5 - Our Dreams On Trial, 1979

Summary

Revolution without Revolutionaries

Kazem had been released from prison only a few days when I met him at an apartment in central Tehran, close to the American Embassy, one October 1978 afternoon. He was not a particularly imposing man, but his wrinkled blue button-up shirt and faded pants clung to him, hinting at his muscles beneath. My friends and I had spent months toiling to arrange a meeting with a representative of the Fedayeen-e Khalq (People's Fedayee Guerrillas). I was not sure what I had expected a Fedayee, a member of the elusive Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group which the Pahlavi state's massive security apparatus had forcefully driven underground, to look like, but Kazem, an unassuming man of twenty-some years, scarcely resembled the hardened guerrilla I had imagined to find before me. In that apartment on Bahar Street, however, Kazem let loose a stream of stories of his years incarcerated at the notorious Evin Prison. His tales were laced not with boastful arrogance, however, but with care and caution. He recounted conflicts he had with pro-Khomeini inmates and imprisoned Shi‘i clerics. “They considered us Marxists najes [impure],” he explained, “and avoided touching or sharing meals with us.” He warned us that though we may struggle for the same cause, certain clerical elements of the resistance abhorred the left more than they did the Pahlavi regime we were supposedly united against. All we could do, he encouraged, was to stay active in circulating Fedayee views, leaflets, and announcements.

I sat politely listening, but by October 1978 I had heard my share of such premonitions and borne the brunt of enough Khomeinists’ hostilities to develop worries of my own about the course the revolution was taking. Growing impatient but hopeful that Kazem and the Fedayees had strategized an exit from this impasse, I put a blunt question to the recently freed guerrilla: Had they prepared for the possibility of a counter-revolutionary coup? At first, he was reluctant to respond to my question, simply emphasizing that “we are all Fedayees” and need not worry, since the group had behind them the support of hundreds of thousands of Iranian youths.