The Fifty-Three

In November 1938—soon after the famous Moscow show trials—Iran staged the most sensational of its political trials. Using the ambiguous 1931 law, it indicted a group of fifty-three—many of them young intellectuals from prominent families—with the clear intention of intimidating the country's intelligentsia. In the past, dissidents had been put away quietly. Now they were placed in the limelight to illustrate to all and sundry the dangers of dallying with radical "alien ideas."

Imitating the Russian practice of labeling political trials with the total number in the dock, the Iranian government billed the group as "the Fifty-three." In fact, one of the famous trials preceding the Moscow purges had been known as the Case of the Fifty-three. It was jested that Reza Shah wanted to keep up with his northern neighbor. Not surprisingly, the Iranian Fifty-three soon became a household term in Tehran. In later years, ten of them—in addition to Bozorg Alavi, the author of the best-seller The Fifty-three —published memoirs describing their arrests, trials, and prison experiences.

The case began inadvertently in March 1937 when border guards came across three men smuggling themselves into the country from the Soviet Union. The three escaped, but their abandoned luggage led the police to a theater troupe in Khuzestan. This, in turn, led the police to associates in Tehran, Qazvin, and Isfahan. By early May, the police had compiled a list of more than sixty suspects and had begun to round them up. Most were taken—often by public transport—to Tehran's Central Jail for "routine questioning." This turned into lengthy interrogations lasting eighteen months. Some were released. One escaped. But fifty-three were brought to trial in November 1938.

The regime claimed these fifty-three constituted a tight-knit

party under direct Comintern control. In fact, they were formed of two loosely linked groups: intellectuals too young to have had a political past and veteran labor activists from the near-defunct Communist party. The intellectuals, numbering thirty-three, averaged twenty-seven years of age. The labor activists, totaling fourteen, averaged thirty-four. The two groups were joined by a handful of university-educated professionals—some of whom had belonged to the youth section of the Communist party in their teens. (See table 2.)

In terms of profession, they included one judge; five professors, including two at the Medical College; two physicians; one factory manager; one museum director; four lawyers; two headmasters; three teachers; nine office employees, almost all civil servants; and twelve university students. Eighteen came from titled families. Among them were also two mechanics, two tailors, two printers, one locomotive driver, one cobbler, and one factory worker. No women were brought to trial, although among those initially rounded up was the wife of one of the veteran communists.

In terms of ethnicity, Persians dominated—in sharp contrast to the early communist movement. Forty came from Persian-speaking homes; the other thirteen, from Turkic (Azeri, Qajar, Afshar, and Turkoman) families. Almost all the intellectuals were from Persian and Persianized households. Of the total, thirteen had been born in Tehran; twenty-two, in the central regions, including Qazvin; and nine, in the Caspian provinces. Two of the six born in Azerbaijan had been raised in Persian-speaking districts outside Azerbaijan. At the time of arrest, forty-one resided in Tehran; the others, in Abadan, Isfahan, Qazvin, Gilan, and Mazandaran. None resided in Azerbaijan. All but one came from Shi'i backgrounds. The long exception came from a Bahai family.

The main figure in the dock was Dr. Taqi Arani—regarded by some to be his generation's most promising intellectual. Born in Tabriz, he had been raised in Tehran by his mother and her family. He disliked his absent father—a civil servant—for being an incorrigible Casanova.^[82] Graduating from the Dar

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al-Fanon—the elite high school—at the top of his class in 1920, Arani took a two-year crash course in medicine in Tehran and then went to Germany to study chemistry in the Berlin Technical University. His stay there lasted from 1922 to 1930. While working toward his doctorate, he took courses in philosophy, taught Persian to supplement his meager family stipend, and published pamphlets and articles on Omar Khayyam, Sa'di, Nasser Khosrow, Aristotle, Azerbaijan, and Iranian history. These articles appeared in two nationalistic journals published in Germany, Iranshahr (Land of Iran) and Farangestan (Europe).

