carrying the hammer and sickle. Islamists chanted beside atheists.

The imam and the ideologue, who agreed on almost nothing about God, man, or eternity, agreed completely on one thing: the Shah of Iran had to go. And for a season, that was enough.

It would not stay enough. Within a few short years, the very Marxists who had helped carry Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power were being hanged from cranes in the prison yards of the regime they helped build. Their story is not simply a curiosity of Middle Eastern history. It is a case study in what the Scripture has been saying all along about unequal alliances, and it is worth laying out plainly, because the same folly is being repeated in our own day by people who ought to know better.

An Unholy Coalition

Iran’s two major secular Marxist organizations in the 1970s were the Tudeh Party — Iran’s old, Soviet-aligned Communist Party — and the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas (OIPFG), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement often called the Fedayeen. Both organizations despised the Shah as a Western-backed dictator, and both saw Khomeini’s Islamist revolution as, in the words of one Tudeh leader, an “anti-imperialist” ally worth supporting — even though Khomeini’s theology and Marxist atheism could not have been further apart.

This was not a minor or reluctant alliance. Nureddin Kianuri, who became First Secretary of the Tudeh Party in January 1979, built his entire strategy around loyalty to what he called the “Line of the Imam.” He worked to persuade Soviet officials that Khomeini represented a genuine anti-imperialist leader worth backing, and he steered the party into open support for the referendum that established the Islamic Republic. The Fedayeen, for their part, distributed weapons and fought in the streets during the final uprising that toppled the Shah in February 1979. Both organizations, along with other leftist factions, believed they were riding the revolution toward their own future. They were wrong.

The Alliance Turns on Its Own

Khomeini did not need his Marxist allies once the Shah was gone; he needed to be rid of them. The regime moved first against the universities and cultural institutions during the “Cultural Revolution,” purging leftist influence. Then it moved against the parties themselves.

On February 6, 1983, Kianuri was arrested and the Tudeh Party was declared illegal. Between May and October of that year, Iranian state television broadcast a spectacle: Kianuri, the man who had spent years defending Khomeini’s regime, sat before the cameras confessing to espionage for the Soviet Union and treason against the Islamic Republic. He would later tell United Nations officials that the confession had been extracted through torture, but by then the damage — to him, and to his party — was done. Ehsan Tabari, the Tudeh’s leading theorist and intellectual, was arrested that same year. After months of torture and solitary confinement, the regime announced he had converted to Islam and renounced Marxism. He died on April 29, 1989, under house arrest, at seventy-two years old — broken in body, and, so far as any man can know, broken in spirit as well.

The Fedayeen fared no better. Both of the factions that emerged from the group’s post-revolution split were hunted down through the early 1980s, their members imprisoned, tortured, or killed, until the organization inside Iran was effectively destroyed.

The Summer of 1988

The worst came in July of 1988. Khomeini issued what survivors and historians describe as an extraordinary and secret order — some call it a formal fatwa — directing that political prisoners be re-examined and, where they would not renounce their beliefs, executed. The order applied first to the People’s Mujahedin, but it swept up the remaining Tudeh, Fedayeen, and other leftist prisoners as well. Prisons were sealed off from the outside world beginning July 19. “Death commissions” interrogated thousands of prisoners over a matter of weeks. Executions were carried out so rapidly that, according to survivor testimony, groups of prisoners were loaded onto forklifts and hanged from cranes at intervals of roughly thirty minutes. Credible estimates place the death toll between roughly 2,800 and 5,000 people, women among them. Many of the bodies were buried in unmarked mass graves at Khavaran cemetery outside Tehran — ground the regime later tried to landscape into an ordinary park, as though the earth itself could be made to forget.

Understand what this means: many of the very people who cheered in the streets in 1979, who saw Khomeini as a useful ally against the Shah and the West, were nine years later dragged before death commissions and hanged by the regime they had helped install. The Islamists never intended to share power with atheists. They used them, and when the use was over, they destroyed them.

What the Word of God Says About This

The Lord did not leave His people without instruction on this very matter. “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14). That verse is most often applied, rightly, to marriage and close personal fellowship. But the principle beneath it is broader than any one application: two parties who are fundamentally opposed in what they believe and what they worship cannot be safely yoked to the same plow, no matter how convenient the arrangement looks in the moment. Iran’s Marxists and Iran’s Islamists were never “agreed,” in the sense of Amos 3:3. They shared an enemy. They did not share a foundation. An alliance built on a common enemy, rather than a common truth, is a house built on sand, and it will not stand when the wind and rain come — and they always come.

