Making an Example: Ebrat Journal and Iranian Prison Politics in the Post-Coup Period

In 1956 and 1957, a few short years after a CIA-led coup that overthrew a popular nationalist Prime Minister in Iran, a short-lived publication focusing on prisons and prisoners called Ebrat – “Example” – published seventeen issues. The magazine was nominally written by “repentant” incarcerated former members of the communist Tudeh (“Masses”) party – the largest mass-based party in modern Iranian history. In the magazine, remorseful former leftists professed their newfound support for the Pahlavi monarchy and wrote pointed screeds against their now-abandoned Marxist political beliefs. The magazine was not an independent operation. The driving force behind the journal was the nascent intelligence arm of the Pahlavi government, which was trained by the CIA and officially founded in 1957 as SAVAK. This “soft” effort at discrediting the Tudeh – which in the prior decade-plus had organized major oil refinery strikes and built a large working-class membership – took place amid a full-frontal post-coup assault on the party that used repression, arrests, and executions to crush its organizational power. For its part, Ebrat largely focused on dissuading would-be Tudeh sympathizers through long-form histories of apparent Tudeh malfeasance, Soviet (and particularly Stalinist) treachery, depictions of prison life, and letters from former party members renouncing their abandoned worldviews. The journal also translated essays from the CIA-funded anticommunist journal The Problems of Communism. This paper analyzes the writing found in Ebrat as well as the global historical context in which the journal emerged. Why did the Pahlavi state aim to discredit the Tudeh using the voice of incarcerated dissidents? Why were prisons and prisoners such an important terrain in the battle to win Iranian hearts and minds? Finally, how do we understand the historical significance of Ebrat given that Iran would adopt significantly more intense forms of carceral coercion and forced recantations?