During these Berlin years, Arani moved to the left. He had arrived a staunch nationalist, full of praise for ancient Iran and the Persian language. His articles on the Persian language urged the purging of Arabic words. His articles on history listed Zoroaster, Farabi, Ibn Sina, Omar Khayyam, Ferdowsi, Cyrus

the Great, Darius the Great, and Anusheravan the Just as the true heroes of Iran. Conspicuously absent was Mazdak, the hero of the left, who had been executed by the Zoroastrian establishment for advocating economic egalitarianism. What is more, Arani's articles on Azerbaijan urged the government to replace Turkish with Persian on the grounds that the Mongol invaders had imposed their "foreign tongue" on northwestern Iran. Praising Azerbaijan as "the cradle of Iranian civilization," he described its people as pure Aryans coerced by the Mongols to give up their indigenous Iranian language.^[83]

By the time he returned to Iran, Arani had joined the Revolutionary Republican party—a short-lived leftist organization—and had befriended a number of Iranian Marxists, including Morteza Alavi, the editor of the Communist party paper Peykar .^[84] Arani later told the police that Morteza Alavi had introduced him to Marxism in 1927 and that he had

returned home in 1930 a convinced communist.^[85] It is not clear what this meant as Arani never admitted to having formally joined the Communist party.

Back in Tehran, Arani lived with his mother and devoted his time to intellectual pursuits, allowing himself only two diversions—long walks and Western music. He taught science at the Dar al-Fanon and Tehran University; chaired the teaching department in the Ministry of Industries; and published booklets on physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and dialectical materialism. The first two works were adopted as high school textbooks. The booklet on psychology linked the workings of the mind to the physical structure of the brain.

He also convened at home a number of separate informal discussion groups—for colleagues from Europe, for students from Tehran University, and for pupils from the Dar al-Fanon and the Ministry of Industries. Meeting on different days, most participants were unaware of the existence of the other groups. They discussed philosophy and modern political theory. They read Victor Hugo's Les miserables and Henri Bergson's Les deux sources de la vie. Some translated—from French and German—Engels's Ludwig Feuerback and the End of Classical German Philosophy as well as Marx's Capital, Communist Manifesto , and Wage Labor and Capital. Others translated Bukharin's ABC of Communism and Historical Materialism .

These discussions inspired some to spend hours in the Majles library devouring all they could find on political philosophy.^[86] They had an insatiable thirst for modern political ideas. Autobiographies published in later years—particularly in the 1980s—gloss over the importance of these political ideas and instead dwell on individual foibles and personal animosities. The authors are probably embarrassed by their "youthful follies," and feel readers would find Freud and Kafka, not to mention Marx and Bukharin, off-putting and passé. The removal of political ideals from individuals who were motivated primarily by political ideals makes them appear one-dimensional, lifeless, and even meaningless. This self-selected memory not only distorts the past but also does their authors a gross disservice.

In addition to organizing discussion groups, Arani obtained a government license to publish a journal named Donya (The World). He borrowed the title from Le Monde —the paper edited by Henri Barbusse, the famous French communist.^[87] In all, twelve issues of Donya appeared between February 1934 and June 1935. Its aim was to bring academic Marxism to the Iranian intelligentsia. As its masthead declared: "This journal will examine scientific, technical, social, and cultural issues from the materialistic point of view."

To pass the censors, Donya avoided inflammatory language, used a dry academic style, and published abundant nonpolitical articles on Persian literature and the modern sciences—on radium, cancer, television, nuclear physics, mathematics, car construction, sleep and dreams, aeronautical engineering, and electrical power plants. It also translated works from European languages—an article on blindness by Helen Keller; White Flowers, a short story about a teenage girl in Germany; and I Am Black, an indictment of racism in the American Deep South. Donya was definitely avant-garde.

Its forte, however, was articles on social sciences. Their titles are self-explanatory: "Dialectical Materialism," "The Materialist Concept of Humanity," "Art and Materialism," "Mysticism and Materialism," "Law and Materialism," "Women and Materialism," "Determinism and Free Will in History," "The Material Foundations of Life and the Brain," "Value, Price, and Labor," and "The Evolution of the Species." The last summarized Lamarck and Darwin. Older readers were often troubled that this new framework left little room for God, the metaphysical, and the supernatural.^[88] One youngster remembers Shariat Sangalaji, the chief reforming cleric, throwing him out of his mosque for raising questions about the existence of God.^[89] Academic Marxism came to Iran coupled with Darwin and the modern sciences. Donya was unique for its time. It remains so.

