Ehsan Tabari

Who is Ehsan Tabari?

Ehsan Tabari was an Iranian intellectual, a founding member and theoretician of the Pro-Soviet Tudeh party.

Tabari was born in 1917 in Sari, Mazandaran, Iran. Tabari was fluent in eight languages, he wrote and translated poetry and did research in linguistics.

He returned to Iran in 1979 after the overthrow of the Shah, but was arrested in 1983 along with other leaders of the Tudeh Party. In May 1984 he confessed on television for spying for the USSR and other crimes. In what one called the "finale of the Tudeh recantations", Tabari proclaimed to television viewers that he converted from Marxism to Islam and had come to realize his entire life's work was `defective`, damaging`, and `totally spurious.` Having read "great Islamic thinkers" such as Ayatollah Motahhari in prison he realized his ideas were based on Freemasons, secularists, western liberals and Marxists linked to `imperialism` and `Zionism`. Disbelief about the sincerity of the Tabari's conversion has been fed by the fact that after giving a confessional speech to other political prisoners at Evin prison he was asked by the prison warden "to deny outright the rumour that he had cast himself into the role of a `Galileo,`" Tabari gave not a clear denial but a "long convoluted response;" and that after his confession he remained "not only incarcerated but also total isolation - even from his own family".