What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

The Left's Fatal Miscalculation

by Iran Prism 8 min read

Two Roads to Evin

Ehsan Tabari was Iran’s foremost Marxist intellectual for four decades. He spoke seven or eight languages. He had written the theoretical foundations of the Tudeh Party. He was sixty-six years old when they brought him before the cameras.

Four days after his forced televised confession — reading from notes because a stroke had impaired his speech — Tabari proclaimed that his entire life’s work had been “defective,” “damaging,” and “totally spurious.” He was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted. He never left prison. He died there on April 29, 1989.1

How did the most prominent Marxist thinker in the Middle East end up renouncing everything he believed on state television? And how did it happen that the movement he helped build — which had drawn 500,000 people to a single rally, published a newspaper with 300,000 circulation, and held 150 offices across Iran just four years earlier — had been annihilated so completely that no one was left to object?2

The answer splits into two roads, both ending at Evin. The Fedayin split into factions that chose opposite strategies — one trusting the regime, the other fighting it. Both were destroyed.

The Strategy of Self-Destruction

The pivotal moment came on November 4, 1979, when students seized the American embassy.

The Fedayin split — a process that had been building since late 1979 — consolidated around this event. The Majority faction, led by Farrokh Negahdar, endorsed the embassy seizure as evidence of Khomeini’s “anti-imperialist character” and adopted a pro-Soviet accommodationist line identical to the Tudeh Party’s. The Minority rejected accommodation, viewing the seizure as a deliberate diversion to suppress political opposition.3

Both readings were analytically coherent. Both led to destruction.

The Tudeh Party, under Kianouri’s leadership, had raised the accommodationist strategy to a doctrine. Soviet ideologist Rostislav Ulianovskii — deputy director of the CPSU Central Committee’s International Department — explicitly theorized Iran’s revolution as an opportunity to place the country on the “non-capitalist path of development.” Orthodox Marxist theory held that semicolonial countries needed a “national democratic” stage before socialist revolution. Khomeini was the national democrat. The Tudeh would inherit what he built.4

The strategy required supporting every escalation. The Tudeh supported the hostage crisis, portraying Bazargan as “an American puppet.” They supported the Cultural Revolution that closed every university — destroying the Left’s most important organizing base. They supported the military campaign against the Kurds. They supported the removal of Banisadr. They actively informed on other leftist organizations to the regime’s intelligence services.5

They denounced Amnesty International’s calls to end summary executions as “blatant interference in Iranian affairs.”

Admiral Bahram Afzali — Iran’s Navy Commander — was a secret Tudeh member. His position gave the regime’s subsequent espionage charges real substance. When the Tudeh was finally destroyed, Afzali was among the ten members executed on February 25, 1984.6

The Fedayin Majority, following the same logic, claimed approximately 20,000 members and over 500,000 supporters by 1982. They formally ceased guerrilla warfare. They pursued “unity-critique” — supporting the regime while gently suggesting improvements. When the crackdown came, several thousand were arrested and hundreds executed, including eight members of the leadership. Negahdar fled to exile in Britain in May 1983.7

The Fedayin Minority maintained armed opposition, relocated to Kurdish regions and the forests of northern Iran. Hundreds were killed in post-June 1981 crackdowns. The survivors were driven into exile by 1988.8

Val Moghadam, writing in the New Left Review, identified two fundamental strategic mistakes: “neglect of the question of democracy, and underestimation of the power of the Islamic clergy.”

The Kuzichkin Pipeline

The intelligence that sealed the Tudeh’s fate came from the Cold War’s strangest collaboration.

In June 1982, Vladimir Kuzichkin — a KGB officer stationed in Tehran — defected to Britain. MI6 debriefed him. His intelligence revealed the full extent of Tudeh penetration of Iran’s military and government — including Admiral Afzali’s identity.9

British intelligence shared the debriefing with the CIA. The CIA passed it to Tehran — part of the early Iran-Contra dealings. The Tower Commission confirmed the transfer: “In 1983, the United States helped bring to the attention of Tehran the threat inherent in the extensive infiltration of the government by the communist Tudeh Party.”10

The authorization was likely made by Margaret Thatcher, Foreign Secretary Francis Pym, and the head of MI6, Colin Figures.11

In February 1983, the regime arrested Kianouri, his wife Maryam Firouz, and the entire Tudeh leadership, ultimately detaining over 10,000 members. Eighteen Soviet diplomats were expelled on May 4. The show trial of 101 Tudeh principals ran from December 1983 to January 1984 before Judge Mohammad Reyshahri. Eighty-seven received prison sentences. Thirty-two were sentenced to death. Ten were executed on February 25, 1984. Fourteen Central Committee members died during interrogation.12

Imagine learning that the Western democracies you had spent decades opposing — the CIA, MI6, the same agencies that overthrew Mossadegh in 1953 — had collaborated with the theocracy you supported to destroy you. The Left’s enemies had found common cause across every ideological divide.

