About Mardom

Mardom

Mardom, whose name meant People, was a Persian-language newspaper published in Tehran, Iran, and the official newspaper of the Tudeh Party of Iran, the country's communist party. It began circulation on 1 February 1942, only months after the party itself was founded, and it was published, with interruptions imposed by bans, exile and revolution, until 1980. In its early years it was edited by Reza Radmanesh and Khalil Maleki, two figures who later stood on opposite sides of the party's deepest internal divisions. During the Second World War it campaigned against the Axis powers, and by the early 1950s it was one of the most read publications in Iran. After the Tudeh Party was crushed following the coup of 1953, Mardom was revived in exile in Leipzig, and after the revolution of 1979 it appeared again in Tehran before the new Islamic Republic closed it for the last time. Few Iranian newspapers lived through so many regimes, and none was more completely identified with a single political organisation.

Founding in 1942 and the Birth of the Tudeh Party

Mardom began circulation on 1 February 1942. The party that published it, the Tudeh Party, meaning the Party of the Masses, had been founded on 2 October 1941, in the opening created by the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and the abdication of Reza Shah, which released political prisoners and allowed parties to form openly for the first time in years. Its founders included Iraj Eskandari and his colleagues, veterans of the group of left-wing intellectuals known as the Fifty-Three, and Soleiman Mohsen Eskandari was elected its chairman. The newspaper was started, as the historian Ali Massoud Ansari recorded, to contribute to the Tudeh Party's achievement of political power. It was published on a weekly basis from Tehran and was written in Persian. From the beginning it was the party's official organ, the printed instrument through which a new communist movement, appealing deliberately to the broad masses rather than to a narrow sect, addressed Iranian workers, intellectuals and soldiers.

Editors and Contributors of the Early Years

During its early years Reza Radmanesh and Khalil Maleki served as editors of Mardom, and Mostafa Fateh also co-edited the newspaper for some time, according to Ervand Abrahamian's history of modern Iran. The editorship joined two men whose later careers defined the party's internal struggles: Radmanesh became the party's leading figure in exile after 1953, while Maleki broke away in 1948 to pioneer an independent socialist position. The paper's pages carried the party's intellectual as well as its political life. The scholar Nasser Vosouqi, for example, who was a member of the Tudeh Party during the 1940s, contributed to the party organ Mardom, including an article on Karl Marx and Marxism published in the paper in Azar 1325, December 1946, before later joining Maleki's splinter group and writing for its journal instead. Mardom was surrounded by sister publications through which the party addressed different audiences, among them Name-ye Mardom, Razm, Khavar-e No, Rahbar and Zafar, and in the party's list of newspapers Rahbar and Khavar-e No stood alongside Mardom in the mid-1940s.

The Second World War and the Anti-Axis Campaign

Mardom was born in wartime, and the war shaped its first campaigns. Iran was occupied by British and Soviet forces from 1941, and the Tudeh Party aligned itself with the Allied cause against Nazi Germany. During the Second World War the paper was part of the campaign against the Axis powers, as research on Iranian resistance to Soviet pressure and on the politics of the occupation years recorded. That anti-fascist stance gave the young party a patriotic language with which to organise: the Tudeh built trade union affiliates whose membership was counted in the hundreds of thousands, far beyond the party's own membership of at most about 25,000, and its following was drawn mainly from urban workers, although its leadership was largely of professional and even aristocratic origin. Mardom was the daily reading of that movement, carrying its arguments into workplaces and universities at a time when no other Iranian party possessed a comparable press and union apparatus.

Ban in 1949 and the Front Organisations

The party's legal existence was cut short in February 1949. After a Tudeh member made an attempt on the life of the shah on 4 February 1949, at a memorial ceremony at the grave of the party theorist Taqi Arani, the Tudeh Party was banned, on 5 February 1949 by the standard party record, and its affiliates were banned with it. The top leaders escaped the country, eight members of the central committee and most leaders of the party's trade union council were arrested and tried before a military tribunal, thirteen fugitives received death sentences in absentia, and those who were caught were sentenced to terms of five to ten years. For a time the party was limited to underground activity, inside the country and in exile. With the rise of the nationalist movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, it re-emerged in the guise of front organisations, such as the Society Against Colonialism and the Iranian Society of Partisans for Peace, together with youth clubs, and its press traditions survived within that broader movement even while the party's own name, and its newspaper, could not legally appear.

