Pishevari
پیشه وری ، سید جعفر پیشهوری
Pishevari was born in Khalkhal in Ardabil province, Iran. He had lived in the Caucasus in the early 20th century and was introduced to Marxism during this period. He was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
He was a founding member of the Communist Party of Iran from the same seeds that created the Toodeh Party, established in 1920, in Rasht. He became a journalist and communist activist in the 1920s.
He was arrested and imprisoned for some time in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the government of Reza Shah Pahlavi for his separatist activities. He was released from prison after Reza Shah was deposed and sent to exile by the Allies in 1941. He went to Tabriz and established the Azerbaijani Democratic Party with manifest material and organizational support from the Red Army of the USSR. He was the ADP candidate for the Majlis but was denied entry by the electoral supervisory body due to using force & fraud in his campaigning practices and vote rigging, such actions are justified in early Marxist ideology; as the goal verifies the means, leaving the person free to use worst unethical methods for personal goals.
The Soviet Union founded the communist Azerbaijan People's Government in November 1945 during their occupation of Northern Iran, making Pishevari its leader. His government's actions, including organizing and arming local militias, disarming of regular Iranian military and police forces, setting up an independent judiciary based on the Soviet legal system, levying taxes, land reform without ratification of the Majlis, using Azari Turkish as the official language and banning the usage of Persian, and setting up an alternative curriculum and educational system, were viewed with deep suspicion by the central government and other Iranians from the beginning as a Russian conspiracy.
Following an agreement reached between the governments of Iran and the USSR under intense American pressure, who viewed Pishevari's government as a not-too-subtle scheme by the USSR to partition Iran, Soviets removed their protection. Iranian armed forces, kept away from the provinces of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan by the Red Army presence since 1942, entered these provinces in November 1946. Pishevari's self-proclaimed government collapsed quickly, as many of the people welcomed the central government's troops. By December 1946, both Azerbaijan and Kurdistan were evacuated by the Soviet forces and the Iranian government re-established control over the USSR-occupied territories. Pishevari was very unpopular especially because he was a communist puppet.
After the collapse of this short-lived republic, he fled to Azerbaijan SSR and died in a car crash in Baku, 1947. Speculations that he was killed by secret services have not been verified.
Iranians consider him as either a Soviet stooge or a traitor because beyond doubt, he had the support of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in setting up his government. There is also no doubt that USSR indeed wanted to annex several provinces in northern Iran. Scope of primary Soviet territorial greed included provinces of Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Gilan, Mazandaran, and Khorasan.
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