Parviz Nikkhah

Parviz Nikkhah (Persian: پرویز نیکخواه, April 1939 – March 13, 1979) was an Iranian communist politician and one of the central leaders of the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS). While studying in Europe, Nikkhah founded a Maoist splinter group of the Tudeh Party that emphasized armed struggle, being arrested for his revolutionary activities after returning to Iran. While in prison he became a supporter of the Shah and was subsequently released, later being executed during the Iranian Revolution for his collaboration with the Shah's government.

During the Iranian Revolution, Parviz Nikkhah was arrested and charged with authoring an anti-Khomeini article entitled Iran and Red and Black Colonization, which appeared in the Ettela'at newspaper on January 7, 1978. As during his earlier trial under the Shah, he had once again been charged with an act he was innocent of. He attempted to defend himself, arguing that he could not have written the article, and tried to justify his reasons for cooperation with the Shah's government. Despite his pleas he was once again sentenced to death, but this time there was no way to get a reprieve. On March 13, 1979, only a month after Ruhollah Khomeini's return to Iran, Parviz Nikkhah was executed.

In a 1968 televised interview, he explained his personal history and why he now believed the views he had held in the past to be wrong. He praised the politics of the Shah and advocated a “united front” against the “enemies of progress” (meaning the conservative clergy). He offered a criticism of his previous ideological standpoint and called on the students of the Confederation, instead of fighting against the Shah, to use their energies for the construction and development of Iran.

On April 10, 1965 there was an attack on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with serious consequences for Parviz Nikkhah. Nikkhah was arrested along with several other members of the ROTP and brought to justice. There was no concrete evidence that Parviz Nikkhah's group was involved in the attack, but it turned out that the SAVAK had been monitoring Parviz Nikkhah's group for a long time and had sufficient documents to identify him as a member a terrorist organization and to be able to charge as such. During the trial, Parviz Nikkhah made no secret of his rejection of the monarchy, but denied any involvement in the attack. “I'm a Marxist-Leninist, that's why I'm against the Shah. Terrorism is not part of my conviction."

After four years of studying physics, Parviz Nikkhah graduated from the University of Manchester with a bachelor's degree. During his time at University he had risen to become the undisputed leader of Iranian students abroad, being the star speaker at both the 2nd Congress of the CIS in London (1961) and also at the 3rd Congress of the CIS in Paris (1962). During this time, he had broken ideologically from the Tudeh Party line and become a member of the newly founded "Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party" (ROTP), a Maoist group that rejected the "revisionist course" of the Soviet Union. The aim of the group was to carry the "armed struggle" into Iran and to organize a peasant uprising there along the lines of the Chinese Communist Revolution. In 1964, Parviz Nikkhah was one of the first to declare himself ready to return to Iran and "lead the masses in the revolutionary struggle against the Shah regime". Parviz Nikkhah had previously accepted an invitation to the People's Republic of China to receive ideological education and training in guerrilla warfare.

According to Nikkhah and his comrades, Iran was "ripe for a revolution" in the 1960s. If it were possible to forge an alliance between workers and peasants led by a revolutionary party, it could be possible to overthrow the Shah and found a Maoist “People's Republic of Iran”, the young revolutionaries thought. Back in Iran, Parviz Nikkhah took a position as a physics lecturer at the Amir Kabir University in Tehran and began his underground work as a revolutionary parallel to his teaching activities. He recruited students for the ROTP, sent them to China for further training and discussed the planned popular uprising with workers and peasants. After a few months he wrote a report for his comrades in Europe on the foundations of the revolutionary struggle in Iran. The reality looked completely different from what the revolutionaries had imagined in their plans. The peasants wanted nothing to do with the "armed struggle" and the workers were also not very enthusiastic about the prospects of a Maoist people's republic. In his report to his friends from the Confederation, the physicist Parviz Nikkhah spoke of a paradigm shift that had to be carried out, which roughly meant that the "armed struggle" was canceled for the time being.