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By Root 427 0

my father decided that he’d had enough of Bahar. He worked for a few months in a mechanic’s shop in order to save money and move to the capital, Tehran. There, his very first stop was the local branch of the Tudeh. Through the party, he found a job in a small factory. Soon he became a skilled metalworker. By 1949, his readiness to get into fights and his writing skills had helped him become one of the leaders of the Union of Metal Workers of Iran. The union was famous for its ability to organize strikes and for its members’ ability to beat opposition groups to a pulp with metal rods.

My father was fanatical about communism. Most religious people I know follow the teachings of their religion (or what they think are the teachings of their religion) without putting that much thought into it. They attend services and join religious groups because they feel more comfortable surrounded by like-minded people. Many communists joined the Tudeh Party for the same reason. My father never denied that this was the case for him; he always said that the party was like a family to him. When he came to Tehran he did not have a penny in his pocket and spoke Persian with a villager’s accent. The party gave him an identity, educated him, and provided emotional and intellectual support in a way his father never had.

Because of this devotion, my father never questioned any of the wrong or treasonous policies of the Tudeh Party. To this day, I cannot understand how he and many other Iranian communists supported the Soviet occupation of parts of Iran in 1945, when the American and British forces left after the end of the war. The Soviets took over the Iranian province of Azerbaijan, in the northwest, where they established the proxy People’s Republic of Azerbaijan. To my father and many of his friends, the fact that the Soviets had shamelessly taken over a part of Iran was not important. After all, the Tudeh Party was part of international communism, and the Soviet Union was the big brother who knew better. It was only in 1946, after the Iranian prime minister’s clever negotiations with the Soviets and threats made by American president Harry S. Truman, that Stalin ordered the Red Army to evacuate Azerbaijan. My father and his friends mourned the death of the thousands of communists who were massacred by the shah’s army, including many of their close friends.

Things continued to get worse for Iranian communists. In 1949, there was an assassination attempt against Mohammad Reza Shah. The shah’s bodyguards killed the would-be assassin immediately. There are still debates about the would-be assassin’s political affiliation, but the attempt against the life of the monarch was blamed squarely on the communists, and the Tudeh Party was outlawed. Many leaders of the party were arrested; others fled to the Soviet Union. Even so, the party’s rank and file continued to hold public meetings under different pseudonyms, especially under the banner of the unions. The communist workers’ unions held illegal meetings all over the city and prepared for an attack by the police and the army. “We all had a piece of wood with us, and as soon as the police arrived we would start beating them,” a friend of my father’s remembered, smiling affectionately at my father. “And your dad was always in the first row of any fight with the police.” My father was arrested several times between 1949 and 1953, mostly during clashes with the police.

My father’s time in prison seemed to have worked much like Mafia initiation rituals. Inside, he met Tudeh leaders who would indoctrinate him further in party politics, and he would leave jail with more responsibility than before. The Tudeh Party had a vast underground military network whose members even included bodyguards of the shah. “Some of the prisons were practically run by our comrades,” my father said. “We could mingle freely with other party members; we had classes about the history of communism and poetry-reading sessions.”

My father was not accustomed to being surrounded by such educated people, and he absorbed what they