1
Reza Shah

Qasr Prison was known as the Iranian Bastille. In actual fact, it did not deserve such a macabre reputation.
Ardashir Ovanessian, Memoirs

Traditional Punishments

Nineteenth-century Iran—like most traditional societies—punished transgressions not with prolonged imprisonment but with various forms of physical torment and violent death. Sharia (religious) as well as urf (state) courts inflicted an array of corporal punishments—some of which were prescribed by the Koran and the sunna (religious traditions). They gouged out eyes. They amputated fingers, feet, and ears. They hanged, decapitated, strangled, impaled, disemboweled, crucified, hurled from cliffs, buried alive, and drew-and-quartered. Most common of all, they flogged the soles of the feet in a process known as falak . The English called this the bastinado—a Spanish-derived term. The Spanish themselves preferred the Persian-derived word falanga . The falak could also be inflicted by provincial governors, tribal chiefs, guild elders, and even village headmen.^[1]

Iran, like traditional Europe, did not contain proper prisons in the sense of places for long-term posttrial incarceration. Instead, it had small jails and dungeons for those awaiting trial

or punishment. These were invariably in royal forts, citadels, and armories. Prominent figures were punished with physical retribution, internal exile—often to their villages—or banishment to bleak faraway fortresses. The best known were Maku in northern Azerbaijan, Kalat in northern Khorasan, and Khor-ramabad near the southwestern border. The last was notorious as the Falak al-Falak. It continued to be used until the 1950s.

In theory, urf and sharia courts had separate jurisdictions. The urf courts, headed by the Shah and his governors, adjudicated cases that directly concerned the state. They based their verdicts on unwritten traditions as well as on maslahat (political expediency). The sharia courts, manned by clerical qazis and shaykh al-islams , enforced the religious law on moral, civil, and criminal matters. In practice, the line was not so clear-cut. The Shah claimed ultimate authority over death sentences. He appointed the qazis and shaykh al-islams in the sharia courts. The urf courts themselves supposedly abided by the sharia. What is more, most capital crimes—for example, heresy, sedition, and even banditry—could be deemed offenses against the dawlat (state) as well as against the ummat (religious community). The most serious crime of all was mofsad fey al-araz —sowing "moral corruption" as well as "political sedition" on earth.

Both systems freely resorted to judicial torture even though the sharia in theory frowned on such practices. Had not the Prophet himself declared that "God shall torture in the next world those who have tortured others in this world?"^[2] Had not the Prophet been outraged when Meccans had tormented his companion Bilal to renounce Islam? According to tradition, Bilal would have accepted anything as his true God, even a beetle, to stop the unbearable pain.^[3] Had not the Prophet's immediate successors—the Rightly Guided Caliphs—explicitly outlawed even verbal intimidation on the grounds that such pressure could frighten the innocent to bear false witness?^[4] What is more, the sharia—like medieval Roman canon law—developed stringent rules of evidence, especially for capital crimes. It categorically rejected circumstantial evidence. It

stipulated that eyewitnesses had to be highly reliable, which was conventionally defined as at least two upright adult made Muslims. It also stipulated that confessions could not be accepted in court unless given freely, orally, and publicly.

These stringent rules led the sharia—again like Roman canon law—to rely heavily on self-incriminatory statements, all the while pretending such statements were entirely voluntary. Thus it accepted judicial torture under various guises: maslahat (expediency), protecting the state and the community; towbeh (repentance), because penance could alleviate punishment in this as well as the next world; and ta'zir (discretionary punishment)—a non-Koranic term—which permitted magistrates to mete out noncapital punishments to suspected criminals, including suspected perjurers. In short, despite the Prophet and the Rightly Guided Caliphs, magistrates freely resorted to judicial torture but acted as if the confession presented in open court was completely unrelated to the physical coercion exerted during the interrogation.

Although nineteenth-century Iran kept judicial torture behind closed doors, formal punishments were performed in full public view—often in the Maydan-e Falakeh (Flogging Square). They were carried out by the Mir Ghazabs (Masters of Wrath) and their farrash (footmen). The Masters of Wrath were also known as the Nasaqchis—literally, those who both "multilate the body" and "restore order to the body politic." The double entendre would have appealed to Foucault. Wearing black hats and bright red coats, the Masters of Wrath led royal processions and displayed to the public the brute power of their sovereign. In appointing provincial governors, the Shah bestowed on them both a Mir Ghazab and a jeweled dagger to symbolize his royal prerogatives over life and death.

Sir John Malcolm, an ealy-nineteenth-century British envoy at the Qajar court, noted that the Shahs preserved the enormity of public executions by minimizing their use but maximizing their "inventive cruelty."^[5] Jafar Shahri, the author of a social history of Tehran, reminisces that in the late nineteenth century the Masters of Wrath performed their duties in public

squares—flogging feet and backs; gouging out eyes; and chopping off fingers, feet, ears, and tongues. They also executed the condemned by hanging them in public squares, hurling them from city walls, or blowing them away with cannon shots.^[6] The last was probably a recent innovation inspired by the British in India.

The condemned were paraded through the bazaar before ascending the public scaffold. In nineteenth-century Tehran, the scaffold was an octagonal brick platform with a mastlike pole in the Maydan-e Qayeq (Boat Square) adjacent to the Ark-e Shahi (Royal Citadel). At the turn of the twentieth century, executions were moved to the expansive Maydan-e Tupkhaneh (Cannon Square) inside the Royal Citadel between the ministries, the telegraph office, and the Anbar-e Shahi (Royal Storehouse), a warehouse used also as an imperial dungeon. This anbar became synonymous first with habs (dungeon) and later with zendan (prison). It was also known colloquially as the Falakeh both because its courtyard had a circular view of the sky (falak ) and because the bastinado (falak ) was administered there. Victims could enjoy a heavenly view while receiving their lashes.

