Tudeh Party of Iran

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tudeh Party of Iran was founded on the 29th of September 1941, in the immediate wake of a foreign invasion that had just toppled a king. Within a few years it would claim hundreds of thousands of sympathizers, field officers inside the shah's Imperial Guard, and put a colonel in charge of the personal security of both the Iranian ruler and an American vice president. Then came a CIA-assisted coup, mass arrests, televised confessions, and broken arms held up as evidence of torture. How did a Marxist-Leninist party go from near-hegemony over Iranian intellectual life to a state where its general secretary used a UN representative's prison visit to display his badly set broken bones? And how did it survive at all, operating underground into the 21st century? Those questions run through the full arc of the Tudeh story.

• 2. Roots in the Communist Underground

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  Marxism arrived in Iran through the northern provinces, carried along by the rapid growth of industry in the late 19th century. The proximity of those provinces to the Soviet Union and the Caucasus made them the natural center of underground socialist activity. The Communist Party of Iran was formally founded in June 1920 at Bandar-e Anzali, in the province of Gilan, following the first congress of Iranian social democrats. Haydar Khan Amo-oghli, a leader of Iran's Constitutional Revolution, became its national secretary.

  Almost simultaneously, Mirza Kuchik Khan, another major figure in the Constitutional Revolution and leader of the Jangali Movement, established the Socialist Soviet Republic of Gilan with direct Red Army assistance. Both ventures collapsed, driving political activity back underground. When Reza Shah came to the throne in 1925 and established the Pahlavi dynasty, he introduced reforms that curbed the Shia clergy while also tightening authoritarian control. By 1929-30, the surviving Communist Party was organizing strikes in Isfahan textile mills, the Mazandaran railways, and the British-owned oil industry. Around 200 communists were arrested; 38 were locked in Qasr Prison in Tehran. Combined with Stalin's purges, which killed many Iranian communist exiles living in the Soviet Union, these arrests effectively ended the Communist Party as a functioning organization outside Qasr's walls.

• 3. Birth and Early Growth

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  The British-Soviet Allied invasion of 1941-42 ended Reza Shah's reign and sent him into forced exile in South Africa. His son and successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, granted general amnesty to political prisoners, including members of the Marxist "Group of the 53 members." Some of those released, among them Iraj Iskandari, met with a Soviet representative at the residence of Soleiman Eskandari to form what they called Hezb-e Tudeh-ye Iran, meaning the Party of Iranian masses. Soleiman Eskandari became the party's first president.

  At its founding, the party was described internally as "a liberal rather than a radical party," stressing constitutional rights, democracy, and judicial integrity. At Soleiman Eskandari's urging, the early Tudeh even barred women from membership and organized Moharram processions, attempting to appeal to non-secular Iranians. This orientation dissolved within months as the party moved rapidly leftward.

  By early 1945, membership and reach had grown dramatically. Police records later revealed roughly 2,200 hard-core members, around 700 of them in Tehran, alongside tens of thousands of sympathizers in youth and women's organizations and hundreds of thousands more in labor and craft unions. The party's newspaper, Rahbar, ran a circulation of more than 100,000 copies, triple that of the semi-official Ettela'at. British ambassador Reader Bullard called it the only coherent political force in the country. The New York Times estimated the Tudeh and its allies could capture as much as 40% of the vote in a fair election. The celebrated writer Jalal Al-e-Ahmad did not leave the party until around 1948, when he quit to form a socialist splinter group called Third Force, citing Tudeh's nakedly pro-Soviet policies as his reason.

• 4. The Oil Crisis and Mosaddegh

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  In early April 1951, the Tudeh revealed what observers called its "true strength" by launching strikes and riots across Tehran, Isfahan, and the northern cities, protesting low wages, poor housing, and delays in oil nationalization. Police opened fire on demonstrators, and the spectacle of Marxist street power sent panic through parliament. Yet the party's relationship with Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who led the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company that same year, was marked throughout by contradiction and self-inflicted damage.

  A June 1950 article in the party's daily Mardom had already dismissed the oil negotiations as something that would "only result in the consolidation of England's position in our country," insisting the oil question could only be resolved through a Tudeh victory. The party attacked Mosaddegh as an agent of American imperialism, refused to join his National Front coalition, and described his conflict with the shah as merely a dispute between competing factions of a reactionary elite.

  On the 16th of July 1952, Mosaddegh resigned after the shah refused to accept his candidate for War Minister. The Tudeh press continued its attacks even as ordinary rank-and-file members were watching popular support for Mosaddegh fill the streets and reversing. One observer noted that whereas before March 1952, roughly one-third of demonstrators had been Tudeh and two-thirds from the National Front, after March 1952 those proportions had reversed. Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, who would later switch sides to support the shah, sent the pro-Tudeh organizations a public letter thanking them for their contribution to Mosaddegh's victory in the July uprising.

