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Hamid Shokat Website Article: Radicalization of the Pre-Revolution Student Movement Abroad >>> |
| HAMID
SHOKAT was born in 1949 in
Tehran. He arrived in the United States of America in early 1967 to continue
his education. He soon joined the ranks of the radical movement, particularly,
the Iranian students opposed to the Shah. He returned to Iran in 1978, on
the eve of the monarchy's fall. In Iran, he participated in the creation
of the National Democratic Front of Iran,
dedicated to upholding secular democratic values. He was a contributing
editor of the Front's official organ, Azadi.
When the newspaper was banned, he again decided to leave his country. He
went to Germany, and then migrated to the United States in 2000. He has published numerous articles and books, all hitherto focused on different aspects of the Marxist movement in Iran and the Soviet Union. His first two books- Background to the Transition to the One-Party System in Soviet Russia, 1917-1921 and The Lost Years: From The October Revolution to Lenin's Death -- dealt with the origins of totalitarian dictatorship in Russia and its impact on the evolution of Marxist theory, particularly amongst the Iranian Left. A three-year grant from the Buntstift e.V Foundation, affiliated with Germany's Green Party, allowed him to finish the research, and publish his two-volume study of the history and evolution of the movement of the Iranian students and the eventual creation, and collapse of their famous Iranian Students' Confederation. In 1985, Hamid embarked on a new project. Through in-depth interviews with three of the leading members of the Iranian Communist movement, he has offered a fresh, critical perspective on the personal pathos, behind-the-scene debates, theoretical struggle and the utopian dreams of a generation of Iranian Marxists. So far, four volumes have been published in the series called An Inside Look at the Iranian Left Movement. The fourth volume has been published in June of 2005. Hamid Shokat is currently working on a political biography of Gavam al-Saltaneh, one of the most pivotal and controversial figures in the twentieth century political history of Iran. |
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to read the article: =========================================================== Radicalization of the Pre-Revolution Student Movement Abroad Hamid Shokat | Presented at the Third Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies | Washington, D.C. | May 2000 =========================================================== |