About Rastakhiz

Rastakhiz

Rastakhiz was the official daily newspaper of the Rastakhiz Party of Iran, published in Tehran between 1975 and 1979. The party, whose full name was rendered in English as the Party of the National Resurgence of the Iranian People, was the sole legal political party of late Pahlavi Iran, and its newspaper served as the printed voice of that single-party system. The paper carried the party's official communiques and proclamations, reported on the party's organisation across the country, and, in its final years, attempted to draw leading intellectuals into discussion on its pages. It was wound down in the autumn of 1978, after approximately 1,060 issues, as the Iranian Revolution gathered pace.

The creation of the Rastakhiz Party

The newspaper existed because of a decision taken on 2 March 1975, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, founded the Rastakhiz Party and made it the country's only legal party. Iran had previously operated with a limited two-party framework dominated by the pro-government New Iran Party and the People's Party, both of which functioned within the political structure of the Pahlavi state and were widely regarded as offering no genuine competition. The new party was formed through the merger of several pro-government organisations, including the New Iran Party, the People's Party, the Iranians' Party and the Pan-Iranist Party, and the few political organisations still functioning were required to become part of it. The party was founded under the government of Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, who became its first secretary-general, and it was built on three stated principles required of its candidates and members: faith in Iran's constitution, loyalty to the monarchical regime, and fidelity to the White Revolution, the shah's programme of reform.

A party of compulsory membership

The character of the party determined the character of its newspaper. Membership of Rastakhiz was presented as a vehicle for national political participation, but it operated within a highly centralised structure closely connected to the state, and membership was strongly encouraged and in many cases effectively required, particularly for government employees and professionals. The shah declared, when announcing the party's creation, that citizens who rejected its principles should either join the organisation or leave the country. Official claims put membership in the millions; one widely cited estimate gave approximately five million members in 1976, while historians noted that the organisation functioned largely as an extension of the state apparatus rather than as an independent political movement. Critics, including a BBC Persian analysis cited in histories of the party, argued that the creation of a single party contradicted the guarantee of political association in the 1906 constitution. The party has been blamed by some historians with contributing to the overthrow of the monarchy, by antagonising formerly apolitical Iranians through compulsory membership and dues and through its interference in the political, economic and religious concerns of everyday life.

Role as the party's official daily

Within that system, Rastakhiz the newspaper performed the classic function of an official party daily. According to the University of Manchester Library, which preserved and digitised the paper as part of its Nashriyah collection of Iranian newspapers, the paper printed official communiques and proclamations of the party. For a single legal party that claimed to organise the whole nation, such a daily was not one voice among many but the authorised record: the place where the party announced itself to its own members, to officials and to the public. Its existence alongside Iran's established commercial dailies of record marked the difference between the press as a state-supervised industry, which it had long been under the Pahlavi monarchy, and a newspaper that was, formally and openly, the organ of the ruling party itself.

Reporting the national organisation

Besides communiques, the Manchester Library's description recorded that Rastakhiz carried considerable information on the party's national organisation in the various regions of the country. That coverage mattered historically because the Rastakhiz Party built an organisation that reached into provinces, towns, workplaces and professions in a way no previous Iranian party had attempted, and its newspaper documented that structure as it operated. Reports of regional organisation, appointments, meetings and campaigns in the paper therefore preserved, from the party's own perspective, a record of how the single-party state attempted to mobilise the population between 1975 and 1978. For researchers, that made the paper a primary source for the everyday machinery of the late Pahlavi state, distinct from the memoirs and opposition accounts through which the period was more usually described.

The party campaigns the paper carried

The campaigns that dominated the party's early life were conducted in public, and its daily was their natural vehicle. A youth wing, Rastakhiz Youth, was established alongside the party and was described by Hoveyda as the instrument of Iran's development. Through that youth wing and a special party task force, Rastakhiz embarked on a large-scale anti-profiteering campaign directed against the merchants of the bazaar, who were soon identified in party language as enemies of the state. In October 1975 the shah, referring to that campaign as a cultural movement, decreed that anti-profiteering be made the fourteenth principle of the White Revolution. The campaign deepened the alienation of the bazaar, a constituency whose opposition became central to the revolution of 1978 and 1979, and the party newspaper's role as the publisher of the party's proclamations placed it on the official side of that confrontation throughout.