The Mosaddeq Years and a Paper Most Read

In the oil nationalisation crisis of the early 1950s Mardom stood at the centre of Iranian public life. William G. Dildine, writing on Iran in 1951 in Pakistan Horizon, recorded that the paper was one of the most read publications in Iran in the early 1950s. Those were the years of Mohammad Mosaddeq's premiership, from May 1951 to August 1953, and of the drive to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Tudeh's position in those years was tortured: the party declined to support Mosaddeq and often mobilised its forces to oppose his government, accusing his National Front of its own failings, and an internal division opened between a group around Noureddin Kianuri, advocating a less sectarian approach to the National Front, and a group around Radmanesh, the former editor of Mardom, which maintained the prevailing hostile attitude until the latter part of 1952. Party-linked front organisations accounted for about a quarter of the support for coalitions during the crisis and played a major role in mobilising mass support on various occasions, even as the party's own organs attacked the government its supporters were defending in the streets.

The Coup of 1953 and Destruction of the Party Press

The coup of August 1953, which overthrew Mosaddeq and restored the shah's authority, destroyed the world in which Mardom had flourished. During the first five years of martial law in Tehran the party and its powerful organisation of military officers were almost totally crushed: an estimated 3,000 Tudeh militants were arrested, the network inside the officer corps, numbering more than 500 officers, was uncovered in 1954, many members were imprisoned and some of the most prominent, including dozens of officers, were executed. Khosrow Roozbeh, the military organisation's leading figure, was arrested in 1958 and executed. Most of the rest of the leadership fled to the Soviet bloc, and the transformation in February 1958 of the martial law administration into the permanent intelligence service SAVAK inaugurated a long silence among opposition groups inside Iran. A legal communist newspaper in Tehran was impossible in those conditions, and Mardom's Iranian publication ceased with the party that published it.

Revival in Exile in Leipzig

Mardom nevertheless continued to exist, in exile. The Encyclopaedia Iranica's history of communism in Persia after 1953 recorded that the presence of a large cohort of Tudeh activists in the Soviet bloc encouraged the central committee, under its newly elected first secretary Reza Radmanesh, the paper's own early editor, to resume operations in 1957. Those operations included publication of the newspaper Mardom and of the theoretical journal Donya in Leipzig, in East Germany, as well as broadcasts of a radio programme entitled Peyk-e Iran, Messenger from Iran, transmitted in Persian, Kurdish and Turkish from East Germany between 1959 and 1970 and then from Bulgaria. Inside Iran, clandestine Tudeh networks, often consisting only of isolated individuals in contact with centres in Tehran and the provinces, continued low-profile operations. The surviving archival record of the paper reflects this divided existence: catalogues of Mardom list runs from 1949 to 1954, a long run from 1965 to 1979, and numbering that restarted more than once, the material trace of a newspaper repeatedly suppressed and repeatedly begun again.

Return After the Revolution of 1979

The revolution of 1979 brought Mardom home. The Tudeh Party returned to open activity in Iran, its leaders came back from exile, and the party again published in Tehran. The archival record of the newspaper includes a run from 1979 to 1980 numbered from its first issue to issue 224, the issues of the revolutionary period. In those years the party supported the anti-imperialist line of the new Islamic Republic, and Mardom was described in accounts of the period as a pro-Islamic Republic publication, the daily publication of a pro-Soviet party that collaborated with the new order in its first years. That collaboration did not save it. As the revolutionary authorities consolidated their hold on the press, closing independent and rival publications one by one, Mardom's turn came with the rest: the catalogue record of the paper ends in 1980, and on 12 June 1981 the office of the Revolutionary Prosecutor ordered six newspapers shut down, charging them with insulting public opinion and acting against the Imam's orders, and Mardom was named among them, listed as the daily publication of the Tudeh Party.

Suppression and Legacy

The Tudeh Party itself survived its newspaper by less than two years: it was banned again in February 1983 by the Islamic Republic, its leaders arrested and paraded in televised confessions, ending the party's legal existence in Iran for a second time in a generation. The party's later official newspaper was Name-ye Mardom, the Letter of the People, which carried the Mardom name forward in a new form. The original Mardom was remembered as the founding organ of Iranian communism's largest mass movement: launched in February 1942 to win political power for a party only four months old, edited by men who became the protagonists of the party's splits and exile, read across the country in the oil crisis years, extinguished in Tehran after 1953, printed in Leipzig for an audience it could reach only clandestinely, and briefly revived by a revolution that then closed it again. Its surviving issues, preserved in library archives in long if broken runs from 1942 to 1980, remained a primary source for the history of the Iranian left, and its name, People, remained the most recognisable title the Tudeh movement ever published.