Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi: Her Life and Times

By Kamran Nayeri, March 25, 2017

Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi

A necessary introduction

Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi, a flamboyant female Iranian socialist who was the Amnesty International’s political prisoner of the year in 1978 died of a stroke in Paris on March 13, 2017.  She was 81 years old.  

I learned about it from Farrokh, my lifetime friend who like me was active in the New York-based Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI) in the 1970s.  While CAIFI publicized the plight of dozens of political prisoners in the Mohammad Reza Shah’s jails, Vida Hadjebi's case remained central as it symbolized what women prisoners of conscience faced.  A non-sectarian defense committee that defended all prisoners of conscience, including leftists of various ideologies, nationalists, and Islamic oppositionists and welcomed the support of all regardless of their political allegiances, CAIFI won over the support of some prominent liberal Americans, including Kay Boyle, Daniel Ellsberg, and Ramsey Clark.  In the case of Vida Hadjebi, CAIFI won over Columbia University sociologist Allan Silver who personally took a letter of protest signed by the Canadian Association of Sociologists to Iranian Embassy in Washington D.C regarding her detention. American feminist, Kate Millett, the National Organization of Women representative and Anne Roberts, Amnesty International representative, and other concerned U.S citizens publicly denounced the imprisonment and torture of Vida Hadjebi and the treatment of women prisoners of conscience in Iran. 

When I read the BBC Persian news about Vida Hadjebi’s death, I also watched their 2014 interview with her.  It was the first time I saw her speak and I was moved by her speech and mannerism.  I then realized how little I knew about this woman who I had spent so much time defending against the Shah’s dictatorship. We used to think that Vida was, in fact, a sociologist, and that is how we presented her to the public and that is why the Canadian Association of Sociologists protested her arrest.  But Vida was really a sociologist by default. She was a socialist who had studied architecture. In 1969, upon returning to Iran and when in need of work to raise her young child she found what turned out to be a short-term job at the Institute for Social Science Studies in Tehran where she helped in studies of nomand and peasant populations of Iran. Three years later she was picked up by the Shah’s secret police the SAVAK on a false tip from the CIA that she was “the contact person for the international left!”  

This prompted me to research Vida’s life and writings to the best I could and what follows is what I have learned through reading her memoirs and other writings.  Vida’s colorful political life is exceptional and yet representational of the political life of many in the Iranian left in the period after the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup d’etat that inaugurated the 25-year U.S.-backed dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.  It also demonstrates how unprepared that Iranian left was for participation in the 1979 Iranian revolution which contributed to its eventual defeat.  I conclude with a meditation on Vida’s paradoxes in part in place of a dialogue I wish I could have had with her had I known her in person.

I must note that this presentation of Vida’s life is largely based on her own account.  In my reading of Vida’s memoirs and other writings, I have noticed errors.  So, my account is colored by Vida's possible self-report biases and my own inability to catch all of her errors if in fact there are more than I have noticed (but these were often insignificant).  Needless to say, this writing was also completed quickly because I wanted it to reach the public soon after her passing.  I may learn more about Vida’s life and reserve the right to correct any remaining errors and add new significant information should that become necessary. 

Early life

Vida was born in the then middle-class Pich-e-Shemiran neighborhood of Tehran in 1935.  She was one of five children. Her parents were well to do and well connected secular Iranians who were very supportive of their daughters. They remained a significant pillar of support for Vida until their death at the end of the 1970s. 

Vida’s childhood memories showed her sensitivities to the plight of others, human or non-human.  She recalls her horror when farm animals were slaughtered in her house, a common practice before slaughterhouses where built to regularly meet demand for meat while hiding human brutality and suffering of the farm animals. Although from a Muslim family, she attended a coed Armenian elementary school that also accepted Jewish and well-to-do Muslim students. When in high school, she attended the Zoroastrian-run Anoushirvan Dagar.(see endnote 1)  She recalls how in her Armenian elementary school sectarian fights broke out from time to time. But she also notes that in her Zoroastrian high school where Muslim, Armenian, Jewish, and Bahai students also attended, she never witnessed a teacher discriminating between them. She later notes how her sense of justice developed very early in life but it took her a long time before joining any social justice group.  As a child, she followed the example of her brother Ghahreman who was two years older and preferred playing ball to drawing or painting.  In high school, she became part of the basketball team. 

As a teenager, it was her older sister Pari that Vida looked up to.  Pari was active in the youth organization of the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party and it was she who first introduced Vida to socialism: “Pari said: ‘Socialism means everyone living well, like in the Soviet Union, not that some be rich and others be poor.’” But Vida had an independent character and for reasons not disclosed didn’t find the Tudeh Party attractive.

The post-world War II period in Iran was a period of mass radicalization due to the weakening of the Pahlavi regime's dictatorship and the damaging impact of the war.  New political parties were formed, including the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party.  In the Kurdish regions and in Azerbaijan nationalist parties that wanted autonomy came to power in 1946.   The popular sentiments against the Anglo-Persian Oil Company that was formed in 1909 and was still taking 51% of the profits from the Iranian oil were on the rise.  On April 28, 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist member of the parliament, became the prime minister and immediately introduced legislation to create the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). Established in June, NIOC took over the British-controlled oil industry. Vida attributes the origin of her unflinching opposition to the Mohammad Reza Shah’s regime to her witnessing of the military trial of Mossadegh who was deposed on August 19, 1953, by the CIA-MI6 coup d’etat that returned the Shah’s to power unleashing a quarter of a century of dictatorship.   

Student years in Paris

Friendship with Farah Diba

In 1956, Vida traveled to Paris where Pari now lived and on her uncle’s recommendation enrolled at École Spéciale d'Architecture (although she initially wanted to study medicine).  It so happened that another Iranian woman who Vida knew was also studying at the École, Farah Diba.  Vida and Farah were both athletes and members of the basketball teams of their respective high schools in Tehran (Fara Diba had studied at Jeanne d'Arc high school in Tehran).  As it turned out their mothers also were classmates at Jeanne d’Arc high school.  They became very close friends in Paris; according to Vida, Farah, while not a leftist, did not support the Shah’s regime.  However, when in 1959 the Shah asked Farah to marry him, she accepted.  Vida, on the other hand, had met a Venezuelan socialist in Paris and married him in 1958. 

 Thus, the two friends’ lives diverged greatly.  Twenty-six years later, in 1986, when riding her son’s car in Paris to distribute her recently published socialist magazine, Aghazi No (A New Beginning), Vida noticed a large black car pulling to their side at the stop light.  A woman called her from the back seat of the black car: “Vida, I am Farah!”  Surprise, Vida asked: “What are you doing here?”  Farah didn’t respond to this silly question returning to formalities: “How are you?”  Vida responded: “Very well; waiting for the next revolution!”  Farah’s face darkened, turning away from Vida, ordering her driver to move on! They never met again. 

Radicalization of Iranian students abroad

Vida’s immediate impressions of Paris in the late 1950s were negative.  Part of this was because of anti-Algerian racism she witnessed. Vida was shocked to learn that even the French Communist Party supported the colonization of Algeria.  At the same time, she was subjected to harassment by Algerian men in Paris who called her a racist for refusing them.  

Pari introduced Vida to the Iranian political circles.  There were continuous debates about the lessons of the 1953 coup and the role of the Tudeh Party.  In 1960, the Confederation of Iranian Students in Europe was formed by those who opposed the Shah’s regime.  After Khrushchev’s (1956) speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there was a crisis in the pro-Moscow parties around the world. A group split from the Tudeh Party that formed the pro-Beijing “The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party.”   Her sister Pari broke with the Tudeh Party in the process.  Pari and her friend, Shahrashoub Amirshahi turned their interest to the emerging feminism in France.  Much later in her life, Vida also turned to feminism. The French women had only achieved the right to vote in 1945.  Vida notes that pro-Moscow Communist parties, including in France opposed the woman’s right to equality and to choose abortion.

Venezuela

It was through Pari that Vida was acquainted with the Latin American leftists who met in coffee shops of Quartier Latin in Paris, including Oswaldo Barreto, a Venezuelan law student and a member of the French Communist Party, who she married in 1958. In 1960, in Venezuela, Vida gave birth to a boy who they named Ramin. Even though Oswaldo’s father was black, his Italian mother searched all over the baby’s body to make sure he is pure white!  Being satisfied, she told Vida: “Only his hair may become curly.”  Such was the racism ingrained in Venezuela. 

Vida had moved to Venezuela in 1959 to live with Oswaldo and enroll in the well-respected program in architecture at the Central University of Venezuela. Eventually, Oswaldo became a leading member of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). Around that time, due to the influence of the Cuban revolution, the PCV began organizing  Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (or FALN, Armed Forces of National Liberation) for guerrilla warfare although the conditions allowed for the PCV’s participation in the elections.  Vida traveled along with Oswaldo who gave speeches on behalf of the PCV election campaign.  They often held their electoral rallies in the central park of each town. That is how Vida learned about Simón Bolivar (1783 – 1830) whose statue was in every park. Bolívar was the military and political leader in the war for independence from Spain that resulted in the establishment of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Panama as sovereign states. In his election speeches, Oswaldo offered the PCV’s electoral plank which included “social justice,” “sufficient wages,” and 100 grams of meat daily for all.  Vida who still did not call herself a socialist was pleased by these promises.  Because of the high illiteracy rate voting cards were colored red for the PCV and white for the rightwing Democratic Action Party that won the election.   

Because of her attraction to the Cuba revolution, Vida joined the newly formed youth group of the PCV.  She notes that the PCV was the only Communist Party that seemed to emulate the July 26 Movement’s road to power.  Oswaldo and Vida who lived in different towns because of their respective work eventually divorced. Oswaldo went to Cuba for training for guerrilla warfare and returned to join the FALN under the nom de guerre Otto.  Vida contributed to the FALN through transportation of arms.  She recalls that once while transporting arms she was stopped by the police. The officer asked for her driver’s license but in her rush, she had forgotten her purse.  Nervously, she told the officer she doesn’t have it, it is in her purse at home. The officer asks: “What is in the back of your car!’  Vida being nervous responded: “Guns!"  The officer smiled thinking she is joking and let her go.  The FALN armed campaign was defeated and Vida was devastated by losing close friends in the armed clashes with government forces.  When Ramin was two and half years old they left Venezuela for Iran. 

A short stay in Iran

Vida had not completed her studies in architecture in Paris or in Caracas.  She returned to Tehran for family support to raise her son.  While her parents were more than happy to help raise Ramin, Vida found no possibility to work.  Her only recourse was to ask for Farah’s favor who was now well settled in as the Queen.  Her uncle who had good relations with the royal family brought her several invitations from Farah. But Vida was reluctant. 

It also became a turbulent time.  Her stay overlapped with the initial phase of the Shah’s White Revolution which combined a state-sponsored path to capitalist modernization and industrialization and a desire to undermine forces opposed to monarchy from the left and the right.  Vida recalls how ayatollah Kashani who turned against the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh joined his disciple ayatollah Khomeini who had come out publicly against the first two provisions of the White Revolution, the women’s right to vote and land reform.  She bitterly complains about the nationalists and the student movement at the time who did not support the women’s right to vote because it was a “reform from the top.”  The Tudeh Party, with the green light from Moscow, and some hope for legalization, unconditionally supported the White Revolution.  Vida found the satirical magazine Tofigh’s position closer to her own views: it put a cartoon of a group of men on the cover with a sign that said: “Now that you have given women their rights, give us men our rights too!”  Tofigh was eventually closed down.  Vida also witnessed the 15 of Khordad (June 5, 1963) revolt by pro-Khomeini forces who in some locations were confronted with machine guns and dozens, perhaps hundreds, were killed.  Some 320, including Khomeini, were arrested.   But Khomeini’s life was spared after ayatollah Mohammad-Kazem Shariatmadari, a senior religious leader, declared Khomeini a Marja, or a “Shia source of knowledge.” The regime figured Khomeini’s execution would do more harm than good.  He was eventually exiled to Iraq.  Vida recalls the male chauvinist and sectarian character of the forces involved in the protest. When she and her female friend went to the bazaar, a center of support for the revolt, they joined a crowd that was reading a Khomeini flier posted on a wall. A man approached them yelling “get lost you, dirty women.”  When they pulled back, they noticed there were no other women. They crowd was entirely men! 

