all “bourgeois” forces as the enemy and led them to a policy that doomed any chance of en- joying such a period of democratic legality. Accordingly, the Tudeh saw any attempt to fight the consolidation of clerical rule in the name of democracy as reactionary, a stance that proved fatal for the party. The Tudeh leaders were victims of ideological miscalculation, but the miscalculation was as much a product of international Communist theories of revolution that gave prior- ity to anti-Americanism and denigrated “bourgeois” democracy as it was of their own misunderstandings of Iran. Furthermore, what made sense from Moscow’s perspective—namely, the ultimate acceptance of an anti-American, though theocratic, Iran—had far more devastating consequences for the left in Iran. The Iranian left ultimately became one more casualty in Moscow’s attempt to combat U.S. influence in the name of socialism.

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