The left in Iran: illusion and disillusion

Middle Eastern Studies ISSN: 0026-3206 (Print) 1743-7881 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmes20 The left in Iran: illusion and disillusion Stephanie Cronin To cite this article: Stephanie Cronin (2000) The left in Iran: illusion and disillusion, Middle Eastern Studies, 36:3, 231-243, DOI: 10.1080/00263200008701326 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00263200008701326 Published online: 06 Dec 2000. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 98 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fmes20 The Left in Iran: Illusion and Disillusion STEPHANIE CRONIN The Left has never held power in Iran, has never come close to holding power, even for a brief historical moment. Yet its impact on the political and intellectual history of the country has been profound. From the constitutional period, through the oil nationalization crisis, to the Islamic revolution, leftist forces have played a significant and even, as Maziar Behrooz remarks, sometimes a determining role.1 Their influence, in both organizational and ideological terms, on the evolution of Islamist trends, including on Khumayni himself, is clear. The leftist forces in Iran have been, furthermore, historically among the most advanced in the nonEuropean world. At the very beginning of the twentieth century socialdemocratic ideas made rapid headway, first among Iranians in emigration in the Caucasus of the late Russian Empire and then in Iran itself. In 1920 local communists joined with the Jangali movement to produce in Gilan the first declaration of a Soviet republic in the Middle East while, in prerevolutionary 1978, working-class action was decisive, the wave of economic and political strikes which swept the country between June and December of that year constituting a phenomenon rare, if not unique, in the experience of the Middle East. The proximity of Iran to the Soviet Union has always been a crucial component in these developments. Contact with the Russian socialdemocratic milieu provided inspiration during the constitutional years while radicals on the left wing of the constitutional movement, such as the poet Abulqasim Lahuti, received their first education in Marxism from the soldiers' committees set up within the disintegrating Tsarist armies in Iran in 1917. The impetus given to the left in Iran was organizational as well as ideological. It was under the umbrella of Soviet power that the Tudeh made such great strides in the 1940s. Yet for the Iranian left the power of their Soviet neighbour was a double-edged sword. The Tudeh discovered, as communist parties elsewhere had already found to their cost, that it was all too easy for the fraternal solidarity of the CPSU to slip into a menacing quasi-imperial domination and the interests of the Iranian communist movement to become identified with the needs of the Soviet state. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.36, No.3, July 2000, pp.231-243 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON 232 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES The Left in Iran has a history which is long and complex, possessing its full share of drama and tragedy. It is a history which has, furthermore, often been obscured by the language and preoccupations of the Cold War. Only recently, well exemplified by the work of Abrahamian2 and Behrooz reviewed here, has it begun to receive the close and sympathetic scholarly interest necessary for a proper appreciation of its actual historical role. These two books both deal, in their separate and very different ways, with the fate of the Left in Iran and each has, at its heart, the denouement suffered by all the leftist factions in the early years of the Islamic Republic. Maziar Behrooz's study is a straightforward political history of the theory and practice of the manifold parties, groups, grouplets, factions and personalities which made up the Marxist-Leninist or communist Left in Iran in the 30 years between 1953 and 1983, and addresses itself explicitly to attempting to offer reasons for this trend's comprehensive failure to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the revolutionary upheavals of 1979 and its subsequent defeat by the new Islamic republican authorities. Ervand Abrahamian is also concerned with the defeat of the Iranian Left in the early 1980s, but approaches the subject from a different perspective. Rather than focusing on the internal weaknesses of the Iranian Left itself, he concentrates on the methods of repression employed by the regime, and places the capitulation of much of the movement's leadership as well as its rank and file in the context of the new and quintessentially modern ideological and political needs of the Islamic Republic. Furthermore, by exploring through the prism of prison experiences the evolving forms of state violence in Iran throughout the twentieth century, under the successive regimes of Reza Shah, Muhammad Reza Shah, and finally the Islamic Republic, Abrahamian casts a searchlight on the very nature of modernity itself in Iran. Maziar Behrooz's account of the vicissitudes of the Iranian Left in the years between its failure to prevent the coup of 1953 and its final suppression by the Islamic Republic in 1983 is balanced and critical and based on the most careful research and analysis. Charting a course through the tangled and occasionally arcane internal disputes of those years is in itself no easy matter and