Algeria: Ben Bella and Che Guevara 

In late 1964 and early 1965 Vida with her son were in Algeria because Oswaldo who was now part of the pro-guerilla warfare faction in the Communist Party of Venezuela was attending meetings to organize some shipment of arms to Latin American revolutionaries and wanted to visit with his son.  

Vida was shocked to see poverty and discrimination in Algiers while Algerians in the higher echelon of power lived next to the French and other foreign managers of Western companies in the well-to-do section of the city.  She was also shocked to see a resurgence of Islamic culture that discriminated against women.  Even the Algerian Communist Party (previously a branch of the French Communist Party) had separate sections for its female and Jewish members.  Ben Bella, the president who called himself a socialist, observed Ramadan fasting. 

She also comments on how the personnel of the Cuban embassy and the French socialist intellectuals such as Maxime Rodinson focused their political analyses on the centrality of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle and reformism of the pro-Moscow Communist parties and criticized anyone who spoke in defense of artistic or individual freedoms in Algeria as aiding the imperialist enemy.  She admits that given the context her own views gradually changed in the same direction.  

A highlight of Vida’s visit was the February 1965 Afro-Asian Conference in which Che Guevara spoke.  She writes: “It was unbelievable.  It was the first time that a minister of a socialist country openly and without hesitation criticized the Soviet Union and China and the internal relations in the ‘socialist camp.’” (for the text of the speech, see, Guevara, 1965)

Cuba

In January 1966, Vida flew to Havana from Prague to attend the Tricontinental conference.  She was delighted to see Haydée Santamaría who was the head of the Cuban delegation but shocked to see her giving her speech wearing hair rollers!   She was also shocked to see two officials from the Shah’s regime representing Iran.  When she protested to the Cubans, they said they have no problem with excluding them but to do so she had to get the agreement of the Soviet Union and China delegations.  When Vida approached the Chinese, they listened with expressionless faces, then shook their heads and walked away!  The Soviet delegation was less dismissive; they simply said the matter is out of their hands.  This was a time when Moscow was pursuing “peaceful coexistence” with Washington and Beijing was calling the United States a “paper tiger.”  

Vida was impressed with the achievements of the Cuban revolution and fell in love with Havana. 

“Upon entering the Havana airport it was as if we had entered another world.   There were no grey and dry airport officials or an oppressive atmosphere. Havana, unlike Prague and East Berlin, was hospitable and naturally green and colorful, with many beautiful palm trees….Streets were bustling with lively people…” 

Vida adored Fidel Castro. 

“Cuban people viewed Castro as a brave man with integrity. In the Revolution Square, they stood under the burning sun for hours to listen to his speeches and in spontaneous questions and answers with him they felt they are being consulted on domestic and foreign policy…” 

She admired the Cuban policy at the time that required office workers to work three weeks on their jobs and one week in production activities. 

After the conference one night she and Oswaldo were awakened by Fidel Castro before dawn.  After sending off his guards to breakfast, Fidel started a conversation that began on the need for method and tactics in baseball and went on to his use of this observation in guerrilla warfare conducted by the July 26 Movement.  “He is sincere and speaks with enthusiasm and distinction…I have never met anyone with such energy and greatness before.”  Fidel told them that the Soviet Union was among the last states to recognize the Cuban revolution while the U.S. was among the first!  Vida also relates that Fidel said: 

“We were not socialist at the beginning. Che Guevara was a communist…Our main problem was political and economic independence.  After the nationalization of American companies and under the pressure of sanctions we called ourselves socialist.” 

Vida met other leaders of the Cuban revolution, such as Celia Sánchez and Manuel Piñeiro.  She became a friend to Fidel Castro and brought him French cheeses from Paris in her visits.  She writes of the simplicity of Fidel’s living quarters: 

“The first time I saw the two-room apartment of Castro on the second floor of an old building I was surprised at its simplicity.  He had invited Oswaldo and I for dinner. I lost my composure when I realized that the legendary Celia Sánchez was also there.” 

Despite her many political experiences, Vida still made important mistakes.  Upon urging of Pari and her husband, Vida agreed to work with Mohsen Rezvani, a leader of the Maoist split off from the Tudeh Party, The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party, to arrange for guerrilla training for a dozen of their members in Cuba.  She raised this with Manuel Piñeiro who readily agreed with the condition that Vida serve as the interpreter.  She then adds: 

“It was not yet a week after their arrival to Cuba that I realized they are enemies of Cuba and consider Che Guevara a betrayer… I asked Rezvani why then you came to Cuba for military training?   He simply said: ‘we came for military training and have nothing else to do with the Cubans’….They were not interested in learning anything about the Cuban revolution..and hardly left their residence during their stay.” 

The Cuban revolution, of course, paid for their entire trip. 

Paris: May 1968

Vida was in Paris during the pre-revolutionary crisis of May 1968 marked by mass student protests and general strike of millions of workers that paralyzed the country.  Vida remembers how the French were no longer “grim and unfriendly” and “everyone seemed rejuvenated and happy.” Streets were turned into a forum for discussion and debate about social concerns. Vida joined groups of students of fine arts that showed critical films and made colorful fliers with revolutionary slogans, such as “Beauty is in the streets,” “Social will against private administration,” “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” “Accept our intentions as reality,” and “Long live factory occupations.”  

