The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party: Iran’s Maoists and the Global New Left

Abstract

In 1964, a group of Iranian students in Europe, inspired by the proliferation of armed, anticolonial movements around the world, split from Iran’s Tudeh Party and formed the Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party (ROTP). The ROTP promoted guerrilla warfare along Maoist lines and became one of the most popular communist groups among Iranian students abroad. This article examines the ROTP’s understudied transnational activities, particularly its members’ travels from Europe to China, Cuba, Iraq, and Iran. Through these travels, ROTP members underwent guerrilla training, developed ties to foreign governments, and even returned to Iran to participate in two armed uprisings. These militants’ transnationalism reveals how deeply enmeshed the Iranian left was within the ideological currents and conflicts of the global left: events such as the Sino-Soviet split and the Tricontinental Conference fundamentally impacted the ROTP’s activities and ideology, radicalizing its members—at times uniting and, at others, dividing them. But beyond this, their travels reshaped the trajectory of the Iranian left as a whole, and the ROTP became the standard-bearer of a new type of Iranian Marxism: Maoist, armed and uncompromising.