Behrooz himself comments on the difficulties of following the arguments contained in the literature. Picking his way through a minefield of polemic, Behrooz has managed to construct an account which seems faithful and fair. Although he has successfully avoided the temptations of partisanship, partisan distortion being only too painfully evident in much of the Persian literature which the Left has produced and on which his work is based, nonetheless Behrooz approaches his subject in an engaged and sympathetic spirit, indeed the book is dedicated to the memory of Bizhan Jazani, one of the founders of the Fadaiyan guerrillas. THE LEFT IN IRAN 233 Yet he makes no attempt to gloss over some of the Left's more negative features. Indeed, between his rather dry tone and his unflinching critique, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the personal idealism which motivated most leftist activity in Iran. Whatever the personal inadequacies and political mistakes of individuals and even entire organizations, and he catalogues many, it remains emphatically the case that no one ever became a communist in Iran out of a desire for self-advancement. A sober dissection of the programmatic weaknesses and leadership deficiencies of, for example, the Tudeh, can never explain and certainly does not negate the hardships endured and sacrifices made by many of its supporters and even by the disgraced leadership itself. The party was, after all, capable of inspiring genuinely, and not merely rhetorically, heroic activity. Abrahamian recounts, for example, the story of the seven military officers imprisoned in 1954 after the discovery of the Tudeh military network. These seven became hold-outs, refusing to sign the conventional letters of regret which would have obtained them their freedom, and remained in prison until the revolution, becoming the world's longest serving political prisoners. It is of course this very dimension to leftist activity which gives its ultimate fate its tragic dimension. It is precisely what we know of the steadfastness of such activists in the Muhammad Reza Shah period which makes their ideological capitulation to the Islamic Republic all the more shocking and baffling. In 1983 two of these same officer hold-outs, Reza Sheltouki, an air force officer imprisoned from 1954 to 1978, and Mohammad Ali Amoui, also imprisoned for 24 years, along with other senior members of the Tudeh leadership, including its chairman, Kianuri, made televised confessions to spying and treason. It is one of the major strengths of Abrahamian's book that he attempts to provide a rational and systematic explanation for this and the many other similar episodes which were such a feature of the early years of the Islamic Republic. At the time and since, as he comments, the Tudeh recantations 'generated much heat but little analysis'. Few observers linked them to torture and prison brutality. On the contrary, most took the opportunity to heap further opprobrium on the Tudeh itself, asserting that the confessions proved that the Tudeh were after all spies and so on. For its part, the Tudeh was so devastated by the shows that they resorted to the explanation that the recanters had been brainwashed with mind-altering drugs supplied by MI6, Mossad and the CIA. Abrahamian, however, attributes the extraction of these confessions directly to the methods of interrogation, including torture, employed by the regime. He discusses, in both general and specific terms, the meaning and significance of the reappearance of torture in Iranian prisons, he places the resulting confessions at the centre of the regime's ideological and political project, and also, through a close analysis of the texts of the confessions, 234 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES attempts to reveal something about the psychological processes at work as far as the victims themselves were concerned. Abrahamian describes the Tudeh leaders' appearances on television, beginning in May 1983, and their profuse confessions to having committed 'treason', 'subversion' and miscellaneous 'horrendous crimes'. 'Negating their whole lives, they recanted their beliefs, their party, their colleagues, and their own pasts.' But Abrahamian then goes on to look closely at what the recanters' words actually amounted to. In a survey of the last 100 years of Iran's history, Kianuri, the Tudeh chairman, and Behazin, the president of the Writers' Association, gave an account of the party's supposed crimes that was 'long on generalities but short on specifics'. Eight more Tudeh leaders, in subsequent television appearances, made equally ambiguous statements. A televised roundtable discussion by 17 Tudeh leaders reads, according to Abrahamian, like a parody of public recantations, the discussion being opened by the veteran Amoui, who sought forgiveness and admitted that the discussions had proved that the Tudeh had links with the Soviets. Other speakers made similarly earth-shattering admissions such as the statement that the Tudeh advocated Marxism, that it had failed to forestall the 1953 coup, that members of the party had communicated with the Soviets and had consistently supported the Soviet Union. At first glance, Abrahamian concludes, the recanters appear to be acknowledging their guilt. 'Closer scrutiny, however, reveals ambiguities, hidden meaning and double entendres ... In general, all the confessions were big on mea culpa but small on incriminating facts.' To explain this phenomenon, Abrahamian draws explicit parallels with the Moscow show-trials of the 1930s, in which similar sorts of highly committed individuals made similar confessions, with similar ambiguities, under similar sorts of pressures. In fact Kianuri himself later made a cryptic allusion to his own experience when, in extensive interviews in the newspapers Kayhan and Jumhuri-yi Islam, he criticized Stalin for having used 'medieval inquisitional methods to extract false confessions'. Of course, and as Abrahamian makes quite clear, the recanters were through their confessions making an attempt to save themselves and sometimes also their families. Although the confessions were spurious and they tried to defend themselves from the psychological and emotional consequences of public recantation by inserting ambiguous subtexts, nonetheless the trauma was enormous and all those forced to recant on national television were invariably put on around-the-clock suicide watch. Perhaps, too, like the old Bolsheviks of the 1930s' Soviet Union, they had been psychologically weakened by the bitter experience of the failure of all the hopes awakened by the revolutionary upheavals for which they had waited most of their lives. This, then, is this context within which we must THE LEFT IN IRAN 235 read Behrooz's judgement that in 1983, when the Tudeh leadership was paraded on television to confess to its crimes, its 'performance proved even worse than the post-1953 period'. As Abrahamian makes clear, public recantation occupied a key role in the Islamic Republic's search for legitimacy. In this respect it showed itself to be truly up to date, both in its concern with the ideological dimension of political conflict and in its methods, specifically its use of modern technology, especially videotape. According to Abrahamian, these recantations functioned as grand theatre, staged by the authorities as positive propaganda for themselves and as negative propaganda against their real and imagined enemies. They were 'intended to destroy as well as to win over hearts and minds'. The Islamic Republic, furthermore, possessed a weapon of an effectiveness undreamt of by earlier regimes, the introduction of television to a mass audience. In his examination of the gradual but steadily growing importance of ideological conformity in Iran, Abrahamian reveals much about the differences between the different regimes in power in Iran during the twentieth century. Although, under Reza Shah, a few minor figures were released from prison once they had pledged in writing to stay out of politics, their pledges were never published. That regime had no desire or need to wage propaganda battles with its opponents. On the contrary. According to Ovanessian, a member of the Iranian Communist Party who spent most of the period of Reza Shah's rule in jail, the government of the time was reluctant even to acknowledge the existence of politically committed citizens. A change in this attitude begins to be apparent under Muhammad Reza Shah in the 1950s when Tudeh prisoners could obtain amnesties by short announcements known as letters of regret, expressing loyalty to the shah, promising to abstain from politics, or declaring their repugnance at the Tudeh party. But it was only at the beginning of the nineteen seventies that the shah's regime, as part of its attempt to win over the intelligentsia and drum up support for the White Revolution, hit upon the strategy of televised public recantations, and Savak began to torture, not just to get information but in order to obtain such recantations. Abrahamian concludes that without the international scrutiny and pressure to which the regime was subject from 1975-76, 'public recantations may well have blossomed into a full industry in the 1970s under the Shah - long before they did so in the 1980s under the Islamic Republic'. An examination of the issue of torture occupies a central role in Abrahamian's work. He both details the methods employed and tries to find general explanations for the reversion to such methods. He observes that the return of torture in Iran runs counter to Foucault's paradigm that societies inevitably replace physical with non-physical punishments as they move 236 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES from traditional to modern discourses. He insists that the use of torture was integral to the ability of the regimes of both the last shah and of the Islamic republic to obtain the recantations that were so necessary to them. In this way he explains the apparent paradox that torture made its reappearance in Iran under the 'modernizing' Pahlavi monarchy, having been banned from the judicial process in the early 1920s. The use of torture, furthermore, flourished under the Islamic Republic for the same reason, and had nothing to do with any generalized medievalism. The re-emergence of torture had, he concludes, little to do with tradition or modernity but everything to do with ideological warfare, political mobilization and winning hearts and minds. Maziar Behrooz, by contrast, in attempting to explain the defeat suffered by the Iranian left in the 1980s, largely focuses on factors internal to the Left in its Iranian context. In a final chapter he explicitly attempts to draw out the lessons of the historical experience which he has so painstakingly reconstructed in the foregoing sections of his book. He identifies as the single most important general factor in the defeat of the Left the relentless repression of the state. However this is not the focus of his interest and, unlike Abrahamian, he devotes only brief, indeed perfunctory, attention to this point, noting that in the 1953-79 period the imperial regime threw the bulk of its weight against the Left but tolerated religious activities, allowing Islam to fill the vacuum of legitimacy rapidly emerging in the 1970s. Of much greater concern to Behrooz is an analysis of the Left itself. His book is, after all, subtitled not the defeat but the failure of the Left in Iran. Dealing with the post-revolutionary period, he locates one of the principal weaknesses of the Left, and one which contributed significantly to its demise, in its inability to comprehend ideologically and politically the nature of the Islamist leadership and of the new revolutionary state. Most decisively the Marxists were 'utterly out-manoeuvred' by the Islamists on the two central issues of radicalism and anti-imperialism. 'When the revolution was successful, the Marxists were at first puzzled and then totally confused as to the nature of the IRI'. As a result a profound split took place in the forces of the Left. To some, the Tudeh and the Fadaiyan majority, the anti-imperialism of the new regime was of paramount importance, and they co-operated with its radical wing against the Islamic Liberals, even demanding a strengthening of institutions under the former's control, for example calling for the IRI to arm the Revolutionary Guards with heavier weapons with which to defend the revolution. To other elements on the Left, for example the Fadaiyan minority and the Paykar, a small Maoist group, the lack of economic change was decisive. For these tendencies, regardless of the IRI's apparent hostility to the West it remained dominated by various sectors of the bourgeoisie and was a dependent capitalist state, the THE LEFT IN IRAN 237 revolutionary process was incomplete and the most urgent task was to ensure its completion by replacing the IRI with an alliance of revolutionary workers and peasants. This theoretical chaos and the resulting divisions and rapid polarization of the left into diametrically opposed camps had disastrous consequences. After the Mujahidin uprising in June 1981, the Tudeh and the Fadaiyan majority, unaware that their own turn was soon to come, participated in the repression of those leftists opposed to the IRI. However, the Iranian Left was hardly alone in its inability to grasp accurately and immediately the essential character of the IRI. Leftists in Iran were guilty only of sharing the almost universal bafflement at the phenomenon of the Islamic Republic. Indeed the Left internationally was as confused as the Iranian Left itself about how to respond to the IRI, given the latter's many peculiar, not to say unique, features. The temptation to allow euphoria at the sudden overthrow of the shah by a genuinely popular movement to overshadow a cool assessment of the nature of the new regime was not resisted very strongly in many leftist quarters, and not just in Iran. Indeed, although Behrooz confines his discussion of the Left entirely to its Iranian context, what emerges most strikingly from his account is the extent to which the Iranian Left was a product of a particular historical period, its key features often determined as much by the international as by the national environment. The Iranian left clearly shared in, and suffered from, developments taking place elsewhere in the international communist movement, both in the non-European world and in Europe, during the 1960s and 1970s. One such development, with almost entirely negative consequences for Iran, was a vogue for Maoism. In the 1960s certain elements on the Iranian left followed a pattern by now well established. After the SinoSoviet dispute and the rupture within world communism a Maoist group emerged out of a split from the Tudeh, just as similar pro-Chinese groups had split from official communist parties elsewhere around the world. Drawing inspiration from the successes in Vietnam, Cuba and China, and appealing especially to those disenchanted both with the Tudeh itself and with the record of the Soviet Union in general, the Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party of Iran (ROTPI) drew up a blueprint for Iran based on the Chinese experience and came to the bizarre conclusion that to fight the imperial regime a vanguard communist organization must work among the peasants, create a people's army and surround the urban areas from rural bases. As Behrooz points out, this model was totally inappropriate for Iran which possessed neither a radicalized peasantry nor a disorganized and weak central state, and the ROTPI's activities among the rural masses in Iran quickly descended into farce and ended in disaster. The ROTPI, like its Maoist counterparts elsewhere, was 'a staunch Stalinist group with a dogmatic belief in Maoism and the Chinese 238 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES experience, and it naturally adopted the conventional language and terminology, calling the Tudeh a revisionist party and the Soviet Union a social imperialist state in which capitalism had been restored. Behrooz identifies the continued adherence to Stalinism of most Marxist groups in Iran as one of their most serious defects, rendering them unable to develop an adequate approach to social issues, most notably the issue of women, and producing a disastrous impact on internal organizational practices, particularly the management of debate