Some political alliances defy logic. They emerge from desperation, shared enemies, and the seductive illusion that today’s tactical partner won’t become tomorrow’s executioner. The relationship between certain leftist factions and Islamist movements in Iran stands as one of history’s most cautionary tales about misplaced trust.
The phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has guided countless revolutions, wars, and political movements. Yet this ancient logic carries a fatal flaw. It assumes that shared opposition creates shared values. In Iran during the late 1970s, leftist groups discovered too late that overthrowing a common enemy does not guarantee a common future.
Revolutionary Partners, Incompatible Visions
The Iranian Revolution brought together people who should never have trusted each other. Marxist intellectuals, Islamic clerics, students, merchants, and workers all wanted the Shah gone. They marched together. They risked their lives together. But they imagined radically different societies emerging from the ashes of the monarchy.
Many leftist organizations, including the Tudeh Party and the Mujahedin-e Khalq, initially supported Ayatollah Khomeini because he opposed the Shah’s regime with uncompromising ferocity. His anti-imperialist rhetoric resonated with leftists who viewed Western intervention, especially American influence, as the root of Iran’s suffering. This wasn’t naivety. It was strategic calculation born from decades of Cold War politics where communist movements worldwide partnered with anti-imperialist forces in developing nations.
The Tudeh Party had deep roots in Iranian politics, founded in 1941 during a moment of political opening. After the 1946 Iran crisis, it became unmistakably aligned with Soviet interests, often prioritizing Moscow’s agenda over Iranian sovereignty. This foreign allegiance would later prove catastrophic for its credibility among ordinary Iranians who wanted liberation, not a new master .
The Mujahedin-e Khalq followed a different path but arrived at a similar destination. Born as an Islamist organization, it blended revolutionary Marxism with Shia Islam, drawing inspiration from Ali Shariati’s writings that tried to reconcile faith with radical politics . By spring 1975, a key leader named Taqi Shahram pushed the group sharply toward Marxism, purging members who clung to its Islamist origins . When Majid Sharif-Vaghefi resisted this ideological shift, Shahram orchestrated his murder. His body was burned and abandoned outside the city, a grim preview of the violence that would consume the revolution .
The Shah, Oil, and American Power
To understand why leftists and Islamists united against the Shah, you must understand how Mohammad Reza Pahlavi came to embody foreign domination. His power didn’t rest on popular legitimacy. It rested on Western intervention .
In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated Operation Ajax, a coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh . Mosaddegh’s crime was nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, threatening Western petroleum interests and raising Cold War fears about communist influence . The coup installed the Shah as a compliant monarch who would rule for 26 years with American backing .
Washington poured resources into the Shah’s regime. Economic aid flowed. Military hardware arrived. The CIA trained SAVAK, his feared secret police, in surveillance and interrogation techniques . By 1972, President Nixon gave the Shah nearly unrestricted access to advanced American weaponry, excluding only nuclear arms, turning Iran into a regional military powerhouse that protected Western interests . When oil prices surged in 1973, Iran’s newfound wealth funded massive arms purchases .
American policy became so dependent on the Shah that questioning the relationship became taboo within the U.S. government . This institutional blindness prevented Washington from recognizing the growing discontent simmering beneath the surface of Iranian society . The Green Belt Theory, a Cold War strategy promoting Islamic states around the Soviet Union’s southern border, further entrenched this partnership . Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, championed this approach . Ironically, American support for the Shah would fuel the very anti-American revolution that Brzezinski’s strategy hoped to prevent .
The Revolution Devours Its Children
When Khomeini denounced the United States as the “Great Satan” and Europe as the “Little Satan,” leftists heard anti-imperialist resistance. They interpreted his religious language through their ideological lens, seeing tactical alignment rather than theological conviction. Marxist and religious factions protested side by side, united in their determination to topple the Shah despite their profound differences. Leftists believed Khomeini was a temporary figurehead, a religious leader they could sideline once the revolution succeeded and socialism took root.
This calculation proved catastrophically wrong. Within a year of the Shah’s departure, political freedoms began evaporating as Khomeini consolidated power under an Islamic state. The provisional government led by Mehdi Bazargan collapsed on November 5, 1979, after Khomeini’s followers seized the U.S. embassy, triggering the hostage crisis that would destroy President Carter’s reelection hopes.
Khomeini moved swiftly against his former allies. Leftist groups found themselves marginalized, then persecuted, then destroyed. The Tudeh Party, already weakened by its Soviet ties and perception as a foreign instrument, struggled to maintain public support as the revolutionary government turned hostile . Banned in 1982, the party faced brutal purges, with thousands of members killed or tortured.
The Mujahedin-e Khalq suffered even worse. Between June 1981 and April 1982, approximately 3,500 members were killed by the Revolutionary Guard in systematic campaigns. Taqi Shahram, the leader who had once purged Islamists from the organization, was arrested in 1980 and executed for “uprising against Muslim combatants” . The revolution had consumed him.
