By 1951 economic and political relations between Iran and the Soviet Union were already established and a demarcation agreement was signed in Tehran by a Soviet-Iranian joint commission. The American struggle to keep Iran from Communism led to the 1953 CIA and MI-6 sponsored coup against Mosaddeq. In its efforts to prevent Iran from falling into Soviet hands, U.S. administration was not restricted to "political" means alone. In fact, the U.S. hoped that a "quiet diplomacy," instead of war and violence, would produce the desired results. This was the beginning of heavy United States support for the Pahlavi monarchy. As Iranians were struggling to come to terms with their identity on the brink of this widespread "American imperialism," the leftist groups in Iran generated fervent debates. While some desired a "return" to local norms, others propagated Soviet models. These views were often imaged and imagined in Iranian Leftist publications. The pro-Communist Tudeh Party's women's bi-monthly, Bidari-e Ma [Our Awakening], is a case in point. Captivated by the views of the Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai, every issue of Bidari-e Ma illustrated Iranian woman as a very simple and slim type. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the Iranian government tried its best to suppress the Tudeh Party and other leftist groups. Farrukh Ghaffari's debut film, 'South of the City' (1958), one of the earliest motion pictures to take a critical look at impoverished life in downtown Tehran, was banned for three years. In the 1970s, leftist views were often verbalized (rather than illustrated) by art and literary critics. Addressing a new generation of artists, who following Andy Warhol initiated a new style by illustrating commodities, the Iranian Marxist art and literary critic Khosrow Golsorkhi lamented in his illegally distributed jeld Sefid (blank cover) manuscript, 'The Politics of Art and Poetry' (ca. 1973), only a few privileged upper-class patrons could relate to the mere "clichl art" [hunar-i qrlibq] of this kind. Once the revolution had taken place, the reality of Iran's "Westoxification"[Gharbzadegr]--to use a term popular at the time--continued to raise the ire of the post-revolutionary elite who created a new visual language that borrowed heavily from that of the Iranian Left. In this sense, the visual culture of the Iranian Left became a "vanishing mediator" (cf. Slavoj Zizek), silently contributing to the propaganda images of the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran.