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The Enemy of My Enemy the Soviet Union, East Germany, and the Iranian Tudeh Party’S Support for Ayatollah Khomeini

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The Enemy of My Enemy the Soviet Union, East Germany, and the Iranian Tudeh Party’S Support for Ayatollah Khomeini The Enemy of My Enemy The Soviet Union, East Germany, and the Iranian Tudeh Party’s Support for Ayatollah Khomeini ✣ Jeremy Friedman The Iranian revolution raises two key questions for scholars, just as it did for contemporaries: Why did the Shah 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 February 1979 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 Iran.1 Liberals of various stripes, including the Freedom Movement led by post-revolutionary Iran’s first prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, and the National Front led by Karim Sanjabi, were best positioned in terms of tech- nocratic skill and international legitimacy, and as a result were initially given the formal levers of power. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s con- ception of the Velayat-e-Faqih, 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 Ervand Abrahamian, 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, Democracy, 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 Marxism,” JUSUR: The UCLA Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 6 (1990), pp. 14–27; and Maziar Behrooz, “The Iranian Revolution and the Legacy of the Guerilla Movement,” in Stephanie Cronin, ed., Reformers and Revolutionaries 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, Islamism and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran (Austin: University of Texas Press, Journal of Cold War 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 3 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00815 by guest on 28 September 2021 Friedman argued that both the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Republic 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 Communist party 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-imperialism, 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 theocracy 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 Reza Shah Pahlavi in May 1937 that came to be known 2007), pp. 110–126. See also Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (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 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 120–121. 3. See, for example, Mansoor Moaddel, Class Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp.140–163; and Nikki Keddie, 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 Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Dis- content: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University 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, Ali Shariati and the Shaping of Political Islam 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. 4 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00815 by guest on 28 September 2021 Moscow, East Berlin, and the Iranian Tudeh’s Support for Khomeini as the “Fifty-Three,” but during the war it was essentially a Popular Front 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 peasants.”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 Azerbaijan 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 February 1949. These gains aside, the Tudeh’s early opposition to the oil nationalization policy of the National Front and to Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq discredited it in the eyes of many Iranians.8 After the August 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 exile 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 Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 154–165. See also Cosroe Chaqueri, “Iradj Eskandary and the Tudeh Party of Iran,” 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: The New Press, 2013), p. 59. On the ideological divergences between the Tudeh and Mossadeq, see Farkheddin Azimi, “The Overthrow of the Government of Mossadeq Reconsidered,” Iranian Studies, 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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