Shahri claims that the Masters of Wrath and their footmen routinely tortured suspected criminals in the royal dungeon. His list of tortures includes starvation, sleep deprivation, chaining in dark, damp cells, heavy rocks on chests, submersion in water, sitting on hot bricks, walking on red coals, limestone and feces in the mouth, weights on the testicles, hot fat on the skin, the strappado (hanging from pullies), and, of course, the most common of all, the bastinado. He adds that the Masters of Wrath were under constant pressure to obtain appropriate "confessions" from the "guilty."

The ultimate in the spectacle of cruelty came in the Babi executions of 1852. Accused of attempted regicide and heresy—they had proclaimed their leader to be the Bab (Gate) to the Hidden Messiah—thirty Babis were found guilty of "sowing corruption on earth" and "taking up arms against God and His Representatives." They were paraded in chains through Teh-

ran, given a final opportunity to recant, and then portioned out for execution to various groups—to the royal family, the Qajar tribe, the clergy, the ministries, the military, the merchants, and the bazaar guilds. Some were blinded before being shot; others were stabbed repeatedly, then decapitated; yet others were beaten mercilessly before being strangled. The leaders were hacked in two after being "turned into torches"—having candles inserted throughout their bodies. For the sake of royal decorum, Nasser al-Din Shah handed his designated victim over to the state chamberlain.

The British envoy tried to persuade the chief minister to forgo these "revolting tortures," arguing that they would "disgust" Europe and tarnish the country's reputation of "advancing towards civilization."^[7] But the chief minister retorted that this was "not the time for trifling" and that the "responsibility" for the executions had to be "spread out." Lady Sheil, the British envoy's wife, writes that once the guilty had received their just "deserts," the Master of Wrath distributed sweets among the participants as a token of royal gratitude and "admission into the brotherhood." The whole community—not just the monarch and the state—was to be seen as the grand executioner. Lady Sheil adds: "It was said that the general impression produced on the people by all this bloodshed was not favorable. Indignation at the attempt on the Shah's life was lost in sympathy for the fate of the sufferers."^[8]

Although such extravaganzas were not repeated, public punishments continued well into the early twentieth century. A diary for 1893–1904 describing public events in Shiraz lists in that city alone 118 amputations—41 of fingers, 39 of feet, and 38 of ears—110 floggings, 48 decapitations, 17 hangings, 11 drawing-and-quarterings, 4 live-wallings, and 2 disembowelings.^[9] These punishments were carried out in public view and the bodies left on display as an 'ebrat (example) to others. Most of the executed were tribesmen accused of rural banditry and highway robbery.

Thus the traditional legal systems of Iran and Europe had much in common. Both rejected circumstantial evidence,

relying heavily on judicial torture and public confessions. Both treated punishment as a grand spectacle to deter and impress the public with the awesome power of the monarch. Both located punishment mainly on the body and rarely incarcerated prisoners for prolonged periods. They had dungeons and jails but no prisons or penitentiaries. If physical punishment happened to be more prevalent in Iran, it was simply because Europe could banish criminals to its colonies and galley navies. Iran did not enjoy such overseas luxuries.

The two, however, differed in one significant aspect. Whereas Europe sporadically launched witch-hunts against "Satan and his agents," Iran, like the rest of the Middle East and the Eastern Orthodox world, did not—even though its elite as well as its masses believed in the existence of Satan (shaytan ) and little devils (jinns ) capable of wreaking havoc on the community. Witch-hunts did not take place probably because the public, including the lower clergy, readily countered "bad magic" with folk remedies: visits to fortune-tellers, invariably "wise old women"; animal sacrifices; alms; prayers to saints; pilgrimages to holy shrines, including Qom, Najaf, Karbala, Mecca, Medina, and Mashed (literally, "the place of martyrdom"); and, most prevalent of all, amulets containing special charms, herbs, stones, seashells, and Koranic quotations. Good spells—tacitly tolerated by Islam—could heal the ill, revive sick animals, overcome barrenness, locate lost property, prevent butter from curdling, and even ward off natural disasters. What is more, the family structure (early female marriages and grandmothers integrated into extended households) produced few impoverished old women—the main targets of European witch-hunts. In short, Iranian society believed in the existence of witches but did not produce European-style witch-hunts with their inquisitional methods, live burnings, and public recantations.

Judicial Reforms

Judicial reform came to Iran gradually. It came first as a trickle in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; then as a stream

during the first quarter of the twentieth century; and finally as a full torrent once Reza Shah established his Pahlavi dynasty in 1926. Inklings of change appeared in the last years of Nasser al-Din Shah (1848–96) when a small group of reformers, known as the munavar al-fekr and rushan fekran (both literally mean "enlightened thinkers"), raised fundamental questions about the traditional judicial system. They questioned the lack of uniformity between urf and sharia courts; the ambiguous line between tween the two; the rejection of circumstantial evidence; the inordinate power of the clergy; the subordinate position of women and non-Muslims; the notion of vengeance and blood money; the corporal punishments that produced limbless and thus unproductive citizens; the premise that law mediated not between state and citizen but between feuding families, clans, and tribes; and the harsh sentences mandated for such victimless crimes as drunkenness, apostasy (kafer ), homosexuality (lavat ), and fornication (zanan ; sex between unmarried couples).

What is more, they began to perceive judicial torture and corporal punishments as signs of barbarism, medievalism, and, to borrow Foucault's terminology, the "surplus power of Oriental Despotism." In the same way that nineteenth-century Russian reformers denounced serfdom as the shameful badge of "Asiatic backwardness," their Iranian counterparts saw judicial torture and corporal punishments as the embarrassing hallmarks of "Oriental Despotism."

Nasser al-Din Shah tried to address the new "discourse" by modifying the horrors of public executions and, on a number of different occasions, outlawing judicial torture—at least in political cases. Torture, however, continued to be used extensively on common criminals both to extract confessions and to locate stolen goods. Significantly, when Nasser al-Din Shah was assassinated, the new monarch refused his Master of Wrath permission to torture the assassin even though the latter was convinced that such methods would uncover a wide network of hidden accomplices. The assassin was hanged in public with a military band drowning out his final speech. This was a sharp contrast to the 1852 Babi executions.