Donya also challenged the notion of Aryan superiority—a notion gaining currency as officials traveled to Nazi Germany and dabbled in the ideas of Count Gobineau, the nineteenth-

century European racial theorist. Some suspected the censors tolerated Donya because they deemed it too dry and academic. Others joked that the censors had confused diyalektik (dialectic) with alakdolak (hair sieve).^[90] One university student spoke for his age cohorts when he said Donya captured his attention from the very moment he saw the first issue.^[91] Another wrote that Donya had whetted his generation's appetite, for it had discussed for the very first time in Persian such subjects as historical materialism.^[92]

In publishing Donya , Arani was helped mostly by his two closest colleagues: Iraj Iskandari and Bozorg Alavi. The three used pseudonyms—Arani, the pen name Qazi (Judge); Iskandari, Jamshid (an ancient Iranian name); and Bozorg Alavi, Nakhoda, which means shipmaster as well as atheist and freethinker. Arani signed his own name only when writing purely scientific articles.

Iskandari was a French-educated lawyer from a highly respected family. His father—a Qajar prince—was revered as a martyr of the Constitutional Revolution. His uncle was the founder of the Socialist party and the leader of the nonclerical parliamentary opposition to Reza Shah. His own French education had been cut short when he forfeited his state scholarship by participating in student political activities. On his return home, he had met Arani and found employment as a Supreme Court attorney.

Bozorg Alavi—the founder of prison literature—was the younger brother of Morteza Alavi in Berlin. He had already established a literary reputation by publishing a collection of essays entitled Suitcase . His grandfather, a wealthy businessman, had supported the Constitutional Revolution and sat in the first Majles. His father, a businessman, had emigrated to Germany in the late 1910s and had committed suicide there after going bankrupt. His uncle was a well-known professor of Persian literature at Tehran University. Growing up in the Weimar Republic, Bozorg Alavi had been influenced by Freud and Kafka as well as Schiller, Marx, Engels, and Darwin. Returning home in 1928, he befriended other young intellectuals, pub-

lished short stories, and translated Schiller and Hermann Hesse. He earned his living teaching German at the Ministry of Industries. At the time of his arrest, he was married to a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. In later years, he married the granddaughter of Ayatollah Tabatabai—one of the leading clerics of the Constitutional Revolution.

Many of the other intellectuals among the Fifty-three came from similar backgrounds—from prominent, even titled, but not necessarily wealthy, families. Dr. Mohammad Bahrami, a Berlin-educated professor of medicine, was the son of a titled court physician. Dr. Morteza Yazdi, a Berlin-trained surgeon, was the son of a senior cleric who had participated in the Constitutional Revolution. After his father's death, Yazdi had been raised by Hakim al-Mamalek, a court doctor and frequent cabinet minister as well as member of parliament. Similarly, Dr. Reza Radmanesh, a Sorbonne-educated physicist, and Nuraldin Alamutti, a senior judge, came from prominent families in Gilan and Qazvin, respectively. In their teens, these five had belonged to the youth section of the Communist party.

Khalel Maleki, a science teacher, came from a family highly respected both in Tabriz and in Sultanabad (Arak). Although in central Iran, Sultanabad contained a large Azeri-speaking community. Like Iskandari, Maleki had not been able to complete his European degree because of his student activities. Nasratallah Jahanshahlu, a leader of a recent strike in the Medical College, was the scion of an Afshar tribal leader from Zanjan. Mohammad-Reza Qodreh, another student who had organized a strike at the Teachers' College, came from a clerical family well known in central Iran. His family was related to the future Ayatollah Khomeini. Taqi Makinezhad, yet another strike leader at the Engineering College, came from a similar family in Arak. Both his father and his maternal grandfather had been senior clerics. Drs. Hossein and Morteza Sajjadi, brothers, had close relatives in the Majles and in the higher ranks of the state bureaucacy. Ehsan Tabari, one of the youngest of the group, was a second-year law student and the grandson of a prominent cleric in Mazandaran. A facile writer and

learner of foreign languages, Tabari in later years became the chief popularizer of Marxism in Iran.

The police dragnet missed three other intellectuals who at the time happened to be out of the country: Sadeq Hedayat, Eprim Eshaq, and Abdul-Hossein Noshin. Hedayat, the towering figure in modern Persian prose, had, together with his friend Bozorg Alavi, introduced Kafka and Freud into Iran. From 1941 until his suicide in 1951, Hedayat worked so closely with the Tudeh that the police were to jump to the wrong conclusion that he was a secret member.^[93] Eshaq, a young Assyrian, was in England studying with Keynes. Considered to be one of Keynes's best students, Eshaq later became a don at Oxford. Noshin, a prominent stage director, was in France trying to join those going to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After 1941, Noshin, together with some innovative actors, including his famous wife, Loreta, organized the county's first professional theater. Not surprisingly, many felt that Arani had attracted the best and the brightest of the new generation.

The labor organizers were led by Kamran Qazvini (Nasrollah Aslani). A KUTIV graduate, Qazvini had been sent to revive the Communist party. He formed a communal household in Tehran composed of veteran labor organizers. He worked in an Isfahan textile mill where he had organized a successful May Day strike. He collected strike money from such sympathizers as Arani, Bozorg Alavi, and Iskandari. He also asked Arani to print a May Day manifesto praising the Comintern and demanding the release of all political prisoners.^[94] Qazvini, however, was not in the dock with the Fifty-three; he escaped from the Central Jail before the trial began.

The chief liaison between the labor organizers and the intellectuals was a Russian-trained pilot named Abdul-Samad Kambakhsh. The son of a Qajar prince living in modest circumstances in Qazvin, Kambakhsh had grown up partly in Qazvin, where he participated in the Cultural Society, and partly in Russia—both before and after the revolution—where he attended high school and obtained an Iranian government scholarship to study aeronautical engineering. On his return to

Iran, he taught at the Military Academy and wrote technical pamphlets for the War Ministry. He was married to the granddaughter of the famous Shaykh Fazlallah Nuri, who was hanged in 1909. His wife—one of the first women to study modern medicine in Iran—had also been active in the Qazvin Cultural Society. Kambakhsh knew eleven of the Fifty-three from his hometown. They became known in prison as the "Qazvin group." He also had contacts in the armed forces, which he kept to himself for the next twenty years.

Much of the pretrial imprisonment was spent in the Tehran Central Jail where many met for the very first time most of their supposed fellow conspirators. They were confined initially in solitary cells, then in three separate but interlocking wards. Those from prominent families—notably Iskandari, Kambakhsh, and Yazdi—were assigned to the "bourgeois ward." Those from less prominent families—including Arani, Bahrami, and Jahanshahlu—were sent to the "petty bourgeois ward." Those from humble homes, including the labor organizers, were sent to the "proletarian ward." The last enjoyed less pocket money, less home-cooked food, and fewer family visits. Anvar Khamehei—one of the few intellectuals in the last ward—claims in his book The Fifty and the Three that this separation was designed to undermine resistance and inflame "class differences." He adds that "his first exposure to working-class life" gave him two surprises: uneducated males were heavily dependent on cigarettes, and they found it quite natural to wash and mend their own clothes.^[95]

The interrogators tried to trick the prisoners into giving self-incriminating information, pretending that others had admitted that the discussion groups were sinister covers for the Comintern and the Communist party. The police intimidated the prisoners with the full force of the 1931 law—five years in solitary confinement for promoting Marxism plus ten years in solitary confinement for joining a communist organization. They held out the specter of death sentences on the grounds that the accused had spied and plotted an armed uprising on behalf of a foreign enemy. What is more, they tried to get the

prisoners to rat on each other by claiming that others—especially Arani and Kambakhsh—had already implicated them. Some bore lifelong grudges against Kambakhsh.^[96] Even now—sixty years later—some insist he betrayed them; others insist he protected them.^[97] Unknown to them, many had been betrayed by a young returnee from Europe who had named names in exchange for his own release.^[98]

The police occasionally used more brutal methods with the suspected ringleaders. Arani was briefly subjected to the qapani and then placed in a cold solitary cell without shoes, blankets, or mattress. Bahrami was punched on the face and deprived of proper food for three days. Kambakhsh was warned that his wife could be arrested and that he—as a War Ministry official—could face the firing squad. Radmanesh was slapped. Bozorg Alavi was subjected to the qapani for half an hour. One labor organizer was force-fed when he began a hunger strike. Some were denied home-cooked meals and family visits. Others were "insulted" by being called "shameless," "unpatriotic," "atheistic," and "foreign spies." They considered this "torture." Although Khamehei claims to have been "tortured," he admits that no one was actually flogged, burned with cigarettes, or put on the rack. He claims that "Westerners had not yet introduced such modern techniques into Iran."^[99]

Students from privileged homes were treated with kid gloves. Jahanshahlu writes in his Recollections that he was well treated simply because his interrogator had studied under his uncle at the Military Academy.^[100] He adds that his mother—as well as Iskandari's mother—monitored the investigations for the president of the Majles, a family friend. The president, in turn, monitored them for his two friends, the justice minister and the court minister. In later years, Iskandari reminisced that "family" mattered in those days, and that his uncle, a gendarmerie colonel, had been his own interrogator's classmate.^[101] Maleki, as well as Iskandari, stresses that "the very worst tortures in those days" were mild compared to what was to come in later decades.^[102]