Vida recalls how the French Communist Party (PCF) that opposed factory occupations and the general strike quickly was discredited: “Even workers who belonged to the PCF, tore apart L’Humanité (PCF’s paper) in the streets.”   At the same time, political tendencies that supported the uprising quickly gained influence. Vida notes this about the Maoist groups but does not mention the Trotskyists who were more substantial and helped organized some of the key protests.  

After conferring with the leaders of key political parties, including the PCF, President Charles de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly on May 30. He announced an election, scheduled for June 23, and ordered workers to return to work, threatening to institute a state of emergency if they did not. The government had leaked to the media that the army was outside Paris. Already organized, immediately after the speech, about 800,000 de Gulle supporters marched through the Champs-Elysées waving the national flag.   

The protests movement died down.

Return to Iran

It was in spring of 1969 that Vida retuned to Tehran with the intention of staying permanently. Ever since she left for France to study, she had visited Tehran for brief periods. She had even left her son Ramin to live with her parents. But she had always returned to her adventures in Europe and elsewhere.  This time was supposed to be different.  

At the airport, she was stopped by the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK. Three “big men in dark suits” poured over her suitcases and took an item of no significance to examine later.  But eventually, she was waved through.  In later years, Vida came to believe that the SAVAK did not arrest her then to be able to follow her around to find her political contacts.  

Before returning to Iran, Vida had participated in the seventh congress of the Confederation of the Iranian Students in Frankfort.  This was her first and only time to participate in their gatherings.  During the congress, Vida served as the interpreter for the Spanish-speaking guests.  “The only thing I took away from the congress was that the Sino-Soviet conflict has now spread to the Confederation of the Iranian Students.” The Maoist The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party successfully carried out the explosion of the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party.  Meanwhile, the factions that remained shared one thing in common: the desire to copy the revolutions in other countries, from China and Vietnam to Albania and Cuba, in Iran:  “There was no questioning of what these ‘models’ have to do with the problems of the student movement or the situation in Iran,”  Vida remarks. 

The SAVAK continued to shadow Vida and her family. She was dumbfounded why: “No [political] activity seemed serious to me except armed struggle.” 

Finally, through a friend Vida found a job at the Institute for Social Science Studies, headed by Firouz Tofigh, a friend of the family.  She was assigned to the Section on Sociology of Nomadic and Rural Populations.  Other notables who worked at the Institute at some point in time included Abolhassan Banisadr, who became the president in the Islamic Republic, Manoucher Hezarkhani, a physician who founded the short-lived National Democratic Front after the 1979 revolution, Amir Parviz Pouyan, a founder of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadāʾi Guerrillas (OIPFG) who was killed in armed confrontation in 1971, and Mostafa Shoa’ian who with Nader Shaygan-shamasbi, Marzieh Ahmadi-osku’i and others formed the People’s Democratic Front which in 1973 merged with the OIPFG. 

As was the state policy, the scholarly research of the Institute was only made available to the “relevant ministries” and was not allowed for publication without permission from the authorities. Vida and her fellow researchers ran into the repressive apparatus a number of times even for their regular research functions. Vida was also continually followed by the SAVAK. 

In Shah’s dungeons

On July 24, 1972, Vida’s automobile was followed by a Mercedes Benz. Thinking that they were woman-chasers, she sped up. The Mercedes ran into the back of her car forcing her to stop.  When she got out to protest someone hit her on the head and she lost consciousness. It was the SAVAK.

Vida was taken to the office of Mohammad Hassan Nasseri, the SAVAK torturer known by the prison name of Azodi, in the notorious Evian prison.  She was beaten by four men and then taken to the basement where the head of the prison, Parviz Sabeti, known as Hosseini, interrogated her.  Hosseini threatened Vida: “Either you cooperate and tell us everything or we will kill you under torture, put your body in your car, set it on fire and throw it off the Ozgol Bridge.”  By the end of the night Vida had fainted under flagging twice and both her legs had turned black up to her knees.   Thus began Vida’s arduous prison experience which she describes in her memoirs.  Only after the 1979 revolution, Vida learned from a televised statement by the former torturer Tehrani (Bahman Naderpour) that her harsh treatment was caused by a CIA report to the SAVAK about her visit to Cuba and that she was “the contact person for the international left groups.”

Unbeknown to Vida (I will get back to this in the concluding section), the New York-Based Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) had made her case a central campaign in defense of political prisoners in Iran.  As noted in the introduction, a host of prominent organizations and individuals spoke on her behalf and in 1978 Amnesty International named Vida its political prisoner of the year.

In the summer of 1976, Vida recalls, Capitan Rouhi, who was said to have been trained in Israel, was placed in charge of the prison. One day, a prison guard brought Vida, who was in solitary confinement, three books and said they were from Capitan Rouhi. Vida was shocked as those in solitary confinement were deprived of reading materials.  It turned out the three books were credible reports of repression in the “socialist countries,” in Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia.  Sometimes later, Vida was taken to the office of Capitan Rouhi where some of her torturers were present as well. She was politely offered a chair and after some phony formalities asked what she thinks of the books.  She responded that she believes they were true.  They all brightened up and the jubilant Capitan Rouhi exclaimed: “Very well, we should have her tell it on the television.”  Vida responded: “But there is one condition. That I preface it with a report of what I have seen in this prison!” The party mood faded, Vida was taken back to her cell and there were no more books offered to her.  

In her descriptions of the political relations among the political prisoners, Vida offers some insight into the problem of why the Iranian leftist showed such a lack of interest in or ability to defend democratic freedoms in the 1979 revolution.  “Regardless of differences in political allegiances, as far as the system of values and political-cultural standards were concerned those who supported or opposed armed struggle or those who were religious or ‘leftist’, they all shared an opposition to Western capitalism and the concept of universality of the right to liberty and human rights.”  She then recounts how the two dominant political groups, the Fadāʾian and the Mojahedin-e Khalq controlled the political lives of the political prisoners by imposing their own rules and sanctions. Vida was censored for humming Beethoven’s Ninth symphony because the composer was banned after the Cultural Revolution in China! 