The pressure for judicial reform intensified during the

1905–9 Constitutional Revolution. In fact, the revolution was sparked by the public flogging of prominent merchants scapegoated for rising sugar prices. In the eyes of the constitutionalists, public floggings were demeaning; royal footmen were the "lowest of the low"; and the Nasaqchis and Mir Ghazabs were no better than "common torturers and sadists."^[10] One newspaper ran a long series of cartoons in color entitled "Punishments under the Despotic Monarchs" graphically depicting the Masters of Wrath carrying out the most horrendous of the traditional executions—public beheadings, live burials, quarterings, eye gougings, and disembowelings.^[11] The cartoons claimed to "illustrate" the incorrigible backwardness of the ancien régime—even though many of these punishments had already fallen into disuse. The very same cartoons were reprinted in 1980 to illustrate the iniquities of all monarchies.^[12]

After 1909, the constitutionalists implemented some mild reforms despite conservative resistance. They renamed the urf the Adliyeh (Justice Ministry) and set up a central office to decide which cases went to the sharia courts. They repeated the ban against judicial torture and promised to respect the independence of the judiciary. Moreover, they restricted executions to hangings and firing squads. When Fazlallah Nuri, the leading conservative cleric, was sentenced to death, he was swiftly hanged. A Revolutionary Tribunal found him guilty of "sowing corruption and sedition on earth" because his fatwas (religious decrees) had urged the faithful to "spill the blood" of the parliamentary leaders on the grounds that they were "apostates," "atheists," and "secret Babis." For some, the sharia gave senior clerics the authority to issue such fatwas against the kuffar (unbelievers)—although such fatwas trespassed on royal prerogatives. The same tribunal condemned to death two other prominent royalists. Fazlallah was hanged before a large jeering crowd in Cannon Square. The other two were shot by a firing squad in a walled garden hidden from public view.

Furthermore, the reformers employed Swedish officers to establish a rural gendarmerie, an urban shahrbani (police force), and city jails that were soon dubbed "shahrbani." Teh-

ran obtained a Central Jail (Zendan-e Markazi)—known officially as the Zendan-e Movaqqat (Temporary Detention House) and colloquially as the Falakeh as it was located on the site of the old royal dungeon. A two-story, square building around a large courtyard, the Central Jail had one huge entryway and three smaller gates separating the inner part (darouni ) of the building from the outer (berouni ). The outer part contained offices and guard rooms. The inner part contained eight cell blocks, four on each floor. The first floor had small solitary cells, two meters by one. These had metal beds and shared with the other solitary cells on the same corridor a common toilet and washroom. The second floor contained large wards, each capable of housing as many as thirty to fifty inmates. According to one inmate, the first floor was dreaded not only because of its solitary cells but also because it was damp and dark.^[13] Another writes that burglars were often placed there to persuade them to reveal their hidden loot.^[14] The provincial jails were even worse; they lacked such amenities as beds, showers, and proper toilets.

Real judicial reform did not come until the late 1920s—after Reza Shah had consolidated the Pahlavi regime. He assigned the task of judicial reform to Ali-Akbar Davar, the justice minister, Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma, the finance minister, and Abdul-Hossein Timurtash, the court minister. This triumvirate had degrees from European universities—two of them in law, the field favored by sons of the landed aristocracy. Later generations disparaged them as kravatis (tie-wearers) and gharbzadeh (mesmerized by the West). But they—unlike their successors—realized that such traditional practices as religious discrimination and corporal punishments could not be eliminated without a root-and-branch revamping of the whole judicial system.

Their outlook is reflected in an essay by Firuz Mirza entitled "Penal Codes."^[15] It sketched the evolution of European law beginning with lex talion (law of vengeance) in primitive tribes and ending with the establishment of uniform state codes in the nineteenth century. Firuz Mirza focused on the contribu-

tions of Beccaria, Rousseau, Kant, Montesquieu, and Bentham. Interestingly, he overlooked their concern about protecting the individual against the state. His own concern was not to protect the individual from the state but rather to safeguard the state from what he perceived to be the shackles of tradition—tribal chiefs, local magnates, and, most serious of all, retrogressive clerics.

The triumvirate used handpicked parliaments to revamp the judiciary. They created a Justice Ministry named the Dadgustari. They established courts on the county, regional, and provincial levels—as well as a Supreme Court on the national level. They abolished the sharia, tribal, and guild courts. They required all lawyers and judges to obtain some modern legal training—either from the West or from the new law school at Tehran University. They drew up penal and criminal codes modeled on those of Italy and Switzerland. Applicable to all—Muslim as well as non-Muslim—the new codes accepted the modern rules of evidence, especially circumstantial evidence; rejected the concept of family vendetta and blood money; diminished corporal punishments in favor of prison sentences; stressed the importance of incarceration and rehabilitation; and reserved capital punishment chiefly for murder, high treason, and armed rebellion. These codes gave to the sharia only one significant concession: they incorporated their rulings on marriage, divorce, and child custody.

The reformers also moved most executions out of public view. In fact, few executions were carried out in these years for the simple reason that violent crime rapidly diminished once the state established control over the highways and stamped out rural banditry.^[16] It should also be noted that the Pahlavi regime—unlike previous dynasties in Iran—did not need to impress the public with gruesome spectacles. For the first time in history, the state was armed with the full machinery of modern government—a central bureaucracy, a standing army, and a national police force. In short, it had the Maxim gun and thus could dispense with the public gallows.

The replacement of corporal punishments with prolonged

incarceration placed a heavy burden on prison facilities. The Tehran Central Jail, designed for 400 inmates, contained more than 1,000 by the late 1920s.^[17] The Mashed jail, intended for 200, housed more than 900.^[18] To meet the new demand, the regime drew up plans to build five large prisons (each housing more than 100 inmates); fifty medium-sized ones (more than 50 each); and thirty small ones (housing less than 30). In fact, most of these were not built until the 1960s.