The roundtable discussions of 1977 and 1978

The most distinctive feature recorded for the paper's later life was its attempt to engage Iran's intellectuals. The Manchester Library noted that Rastakhiz attempted to woo leading thinkers and intellectuals by hosting roundtable discussions in 1977 and 1978. The effort belonged to the same late period in which the party's leadership changed repeatedly: Hoveyda was succeeded as secretary-general by Jamshid Amouzegar in 1976, then by Mohammad Baheri in 1977, with Amouzegar returning briefly in 1978 before Javad Saeed held the post in the party's final months, while figures including Dariush Homayoon served as deputy secretary-general. That the official daily of a compulsory single party sought, in 1977 and 1978, to present itself as a forum for discussion with leading thinkers illustrated the regime's recognition, as protest grew, that the paper's proclamations alone could no longer command the audience it needed. The roundtables did not reverse that loss of authority, and they remained a small, late chapter in the paper's history, but they distinguished its final volumes from the communique-driven issues of 1975 and 1976.

Rastakhiz-i Kargaran, the workers' supplement

The main newspaper was accompanied by a supplement, Rastakhiz-i Kargaran. The Manchester Library described it as a supplement of Rastakhiz that carried a corporatist view on labour organisation and workers' rights, and recorded that it was published during the same time span as the main newspaper. The supplement reflected the party's ambition to organise every constituency, including industrial workers, within its own structures and under its own doctrine, rather than leaving labour to independent unions or to the banned opposition movements. Together, the daily and its workers' supplement showed the breadth of the publishing operation the party maintained: a general political organ for communiques and national organisation, and a specialist publication addressing one of the constituencies whose loyalty the regime most needed and, in the strikes of 1978, most conspicuously lost.

The elections of 1975

The paper was founded in an election year. Parliamentary elections were held in Iran on 20 June 1975, and all 268 seats in the National Consultative Assembly, together with the elective seats contested in the Senate, were won by the Rastakhiz Party, the only legal party at the time. Around 750 candidates contested the elections, most of them standing for the first time, and candidates were in some constituencies multiple nominees of the same party competing for a single seat, since no rival party could stand. Those were the final elections held under the shah before the revolution of 1979. The party newspaper's coverage of a parliament composed entirely of its own party was a further illustration of its position: it reported a political system in which its proprietor could not lose, a circumstance that gave its official news a certainty that events in 1978 would destroy.

Winding down in the autumn of 1978

As demonstrations intensified in 1978, the Rastakhiz Party became a frequent target of criticism and protest, and the shah dissolved the party as part of broader attempts to ease political tensions, its dissolution being dated to the autumn of 1978, on 1 October 1978 in the standard party histories. The newspaper was wound down at the same moment, after approximately 1,060 issues, in the autumn of 1978, as revolutionary fervour was gathering pace. The dating in the sources accordingly described the paper as published between 1975 and 1979, the span of the revolutionary period as a whole, while its effective life as a functioning daily ended with the party itself in the autumn of 1978. The monarchy collapsed in February 1979, monarchist political organisations were suppressed under the new order, and no revival of the party's newspaper followed.

Survival in the Nashriyah archive and legacy

The paper survived for later readers principally through archives. The University of Manchester Library's Nashriyah digital collection, which made more than 12,000 pages of Iranian newspapers freely available, included 150 issues of Rastakhiz among its holdings from the 1979 revolution era, alongside titles such as Ayandegan and Kayhan. That digitisation mattered because newspapers of the revolution period had for years been only partially accessible inside Iran. For historians, Rastakhiz remained a distinctive source precisely because of its official character: it showed the late Pahlavi state explaining itself, in its own daily, in the last years before its fall, through communiques, organisational reporting, campaigns and, at the end, roundtables with the intellectuals it had failed to win. Read against the opposition and commercial press of the same years, it completed the printed record of a system that had made one party, and one party newspaper, the whole of legal politics.