Haydar Khan Amo-oghli

Haydar Khan Amo-oghli is a leftist Iranian revolutionary, a key figure in the Persian Constitutional and Republican Revolutions. Currently he serves as the head of the Union Party and is a unionist activist inside Iran.

## Childhood

He was born in Urmia, but immigrated with his family at a young age to Alexandropol. He received training in Erivan and Tiflis in electrical engineering, before he was invited to Iran, in 1901, to set up an electrical plant for Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad. His father was Ali-Akbar Afshar, a physician, and his mother was Zahra. Because local people tend to call his father *Amo* ("Uncle," in Persian and Azeri language), they also called him *Amo-oghli*(*Cousin* in Azeri language). He immigrated to Alexandropol in 1886. As a student of Tbilisi Polytechnic University, he became more closely acquainted with the ideas of and history of socialism; in 1898, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

## In Iran

Haydar Khan arrived in Iran as an inexperienced young man with no knowledge of Persian and was unfamiliar with Iranian society and culture, but was driven to action by his restlessness, his sense of mission, and a belief in his exceptional love for Iran and the Iranians. Upon humiliating an official (Saham ol mulk Motavalibashi) in Khorasan, he comments in his memoirs, "I had only one purpose in mind, which was to show the people of Khorasan (Iran) who had little or no education and understanding that [the official] was also an ordinary human being." He remained 15 months in Mashhad and after that he went to Tehran as the engineer of Haj Amin Al-zarb electrical plant.

When he arrived in Tehran, he began participating in revolutionary politics, first being active in the Constitutional Revolution in 1903 and during the aftermath of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Agreement where he fled to the Caucasus, returned to Iran before being forced to leave again 1 year later, where this time he left for Europe.

## Emergence in politics

Following the news that workers began striking in various British-owned plants and factories, Khan arranged to travel back to Iran to aid the strikers, being inspired by the ongoing German Civil War, and arrived in January 1920. Khan in February was able to persuade various other workers across the city to strike alongside those associated with foreign-owned British factories, one of the main reasons the strike spread out of Tehran. Khan was a radical supporter of Syndicalism and actively encouraged a revolution, but when Tehran was seized by radicals associated with the Islamic Republican Party, Khan highly detested Muhammad Hujjat Kuh-Kamari and urged the strikers to align with radical socialism, to no avail. After Tehran was overtaken, most of those who opposed the Shah supported the Republican Party.

At first after the Shah fled to India, Khan wanted to form a resistance movement in a chaos-plagued Iran, but found it to be futile with little support. Instead, Khan formed the Union Party of Iran in 1921, closely modeled after the orthodox Marxist Luxemburgists of the German Union. At first for the next few years, the Union Party was a fringe movement, gaining about 10,000 members by 1924 though it saw steady growth, in large pat thanks to post-war politics. Without the Shah new ideas began to emerge within Iran, ranging from statist nationalism to anarchism.

In the 1925 elections, Khan announced he would run as a presidential candidate, the first major socialist politician in Iranian history, and soon after other fringe socialist organizations and parties threw their support behind him. Baqir Khan was outraged at the Union Party’s growth, and initially made plans to ban it, but the move was unpopular among the Consultative Assembly. Without much support, Khan wasn’t able to ban or criminalize socialism, but the January elections saw him winning a second term as the president of Iran.

In the 5 years after the second elections, the Union Party began to grow a significant following, especially in large cities like Tabriz and Tehran, though he was watched suspiciously by Iranian authorities in a similar fashion to Abdolhossein Teymourtash. In the 1933 elections, the Union Party won their first major victory as they gained a significant amount of seats in the Assembly, while Khan was replaced by the more conservative Hassan Modarres, a man who tried, in vain, to clamp down on the Unionists, only to see it gain even more followers as more and more people rallied against the failing Islamic Republican Party, while the Union Party gained a significant following of Assyrians, Azerbaijanis, Lurs, Kurds and Arabs, as the Union Party was the only major political entity in Iran which explicitly preached for ethnic, religious and linguistic equality in Iran.

In September of 1935, Khan announced that he would again run for president alongside other likely contenders like Teymourtash. More and more people have realized the IRP was doomed to fail from the start, and if Khan can undermine the IRP's election strategy, the road may be open for his election.