Stalinism and the Shah

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The Shah's tyranny owed its birth and its long life partly to the treachery of During the war Stalin conceded Iran to the Western 'sphere of influence'.

As in Western Europe he ordered Stalinists in Iran to support the imperialist stabilisation of the country.

Stalin's troops walked out of the nationalist republics of Kurdistan and Azibijan which were then reconquered with much bloodshed by the Shah's imperialist backed army.

During the 1940's the Iranian Communist Party (the Tudeh Party), and its allies in Kurdistan and Azibijan, became mass parties with wide popular US agents believed that the Tudeh would have won any free elections taking place at the end of the war.

Stalin ordered these parties to support the imperialist restabilisation but to demand an oil concession to the USSR on the same lines as the one granted to the capitalists.

Such a policy lost much of the party's mass support and played into the hands of the Mossadeq nationalists.

In 1953 it ended up by tail-ending these nationalists, even though Mossadeq had declared the party illegal.

During the dictatorship the Tudeh has been the victim of severe repression.

In its policies it has done anything except develop an independent proletarian position.

Its present position is for a class collaborationist alliance with the National Front and the Islamic leaders.

In the 1960s it even tried to form an alliance with a former head of SAVAK who had fallen out with the Shah!

In the 1960s the USSR, in spite of the anti-Soviet tone of the Shah's policies, began to develop a new alliance with the dictatorship.

The Kremlin sold arms to the Shah and bought natural gas from him.

Its propaganda began to support him, a line only ambiguously abandoned a few days before the Shah's departure.

In 1976 the Tudeh' Party was forced to close down its opposition radio station in Bulgaria when the Bulgarian bureaucracy signed a trade deal with the Shah.

The Chinese Stalinists have been verbally even more slavish in their support of the Shah.

Honoured ally

The position of the Iranian masses has not made them hesitate to see the Shah as an honoured ally against Moscow.

In 1975 Mao Tse-tung feted the Shah's sister Ashraf in Peking.

And in his recent world tour Chairman Hua Kuo Feng chose Iran, in the midst of the mass agitation against the Shah, as one of his only three stopping places. • In these circumstances it is not surprising that none of the Stalinist parties-pro-Moscow or pro-Peking-have yet managed Brezhnev to gain a significant following in the present mass upsurge.

The most politically conscious of the Iranian masses recognise their historically treacherous role and will now be searching for an alternative.

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PHOTO: Mark Rusher, IFL Police charge at Garners pickets From the moment George Abrahams pulled 84 workers out on strike and then went on holiday for two weeks it has been clear that the Regionai leadership had no intention of mobilising a fraction of its 500,000 members to win the strike.

After six weeks on strike the Region realised that it couldn't win without a full scale fight but promptly offered Margolis a deal to call off the strike in return for a second ACAS PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Wednesday January, GE The Garners strike is a year old -but nobody will be celebrating.

A year on strike is not a time to celebrate but to look back, draw a balance sheet of the forces involved, examine the lessons of a year in struggle so as to sharpen the political weapons taken into the struggle in the weeks ahead.

ne Staden's treachery implicates more people than the Region 1 Committee.

The Communist Party, which for months took an ambivalent attitude towards the