Poetry, Politics, and Death
Not everyone in the leftist coalition was a hardened militant. Some were artists, poets, and intellectuals who believed revolution could create a more just society. Saeed Soltanpour was one of them .
A leftist poet and playwright, Soltanpour initially supported the revolution with genuine enthusiasm . As a member of the Marxist Fedai Guerrillas, he used street theater to critique social inequities, drawing thousands to performances that blended art and activism . His poetry spoke of dignity, justice, and human suffering .
Security forces arrested him during his wedding . They demanded he recant his beliefs. He refused. They killed him in 1981 . His works were later banned, erased from official memory as if his voice had never existed .
The Bloodiest Decade
The 1980s became Iran’s darkest modern chapter. The war with Iraq raged from 1980 to 1988, consuming hundreds of thousands of lives. But domestic repression killed with equal brutality.
In 1988, Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the execution of political prisoners who refused to renounce their beliefs. “Death Commissions” interrogated inmates, asking questions designed to identify the unrepentant . Those who maintained their convictions were executed. Estimates of the dead range from 2,800 to 30,000, mostly members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq and leftist groups.
Bodies were dumped in mass graves. Families received no notification, no remains, no closure . The scale of this massacre remained partially hidden until 2016, when audio recordings of Ayatollah Montazeri leaked, exposing what he called “the greatest crime” of the Islamic Republic. The recordings implicated figures like Ebrahim Raisi, who would later become president.
The Enduring Puzzle
History’s lessons often go unlearned. Despite this bloody record, some leftist factions today still embrace Islamist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, framing them as anti-imperialist allies in struggles against Western power.
This raises uncomfortable questions worth sitting with rather than dismissing. How do advocates of secularism reconcile with movements that impose religious law? How do champions of gender equality partner with organizations that enforce rigid gender hierarchies? How do critics of authoritarian violence ally with groups that use violence to achieve ideological conformity?
Perhaps the answer lies in examining our own capacity for self-deception when confronting power we oppose. The leftists who supported Khomeini weren’t fools. They were people making calculated choices in desperate circumstances, believing they could control forces they fundamentally misunderstood. They prioritized defeating an immediate enemy over anticipating the nature of what would replace it.
This pattern repeats because human beings struggle to hold complexity. We simplify. We categorize. We seek allies against threats without fully reckoning with what those allies represent. The Iranian Revolution asks us to resist these shortcuts, to examine not just who we oppose but who we support and why.
The ghosts of Saeed Soltanpour, Taqi Shahram, and thousands of others executed by the regime they helped create deserve that introspection. Their tragedy wasn’t inevitable. It emerged from choices, compromises, and the fatal belief that shared enemies create shared values. Understanding this doesn’t require condemning everyone who made those choices. It requires recognizing the pattern so we might, perhaps, avoid repeating it.
On this shore of fear
No
I will reach
Heights of madness and fury
No
To the farthest blood-red star
I will soar and scale peaks of revulsion.
I will plunge down
Heights of fortitude
Into deepest stretches of the dark-
stained marsh
And there I will rest
Like a water-lily anticipating my
lover’s anger
Shedding from my laurels the pollen of
mutiny
Upon the dead water.
Consider the plain:
Menacing waters
Feeding on our love-drenched blood.
Black are the sails
Burnt out crucifixes for these graves of
the sea.
Observe the martyrs riding westward
Hear the soreness of their blood-torn
voices
Remember in the confusion
The fishers’ seasoned nets
Catching corpses
From these muddy waters.
In the fallow ground of this silence
On this shore of fear
Upon this plain of blood roses and iron
stalks
I will not stay silent.
I chose defiance
The way of those poets of the past
The way of Eshghi, the way of
Farrokhi.*
So hear my voice
As it sings in the slaughter-house.
Another colour covers my hoarsened
voice:
Rage red ferocity of an eagle
Beating its wings at twilight on the
heights.
The molten spikes of his cries
Circle and soar high over the lines
Where the future and the revolution
meet.
The waves will bring me a boat
And on the sea I will remain
Sailing across to death.
But the seeds will be there
Seeds of the ever-green flower
Seeds of my being
Planted somewhere on the road
Somewhere by the house where our
people live
In the feverish garden of the tulips.
After the dry spring of a defeated
nation
Sow the field with mingled seeds
Hide them by the furnace
Scatter them on the land
And watch them grow in silence
Into the future rising.
Saeed Soltanpour, adapted and translated by Patrick Cross.
* Eshghi and Farrokhi, two of Iran’s leading poets, also died in the
struggle.
Your donation, no matter the size, helps sustain authentic research, creative writing, and the spirit of sharing that connects us all. Let yourself relax and click below to show your support.