In the early 2000s, Marxist student groups began to form at several Iranian universities for the first time since the government’s violent campaign of repression against leftist political prisoners in the 1980s. This campaign culminated in 1988 when thousands of Marxist and other leftist political prisoners who had participated in the 1979 revolution were executed by the postrevolutionary regime. In the early 2000s, the memory of this massacre was barely over a decade old, yet its hold was not strong enough to stop the rebirth of leftist student groups. In this paper, I explore the origins of this resurgence as well as the continued anxieties of Iranian political leaders regarding its trajectory. For nearly two decades, these political elites, including both reformists and conservatives, have time and again condemned the resurgence of the left in the Iranian student movement. I explore oral histories with a number of key leaders in the movement at that time as well as the discourses of political elites throughout the 2000s and 2010s to argue that one outcome of the resurgence has been a challenging of the historical erasure of the state’s violent repression of the left in the 1980s, a history that continues to exist in the shadows, silenced and distorted by the Iranian state. Building from the work of scholars who have studied related campaigns of terror and “disappearance” against leftist sympathizers and revolutionaries in Chile and Argentina, I connect these struggles over historical memory to the struggles of Iranian student activists to come to terms with and honor the memory of the 1988 massacre. I argue that the continued rhetorical admonitions and outright repression against the student left by political leaders, most recently on display following the 2019 “Aban” uprising against the high cost of living, is motivated by elites’ anxiety of both the excavation of erased past trauma and that of the persistent belief for a different future espoused by these youth.