• 5. The 1953 Coup and Its Aftermath

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  The CIA and British intelligence began plotting to remove Mosaddegh in 1953, driven in significant part by fear that "rising internal tensions and continued deterioration might lead to a breakdown of government authority" opening the way for a Tudeh takeover, just as a communist party had replaced Czechoslovakia's democratic government in 1948.

  Tudeh's military arm, the secret TPMO, mapped key military installations, army depots, and command-and-control centers in Tehran in preparation for resisting any coup. On the 15th of August, the first coup attempt was in fact uncovered by Tudeh supporters in the military. Colonel Mohammad Ali Mobasherri, a member of the TPMO's three-man secretariat, was also embedded in the Tehran Military Governor's office at the center of the operation. Major Mehdi Homaouni, serving in the shah's Imperial Guard, discovered the plot and reported it to the party.

  But two days after the foiled first attempt, Tudeh militants undermined Mosaddegh themselves by staging demonstrations demanding that Iran be declared a democratic republic. This challenged the constitutional monarchy. Mosaddegh responded by ordering the military to suppress the demonstrators. The party then demobilized its forces late that same day, leaving itself unavailable to resist the coup that followed the very next morning. On the 19th of August, the CIA and its Iranian partners replaced Mosaddegh with General Fazlollah Zahedi.

  Between 1953 and 1957, Iranian security forces, likely aided by CIA cryptographic knowledge, tracked down 4,121 party members. Historian Ervand Abrahamian noted a striking irony: a Tudeh colonel had been assigned to protect both the shah and Vice President Richard Nixon during a visit to Iran, yet the party had the opportunity to assassinate both men and chose not to act. The arrest and execution of Khosro Roozbeh in 1957-58 marked the end of the systematic crackdown.

• 6. Survival, Suppression, and Confession

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  The Tudeh supported the 1979 Islamic Revolution even as other leftist groups opposed the new clerical order, a position that may have reflected the Soviet Union's own pro-Tehran line at the time. By 1980, the party was working alongside the revolutionary government, and its leadership decided to support the Islamic Republic while others on the left were being suppressed for resisting it.

  The arrangement fell apart in 1982. The government closed the Tudeh newspaper and purged its members from government ministries. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, a KGB officer named Vladimir Kuzichkin defected to British intelligence that same year. MI6 passed his information to the CIA, which then shared it with the Iranian government as part of what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. In February 1983, the party's leaders were arrested and the organization was formally disbanded. Admiral Bahram Afzali, commander of the Iranian navy, was among the officers caught up in the arrests. International media, including UPI, reported that 18 Soviet diplomats were simultaneously expelled from Iran for "blatant interference."

  From the 1st of May 1983 to the 1st of May 1984, nearly all of the Tudeh leadership appeared in televised confessions, individually and then jointly in an October 1983 roundtable, recanting their Marxism and praising Islamic government. On the 1st of May 1984, Ehsan Tabari, described as a man with fifty years of leftist experience, told viewers he had been reading Islamic thinkers in prison and had concluded his entire life's work was "defective, damaging, and totally spurious." The confessions appeared to be extracted by force. Taqi Keymanash and thirteen other members of the central committee died during prison interrogation. Years later, a UN human rights representative, Galindo Pohl, visited Evin Prison and reported that Tudeh General Secretary Noureddin Kianouri displayed a badly set broken arm as evidence of torture. Kianouri later wrote an open letter to the Ayatollah detailing the mistreatment. One report counted 90 Tudeh prisoners killed in just some cell blocks of Evin and Gohar Dasht prisons during the 1988 executions of political prisoners.

• 7. The Party in Exile

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  After 1983, a large portion of Tudeh membership fled into exile. The party survived, though in a form far removed from the mass organization of the 1940s. Its new Central Committee was elected in 1992, and leadership has operated from outside Iran ever since.

  The party continued to take positions on Iranian and international affairs. In 2017, it supported Jean-Luc Melenchon as a leftist force in France, commemorated the Russian Revolution, pledged solidarity with the Venezuelan Communist Party, and condemned what it called the betrayal of ideals by Iranian reformists. That same year it was the only element of the Iranian opposition to condemn Donald Trump's missile attacks on Syria. In 2020, the party criticized the Trump administration's airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani while also attacking the Iranian government for military interventions in Iraq and Lebanon.

  During the 2025-2026 Iranian protests, the party called for continued struggle against what it described as the Islamic Republic's "despotism" and authoritarianism, while warning against U.S. interventionism and any effort to restore the monarchy, specifically citing requests by Reza Pahlavi for foreign intervention. The party, founded in the house of Soleiman Eskandari in 1941, still lists itself as the historical successor of the Communist Party of Persia, whose members once ran strikes in Isfahan textile mills and sat in Qasr Prison waiting for a different Iran.