Recent studies of Sino-Persian relations tend to focus on state-to-state relations post-1972 and take a political science approach. This paper instead examines unofficial connections between the Iranian Tudeh Party and the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 to 1979. It will take a historical approach and draw on newspaper records, oral interviews, and memoirs to explore the role China and Chinese politics played in the ideological shifts that occurred among young Iranian activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It will demonstrate that the idea and example of China played an important role in the rise of a radical, internationalist approach to politics, as Iranian youth increasingly saw Iran as part of a global community of oppressed nations locked in conflict with imperialist powers. Many on the left, both secular and Islamic, studied Chinese texts and drew on Maoist theories to analyze Iran, the international situation, and the overall direction of the opposition. China directly participated in and encouraged these developments, first by public support for the Tudeh Party, and later with clandestine support for a break-away faction of European-based Tudeh student leaders. These students endorsed “Mao Zedong Thought” as their guiding principle, traveled to Beijing for military and ideology training, attempted to merge with Kurdish militants within Iran, and were part of a global trend towards radical, Maoist-oriented student opposition movements that peaked in what is sometimes called “global 1968”. This study emphasizes the global origins of the Iranian revolution and the international context in which it developed. By focusing on international rather than domestic factors that impacted the Iranian opposition, the revolution is demonstrated to be an intensely global affair, with centers of gravity from Berkeley to Beijing. The tangled relationship between the Chinese state, the Iranian state, and the Iranian opposition belies the complex and sometimes controversial historical reality that is often glossed over by modern narratives of perpetual friendship and mutual co-operation. Primary sources (Mandarin and Persian) include Chinese state-affiliated media outlets like People’s Daily, Shanghai Daily, and Guangming Daily; published interviews by Hamid Shawkat with Iranian Maoists who went to China; Iranian newspapers (Keyhan, Ettela’at) and Communist organs (Mardom, Setare-ye Sorkh); and oral interviews conducted by the author with a leading member of the Iranian student Maoist organization in Europe.

A History of Russian-Iranian Relations The thematic question of this paper is the nature of Iran’s relations with Russia focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My revisionist thesis departs from mainstream historiography by suggesting that Russia has been at least as important as Great Britain and the U.S. in shaping modern Iranian history. Methodologically, I replace Eurocentric assumptions by a global historiographic perspective, assigning Russia a central constructive impact on modern Iranian history. The paper will draw upon Persian primary and archival sources, recent scholarly compilations edited by Cronin (2013) and Matthee and Andreeva (2018), and book chapters and a monograph by the presenter (2018). Following imperial Russia’s expansion to Iranian borders, military, economic, political and cultural interactions with Iran began in the eighteenth century, intensified during the nineteenth century and peaked in the twentieth-century Soviet era. Cold War and Great Game historiography assumes a detrimental impact on Iran, as well as negative perceptions among Iranians of both imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Challenging such assumptions, I will show that nineteenth-century Iranian political perceptions tended to be more anti-British than anti-Russian. During the 1905-1911 Constitutional Revolution, Russo-Caucasian social democracy made a major ideological impact on Iran, later intensified by the Bolshevik Revolution. Countering mainstream historiography, I will show that 1920s Bolshevik support for a Soviet republic in Iran had domestic backing and was defeated primarily due to British intervention. Under Reza Shah Pahlavi (1926-1941), the Soviet Union remained Iran’s largest trade partner, exerting significant cultural and political influence, despite the Pahlavi regime’s anti-communism. The greatest impact of the USSR, however, came with its WWII occupation of northern Iran, leading to the formation of the communist Tudeh Party, whose social reform program made it incomparably popular, while establishing Marxist intellectual hegemony in mid-century Iran. Disillusionments notwithstanding, the Soviet model of building modernity remained attractive to two generations of educated Iranians, while the Communist Party’s agenda served as the basic template for 1960s-1970s Iran’s modernization and social reform. Soviet-style Marxism was a crucial political and ideological factor shaping Iran’s 1978-1979 Revolution, in whose aftermath the Islamic Republic fought a small civil war to eradicate the revolution’s Marxist and Islamic leftist factions. Fraught with tension, the Islamic Republic’s relations with the USSR were nevertheless better than with the U.S., while in recent post-Soviet decades, Iran has formed a semi-strategic military-political alliance with the Russian Federation.

In 1941, Iran watched its neutrality violated as Allied forces launched an amphibious attack on its borders. The literature of the Second World War has largely described the invasion as a justified and necessary incursion on a country accused of harboring a German fifth column and of accommodating a small community of Italian and Japanese nationals. In actuality, the offensive proved the most efficient way of opening and controlling supply lines to the Soviet Union. The offense raised questions in international law about the legality of such invasions. While Iran remained a hub of espionage during the war, the impact of the occupation had a serious impact on the daily lives of Iranians, who grappled with food shortages, imposing foreign soldiers in their communities, and a typhus epidemic. In addition, Iran hosted a group of Polish refugees who had been uprooted during the conflict. Finally, the international crisis brought to the fore the ethnic tensions in Iran, which were being fanned by the Great Powers. This essay draws on a range of archival, visual, and print sources to document the multi-faceted dimensions of these crucial years and their impact on the lives of Iranians under occupation. My analysis rethinks the history of the occupation by paying attention to domestic responses and by addressing the role of Iran as a relatively small, but vital, player in the global conflict.

Iran’s relations with Sub-Saharan Africa are a neglected subject within the field of late Pahlavi foreign policy. Aside from an article by Houchang Chehabi, titled “South Africa and Iran in the Apartheid Era,” there have been no article-length studies in English on either Iran’s relations with Sub-Saharan Africa in general or individual case studies. The situation is comparable in Persian-language scholarly literature, which could lead us to conclude that Mohammad Reza Shah’s regime paid little attention to this part of the world. This conclusion would, however, be false, as in the final decade of Pahlavi rule, Iran established political relations with several Sub-Saharan African states, including South Africa in 1969, Kenya and Senegal in 1971, Zaire and Sudan in 1972, Nigeria in 1973, Ghana in 1974, Gabon, Ivory Coast and Madagascar in 1975, and Mauritania in 1976. By the late 1970s, Iran was seeking ever closer relations with these countries, signing trade treaties and pledging substantial funds as investment in development programs. During this period, too, African leaders paid frequent visits to Iran –President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, for example, visited Iran four times between 1971 and 1978 in trips that were enthusiastically reported on in the local press. Empress Farah also traveled to Senegal in 1976 to lay the foundation stone of a new city named, in her honor, Keur Farah Pahlavi. Using a wide range of primary source materials, including Iranian and African newspapers, and documents from archives in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands, this paper examines the types of relationships Iran developed with Sub-Saharan African states under the Shah. The paper will investigate these relations in some detail to discover what they can tell us about the Shah’s broader foreign policy objectives, particularly with regards to developing countries beyond his immediate sphere of influence.