The most famous of those built in the 1920s was Qasr. Its full name was Qasr-e Qajar (the Qajar Palace) because of its location near the ruins of a royal summer retreat on the cool northern hills of Tehran. A large, tall building perched prominently on the hilltops next to an army barracks, Qasr became a symbol of both the new Pahlavi state and the modern judicial system. Its thick walls not only absorbed the inmates but also concealed the wardens and the occasional executions from public view. A former prisoner writes that those driving past were easily intimidated—as they were supposed to be—by the thick, high walls covered with barbed wire, armed guards, searchlights, and gun turrets.^[19] Some dubbed it the Iranian Bastille. Others called it the faramushkhaneh (house of forgetfulness): the outside world was supposed to forget its inmates; its inmates were supposed to forget the outside world.

Despite Qasr's later reputation, the first transfers from the Central Jail were impressed by its cleanliness, sunlit windows, wide corridors, spacious courtyards, flowered gardens, and, most of all, running water and shower rooms.^[20] Although inspired by Bentham's Panopticon and the Philadelphia Penitentiary, Qasr discarded their most inhumane features—the treadwheel, the absolute silence, the ever-present eye, the obligatory hoods, the totally solitary cells, and the constant religious indoctrination. The modern prison had come to Iran via the modified and more humanitarian systems of early-twentieth-century Western Europe. Like much else in Pahlavi architecture, ancient Iranian motives were grafted onto the building to give it an "authentic" look. The Western penitentiary had been Iranianized.

The building contained a major communal block, three large blocks housing 10 to 20 inmates each, and five smaller ones with multiple double and single cells. Block 1 housed shortterm inmates—petty thieves and, paradoxically, murderers awaiting execution. Blocks 5 and 6 held common criminals, with the more "dangerous" in chains. Block 8—with its small cells—was soon to be used for privileged prisoners such as former ministers, tribal chiefs, and prominent bankrupts. Some had private rooms with easy access to nearby cells. Political prisoners were placed in the neigboring block 7. The corridors of blocks 7 and 8 led to the prison courtyard and garden. Other wings contained solitary cells, baths, guard rooms, prison offices, the workshop, and the infirmary. A separate women's section was planned for the future.

In its first year of operation, 1929-30, Qasr housed 300—18 of them political prisoners. By 1940, it housed more than 2,000—200 of them political prisoners.^[21] More than 50 of them were crammed into block 7, which was built for 20. Others were in blocks 2 and 4. Not surprisingly, Qasr soon obtained the reputation of being the regime's main political prison. It retained this reputation until the 1970s.

Communist Prisoners

The first political prisoners in Qasr were from the Communist party. They were to set the pattern for prison life for forthcoming generations of political inmates. Some two hundred communists were arrested in 1929–30 soon after organizing a series of strikes—in an Isfahan textile mill, in the Mazandaran railways, in the Mashed carpet workshops, and, most sensational of all, in the British-owned oil industry. Some were soon released. Others were sent into "internal exile"—northerners to the intolerable heat of Bushire, southerners to Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan. But thirty-eight were incarcerated in Qasr. Seven died there—all from natural causes. The other thirty-one remained there until 1941 when the Anglo-Soviet in-

vasion forced the government to grant a general amnesty to all political prisoners.

The thirty-one remaining communist prisoners spent much of these eleven years in block 7. There they set up their own komun (commune) with a three-man steering committee to coordinate their activities, pool their meager resources, organize their daily routines, and help those in need of financial and medical assistance.^[22] In fact, after the 1930 arrests in Iran and the Stalinist purges in Russia—which took a heavy toll from Iranian exiles—the Communist party of Iran ceased to exist for all practical purposes outside the walls of Qasr.^[23]

The regime intentionally created the impression that these communists had been convicted for espionage. In fact, they were not brought to court until 1938–39, and then they were tried retroactively under a 1931 law banning all forms of maram-e ishteraki (collectivist ideology).^[24] This 1931 law threatened anyone advocating "collectivism" or joining an organization—defined as more than two persons—that advocated "collectivism" with three to ten years in "solitary confinement." It also threatened those opposing the "constitutional monarchy" with prolonged incarceration and those taking up arms against the same monarchy with the death penalty. Reza Shah decreed this law without parliamentary discussion, knowing well that its sweeping language would be highly controversial, even for his handpicked deputies. Although these communists were not tried for espionage, some historians remain under the false impression that they had been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.

The one major espionage trial of the reign did not implicate these thirty-eight. In 1930, Georges Agabekov, the head of the Soviet secret service in the Middle East, defected to France and presumably revealed what he knew of his agency. Soon the Iranian police rounded up thirty-two Soviet agents—many of them functionaries in the Ministry of Post and Telegraph. Two were executed, three were sentenced to life, and the others were given terms varying from five months to fifteen years.^[25] Only

one was to participate in the subsequent communist movement. In his memoirs, Agabekov mentions in passing that his superiors were so fearful of double agents that they strictly forbade the recruitment of local communists.^[26] Agabekov himself seems to have been remarkably ignorant of the Iranian Communist party—of both its internal workings and its recent history.^[27] The Soviets probably compartmentalized their espionage and revolutionary activities.

In Qasr, the communists distanced themselves from these spies. They looked down on them as weaklings who had ratted on each other, as simpletons who had been fooled into making self-incriminating confessions, and as "moral degenerates" indulging in opium and card gambling.^[28] What is more, they felt that anyone who had spied for money would again do the same for the prison authorities. According to one communist, such "highly dubious" characters were to be "avoided" at all costs.^[29] Another revealed in his interrogation that the party expelled anyone suspected of being a Soviet spy on the grounds that they were too untrustworthy.^[30] The lone spy who participated in the later communist movement—Sayyed Baqer Emami, the son of Tehran's Imam Jom'eh (Friday Prayer Leader)—continued to be handicapped by the reputation of being a dangerous ultraleftist—perhaps even an "agent provocateur."^[31]

Prison memoirs—most of them published after the 1979 revolution—reveal much about the social composition of the thirty-eight communist prisoners and thus of the early communist movement in Iran. (See table 1.) The thirty-eight were predominantly ethnic minorities. Two were Jews, another two were Armenians, and twenty-four were Azeris (Turkish-speakers originally from Iranian Azerbaijan). Persians numbered no more than four, and two of them had Turkic-speaking mothers. Ethnicity, however, does not appear to have been of great importance to them and hardly figures in their writings. At one time, the steering committee of their komun was composed of one Azeri and two Armenians.^[32]