and dissent. While the Tudeh resolved party differences by silencing or purging ideological opponents, groups such as the Fedaiyan and the Marxist Mujahidin resorted to actual physical elimination. Behrooz devotes a considerable amount of space to the experiences of the guerrilla movement in Iran, active between 1971 and the revolution, when the stalemate which had developed between the guerrillas and the imperial regime was swept aside by a mass movement led by Islamists. Although Behrooz acknowledges the impact of the guerrilla groups during the 1970s, as they showed that the regime was not invincible and created 'a culture of resistance to the dictatorship', nonetheless he emphasizes that the absence of any theoretical grasp of the actual situation or any real political strategy for overthrowing the regime was a devastating weakness. Again, although Behrooz discusses the guerrilla movement exclusively in its Iranian context, his account has powerful echoes of the turn to armed struggle elsewhere around the world. The youth of the Iranian guerrillas, their relatively high level of education, their frustration with the apparently futile and discredited policies of the older generation, their harsh criticisms of orthodox communist parties, their general impatience, all recall the emergence of armed groups in Europe, for example in Germany and Italy, and in the Third World, especially in Latin America, after the disappointments and retreat following the peak of radical activity in the late 1960s. Of particular significance for such elements everywhere was the iconization of the Palestinian commando, a feature of their Weltanschauungen which was also clearly visible in Iran. For most of the period with which Behrooz deals, the Iranian left was impotent, existing at all only in exile or in deepest clandestinity. He devotes much painstaking detail to charting the course of relations between tiny groups, minuscule factions within the tiny groups, and between individuals, as these were expressed in doctrinal disputes, organizational splits and fusions, and personal, and sometimes violent, quarrels. Behrooz's work reflects the preoccupation of the left with its own internal conflicts, even after the launching of the guerrilla struggle in 1971, detailing doctrinal disputes which now seem arcane, arid and dogmatic. The more one tries to follow these disputes, the more impoverished they seem, and the emptier of THE LEFT IN IRAN 239 any real strategy, with the adoption of armed struggle seemingly filling an emotional/psychological need as much as implementing a political agenda. This was ultra-leftism of a classical kind, the impatience and short-termism of the very young activists compounded by the complete discrediting of an older generation whose experience and maturity might have helped to anchor them in reality. There were attempts to rationalize the need for action. Amir Parviz Puyan developed the theory of two opposites, according to which the overwhelming power of the state on the one hand, and the total lack of working-class political organization, on the other, had created a situation in which absolute strength met absolute weakness. Puyan concluded, with little logic and less evidence, that armed struggle would shatter this atmosphere and lead to the establishment of a revolutionary vanguard and victory. This thinking has little relation to classical Marxism, let alone its Leninist derivative, but recalls rather the desperate Blanquism and the 'propaganda by deed' which was such a feature of nineteenthcentury European radicalism prior to the rise of organized labour, and which so irritated Marx himself. It is also possible, from Behrooz's account, to detect parallels between the history of the Tudeh and the experiences of other orthodox communist parties in different parts of the world. Certainly such 'old left' organizations underwent a decline everywhere, rapidly losing their appeal for the younger and more radically inclined as their increasing reformism distanced them from the activism of the far Left. However in Europe official communist parties were able to rely on their established and solid role in trade unions to provide them with a continuing raison d'etre and a social base. In Iran by 1979, although the working class had grown tremendously, any tradition of independent trade unionism had long since been eradicated. On the contrary, the workers' councils which developed spontaneously in the revolutionary period were characterized by the absence of any political presence. In 1978-79 the Tudeh had virtually no implantation in the Iranian working class, had, in fact, under the impact of Muhammad Reza Shah's dictatorship, effectively ceased to exist inside Iran. Furthermore, it proved itself unable to utilize the immediate post-revolutionary opportunities to organize on a mass scale. Not only this, but Behrooz describes a situation which becomes even bleaker as the new state consolidates, the Tudeh establishing a miserable record of appeasing the new authorities. In March 1981, for example, the Tudeh supported the revolutionary prosecutorgeneral's rules setting out which parties could be active in the IRI and forbidding parties from inciting strikes, justifying this stand on the grounds that strikes and other activities were anti-revolutionary and could only help American interests in Iran. 