The 1979 revolution

Early expressions of mass discontent such as clashes between Tehran’s shantytown dwellers with the municipal workers and the police in their effort to “beautify Tehran” by demolishing their shelter, gave way in February 1978 to the mass mobilization of tens of thousands in Tabriz, the seat of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the autonomous Azerbaijan government in 1946. By November of 1978, soon after Vida was freed, there was a general strike of the oil workers and many millions took to the streets of Tehran and all other major cities chanting “Down with the Shah.” On January 16, the Shah left Iran for good and on February 11, 1979, monarchy became part of the Iran’s past history. 

In her memoirs, Vida rejects the view of a small group of the Iranian leftists who denied the 1979 revolution as if nothing of substance had changed. She also criticizes the larger section of the left for their political support to Khomeini. The Tudeh Party, which with support from Moscow, replaced it General Secretary, Iraj Eskandari, the French-educated former Qajar prince, with Nourredin Kianouri, a grandson of Sheikh Fazlolah Nouri, a founder of political Islam and an outspoke enemy of the Constitutional Revolution, had come down squarely in support of Khomeini. Most Maoist groups pursuing the Chinese Three Worlds Theory formed the Ranjbaran Party (Toilers Party) supporting Khomeini.  

Meanwhile, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadāʾi Guerrillas (OIPFG) was badly behind the times. Right after the February 1979 victory, they briefly occupied the U.S. embassy but were promptly evacuated by the Khomeini-Bazargan provisional government. The organization was politically heterogeneous and lacked agreement on key questions, such as their attitude towards the emerging Islamic Republic regime, their assessment of their guerrilla warfare "strategy" against the Shah's regime, and attitude towards the Tudeh Party, as well as newly emerging mass struggles from the defensive struggle to defend women's rights against Khomeini's attack, to the peasant and oppressed nationalities fights that broke out Turkmen Sahra and Kurdistan. 

Vida says that she felt the need for “a newspaper to report news and offer analysis from a non-religion and independent” point of view.  Accordingly, she wrote a letter to the leaders of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadāʾi Guerrillas (OIPFG) who began publishing their paper Kar (Labor) a month after the February revolution. Vida contributed to its production until May 1979 when the Fadāʾian headquarters came under armed attack.  But in her own words “until that day, none of us had considered the resolution of the organizers of the November [1978] mass demonstration that called for the establishment of an Islamic Republic in place of the monarchy.” In her memoirs, she approvingly cites statements by two intellectuals, Shahrohk Meskoob and Mostafa Rahimi, that demanded minority rights as the condition for freedom in any society.  And then recounts the wave of attacks on the individual, political and human rights.  

The Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas that Vida had just joined was in the midst of a political turmoil. At the center of the dispute was the attitude towards the Islamic Republic which itself was predicated on the nature and dynamics of the Iranian revolution.  A faction later known as the Fadāʾian Majority followed the Stalinist “two-stage theory” of the Iranian revolution which was widely held in the Iranian left at the time, except for the Trotskyist movement organized in the Socialist Workers Party. According to this “theory,” capitalistically undeveloped countries had to go through a capitalist phase of development before they can embark on the road to socialism.  Thus the character of the Iranian revolution was “bourgeois” and it needed the “national bourgeoisie” to lead it. The role of the socialist currents and the working class movement was to support this “national bourgeoisie.”  Thus, the debate among all Iranian leftist currents on the eve of the 1979 revolution was whether the Khomeini leadership or some parts of it represented the Iranian national bourgeoisie.  Only the Iranian Trotskyist movement clearly declared the Khomeini-Bazargan provisional government that came to power on February 11, 1979, was a capitalist government that must be replaced by a government of workers and peasants. 

In the summer of 1980, a group named Fadāʾian Minority split from OIPFG because they characterized the Islamic Republic as “dependent capitalism.”  Vida remained with the Fadāʾian Majority that now explicitly supported Khomeini and was moving in the direction of merging with Tudeh Party.  In the face of this political pressure, Vida, in collaboration with two others, submitted three pamphlets to the Majority faction opposing its course. The first questioned the Majority’s attitude towards the Islamic Republic as suggested in its title: “Angry at Imperialism, Fearful of the Revolution.”  The second questioned political support the Majority was giving the Islamic Republic in its anti-labor and repressive actions during the Iran-Iraq war. Vida and her collaborators did not call for an independent socialist policy to defend Iran against the imperialist-supported Iraqi invasion but drew attention to the ruinous effects of the war suggesting the need for its early termination. The third was a critique of the “non-capitalist road to development.” Actually, the so-called “theory of non-capitalist road to development” was a restatement of the Stalinist “two-stage theory.” 

They were promptly expelled.  Basing themselves on these documents, they formed the Left Faction of the Majority. Alas, by 1981 Vida and many other former political prisoners were forced into hiding. 

Paris: A new beginning?

Vida went into hiding in Tehran in the summer of 1981 when the Islamic Republic unleashed a reign of terror after the Mojahedin-e Khalq leadership responded to repression with a series of terrorist attacks that killed dozens of highly placed figures of the regime.  For Vida “underground life was like a prison…” Vida also suffered personal tragedies. She lost her mother before her released from prison, her father died in 1979 and her uncle committed suicide. Without a source of income, her brother Kamran and Vida sold their family estate at the low price of one million toman (about $100,000) to an up-and-coming Islamic Bazaar merchant. All her immediate family and many in her extended family eventually left Iran. Having sent her son Ramin to Paris, in 1982 she followed using smugglers connected to the Kurdish Democratic Party. 