Intimidation had limited success. Some gave names, but

mostly of those already in custody or out of the country. Although Kambakhsh was rumored to have "spilled the beans," he defended himself by arguing that he could not have identified people unknown to him and that his arrest had followed—not preceded—many of theirs. The older intellectuals pleaded that they had severed their ties with the Communist party long ago. The younger intellectuals pleaded that their discussion groups had dealt only with academic issues. Dr. Morteza Sajjadi insisted he had visited Arani's home only once. A handful, however, were pressured or tricked into describing their discussion group as a tashkilat (organization) and a ferqeh (party).

Arani admitted being a Marxist but denied forming an organization or joining the Communist party.^[103] He insisted that some of the accused had not even attended the disussion groups and that he had rebuffed Qazvini's offer to finance Donya because he did not want to turn the journal into a Communist party organ. he further insisted that the only people he knew to be party members were Morteza Alavi and Qazvini.^[104] The former was in exile, and the latter had escaped custody.

Iskandari and Bozorg Alavi both argued that their interests had been cultural and that Donya had been purely an intellectual journal. It was true that they had read Bukharin and Marx; but they had also read Freud, Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Le Bon, Darwin, Bergson, and Hitler. Iskandari insisted that they had never once talked of creating a party or any such organization. Bozorg Alavi argued that he had lost contact with his brother; his recent honeymoon had distracted him from even intellectual pursuits; he had found Capital to be too boring to read; and his contributions to Donya had dealt with literature and psychology, not with politics. He added cryptically that the very first time he heard of the existence of a ferqeh or tashkilat was from his police interrogator.

Although the lengthy investigations failed to unearth an underground organization linked to the Comintern, the regime was determined to stage a show trial. It gave the trial a great deal of publicity and permitted the press to summarize some of the defense speeches. This was the first time in Iran that a

political trial had been given extensive coverage. The British Legation reported that the secret police watched the public galleries for signs of sympathy and that the government publicized the trial to "broadcast a plain warning to all that it will tolerate nothing remotely savoring of communism."^[105] The regime also permitted the defendants to have three well-known defense attorneys: Dr. Alexander Aghayan, a European-educated jurist; Amidi-Nuri, a flamboyant journalist who later became a prominent senator; and Ahmad Kasravi, a former judge and leading historian of the Constitutional Revolution.

The prosecutor demanded the maximum penalty under the 1931 law.^[106] He argued that the accused had propagated "atheism" as well as "materialism," formed a subversive party at the behest of international communism, and thereby undermined the "security and independence of the royal kingdom." As evidence, he produced Donya , the May Day Manifesto, and the unfinished translations of Bukharin's ABC of Communism and Historical Materialism . The emphasis on Bukharin was probably for Stalin's ears. As further evidence, the prosecutor cited the border crossings, the strike fund, the university strikes, and the "secret discussion cells." "These ungrateful creatures," he declared, "have taken advantage of the unprecedented generosity of the Shah and the hardworking people of Iran."

The defense lawyers retorted that their clients had done no more than take part in innocent discussion groups. They categorically denied Comintern links. One lawyer argued that such scions of "respectable families," of "well-known clerics," and of "the privileged class" could not possibly harbor "communistic and atheistic notions." Another declared that the law could not ban books and that in Western Europe such works as Capital were essential reading: "One is not considered educated in Europe unless one has read Karl Marx." Yet another declared that these defendants should be congratulated because so many of their contemporaries did their best to avoid reading serious books. The lawyers for the labor organizers depicted their clients as simple folk uninterested in esoteric and high-flown theories.

Arani, in a four-hour speech, denounced the trial as a blatant violation of the constitutional laws—especially the clauses on freedom of thought.^[107] Needless to say, the press did not reprint this speech. Referring to other famous trials in history—those of Socrates, Galileo, the Inquisition, the Reichstag Fire, and the recent "Fifty-three" in Russia—Arani reprimanded the judges for knuckling under to political pressure, abdicating moral responsibility, and betraying the Constitutional Revolution for which "thousands of Iranians had sacrificed their lives." He argued that the Fundamental Laws had been designed not only to make the judiciary independent of the executive but also to protect freedom of speech—especially the right to read books. Freedom of thought, he argued, was valued by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, as well as by the most advanced countries of the world—namely, America, Britain, France, and Switzerland. "Free speech," he continued, "is stifled mostly in colonized countries, such as Palestine and India." This was hardly the voice of a Stalinist.

