Tudeh

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Tudeh (full name: Hezb-e Tudeh-ye Iran or حزب توده in Persian) is the name of Parthia's illegal, underground communist party. Its name translates to "Party of the Masses of Iran." It was once a major political party in the 1940s and early 1950s, subsidized to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, until Shah Ardeshir XI passed the National Security Act of 1955, which banned the party and forced its members to go underground.

At the peak of the party's glory, it had almost 12,000 members, but a massive crackdown in the 1950s by the Organization for Intelligence and National Security reduced its numbers to a few hundred. The Shah also oversaw the destruction of virtually all leftist-oriented literature, imposed stringent censorship laws, gave the state complete control of education curriculums, and gave the Organization for Intelligence and National Security almost unlimited powers. The results have been impressive: since 1955, there have been less than 30 terrorist incidents by Tudeh, as opposed to the more than 1,000 incidents perpetrated by them in the early 1950s alone (which was the impetus for Ardeshir to ban the party in the first place). Between 1941 and 1954, more than 3,000 people were killed by Tudeh militants; more than $2 billion damage was caused by sabotage and arson by Tudeh; and crime and ethnic tensions were periodically stoked up to alarming heights, to foment instability and incite a "revolution," which never succeeded (due to the overwhelming support the monarchy enjoyed among workers).

Since then, Ardeshir's successor (Ardeshir died in 1979), Shah Khosru III, has greatly stepped up the government's efforts, eliminating Tudeh almost entirely, while launching reprisals against states and organizations that supported them abroad. Tudeh has since faded from the limelight and from most Parthians' memories, although a tragic incident in 1996 - the assassination of the Shahbanu by a Tudeh gunman - served as an ugly reminder that the party had been severely weakened, but not eliminated. In the aftermath of her death, Shah Khosru III oversaw a series of purges that saw nearly all remaining Tudeh members, as well as thousands of real and perceived sympathizers, killed. The party's current activities and whereabouts remain unknown.