Back in Paris, like many others Iranian leftists, she felt defeated and politically disoriented.  She bemoans supporting the Mojahedin-e Khalq-controlled “Council of National Resistance” based in Paris as a “democratic alternative” to the Islamic republic and her continued clinging to the fantasy of the Soviet Union as being socialist until it finally collapsed (“I held the Soviet Union to be close to my ideals,” she wrote in the preface to Dad-e-Bidad).  Although she founded a magazine called Aghazi No (A New Beginning) in 1985, in collaboration with two former Fadāʾian Majority dissidents, Mojtaba Taleghani (a son of ayatollah Taleghani) and Nasser Mohajer, her continued political confusion leaves no room for doubt that she remained unable to radically question her life-long held views about socialism and what is politically needed to achieve it.  At any rate, this project collapsed due to conflict among its founders.  After this experience, Vida herself toyed with democracy as an end-in-itself.  At the same time, she experienced an episode of deep depression that required treatment. 

In 1999, her beloved sister Pari died. Vida put together a small book of tribute (Pari Hadjebi: As Her Friends Remember Her, 2002). The small book includes a sample of images of Pari’s colorful abstract paintings.  In 2003 and 2004, Vida published the two-volume  Dad-e-Bidad: The First Prison of Political Women (in Iran) that includes prison stories of 37 female political prisoners in the Shah’s jails (she interviewed 35 of them). Finally, in 2010 she published her memoirs, Yadha. In 2015, Vida lost her son Ramin to cancer. There are articles and interviews of Vida in various publications and sources and from different periods in her life that I hope someone will collect and publish as a collection.

Vida’s regrets and my own

Up to now, I have simply outlined Vida’s political life story relying mostly on her own writings.  In this concluding section, I will critically discuss her reassessments of her political life.  Much of what the reader will find are my questioning of her reassessment which as the above heading shows I regret I could not discuss with Vida when she was alive. 

Vida’s political reassessments

Vida’s reassessments are fragmented. In her memoirs, Yadha, they appear in most chapters sometimes in a confusing manner, that is, it is not always clear which of her critical comments are contemporaneous and which are her more mature view formulated sometimes decades later.  And, if the reader is familiar with the events, political currents and personalities involved, and socialist theory, history, and norms, Vida’s reassessments at times appear as misinformed or misguided.  

Let me illustrate this point with Vida’s reassessments of the Cuban revolution which she embraced as a young woman in her visit in 1966.  Vida’s criticism of the Cuban revolution bundles up genuinely important concerns (she doesn’t call it that but we can classify them as concerns with socialist democracy), with faulty analysis of events based on misinformation, and undue criticism of the Cuban revolutionary leadership as she lacks any coherent theory of socialism herself.  Is it true as Vida claims that after the 1960s Cuba withdrew its support for the anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World under pressure from Washington and Moscow?  From Angola in the 1970s to Venezuela of today, there is an unbroken policy of support for the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles by the Cuban revolution. Vida mistakenly considers the Communist Party of Cuba as just another pro-Moscow party and Cuba political system just another case of the Soviet-style rule. She mistakenly believes that Cuban one-party system is simply a copy of the Stalinist one-party system.  When did Vida’s revolutionary Cuba of the 1960s degenerate into a one-party totalitarian state? In Vida’s view, it happened after Fidel Castro replaced Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado as the President of Cuba in 1976!  Vida seems unaware that the post-revolution Communist Party of Cuba (PPC) was constituted on October 3, 1965, as the result of a unification of three political currents: July 26 Movement, pro-Moscow Popular Socialist party, and the Student Directorate.  This means that Cuba was a single-party state when Vida was dining with Fidel Castro in his humble two-bedroom apartment in 1966! (The present day PCC should not be confused with the Stalinist Communist Party of the 1930s which was renamed as the Popular Socialist Party in the 1940s).  Another historical fact: Cuban revolutionaries think their one-party system is based, not on the Stalinist totalitarian model, but on the ideas of José Martí who thought Cubans should unite in one party to face the imperialist United State. 

Similarly, Vida accepts the claim that General Arnaldo T. Ochoa Sánchez and Colonel Antonio de la Guardia y Font who were tried and executed for drug trafficking and massive corruption in July 1989 were really victims of a power struggle with Fidel Castro!  She complains bitterly that Fidel Castor joined Hugo Chavez and the Islamic Republic President Ahmadinejad in opposition to Washington!  Should socialist governments refuse the opportunity to join in as broad a coalition of world governments as possible to oppose Washington’s policies, especially when they are directed against the Cuban revolution?  The problem with Vida’s approach to the Cuban revolution is not that it is critical.  The problem is that she is misinformed, misguided, and really does not possess any explicit theory of socialist revolution to gauge the record of the Cuban revolution critically. 

Now Vida could have engaged in a discussion with other socialists, including myself, who studied the Cuban revolution.  While she was in Paris, I published in Farsi well over a dozen, often well-documented long articles, to help educate the Iranian socialists about the Cuban revolution (A polemical essay with a critic of the Cuban revolution appeared in Arash, which was published in Paris, and the rest was published in Negah, published in Stockholm, between 2000-06, as well as articles I published in Kar-Mozd and Andishe-Jameh in Tehran).  While a strong supporter of the Cuban revolution, I have also been critical of it and expressed these criticisms in my writings (For my recent critical assessment of the Cuban revolution see, Nayeri, January and October 2015; for my critique of Fidel’s views on Ahmadinejad see, Nayeri, 2010).