'This policy neutralised efforts to gain workingclass support, since the Tudeh was appeasing the state at a time when the 240 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES working-class was confronting it.' By 1981, even according to its own assessment, the party had failed to improve its support among the working class. In this it again followed a path beaten by many of its fraternal organizations. By this time, across the world, in Europe and beyond, orthodox communist parties had established a well-deserved reputation for attempting to collaborate with any authority that would recognize them, and being willing on that account to curb and restrain any mass revolutionary activity. The abject position of the Tudeh by the early eighties contrasts starkly with its achievements in the relatively favourable conditions of the post1941 period. By 1951 'the Tudeh had become an experienced mass party ... based in urban areas and especially strong among the working class ... The party played a leadership role in the major trade union organization, the Central Council of the United Trade Unions of Iranian Workers and Toilers ... which had unionized some 75% of the industrial labour force.' However unpalatable, it is nonetheless unavoidably clear that the Tudeh's spectacular success in its early years owed much to Soviet protection and its ability to flourish unhampered under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation. In general Behrooz draws a harsh balance sheet concerning the consequences of the relationship between the Tudeh and both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state. Yet although this relationship undeniably had many negative features, the Tudeh also derived substantial sustenance from this source. Behrooz, assessing the impact of the Tudeh's Soviet link from the point of view of its impact on nationalist opinion, describes this relationship as the factor most detrimental to the party. Yet this judgement neglects any acknowledgement of the role of the Soviet Union in providing the environment within which the Tudeh could undergo the massive expansion of the years 1941-46 while its very survival, both organizationally and even physically, after the shah's crackdown after 1953 was largely due to its leadership finding sanctuary in the Soviet Union and the GDR. Behrooz emphasizes that the Tudeh disintegrated before the fall of the Soviet Union. Although the manner of its demise was specific to Iranian circumstances, in its timing it was perhaps not so different to orthodox communist parties elsewhere. Although the official pro-Soviet communist party structures survived a few years more in Europe, this trend had largely been emptied of any real political content, having been superseded by the activist far left, and, especially after the advent of Eurocommunism, having largely lost its identity. With the exception of the Tudeh in the years 1941-53, all the Iranian Marxist groups failed to make any real inroads into the working class. Not only did the various leftist groups never establish any real ties to the Iranian working class but the majority of the membership of Marxist organizations THE LEFT IN IRAN 241 were not themselves working class by origin. Here, again, they showed a remarkable resemblance to the experience of far leftist groups elsewhere, all of whom, like their Iranian counterparts, paid homage to the centrality of the working class as the agent of historical change, yet themselves remained marginal to that class. The differing timbres of the two books under review may partly be explained by the differing sources on which they draw. While Behrooz has assembled a huge array of policy documents produced by the Left, Abrahamian has utilized a quite different type of material, the prison memoir. As he comments, modern Iran has, like Europe, a rich genre of prison literature. A trickle of memoirs published in the 1940s became a flood after 1979. Abrahamian has used these accounts to shed light not just on the politics of the successive phases of Iran's modern history, but also, at a profound level, to analyse the social history of the country and the very experience of modernity itself. He has shown how these memoirs can yield 'a wealth of information on prison life. They - especially those written by women - throw light on daily life: on the relationships between classes, ethnic groups, young and old, rival political organizations, leaders and followers, sympathizers and true believers, Muslim and non-Muslim'. For Abrahamian the prison itself stands as a symbol and metaphor for Iran. He uses the changes in the penal system to illustrate vividly the general transformation from traditional to modern under Reza Shah. As physical punishments were replaced by terms of incarceration in the 1920s, several new modern prisons were built. The most famous of these was Qasr, 'a symbol of both the new Pahlavi state and the modern judicial system'. According to Abrahamian, prison memoirs from this period document many hardships but few actual instances of brutality, with a conspicuous absence of any systematic use of torture. The main concern of the political prisoners was boredom and lack of privacy, although in the 1930s the monotony was occasionally broken by the sudden appearance of fallen dignitaries. Conditions could be further ameliorated by the use of bribery and family connections. Nasratallah Jahanshahlu, one of the Fifty-Three, recorded that the jailers were helpful because they were 'decent folk' in dire need of extra cash, while Anvar Khamehei described how class privileges were recognized even inside