The group was relatively young. At the time of arrest, most were in their late twenties or early thirties. This meant that they

had been in their impressionable teens at the time of the Russian Revolution. Few had higher degrees. Only two had completed college—both at the Medical College in Baku. Two had no formal education whatsoever. Eleven had been to primary school. Twenty had finished secondary school. Many had briefly attended the Communist University of the Toilers of the East located in Moscow. This was known in Iran by its Russian acronym, KUTIV. The Iranian regime considered KUTIV a school for espionage. In fact, it was an ideological institute designed to give party organizers a smattering of Marxism-Leninism. One alumnus estimates that some one hundred Iranians attended KUTIV at one time or another during the 1920s and 1930s.^[33]

Among the thirty-eight were thirteen teachers, three office employees, two doctors, one pharmacist, and one bookseller. There were also thirteen workers—many of them printers, carpenters, and skilled artisans. The early labor movement in Iran, as in many other countries, was located not so much in modern factories—which were few—as in the skilled crafts and trades.^[34] Only one among the thirty-eight had been born into the wealthy upper class.

Three of the thirty-eight—Jafar Pishevari, Yousef Eftekhari, and Ardashir Ovanessian—played particularly important roles both inside prison and, later, in national politics. They—as well as some of the others—were to publish prison memoirs in later years. Pishevari, the eldest of the three, was a founding member of the Communist party. Born in Iranian Azerbaijan as Jafar Javadzadeh, he and his family had emigrated to Baku when raiding tribesmen destroyed their home and livelihood. His father—an educated sayyed (presumed descendant of the Prophet)—earned a living running a small grocery store. After completing his schooling in Baku, Pishevari taught Turkish language and Persian literature at the local municipal high school. In his words, "The drama of the Russian Revolution had swept me into radical politics."^[35] He joined the Adalat (Justice) party formed by pro-Bolshevik Iranians in Baku. He participated in the famous Jangali Revolt in Gilan and served as

(table continued on next page)

interior commissar of the short-lived Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran. When the Adalat party reconstituted itself as the Communist party, he was elected to its central committee. After the demise of the Jangali Revolt, he went first to KUTIV and then to Tehran where he opened a bookstore and helped edit the trade union paper Haqiqat (Truth). He was arrested in 1930 when funds destined for striking oil workers in Abadan were traced back to him in Tehran. The police, however, failed to link him to the Jangali Revolt, probably because he had changed his name to Pishevari (Artisan).

Eftekhari had a similar background. His father, also a shopkeeper in Azerbaijan, had died young, forcing the family of four brothers to emigrate to Baku. There the eldest brother started a small business while the younger ones taught at local schools and joined the Iranian Communist party. Eftekhari and one other brother also studied at KUTIV, where they attended lectures given by Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. After returning to Iran in the mid-1920s, Eftekhari first set up a teachers' union in Tehran. He then moved to Abadan with three fellow Azeris determined, as he boasts, to organize the oil workers against the British.^[36]

By May Day 1929, Eftekhari had organized Iran's first oil strike, bringing the whole industry, including the refinery—which at that time was the largest in the world—to a total standstill. He mobilized the workers through literacy classes and public theaters; through protests against racial discrimination (the oil company discriminated in favor of British and Indian employees); and through demands over such bread-and-butter issues as the minimum wage, paid Fridays, job security, and the eight-hour day. The strike was not broken until the military arrested more than forty-five labor organizers. The British "thanked" and "congratulated" Reza Shah for his decisive intervention.^[37] Eftekhari, however, won fame as the man who had shaken the British Empire as well as the Pahlavi state.

Ovanessian had been born into an Armenian family living in Rasht. His father—originally from Tabriz—was a salesman-turned-pharmacist who apprenticed his sons to Alexander Ata-

begyan, a local Armenian pharmacist who later succeeded Prince Kropotkin as one of Russia's foremost intellectual anarchists. On completing his apprenticeship, Ovanessian forsook pharmacy for revolutionary politics. In his memoirs, he writes that one of his first recollections was that of the Jangalis holding enthusiastic rallies in Rasht.^[38]

Ovanessian soon joined the Cultural Society—the hotbed of radicalism in Rasht. There Armenian and Muslim intellectuals, including women, organized literacy classes, book readings, chamber concerts, soccer games, and theatrical shows, including Molière's anticlerical play, Tartuffe.^[39] Conservatives denounced the society as a den of iniquity—even of Babis. The British Consul kept close tabs on the society, suspecting it of being a den of Soviet spies.^[40] After all, did it not proudly display Lenin's portrait every May Day?^[41] Similar cultural societies existed in nearby Qazvin and Enzeli (Pahlavi).^[42]

Ovanessian joined the Communist party in 1923 and was sent to KUTIV in 1925. On his return in 1926, he organized a pharmacists' union in Tehran and served as the party's trouble-shooter in the provinces, traveling frequently to Rasht, Qazvin, Mashed, and Tabriz. On one such visit to Tabriz, he was arrested and transferred to Tehran. He spent the next eleven years in Qasr. The British Embassy later described Ovanessian as one of the premier "brains" and "dominating personalities" of the Iranian communist movement.^[43]

The prison memoirs of these three—and others—document many hardships but few actual incidents of physical brutality. They were kept in limbo for years without being formally charged.^[44] The long wait drove one to attempt suicide. Some were never brought to trial.^[45] Others were sentenced to ten years—the maximum permitted by the 1931 law. Of course, the time spent awaiting trial was not taken into account. Those completing their sentences were invariably banished to the provinces. The police chief later testified that the Shah had instructed him to send these prisoners into "indefinite exile"—preferably to the deep south.^[46]

Moreover, prisoners were occasionally forced to watch

executions. When a group of bandits tried to break out of Qasr, their leader was hanged in the main courtyard in full view of all inmates.^[47] In addition, prisoners were often deprived of books, newspapers, visitors, food packages, and proper medical care. Of the seven communists who did not survive prison, most died from lack of medicine: one succumbed to appendicitis, two to heart attacks, and at least two to typhus epidemics. What is more, any blatant infringement of prison regulations was punished with solitary confinement. Pishevari described this as the very worst punishment in Qasr.^[48] He added that this was real "torture" because humans are by nature social beings in dire need of companionship, conversation, and the sharing of such everyday pleasures as tea, cigarettes, and laughter.