Vida’s socialism

Vida’s own narrative makes it clear that she did not mount an active search for any theory of society and radical social change.  Rather, her political life was shaped largely by being in or going to places where some significant political event was underway, sometimes simply in the company of her companion Oswaldo. She also met and befriended revolutionary leaders like Fidel Castro. But for socialists, as Lenin reminds us “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” (Lenin, 1902).  This is because the socialist revolution is the first self-conscious, self-organized, and self-acting social movement in history. If we cannot conceive of socialism at least in broad outlines, if we do not possess a radical critique of capitalism and class societies that preceded it, and if the direct producers are not the agency for radical social change, how can we ever transcend the bourgeois and pre-bourgeois forms of alienation, oppression, and exploitation? The idea of socialism as “social justice” that young Pari offered the teenage Vida in the early 1950s was an acceptable beginning. But it hardly scratched the surface of the problem of socialism.  And, there is no indication that Vida ever mounted a search for a deeper understanding by consulting key works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and others. Despite the impact of the Cuban revolution on Vida, she never studied it historical and intellectual sources and profound contribution of its leaders such as Ernesto Che Guevara's to which she was fortunate to have an easy access. Thus, the Cuban revolution was reduced to a successful case of guerrilla warfare and when that was done and the task of transcending capitalism was posed in the context of constant imperialist aggression and Stalinist betrayal and ebbs and flow of the world revolution, Vida was no longer able to support it even critically. 

But Vida’s lack of interest in the “big questions” and lack of interest in studying the classics of Marxian socialism was symptomatic of the Iranian socialist movement at large.  When I researched the influence of Marx’s Grundrisse in Iran (written in 1857-58, and expertly translated into Farsi by Bagher Parham and Ahmad Tadayon), I discovered that while the book sold well it was never reviewed nor there was any evidence that it became subject of any study group formed by socialists or by academics. (see, Musto, ed. 2009, chapter 26)  The Trotskyist movement that I belonged to probably was one the most literate socialist tendencies in the Iranian left. Not only its initial membership were well-educated college students in the United States and Western Europe, we were closely tied to the Trotskyist parties in the U.S., Britain, and France, and in the United States where I lived in the 1970s, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party published many books and pamphlets, a political weekly (The Militant), a theoretical review (International Socialist Review), a well-edited weekly international political review (Intercontinental Press), had bookstores in many cities that held weekly forums, had study groups, and the SWP held annual socialist conference/conventions.  We also had access to the SWP's Educational Bulletins, Internal Information Bulletins, Internal Discussion Bulletins, as well as those of the Fourth Internationa.  The Satter League itself had study groups, mostly but not exclusively organized around Trotsky’s key writings.  But only a few individuals (I am thinking or two, maybe three) in the entire Trotskyist movement had read Marx’s Capital (probably only Volume 1), and there was no effort to systematically read Marx’s and Engels’ key writings.  By and large, we did not know historical materialism, dialectics, and critique of political economy.  Thus, we had no deep understanding of capitalism, of socialism, of the transitional period, etc.  Add to this, a general lack of knowledge of world history, especially in the twentieth century.

With a lack of critical attention to the intellectual basis of Marxian socialism comes Vida’s blind acceptance of the Soviet Union as the socialist model despite her many reservations, until it collapsed, and she never justified the view that real revolutionary politics is guerrilla warfare and, to my knowledge, never radically critique that view.  If Vida had undetaken such a study, she would have known that her long-held beliefs negated Marx’s theory of socialism, as well as Lenin as in his The State and Revolution, 1917, and, Trotsky’s sustained critique of the degeneration of the Soviet socialism as in The Third International After Lenin: The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals, 1928, and The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? 1936).  I have seen no evidence that Vida consulted any of these sources and if she had what conclusions she drew from her studies.  

Vida and Trotskyism

I find it rather strange that Vida never makes any reference to the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI) or the Iranian Trotskyist movement that led it and was the only socialist current that in the aftermath of February 1979 characterized the Khomeini-Bazargan provisional government as capitalist and called for its replacement with a workers and peasants government.  It may be worthwhile considering why.

It was CAIFI that made Vida’s imprisonment and torture part of its ongoing campaign soon after her imprisonment until she was freed in October 1978 drawing international attention to the injustice in her case and the plight of women political prisoners in the Shah’s jails.  As I explained in the introductory section, this campaign won the support of a significant layer of American intellectuals resulting in the Amnesty International’s decision to choose Vida as its Political Prisoner of the Year in 1978.  Yet, Vida credits the Confederation of Iranian Students which did not wage any sustained campaign on her behalf. In fact, Vida herself recalls in her memoir that the Maoist The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party, which was a dominant force in the Confederation, accused her of being a SAVAK agent just before she returned to Iran in 1969.  The Maoist and National Front currents that were in the leadership of the Confederation of the Iranian Students had no ongoing campaign in defense of political prisoners. Rather, they held to the ultra-leftist view that the Confederation should defend only the “revolutionaries” in the Shah’s jail. Didn't Vida herself criticize the lack of respect for the individual, democratic and political rights among the leftist, nationalist and religious forces in prison?  As a friend who was part of a Maoist current in the Confederation in the United States reminded me, at one point posters of Vida as a political prisoner was circulated by some of the political forces in the Confederation but with The Organization of Iranian People’s Fadāʾi Guerrillas (OIPFG) logo, implying she was a guerrilla fighter in the Shah’s jail.  Not only, this was factually wrong and dishonest, Vida was not a member of the OIPFG until after her release from prison in October 1979 and never was a guerrilla fighter, it was also an ultra-leftist error that played into the hands of the Shah’s regime. Surely, guerrillas fighters were in the Shah’s prisons, but so were writers, poets, artists, intellectuals, religious leaders, union activists, members of the oppressed nationalities, teachers, students, and others.  Our task was to show to the world the scope and the barbarity of the U.S.-supported Shah’s rule. 

