Mehdi Khanbaba Tehrani

Mehdi Khanbaba Tehrani was born in May 1934 (Ordibehesht 1313 in the Iranian calendar) in Tehran's fourth district. His father was Qasem, and family photographs published on his personal website show him as a boy with his father and, at about 13, on the sports ground of Alborz High School. He later attended Khayyam High School.

He grew up in the years after the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, when Iranian political life opened up and the communist Tudeh Party drew in large numbers of students and intellectuals. He said that from the age of 12 one of his uncles introduced him to Tudeh ideas and circles, and at 18 he joined the party's youth organisation. He took part in the campaign to nationalise the Iranian oil industry.

After the coup of 19 August 1953 that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the party asked him to hide the archive of its newspaper Mardom. When the hiding place was discovered he was arrested and held for about four months in the prison of the army's second armoured division, where, according to his own account, he was tortured. In the summer of 1954 he was arrested again and spent three months in Qezel Qal'eh prison, where his fellow prisoners included the writer Shahrokh Meskoob.

In 1956 Khanbaba Tehrani left Iran to study at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, starting in dentistry and switching to law, a degree he never finished because of his political work. He was one of the organisers of the Iranian student movement abroad and played a large part in founding the Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union), which grew into the most important opposition body to the Shah outside Iran. On 2 November 1962 he was arrested in Munich under an old German law against secret societies and held at Stadelheim prison until early 1963. He later said the isolation of the Munich cells was harder to bear than prison in Iran.

Disputes with the Tudeh leadership over its dependence on the Soviet Union, sharpened by the Sino-Soviet split, led him and other younger activists to found the Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party, inspired by Maoist ideas. In 1964 he went to the People's Republic of China, where he worked for the Persian service of Radio Peking, and in 1965 he headed an Iranian delegation to a meeting of Afro-Asian writers, speaking in support of Vietnam. He met Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and was in China at the start of the Cultural Revolution. He returned to Europe around 1968 and, after internal disputes and growing criticism of Chinese policy, left the Revolutionary Organization and helped form a group known as the Cadres. In Germany he moved in radical circles; the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer told Abbas Milani that he had shared adventures with Khanbaba Tehrani in his student days.

He returned to Tehran on 10 February 1979 on the last Swissair flight into the city, alongside other Confederation veterans including Bahman Nirumand. After the revolution he took part in founding the National Democratic Front of Iran and the Union of the Left, working for cooperation between nationalist, left and democratic forces as the clergy consolidated power. After the events of June 1981 and the crackdown on the opposition he lived in hiding and in late 1981 left Iran across its western border with other activists.

In exile he joined the National Council of Resistance and represented it in Germany and Austria for more than two years. On 4 April 1985 he resigned, in protest at what he saw as the People's Mojahedin's deviation and its rapprochement with the Baathist government of Iraq.

Khanbaba Tehrani lived for most of his exile in Frankfurt, where his home became a meeting place for Iranian political activists, writers and intellectuals. His wife was Parvin, and they had a son, Siamak; a family photograph from about 1963 shows father and son together after his release from prison in Munich.

Friends remembered him as a witty, independent minded and hospitable man famous for the chelow kebab he served guests. His friendships reached well beyond politics, to the writer Shahrokh Meskoob and to the poet Forough Farrokhzad and her brother Fereydoun Farrokhzad. Asked in a Radio Farda interview to name imaginary dinner guests, he chose Meskoob, Forough and Fereydoun Farrokhzad, the Tudeh leader Nureddin Kianuri and the German lawyer Hans Heinz Heldmann.

Mehdi Khanbaba Tehrani died in Frankfurt, Germany, on the evening of Monday 19 October 2026 (27 Mehr 1405), at the age of 92. His death was reported on 20 October 2026 by BBC News Persian, Radio Farda and other Persian language media. The cause of death was not made public, and funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of writing.

Khanbaba Tehrani was both a participant in and a narrator of the history of the Iranian left. In later decades he moved away from Marxism-Leninism and centralised revolutionary models and argued for democracy, individual freedoms, pluralism and civil society. In a 2010 interview with the quarterly Rahavard he rejected both the view that the 1979 revolution had been Islamic from the start and the view that the clergy had simply stolen it, arguing that secular and left forces had underestimated the clergy and papered over fundamental differences for the sake of unity against the Shah. In a later essay on the Iranian opposition he criticised its dogmatism and weak culture of cooperation.

His interviews with Hamid Shokat, published in 1989 in Germany as A Look from Inside at the Iranian Left Movement and later reprinted in Iran, are among the most important first hand accounts of the movement's splits and mistakes. He also gave testimony to the Iranian Oral History Project at Harvard University, published radio conversations with Hossein Mehri, and was the subject of the BBC Persian documentary Khanbaba, a Review of a Political Life, produced by Enayat Fani.