Word: tudeh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been the prime mover recently in Iran's somewhat improved relations with the Soviet Union and the resumption of natural-gas exports to Moscow. This is not likely to strengthen his chances for leadership. Since 1984, the Khomeini regime has arrested, imprisoned or executed most of the leaders of Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party. The continued Soviet occupation of Muslim Afghanistan has intensified Iranian opposition to Moscow. Afghan refugees have poured into Iran bearing tales of Soviet brutality, and Iran has been stepping up its support of the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels...
...have executed 30,000 dissidents in all, while keeping more than 100,000 political prisoners behind bars. The ruling mullahs admit to just 2,000 to 3,000 executions, but they have nonetheless systematically eliminated every group that does not conform to their beliefs. Last May they forced the Tudeh Communist Party to denounce itself publicly and disband. In August they suspended the Hojjatieh Society, an esoteric Shi'ite Muslim splinter group that refuses to interpret the Koran in the fashion approved by the mullahs. During the past five years the regime has also incited mobs to desecrate...
Moscow-Tehran relations have, in fact, long been characterized by mutual and mistrustful exploitation. The Soviets were far from enthusiastic in their support for Khomeini in the months just before his 1979 overthrow of the Shah. The reason, as a Tudeh member now in jail puts it, was that "Moscow perceived the clergy as incorrigible reactionaries." Those fears were well founded. Right-wing clergymen routinely reviled the Soviets as godless Communists, while Khomeini opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But Moscow wooed Tehran by offering assistance against the nettlesome Mujahedin guerrillas. In response, the mullahs invited KGB agents to Iran...
...course, however, Khomeini indulged the Soviets only as long as they were of use to him. Last autumn, despairing of his two-year campaign to obtain major sophisticated weapons systems from Moscow and to halt Soviet arms shipments to the Iraqis, Khomeini began tightening the screws on the Tudeh Party, at first through restrictions in their publications, later through sporadic arrests. Finally, about six months ago, some 25 Communist leaders were casually arrested...
...nations were eyeing each other more warily. Iranian authorities nervously tried to squelch rumors that the Soviet embassy in Tehran would be seized, as its U.S. counterpart had been in November 1979. The Soviet party newspaper Pravda vigorously asserted that the Soviet people "resolutely reject" the charges against the Tudeh. The article went on to argue, speciously, that the Tudeh was unlikely to know any important secrets and, disingenuously, that the U.S. had instigated the sudden crackdown...