The absence of physical violence turned interrogations into battles of wit. Eftekhari writes that when he was arrested his interrogator threatened him with torture, but he mockingly dismissed this as a bad joke, knowing well that physical violence was not permitted.^[49] It took the interrogator months to discover even his name and identity.

Ovanessian reminisces that his initial interrogation in Tabriz lasted two days, beginning early in the morning and ending late at night. He describes his two interrogators as persistent and experienced but correct and cordial. They shared meals with him and flattered him and other educated prisoners by praising their learning and insisting that they respected their social ideals. They tried to trick them into thinking their accomplices had already implicated them. The prisoners, in turn, tried to put the interrogators on false trails. Ovanessian's Tabriz contact pretended he did not know Ovanessian's identity but claimed that his forehead bore the calluses of someone who diligently performed his daily Muslim prayers. Ovanessian writes that his interrogator had pointed out to the Shah in 1930 that advocating socialism was not in itself a crime. After his 1941 release, Ovanessian remained on cordial terms with some of his interrogators. One even phoned in 1944 to congratulate him on his election to parliament.^[50]

The interrogators used similar tactics with Pishevari. They

claimed that his accomplices had already testified that he had been sent by the Comintern with a false identity to participate in the Jangali Revolt, launch a communist newspaper, and foment unrest among oil workers. Demanding a "face-to-face" confrontation with these "liars," Pishevari offered a number of plausible explanations for his past life. He had been a mere observer of the Jangali Revolt. His Persian had not been good enough to enable him to write newspaper articles. He had come to Tehran because his in-laws resided there. His knew some of the oil strikers by sight because they occasionally visited his bookstore. He had adopted a new name only because the government had recently ordered all citizens to obtain identity cards. He added that it was true he had been an ardent revolutionary in his youth but age had mellowed him. When asked to name fellow students at KUTIV, he listed those who had either died or remained outside Iran. He repeated these explanations ten years later when brought to trial. He added caustically that the passage of time had faded his memory and that the 1931 law could not possibly apply to him because he had been in prison since 1930.^[51] He commented that the main strategy of the police was to to break down prisoners by offering them bribes and threatening them with solitary confinement.^[52]

This conspicuous absence of torture can be explained in a number of ways. First, the law explicitly banned the use of physical force to extract information. In 1941, at his own trial, the police chief successfully pleaded that he had respected the law banning such "abhorrent" investigatory methods.^[53] Ovanessian writes that the prison authorities—with the notable exception of the notorious "doctor" in the Central Jail—were on the whole "decent," "reasonable," "sympathetic," and even "European-trained products of the Constitutional Revolution."^[54] The police chief was himself an accomplished classical violinist.

Second, the Comintern kept close tabs. Eftekhari and his two colleagues were convinced that they were not tortured because the regime shunned bad foreign publicity, especially from the Comintern.^[55] Leo Karakhan, the Soviet deputy foreign minis-

ter, visited Qasr on his 1933 tour of Iran—just before falling victim to the Stalinist purges.

Third, the communist prisoners were willing to organize hunger strikes to protest outrageous behavior. Such strikes erupted in Tabriz, in the Central Jail, and in Qasr. In 1929–30, prisoners in Tabriz and the Central Jail protested the mass detentions without formal charges. Likewise, prisoners in Qasr went on a hunger strike to demand the right to earn pocket money in the prison workshop. Ovanessian writes that destitute prisoners needed this income to ward off bribes offered by the prison authorities. These three strikes were partially successful. Less important detainees were released. Political prisoners gained access to the workshop on condition they did not use it during the same hours as the Lurs and Kurds—these tribesmen were segregated in their own cell blocks. The wardens feared fraternization between communists and such "dangerous" inmates. After the Qasr strike, the warden exclaimed that Ovanessian could no longer deny being a communist because "only communists organize hunger strikes." Ovanessian retorted that Gladstone—the Conservative prime minister of Britain—had himself once organized such a strike. He later commented that this was pure fabrication, but he figured the warden had not read enough European history to know better.^[56]

Fourth, the regime did not have a pressing need to use torture. It was not seeking vital security information as the Communist party had rejected the notion of armed struggle. And it was not in the business of extracting ideological recantations and winning over hearts and minds. A few minor figures were released once they pledged in writing to stay out of politics. These pledges were never published. Ovanessian explains that the government was reluctant to acknowledge even the existence of politically committed citizens.^[57] He adds that those who signed such pledges terminated their political careers because they were stigmatized as "sellouts" and "corrupt collaborators."^[58] For its part, the regime rarely sought such pledges. In a revealing passage, Pishevari writes that one worn-out pris-

oner offered to write His Imperial Highness a letter pledging full support and recanting his ideological past. The warden laughed, retorting that the "regime wanted not active citizens but obedient and apolitical subjects."^[59] The regime was more interested in keeping subjects passive and outwardly obedient than in mobilizing them and boring holes into their minds. Reza Shah had created a military monarchy—not an ideologically charged autocracy.

Physical force, however, continued to be used on common criminals, on suspected spies, and on those accused of plotting regicide. Criminals, especially burglars, were subjected to the bastinado and the strappado to reveal their hidden loot. Suspected spies and assassins were beaten, deprived of sleep, and subjected to the dreaded qapani —the binding of arms tightly behind the back. Sometimes this caused the joints to crack. It was rumored that this excruciating torture had been imported from Western Europe. Ovanessian writes that the qapani prompted some spies to seal their own fates.^[60] Although political prisoners were often threatened with the qapani, they were rarely subjected to it.