Arani accused the regime of violating due process of law. He dismissed the 1931 law as invalid, both because it violated freedom of thought and because it had not been discussed by parliament. He argued that the police had coerced naive youngsters into false statements about the existence of a nonexistent political party. He categorically denied creating a political organization or writing the May Day Manifesto. He stressed that his interests had been academic—reading books, discussing ideas, and editing Donya , which, he reminded the judges, had been licensed by the government itself. "You," Arani declared, "may dislike my democratic and socialistic ideas, but you cannot ban them any more than you can ban other things Western. Like it or not, you are obliged to borrow much from the West—Western clothes, Western food, Western architecture, Western laws, Western civilization, and Western political concepts." Arani—unlike recent intellectuals—was a self-avowed modernizer and Westernizer. Some would consider him a gharbzadeh—one bewitched and bedazzled by the West.

The court meted out stiff sentences. Arani was given ten years of "solitary" imprisonment for belonging to a communist organization, three years of "correctional" imprisonment for propagating communism, and another three years for writing the May Day Manifesto. To maximize the impact, the court did not mention whether these sentences ran consecutively or concurrently. It also mentioned solitary confinement, even though Iranian prisons rarely placed anyone in total isolation for prolonged periods. In short, the impression was created that Arani had been sentenced to sixteen years—ten of them in solitary.

Eleven others, including Kambakhsh and Bahrami, were each sentenced to ten years in solitary; four, to eight years in solitary; two, to seven years in solitary; one, to six years in solitary; twenty-one, including most of the young intellectuals, to five years in solitary; nine, to four years; and one, to two years. Three with lesser terms were soon released. The British Legation commented that the sentences were unduly harsh considering the defendants had merely belonged to a "student debating society with leftish tendencies."^[108] Bozorg Alavi writes, "Many concluded we were given such stiff sentences to warn youth away from dangerous ideas."^[109] He adds that this succeeded: the public, especially the middle class, soon took shelter behind silence and bland conformity.^[110]

The Fifty-three were moved from the Central Jail to Qasr in July 1938—some five months before the trial. Many remained there until 1941. "Our lives," Khamehei writes, "improved in Qasr."^[111] Some—including Iskandari, Yazdi, Radmanesh, and Bozorg Alavi—were placed in block 7 together with the veteran communists. Others—notably Arani, Kambakhsh, and the labor organizers—were placed in block 2, which had been emptied of its nonpolitical prisoners to "protect" them from "dangerous ideas."^[112] Block 7 became known as the "dignitaries' ward" (band-e a'yan ); block 2, as the "proletarian ward" (band-e proletariya ). Despite the fact that the hardened communists were in block 7, Khamehei boasts that the more "dangerous" prisoners, like himself, were in block 2.^[113]

Each block set up its own sandoq (common fund) to buy

food, especially fruit. Because block 7 inmates were better off financially, its common fund had more money to dispense. Block 7 inmates were also assigned common criminals to clean out their cells, make their beds, and warm up their food. Khamehei comments caustically that class privileges were recognized even inside Qasr.^[114] Although these "household servants" were supposed to spy on their "masters," their sympathies often lay more with them than with the wardens.

The Fifty-three were treated better than the veteran communists—in part becasue of family connections and in part because they could afford to bribe. Jahanshahlu writes that the jailers were helpful because they were "decent folk" in dire need of extra cash.^[115] Bozorg Alavi remembers that on the whole they and the guards left each other alone. He also remembers telling a noisy guard to lower his voice outside the baths because there was a shahzadeh (prince) inside—the prince being Iskandari. The guard deferentially obliged.^[116]

The prisoners had visiting hour for friends as well as family members. They could send and receive letters. They could also receive from home clothes, meals, medicines, and bedding. They could spend as much as five hours a day in the courtyard walking, exercising—both individually and collectively—and playing soccer and volleyball. Some grew flower and vegetables in the prison garden. They socialized with inmates from other blocks in the courtyard, in the baths, and in the infirmary. To reach the infirmary, they passed through block 4, which housed other political prisoners. To reach the baths, they passed through block 8, reserved for special dignitaries. They arranged dinner parties to celebrate May Day, the October Revolution, and Nowruz (Persian New Year). They put on skits and played chess but avoided opium and cards—pastimes favored by the old elite. They interpreted dreams using a smuggled-in handbook on pop psychology. They practiced traditional fortunetelling, which consists of opening up at random the works of Hafez and Sa'di. They told each other stories and jokes. Arani—who had a great sense of humor—was an endless source of Mulla Nasraldin jokes. Yazdi—famous for his voice—often

filled the ward with his loud laughter. Some studied art with one of the veteran communists who happened to be an accomplished sculptor.