Qasr, with separate cell-blocks for dignitaries, for bourgeois and for proletarian prisoners. After the modernization of society inaugurated by the White Revolution, the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah turned its attention to modernizing the prisons. Maximum security prisons modelled on those of the United States were built in many parts of the country, most notoriously at Evin, on the north-western outskirts of Tehran. According to the testimony of those with experience, conditions in Evin were much harsher compared to the prisons 242 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES of the past. Evin was, furthermore, under Savak supervision, its guards, all military personnel, changed every month to prevent any fraternization. A particularly significant difference from the Reza Shah period was that class privileges had become less apparent as modern egalitarianism had crept in. Prisoners, irrespective of income and social background, were put in the same cells and now members of the elite rarely found themselves in prison, which ceased to contain 'aristocratic wards'. Abrahamian points to another contrast with the Reza Shah period. Few of the new generation of political prisoners, arrested after the launch of the armed struggle in 1971, enjoyed any family ties to the ruling elite and the social connections that had protected previous dissidents had evaporated. Not surprisingly, he observes, torture increased dramatically from that point on, in scope, intensity, variety and sophistication. Under the Islamic Republic prison life took another drastic turn for the worse. The boredom of the Reza Shah period was replaced by terror. The harsh conditions were aggravated by the social gap between the political prisoners and the authorities and the revolutionary guards, many of them former political prisoners, were too committed to be malleable or bribable. 'Modernity had worsened prison conditions in more ways than one.' What is clear from Behrooz's work is that the 1979 revolution presented Iranian leftists with an extraordinary number of dilemmas for which nothing in their experience had prepared them. In the course of his discussion of the reasons for its failure, Behrooz contrasts the history of the Iranian Left with victories elsewhere. He describes how other communist movements, notably in China and Vietnam, also accepted Stalinism yet succeeded in taking power, supposedly because they were better able to adapt to the realities of their society. Yet in their failure the Iranian Marxists may in fact be more typical of the experience of the left in the twentieth century than the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Were the Iranian experience to be measured, not against successes in vastly different circumstances but against other defeats suffered by far stronger leftist movements, for example in Chile in 1973, the balance sheet would perhaps look slightly different. Indeed Behrooz, in his case study of Iran, has provided us with an almost textbook account of the weaknesses and failures of the Left internationally in the twentieth century. Behrooz furthermore pays little or no attention to the regional and international context although clearly the Iranian left suffered from spectacularly unfavourable circumstances. The outbreak of the war with Iraq aggravated tensions inside Iran and contributed to a climate in which internal repression was more likely while the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan also heightened fears and further discredited the pro-Soviet left. THE LEFT IN IRAN 243 Although the Iranian Left suffered an historic defeat in the early 1980s, the meaning of failure in this context is therefore less clear. There was certainly a failure to establish a socialist state in Iran, but the inability of the Iranian Left to do what better organized, larger, stronger, more sophisticated and freer leftist movements elsewhere could not is hardly surprising. Indeed as any sort of objective this would have been Utopian in the extreme. More telling perhaps is the Iranian Left's failure to defend the freedoms of the post-revolutionary period, so essential to the political development of the Iranian working class and to its own political and, in the end, even physical survival. Whether this lesson has been learnt, and whether the Iranian Left can begin to operate more effectively within the context of the Khatami reforms, remains to be seen. Abrahamian and Behrooz have produced accounts of the history of the Left in Iran which are very different - in approach, analysis, emphasis and tone, but each is profoundly important, not just for the light they shed on the experience of a particular political current, but for understanding the general development of modern Iran and the character of the Islamic Republic. Both are well and carefully written, Abrahamian's work in particular having a passionate quality which makes especially the final chapters both moving and disturbing. Both stand as epitaphs for a generation although not for the Left as a trend which, far from extinct, is now actively reinventing itself within the margins allowed to it by the current liberalization. NOTES 1. 2. Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran by Ervand Abrahamian. University of California Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 279. $45.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran by Maziar Behrooz. London. I.B. Tauris, 1999. Pp. xv + 239. £39.50 (cloth).