Iran

SINCE IT EXPERIENCED the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Westerners have developed an idea of Iran as a highly conformist, authoritarian state that is based on a conservative reading of Islamic teaching. In the decades before this revolution, Iranian politics, while predominantly authoritarian, were anything but conformist or dull.

Based on historian Fred Halliday's 1979 work, it is useful to see 20th-century Iranian history, before the 1979 revolution, as defined by five crises. The first was a Constitutional Revolution from 1905 to 1911, which established a parliament, the Majlis, in an effort to modify the power of the Qajar dynasty. Second, from 1919 to 1921, the Qajar dynasty was deposed and Reza Khan came to power and crowned himself shah. Third, as part of the wartime foreign occupation of Iran by British and Soviet forces, Reza shah was ousted and replaced as shah by his 22-year-old son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Fourth, from 1951 to 1953, Mohammed Mossadeq became prime minister of Iran, attempted to expropriate Iranian oil from foreign control, and was overthrown by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in concert with some internal Iranian social forces. And fifth, in the early 1960s, the shah consolidated his regime and to some degree modernized Iranian society and economy.

Through much of this period, there was active competition between right- and left-wing forces, and the outcome of this struggle has had important long-term consequences for Iran. During much of the 20th century, Iran had an active Communist Party and/or the “Masses Party,” commonly referred to in English as Tudeh (and probably most accurately transliterated as Téda). The Communist Party of Iran was formed in [Page 241]June 1920, inspired in part by the Russian Revolution and by the political tumult in Iran at that time. The Communist Party, like Tudeh later, however, attracted the negative attention of Reza shah and his son over their 70-odd year rule.

The shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, persecuted the political left, which helped the rise of the religious extremism that deposed him.

During the Pahlavi era, violations of human rights in Iran were common, especially after the deposing of Mossadeq and especially with regard to activists on the political left. In later years, the shah exercised wide-spread censorship, held political prisoners, engaged in torture, imprisoned people in harsh conditions, and engaged in summary executions and extra-judicial killings. The only trade unions tolerated were state-controlled. While there were elections in the 1950s through the 1970s, only the two political parties that were acceptable to the shah were legal, and the shah's secret police, SAVAK, had the right to examine and approve all candidates.

Under these conditions, dissident political movements, especially on the political left, could hardly survive, let along thrive. As early as 1932, 32 leaders of the Communist Party were arrested and tried and 27 were convicted for espionage, based on the belief that they were working for the Soviet Union. In fact, Western suspicion of communism and the Soviet Union, even during World War II, as well as the development of the Cold War after 1945, strongly informed the prospects of the Iranian left in the second half of the 20th century. As the 1930s wore on, the Communist Party largely disappeared as a result of the repression of its leadership and organization. But 1942 saw the establishment of the Tudeh Party, though there is significant scholarly disagreement about its origins and upshot. For example, Donald Wilber (1981) views Tudeh as nothing more than a Iranian front for the Soviet Union, designed to encourage a nationalist government like that of Mossadeq, with a plan to take over once conservative social forces were weakened. On the other hand, Homa Katouzian (1981) argues that Tudeh began as a broad anti-imperial, liberal, nationalist, and socialist movement and only eventually became aligned with the Soviets.

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