Bribes got them special perks. They brewed vodka. They smuggled in books, newspapers, and even magazines with pictures of scantily dressed women. Some kept pets: Maleki, a stray cat; Bahrami, an owl from the courtyard. During typhus epidemics, they stayed up all night nursing the sick and thus saving lives. The four physicians among them were allowed to practice medicine. When Bozorg Alavi needed his appendix removed, he was operated on by his family doctor in a private hospital in downtown Tehran. When Jahanshahlu came out of an interrogation session at the Central Jail, he was allowed to wander the streets while his guards paid a leisurely visit to a nearby teahouse.^[117]

The prisoners also pursued their intellectual interests—especially after 1938 when the Shah ruled they could have "nonpolitical books." This ruling, Bozorg Alavi notes, was greeted with joy even though it produced some absurd results. The warden allowed German but not French books on economics simply because the latter used the term "political economy" instead of "national economy,"^[118]

"These intellectuals," writes Ovanessian, "turned Qasr into a lively university."^[119] Some read textbooks hoping to complete their degrees some day. Others exchanged language classes. Tabari studied English, German, Russian, and Istanbul Turkish—the latter with Ispahani and a Jewish communist who had spent years in Istanbul. Bozorg Alavi learned some Russian, English, and Armenian. He also translated Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren and tried out on his cellmates segments of his Prison Scrap Papers . He later reminisced that his decision to become a professional writer had been made in Qasr.^[120] Arani exchanged German for Russian lessons with Ovanessian. Maleki taught French and German and learned some English. Others composed poetry and read literature, especially Hafez and Sa'di. Tabari and Pishevari spent hours discussing classical Persian poetry. Some lectured on their areas of professional

expertise—Maleki on chemistry, Radmanesh on physics, Yazdi and Bahrami on medicine. Iskandari formed a small group to translate Capital —a task he had started before his arrest.^[121] Jahanshahlu writes, "Free to do as we wished from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., we were probably the most fortunate prisoners in the whole world."^[122] Khamehei quotes one cellmate as saying his four years in Qasr were easier than his four months in military service.^[123]

They also spent long hours with the veteran communists listening to their accounts of the early radical movement, the Jangali Revolt, and the 1929 oil strike—all forbidden subjects in Reza Shah's Iran. But the relationship between the veteran communists and the Fifty-three was not always smooth—both because of age and social differences and because of the long-standing animosities between Ovanessian, Pishevari, and Eftekhari. Jahanshahlu portrays the older prisoners as "blind worshipers of Russia" and as "illiterate northern commonfolk with no more than a smattering of KUTIV-style Marxism."^[124] Khamehei describes them as unread, unsophisticated, and uncultured activists burning with the simple desire to throw the British out of Iran.^[125] Similarly, Maleki depicts them as khoshk (dry; austere) admirers of the Soviet Union, who, because they had never seen Western Europe, were easily impressed by Moscow's wide streets and large hospitals.^[126]

For their part, the veteran communists considered the new arrivals to be mostly "pampered feudalists" and "inexperienced intellectuals."^[127] Years later Pishevari gave Bozorg Alavi's Fifty-three a mixed and patronizing review. While praising Arani as "a sincere Marxist intellectual who may or may not have been a member of the Communist Party," he dismissed his disciples as immature youngsters, who, like the rest of their generation, had done nothing more than read a few books. "Readers of The Fifty-three, " he cautioned, "may get the wrong impression that when political prisoners are arrested the only thing on their mind is their next cigarette."^[128]

Their relationship was further complicated by the ongoing crisis in the Comintern, especially the Moscow show trials.

Eftekhari often denounced Stalin as a new tsar, and relished reading off the list of prominent Bolsheviks executed as "saboteurs," "foreign agents," and "imperialist spies."^[129] Ovanessian retorted by denouncing Eftekhari as a "treacherous Trotskyist." Meanwhile, both Ovanessian and Eftekhari shunned Pishevari, claiming that he had lost faith in communism and that his policy of forming a broad movement was designed to dilute Marxism and curry favor with the reactionary classes.