On the whole, political prisoners were treated reasonably well. Block 7 was clean and well ventilated—unlike block 5, reserved for common criminals. They were allowed to bring in their own clothes, blankets, bedding, and sometimes books. They received home meals and pocket money—friends and relatives entrusted money to the warden, and the warden, in turn, issued prisoners weekly jetons (coupons). They were permitted visitors; by the mid-1930s, Tuesdays, Fridays, and national holidays were designated visiting days. Forty years later, Ovanessian reminisced that on their release in 1941 he and his fellow prisoners had been hailed as heroes for having survived the "Iranian Bastille." But, he adds, Qasr did not really deserve this sinister reputation.^[61] Of course, Ovanessian, like many, had an exaggerated notion of the original Bastille.

The main concern of the political prisoners was not torture but boredom and lack of privacy. One inmate writes that everyone, including the jailers, was deadened by the monotony of

waking up every morning at the same hour, eating the same tasteless breakfast, walking in the same courtyard, listening to the same complaints, and hearing the same trampling of boots, the locking and unlocking of the same iron gates.^[62] Prison, he adds, was like a small village where everyone poked their noses into other people's business:

The one thing you must keep in mind is that the occupants of these villages inhabit a tiny world. They tend to squabble over small things and obsess over their neighbors' sex lives. They gossip when an older inmate goes around with a younger one. What is more, the overcrowding leads to petty squabbling over such issues as whose bedding should make room for walking space, who should go to the courtyard when, and how much should the window be left open. What a relief it is to get away from one's own cell even if for a short spell.^[63]

To break the monotony, the prisoners organized a wide variety of activities. They spent as much time as possible in the courtyard walking, exercising, and playing soccer and volleyball. Some grew plants and vegetables in the prison garden. Others—especially from the Cultural Society in Rasht—put on skits and shows. They played chess and recited poetry—especially Hafez, Sa'di, and Lahuti (their contemporary revolutionary poet who had fled to the Soviet Union). Ferdowsi was shunned as a royalist. They read both smuggled-in newspapers and permitted books—the favorite titles were Dumas's Mount Cristo and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front . Some translated Chekhov's plays, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina , and Petrushevky's Islam in Iran . They organized literacy and language classes. Ovanessian added French to his working knowledge of Turkish, Persian, Armenian, Russian, and English. Pishevari mastered colloquial Persian—which he had not been able to speak fluently in the 1920s.^[64]

They also socialized with inmates from other blocks during their periodic visits to the prison clinic. They invited guests to their komun dinner parties to celebrate May Day and the Oc-

tober Revolution. They told each other stories. Eftekhari comments that a story, however interesting, becomes boring when heard for the umpteenth time. For example, the Bakhtiyari tribesmen drove him up the wall by telling and retelling how one of their heroines had saved the Constitutional Revolution.^[65] The poorer communists earned pocket money making toys in the prison workshop. Those with craft skills trained others to make goods that were then sold to the outside market through the prison guards, who, of course, took their commissions. The money thus earned bought the inmates cigarettes and citrus fruits considered essential to survive disease, especially the typhus epidemics that periodically hit the prisons.^[66]

The communist prisoners also spent considerable time discussing the hot issues of the day—especially the debate over "World Revolution" versus "Socialism in One Country." Ovanessian, Eftekhari, and Pishevari took different positions. Ovanessian, who later used the pen name Ahan (Iron), supported the official party line, arguing that industrialization and collectivization would inevitably lay the groundwork for democracy and socialism in the Soviet Union. Eftekhari, who lost a brother in the purges, denounced Stalin for "betraying" Lenin, failing to export the revolution, and using brutal methods to crush the opposition. Meanwhile, Pishevari, while still loyal to the Comintern, argued that ultra-revolutionary slogans about class struggles were counterproductive in such backward semicolonial countries as Iran.^[67] He insisted that radicals in these countries should think more in terms of creating a cross-class progressive organization—such as the Democratic party that had played a crucial role in Iran from 1906 to 1921.^[68] One communist prisoner repeated the old Persian saying: "If you put two Iranians in one place you will get at least three different political views."^[69]

Other Political Prisoners

Monotony was broken—especially in the mid-1930s—by the sudden appearance of fallen dignitaries. Ovanessian writes that Qasr inmates were the first to feel the shifts in national politics:

dignitaries would arrive at all hours of the night, sometimes after having spent the same evening playing cards with the royal family.^[70]

Seven prominent figures passed through Qasr before meeting their deaths in the Central Jail: Timurtash and Firuz Mirza, two of the triumvirate who had reformed the judicial system; Abdul-Hossein Diba, Timurtash's confidant and the uncle of the future empress Farah Diba; Sardar As'ad, a Bakhtiyari leader and war minister; Khan Baba As'adi, his brother; Sowlat al-Dowleh, the Qashqayi chief; and last, but not least, Mohammad Forrokhi-Yazdi, a well-known poet and the editor of Tofan (Storm) who was arrested after visiting Moscow and publishing in the émigré communist paper Peykar (Struggle). Forrokhi-Yazdi was murdered probably because he satirized the marriage of the crown prince to Princess Fawzieh of Egypt. Expecting a similar fate, Davar, the other member of the triumvirate, committed suicide.

These murders were committed in the Central Jail rather than in Qasr to avoid prison unrest. They were carried out by Lieutenant "Doctor" Ahmadi, a self-taught pharmacist promoted through the ranks and given a crash course on nursing. It was said—probably apocryphally—that he had received his promotion as compensation for having inadvertently eaten poisoned stew intended for one of the prisoners.

Two other national figures—Sayyed Hassan Modarres, the chief cleric in parliament, and Shaykh Khaz'al, the main Arab leader in Khuzestan—were both strangled after spending years in internal exile. To discredit all these dignitaries, the regime accused them of bribery and embezzlement. Such smears easily stuck as the public tended to view the elite as inherently venal and financially corrupt. The regime did not try to extract public confessions from them. Financial accusations were deemed more than adequate.

