Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [57]
The fall of Reza Shah in 1941 took the lid off Iranians’ historic frustration with despotic rulers and foreign intervention. Amid the postinvasion chaos, political parties mushroomed in Iran, as prominent politicians started their own parties, promising freedom and independence. With the help of the Soviet Union, which had long had designs on Iran’s rich natural resources, the Tudeh Party of Iran was established. The Soviets financed it heavily and aided its members with their organizational and intelligence skills, and the Tudeh customized its message for different groups in Iranian society with great success. It also developed official and underground networks all over the country. By the mid-1940s many prominent intellectuals, artists, and authors were members of the Tudeh. As the sole voice of the proletariat, the party also attracted many workers and the unemployed.
Like many communists at the time, my grandfather, I believe, was not drawn to communism by stringent ideological beliefs. In fact, I doubt that he ever read Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto or Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Rather, he deplored the widespread corruption of his government, hated to see his country occupied, and sympathized with the poor. In the face of these problems, he believed that the Communist Party presented the quickest way out of misery. At the time, the Tudeh Party shrewdly did not present itself as an atheist organization, and, in fact, a number of its leaders were practicing Muslims.
But perhaps my grandfather was just looking for a way out of his own misery. At the time, he had almost depleted his inheritance. My father’s mother, Hossein’s first wife, died when my father was only five years old, and soon after Hossein remarried. Hossein was not a very good husband to his second wife, or father to his four children. According to my father, he had a habit of coming home very late from political meetings, beating his wife and children on his way to bed, and sleeping until noon the next day. I think this is partly why my father spoke so often about him—he was adamant that his children not become anything like his father. “What kind of man mistreats his family?” my father would ask. “What kind of man doesn’t take responsibility for his actions?”
My father loved my mother’s cooking, and during meals that went particularly well with a drink—such as fried whitefish with rice, accompanied by yogurt with garlic and marinated vegetables—his grandiloquence could become overwhelming. “You have to fulfill your responsibilities no matter how difficult it is,” he’d tell us. And always, just to spice it up a little, he would add, “Otherwise you’re worth less than shit!”
After my grandfather joined the Tudeh Party, his life gained a third ingredient, beyond the debauchery and the religious sessions: discussions about equality and independence. My father was forced to attend these party meetings and serve tea to the guests. “They were like religious ceremonies,” my father would tell us over family meals. “In a religious ceremony, a mullah would talk about religious figures and battles at the time of the Prophet. In a Communist Party meeting, we would listen to the stories of the Great October Revolution of 1917, and the heroism of Soviet troops fighting the Nazis.”
Following in his father’s footsteps, my father became a Tudeh member in 1945, when he was seventeen. Joining the party gave him a means of satisfying a need of his own: getting into street fights as often as possible. My father was by all accounts a very talented young man, but he didn’t like to study nearly as much as he liked to fight. After joining the party, he would organize the young Tudeh members and attack the members of other political parties. “If I had not become a communist, I would’ve become a thug,” my father used to say.
After the war ended,