In the competition to sway the Fifty-three, Ovanessian won hands down. This revealed much about that generation's political outlook. Pishevari carried little weight among radicals fired with the concepts of class warfare and working-class revolution. Eftekhari, while listened to, convinced no more than four—and even they soon deserted him. In a revealing passage written half a century later, Khamehei admits he still does not understand the Moscow trials even though they spent hours in prison discussing them.^[130] Maleki—who later became Iran's main Marxist critic of Stalinism—comments that in those days criticism of the Soviet Union was synonymous with opposition to the Great October Revolution, and that opposition to the October Revolution was synonymous with rejection of Socialism, Democracy, and Historical Progress itself.^[131] When in 1944 the Tudeh convened its first party congress, the delegates—some of them from the Fifty-three—denounced Eftekhari as a reactionary, barred Pishevari from the proceedings, and overwhelmingly elected Ovanessian to their central committee. The latter had put to good use his long years in Qasr.

Although the Fifty-three were treated reasonably well in Qasr, they experienced one noteworthy incident of police brutality. One afternoon in September 1939, Maleki got into a fistfight with one of the prison guards. Some say the guard had interrupted his siesta; others, that the guard had made a pass at a younger prisoner; yet others, that Maleki had caught the guard stealing his toothpaste. Whatever the reason, Maleki was given fifteen lashes and thrown into block 5, which was reserved for common criminals. Protesting these "insults," some one hundred political prisoners in blocks 2 and 7 launched a

hunger strike. "Political prisoners," declared Iskandari, "should not be treated and flogged like common criminals,"^[132] The strikers included all the veteran communists and most of the Fifty-three. Some with short sentences abstained, hoping to receive amnesty at the upcoming royal wedding. This decision was to blemish their future revolutionary credentials.

The hunger strike lasted five days. It ended only when Maleki was returned to his cell, and ten strike leaders—including Arani, Kambakhsh, Ovanessian, Eftekhari, and Bahrami—had their feet flogged in the prison courtyard. Iskandari comments, "A country in which doctors and professors are whipped cannot be deemed civilized."^[133] Khamehei claims the warden exempted Iskandari from the whipping simply because he was an old family friend.^[134] The warden later argued that the flogging did not constitute "torture" as its intention was to enforce prison regulations, not to extract "information" or "confessions."^[135]

This crisis reinforced earlier ordeals to create a strong sense of solidarity. Khamehei writes that the group—despite internal differences—cooperated against adversity and thought in terms of "We" rather than "Me."^[136] Maleki remembers that his colleagues developed a strong esprit de corps even though many had not known each other before their arrests.^[137] Bozorg Alavi uses the hunger strike as the climax of his Fifty-three, describing it as their greatest single feat and stressing that it had been instrumental in forging very disparate individuals into a single group. "Qasr created the Fifty-three."^[138]

Immediately after the hunger strike, eight of the ten strike leaders were sent to the malaria-infested port of Bandar Abbas. Although Ovanessian and Eftekhari were not on speaking terms, they were transported literally chained together. They remained there until the 1941 amnesty—even leading a prison strike. The other two, Arani and Kambakhsh, were transferred to the Central Jail and thrown into damp solitary cells without proper food, bedding, shoes, or clothing. Arani died five months later during a typhus epidemic. Some claimed the prison "doctor" had given him a lethal injection. Others claimed typhus-

infested clothes had been placed in his cell. He probably succumbed to typhus because he had no cellmate to nurse him through the high fever.

Soon after Reza Shah's fall, four of his henchmen—including the Qasr warden and the Central Jail "doctor"—were charged with violating privacy laws, taking bribes, unlawful detention, and murdering political prisoners, including Arani, Diba, Firuz Mirza, Farrokhi-Yazdi, Modarres, Shaykh Khaz'al, and Sardar As'ad Bakhtiyari. It is significant that torture did not figure in the indictments. After a well-publicized trial in which members of the Fifty-three gave evidence, the four henchmen were found guilty of murdering a number of prisoners—but not Arani. The court ruled that Arani's death had been caused by the cumulative effects of typhus and medical neglect. The new Shah promptly pardoned three of the four but, in a rare return to public executions, permitted the "doctor" to be hanged in Cannon Square. The British ambassador commented that the execution was "greeted with great satisfaction."^[139] The hanged "doctor" was an apt symbol for the fallen regime—phony, brutal, and even deadly, but not one that tortured.