Like Vida, who was the subject of character assassination by the Maoists, CAIFI and its activists were also attacked by the ultra-left sectarian and Stalinist factions in the Confederation. When the prominent writer and poet, Reza Baraheni, was released from the Shah’s prison because of CAIFI’s campaign, he took the extraordinary step of becoming CAIFI's keynote speaker for its public events after was allowed to come to the United States.  Political currents in the Confederation of Iranian Students attacked Baraheni and CAIFI as being agents of the SAVAK simply because they disagreed with them politically.   Clearly, Vida hesitated to recognize CAIFI’s contribution because of the leading role played by the Iranian Trotskyists in it. In so doing, she caved in to the Stalinist campaign that attacked not just a historical current in the world socialist movements but also the very right to be able to free political expression. She also proved ungrateful to many prominent intellectuals who spent their time and resources over the years to defend her against the Shah’s regime, including Kay Boyle, Daniel Ellsberg and Ramsey Clark, and Kate Millet.  Soon after the February revolution, the newly organized Socialist Workers Party held a meeting in the Polytechnic College in Tehran. This meeting was physically attacked by two Maoist currents: The Organization of Revolutionary Communists that was active in the United States and had a history of physically attacking the Iranian Trotskyists and CAIFI meetings, and Peykar, a Maoist group that violently split off from the Mojahedin-e Khalgh. It didn't take much time for these groups themselves to fall victim to bloody repression from the Islamic Republic regimes that practically destroyed them.  If Vida ever expressed regrets for such violence perpetrated by these Stalinist groups against CAIFI or the Iranian Trotskyists I am not aware of it.  The point is not a narrow one; Stalinist perpetuated violence was a major problem in the 1979 revolution.  The Tudeh Party referred to the Maoists groups as "radishes," red outside but white inside. By 1981 when the Mojahedin-e Khalgh begin their terrorist campaign against increasingly bloody repression by the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic regime and a sector of the Iranian left, including Fedaian Minority, supported it, the Tudeh Party and Fedaian Majority gave information about these groups, their hide-out and membership and sympathizers to the regime contributing to their mass arrest, imprisonment, torture and executions. Both the Tudeh Party and Fedaian Majority themselves fell victim to the Islamic Republic regime in the next round of bloody repression that began at the end of 1982. 

The only time I came across the word “Trotskyism” in Vida’s writings it is when she recalls that Fadāʾian Majority leadership used it to attack her critique of “non-capitalist road to development.”  Trotsky (1937) recalls how the label of “Trotskyism” was cooked up by Zinoviev and Kamenev in collaboration with Stalin in 1924 to muddle discussion of his criticism of the Politburo’s policy.  Lenin, who died in January 1924, had expressed his own criticism of the Politburo’s policy and enlisted Trotsky to continue this fight (see, Lenin, 1922-23).  Trotsky was, next to Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Russian revolution and one of the most prominent socialists of the twentieth century, who organized the Left-Opposition to defend and extend the Bolshevik heritage against the rising bureaucratic counter-revolution in the Communist Party and the Soviet government.  He was expelled from the party in 1928, exiled Turkey, and eventually murdered in Mexico in 1940 on the orders from Stalin.  In 1938, with the irreversible degeneration of the Communist International, Trotsky and the international movement that continued to defend and extend the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition, the Fourth International was established whose cadres were called Trotskyists.  

A generation whose time has passed

Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi was a trailblazer for Iranian socialist women. Her colorful political life, her audacity to stand up to the Shah’s repressive regime, her love for social justice are examples for the new generation of Iranians to emulate.  But Vida was also a child of the mid-twentieth century Iranian socialist movement, heavily influenced by Stalinism, and by the post-world war guerrilla movement that in its many reincarnations proved its limitations for radical social change.  At the turn of the millennium, neither Stalinism nor guerrilla warfare is a serious option for the newly radicalized working people. Even the vision of socialism of the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals need to be radically re-examined in the view of the planetary crisis that we have become aware of since the 1970s.  Today it is ecological socialism, a radical reconceptualization of socialism as an ecologically sound mode of production, that can provide the humanity with the hope of overcoming the planetary/social crisis that capitalism and decades of the treachery of Social Democracy and Stalinism have brought forth.  Vida sought a new beginning. I wished I could have talked to her about my vision of ecocentric ecological socialism (for an outline, see, Nayeri 2013).

Endnote:

Khosrow I (also known as Chosroes I and Kasra in classical sources; 501–579, most commonly known in Persian as Anushiruwān (Persian: انوشيروان, "the immortal soul";,[2] also known as Anushiruwan the Just (انوشيروان دادگر, Anushiruwān-e Dādgar), was the King of Kings (Shahanshah) of the Sasanian Empire from 531 to 579. Source: Wikipedia. 

References:

Ahmadi Khorasani, Noushin. “The Tree That Was Not Irrigate by Hate: An Appreciation of Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi.” (in Farsi; a collected articles about and interviews with Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi). The Feminist School, 2012.

BBC Persian. “In other words: An Interview With Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi.” (in Farsi) 2014

Hadjebi Tabrizi, Vida. Pari Hadjebi: As Her Friends Remember Her. (in Farsi), 2002.

———————————. Dad-e-Bidad: The Prison of Women Political Prisoners. Volume 1. (in Farsi) 2003. 

———————————. Dad-e-Bidad: The Prison of Women Political Prisoners. Volume 2. (in farsi2004. 

———————————. Yadha. Volume 1. (in Farsi) . 2010.
Guevara, Ernesto Che. "Speech at the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria," February 24, 1965 
Lenin. V. I. What Is to Be Done:Burning Questions of Our Movement, 1902.

—————. The State and Revolution, 1917.

—————. Lenin’s Final Fight-1922-23.

Musto, Marcello, ed. Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, 2009.    

Nayeri, Kamran. “The Iranian Revolution, Imperialism, and Fidel Castro,” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism.  October 2010.

————————. “Economics, Socialism and Ecology: A Critical Outline--Part 2.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism.  October 2013. 

————————. “The Cuban Revolution and the Decline of the American Empire: Opportunities and Challenges, Part 1,” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. January 2015. 

————————. “The Cuban Revolution and the Decline of the American Empire: Opportunities and Challenges, Part 2,”Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism, February 2015.
Khrushchev, Nikita. "Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U." February 24-26, 1956.

Omid, Behjat. “I Am Not Regretful: An Interview With Vida Hadjebi Tabrizi.” (In Farsi)  Deutsche welle, 2014.  

Trotsky, Leon.  The Third International After Lenin: The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals, 1928.

———————. The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? 1936.
———————. The Stalin School of Falsification , 1937.