It is a well-established narrative within the historiography of modern Iran that it was the circle around the Leftist intellectual Taqi Arani which constituted the nucleus of the Marxist Tudeh Party of Iran founded in 1941. This paper seeks to critically engage with this narrative by exploring the links between the Tudeh and members of the so-called “Jahansuz Group”, which came into being one year after the arrest and trial of Arani and his comrades. Shortly after its creation, this Group, which was composed of a number of junior military officers around Mohsen Jahansuz, was tried by Reza Shah’s authorities for an alleged conspiracy against the royal family in 1939. While Jahansuz was executed in early 1940, several of his associates received prison terms.
Although Jahansuz was clearly sympathetic to national socialist Germany and fascist Italy and his group is considered as a radical nationalist one by the existing scholarship, many of his former associates and friends came to join the explicitly anti-fascist Tudeh Party shortly after its foundation. A significant number of them, among them the future members of the party’s executive committee Nur-al-Din Kianuri and Ahmad Qasemi, even managed to emerge as prominent members of the Tudeh leadership. By drawing on memoirs of contemporary witnesses as well as court files regarding the Jahansuz Group which have remained hitherto unused by the academic scholarship, this paper seeks to analyze and explain this surprising connection. Emphasizing the blurriness of the line between “Left” and “Right” in late Reza-Shah Iran, it argues that it was the Tudeh’s convincing modernist appeal which attracted even former sympathizers of nationalist and even fascist ideologies and causes. In several cases, the attractiveness of the party’s ideological orientation was reinforced by personal ties, which this study will uncover by making use of digital tools for the analysis of social networks.
The paper thus seeks to shed light not only on the nature of the modernist opposition to Reza Shah during the last years of his rule and the development of the early Tudeh Party, but also aims to provide valuable material for the study of the internal factional structure of this party, which would come to play a significant role especially following the start of the party leadership’s exile after 1953.