Scripture also warns plainly against trusting in the arrangements of men and princes for deliverance. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3). The Tudeh leadership put its trust in a coalition of convenience with a man whose entire theology they rejected, believing that shared hatred of the Shah and of Western influence would be enough to secure their future. It was not. And Galatians 6:7 stands over the whole episode like a headstone: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Men who sow to the flesh — who build their hopes on tactical alliances with those who deny the living God — should not be surprised when they reap corruption from that same field.

I want to be careful here, and speak the truth in love rather than with any spirit of gloating. These were real men and women, made in the image of God, and their suffering — the torture, the show trials, the mass hangings, the unmarked graves — was a grave evil committed against them by wicked men who will answer to God for it. Nothing in the Word gives a Christian license to rejoice over the death of the wicked, nor to look upon a communist’s execution with anything but the sober grief that any human tragedy deserves (Ezekiel 33:11). We are not commenting on this history to score a point against dead men who cannot answer for themselves. We are commenting on it because the same folly that destroyed them is alive and well today, and it is being repeated by people who have had forty-five years to learn the lesson and have refused to learn it.

The Same Story, Told Again

It should trouble any thinking person that, in the years since, elements of the secular Western left have shown a similar willingness to make common cause with Islamist movements — from Iran’s own regime to Hamas and beyond — on the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” History has already run this experiment. The verdict came in on the cranes at Evin and in the mass graves at Khavaran. An ideology that denies God and an ideology that weaponizes God in the name of theocratic power are not natural allies; they are rivals who will, sooner or later, turn on one another, and it is very often the weaker partner who pays for the alliance with his life.

For the believer, the lesson runs deeper than foreign policy. It is a warning against any partnership — political, social, or even within the visible church — built on a shared grievance rather than a shared confession of the truth. Fellowship that is not grounded in the truth of God’s Word is fellowship on borrowed time.

A Closing Word

Iran today is not a lost cause. The same God who sees the unmarked graves at Khavaran sees the house churches meeting in secret across Iran even now, and the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is reportedly spreading in that nation faster than at almost any point in its history. “The word of God is not bound” (2 Timothy 2:9), not by the Shah’s secret police, and not by the Ayatollah’s death commissions either. Pray for Iran. Pray for the persecuted church there. And let the story of the Tudeh Party and the Fedayeen stand as a sober reminder to every believer, in Iran and here at home: do not link arms with those who deny the truth of God for the sake of a shared enemy. The ground will not hold.

Suggested images (please verify licensing before posting)

Below are real, browsable public archives where photographs from this era can be found. I have not embedded specific image files, since licensing and copyright must be checked individually before anything is posted to Fortressoffaith.org — but each of these is a legitimate, verified starting point:

1. Wikimedia Commons — Category: Iranian Revolution (crowds, Khomeini’s return to Tehran, February 1979) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Iranian_Revolution
2. Wikipedia — “Ruhollah Khomeini’s return to Iran” (photos of the February 1, 1979 arrival, massive crowds) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini%27s_return_to_Iran
3. Wikimedia Commons — Category: People’s Fedayeen (Fedayeen guerrillas, banners, armed members in 1979) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:People’s_Fedayeen
4. Library of Congress — “Photographs of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeini” (archival photo collection) — https://www.loc.gov/item/2010649848/
5. Wikimedia Commons — Category: Evin Prison (exterior/period photographs of the prison where many were held and interrogated) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Evin_Prison
6. Wikipedia — “Khavaran cemetery” and “Mothers of Khavaran” (the unmarked mass-grave site and the mothers who still seek their sons and daughters) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khavaran_cemetery and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_Khavaran
7. RFE/RL photo essay, “In Pictures: Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution” — https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-politics-revolution/29752729.html

A note of caution: many of the most striking press photographs of this era (AP, Getty, Magnum) are still under active copyright and licensing fees apply. Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress collections above are the safest starting points for images cleared for reuse — but check the license tag on each individual file before publishing.

Sources consulted and verified for this article

• 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners – Wikipedia
• Deadly Fatwa: Iran’s 1988 Prison Massacre – Iran Human Rights Documentation Center
• Kiānuri, Nur-al-Din – Encyclopaedia Iranica
• Ehsan Tabari – Wikipedia
• Khavaran cemetery – Wikipedia
• The Enemy of My Enemy: The Soviet Union, East Germany, and the Iranian Tudeh Party’s Support for Ayatollah Khomeini – Journal of Cold War Studies
• Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas – Wikipedia
• Marxist-Leninist Guerrilla Group Is a Potent Force in the New Iran – New York Times, Feb. 15, 1979
• Tudeh Party – Encyclopedia.com