You may notice a pattern in how this history reaches Western audiences — when it reaches them at all. The standard narrative collapses Iran’s pre-revolution political landscape into a single category: “Islamist revolution.” This is selective framing. By erasing the diversity of Iran’s opposition — the 500,000 who rallied for the Fedayin, the Tudeh officers in the Iranian navy, the Kurdish autonomists, the liberal nationalists — the story of how that diversity was systematically exterminated disappears. Khomeini’s monopoly on power looks like a natural expression of Iranian culture rather than what it actually was: the outcome of a three-year purge.

1988: The Final Act

Five years after the Tudeh was destroyed, the regime returned to finish what remained.

In the summer of 1988, following the MEK’s failed cross-border assault from Iraq, Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the execution of political prisoners who remained loyal to their organizations. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri later revealed that the Ministry of Intelligence had used the MEK’s incursion as “a pretext” for mass killings that “had been under consideration for several years.”13

Death commissions operated in at least 32 cities. The Tehran commission included Hossein-Ali Nayyeri as sharia judge, Tehran prosecutor Morteza Eshraqi, intelligence representative Mostafa Pourmohammadi, and deputy prosecutor Ebrahim Raisi — who would become president of the Islamic Republic in 2021.14

The interrogation protocols divided prisoners by ideology. MEK prisoners were questioned about organizational loyalty. Leftist prisoners faced a religious inquisition: “Are you a Muslim? Do you pray? Do you read the Quran? Did your father pray?” Those born Muslim who identified as non-believers were condemned as apostates. Women in this category were ordered to be whipped five times daily until they agreed to pray.15

One woman endured 550 lashes over 22 days. Her death was officially classified as “suicide” — because “she had made the decision not to pray.”16

Executions were carried out by mass hangings from cranes — groups of six every thirty minutes. Bodies were placed in plastic bags, loaded into refrigerated trucks, and buried in mass graves at Khavaran cemetery in southeast Tehran. Scholarly consensus places the toll at 4,000 to 5,000.17

Pourmohammadi declared publicly in 2016: “We are proud to have implemented God’s order.”

In 2021, Hamid Nouri — an assistant prosecutor at Gohardasht Prison during the massacre — was convicted of war crimes by a Stockholm District Court. Dozens of survivors testified. In June 2024, Sweden pardoned him in a prisoner exchange. He received a hero’s welcome in Tehran. Amnesty International called it “a stunning blow to justice.”18

The Mothers of Khavaran — families of the dead — have gathered for decades to lay flowers on unmarked graves. They have been repeatedly arrested, their flowers trampled, their photographs destroyed. In 2008-2009 and again in 2022, the regime bulldozed sections of the cemetery. In August 2025, they demolished Section 41 of Behesht Zahra — an estimated 9,500 graves — and converted it to a parking lot.19

Many of the prisoners executed in 1988 were survivors of the 1970s guerrilla movements — people who had already spent a decade or more in prison. One survivor later told an interviewer: “Four months under Lajevardi took the toll of four years under SAVAK.”20

This article is part of Everyone Thought They Were Using Khomeini. For the merchants who funded the revolution, see The Bazaar’s Bill. For the guerrillas SAVAK destroyed, see Cigarette-Paper Manuscripts.

Footnotes

  1. Tabari from Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions; death in prison on April 29, 1989 from multiple confirmed sources. ↩

  2. Fedayin post-revolution strength from party records and Abrahamian; “two cadres in Tehran” from Fedayin leadership testimony. ↩

  3. Fedayin split from Abrahamian and multiple scholarly analyses; Negahdar’s position from Fedayin publications. ↩

  4. Ulianovskii’s theory from Wilson Center documents and CPSU archives. ↩

  5. Tudeh support for regime actions documented in Abrahamian, Radical Islam; Cultural Revolution support documented in party publications. ↩

  6. Afzali from execution records and scholarly analyses of Tudeh military penetration. ↩

  7. Fedayin Majority destruction and Negahdar’s exile from multiple sources. ↩

  8. Fedayin Minority fate from multiple scholarly accounts. ↩

  9. Kuzichkin defection from intelligence analysis and MI6 records. ↩

  10. Tower Commission confirmation documented in official report. ↩

  11. Authorization chain from scholarly analysis of British intelligence policy. ↩

  12. Tudeh arrests, trial, and executions from Abrahamian and court records; 18 Soviet diplomats from diplomatic records. ↩

  13. Montazeri’s 2016 audio recording revealing premeditation; fatwa context from Amnesty International, “Blood-Soaked Secrets” (2018). ↩

  14. Death commission composition from Amnesty International and Stockholm District Court proceedings. ↩

  15. Interrogation protocols from survivor testimony at Hamid Nouri trial, Stockholm District Court. ↩

  16. 550 lashes documented in Amnesty International reports and survivor testimony. ↩

  17. Execution methods and Khavaran from multiple scholarly and human rights sources; scholarly consensus from Amnesty International and Abrahamian. ↩

  18. Nouri trial and conviction from Stockholm District Court; Pourmohammadi’s 2016 statement from public records; Amnesty International quote on Swedish pardon. ↩

  19. Mothers of Khavaran from human rights documentation; cemetery demolitions from contemporary news reports. ↩

  20. SAVAK comparison from prison survivor testimony documented in Abrahamian. ↩