While in prison, Timurtash and Firuz Mirza were constantly ridiculed for having collaborated with Reza Shah and having built Qasr. Firuz Mirza wrote in his Prison Memoirs —not pub-

lished until 1986—that he was proud of his model prison and was tempted to remind his fellow inmates of the old dungeons and their "horrendous filth."^[71] Nevertheless, he was so "ashamed" of being incarcerated in the same prison as "pickpockets and petty crooks" that he forbade his children to visit him. After watching Moharram flagellations in the courtyard, he commented that it was a pity the regime had not diverted such "deep and genuine energies" into creating a strong modern nation-state. He found Shi'ism to be closer to Christianity than to Sunni Islam with its "passive fatalism." Firuz Mirza filled his cell—which enjoyed a skyline view of Tehran—with carpets and his private library. There he composed his memoirs, wrote the history of legal reform, and translated Oscar Wilde's De Profundis —this probably suited his self-pity and the pain of misplaced affection.

Timurtash was needled even more. Pishevari writes that Timurtash was disliked because of his role in the execution of the Jangali leaders, his drafting of the 1931 law, and his constant self-pity, weeping, and childlike behavior.^[72] He pleaded with the guards to shoot some harmless owls nesting in the prison courtyard on the grounds that they were bringing him bad luck. The guards could not oblige; they were not permitted to bring guns into the prison compound. According to legend, the master builder of the Tower of London had been one of its first inmates. With Qasr this was no legend.

Three lesser figures were executed for plotting a coup: Colonel Fouladin, the governor of Azerbaijan; Samuel Haim, the Jewish Majles deputy; and Alimardan Khan, a Bakhtiyari rebel leader. Fouladin insisted on giving the order to fire at his own execution. Haim, who spent seven years in prison refusing to answer questions about Fouladin, devoted his last hour to giving Eftekhari his daily French lesson. Alimardan Khan went cheerfully to the firing squad, refusing a blindfold and distributing his possessions to his fellow prisoners. Ovanessian writes that he published his prison memoirs in part to "keep alive the memory of such courageous figures as Alimardan Khan"—even

though he came from the upper class.^[73] Pishevari contrasts their fortitude with the panic that broke out among the convicted spies as they approached the gallows.^[74]

Many other dignitaries spent time in Qasr: Amir Mojahed and Manoucher As'ad, two other Bakhtiyari leaders; Nasser Khan, a Qashqayi chief; Dabir Azam Bahrami, a court minister; Qavam Shirazi, the Shah's future son-in-law; Moshir Homayun, the former mayor of Tehran; Abu-Nasr Azod, a wealthy Qajar landlord who had sent a letter critical of the Shah to a French newspaper; Generals Jahanbani and Shahybani; Amir Khosrow Khan, the chief of the Kalhor tribe from western Iran; Salar Zafar Sanjabi and Sardar Rashid Ardalan, two Kurdish chiefs (the latter spent eleven years in Qasr); Mirza Taher Tunekaboni, a cleric on the Supreme Court; Movarrekh al-Saltaneh Sephar, a senior bureaucrat who fell victim to typhus while in prison; Zaka al-Dawleh Ghaffari, a law professor who had questioned the financial wisdom of building the Trans-Iranian Railway; Abdul-Qadir Moshkinfam, a maverick journalist who changed his name to Azad (Free) while in prison; and Ali Dashti, a journalist who had started his political career by singing loud praises for Reza Shah.

Dashti was in Qasr for only a few months. Suffering from acute insomnia, he was transferred to a mental asylum where he translated Le Bon's Sociology and composed his Prison Days, which was not published until 1948. Prison Days contains little on prison life but much on fate, love, death, suicide, divine providence, Christ, and Thomas Jefferson. It belongs less to the genre of modern prison literature than to that of medieval courtiers bemoaning their unfair fate. Dashti describes prison as a "cemetery," chastises Europe for inventing such horrors, and depicts incarceration as "torture worse than death."^[75] Ovanessian comments that prisoners of Dashti's ilk enjoyed many privileges in Qasr, including private rooms, opium pipes, and personal servants—common criminals who cleaned out their cells and did their daily chores.^[76]

In addition to these dignitaries, a colorful array of person-

alities passed through Qasr. They included Mr. Lapidus, a wealthy Polish businessman who often bribed his way out to fancy restaurants; "Alexander," a White Russian officer who entertained cellmates with artful portraits; and Sayyed Farhad, a bandit who made a rare escape from Qasr—when gendarmes took his eighty-year-old father hostage, the old man told them he could produce for the Shah another Sayyed Farhad if given nine months of freedom.^[77] At one time, the cells housed a group of "simple peasants" from Azerbaijan who had dreamed of an unnamed figure heralding the dawn of freedom. The communists jested that these villagers had invented a new form of high treason—subversive dreams.^[78]

Some remained in Qasr until 1941. These included Yousef "The Armenian" (in fact, he was Assyrian), a bandit who bribed the guards to smuggle in his wife for overnight visits; Matous Melikian, the octogenarian principal of the Armenian high school who had protested the closing of his teaching establishment; Ahmad Ispahani, a young literary friend of the famous Nazem Hekmat of Turkey (Ispahani had been caught crossing the border into Iran); Ruhollah Kazemzadeh, an air force pilot who had tried to escape abroad in his airplane; and eight young officers accused of forming a fascist organization. Their leader, Lieutenant Mohsen Jahansouz, was a Beirut-educated aristocrat who had translated Hitler's Mein Kampf . Suspected of plotting to assassinate the Shah, Jahansouz was deprived of sleep, subjected to the qapani, and then executed.^[79] His seven associates remained in Qasr; two of them soon converted to Marxism.

For the veteran communists, however, by far the most interesting of all the newcomers were a group of young Marxists known as the Fifty-three. They were to form the nucleus of the future Tudeh party. Ovanessian reports that their arrest struck Qasr like a lightning bolt. "We were all eager," he writes, "to see, talk to, and get to know these famous newcomers."^[80] Pishevari recounts that by the mid-1930s the communist komun had grown gloomy: few radicals were coming in, and the state

appeared to have the whole country in its tight grip. "We had concluded Iran was either dead or in deep sleep. The arrival of the Fifty-three shook us out of our gloom."^[81]

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.