The Cold That Stays. The 1953 Coup and Its Afterlife in Iranian Political Memory

By Mina Khanlarzadeh

هوا بس ناجوانمردانه سرد است
The weather is painfully cold. ‒Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, “Zemestān”

I learned about the 1953 U.S.-British coup in elementary school. My father taught me chess openings every night while listening to music in the background. Every once in a while, he would let me enter his musical world: he would stop and tell me a story about what we were hearing—the lyrics, the dastgāh and its gushehs, the musical mode and its melodic phrases. “This is darāmad-e Māhur,” he would say, sometimes vocalizing the melody himself, before turning back to the board and asking how I would respond to defāʿ-e hendi-e shāh, the King’s Indian Defense.

One night we heard a 1960s recording by Parvin, a tasnif—a composed, lyrical song—with words drawn from Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s “Zemestān.” Written in the aftermath of the 1953 coup, the poem follows a solitary figure walking through a city where cold has entered every gesture: heads buried in collars, hands kept in pockets, breath clouding the face. No one greets anyone; “the path is dark and slippery.” If a sound is heard, it is only “the talk of cold and teeth.” Near the end, outside a closed tavern door, the speaker is told that morning is near, but he refuses the consolation: that redness, he says, is not sunrise. “It is the mark left by winter’s cold slap.” In this world, every apparent dawn has to be doubted.

“No one wishes to greet you, their heads buried in their collars… because the weather is painfully cold.” My father told me the coldness in the poem was not about any ordinary winter—it was the winter after koodetā-ye 28 Mordād, the 1953 coup. When he was exactly my age, he had written an essay about the coup for his composition class—the first time he had found a political voice. His teacher gave him full marks but advised him to stay away from politics; otherwise, the principal would “cook him an elaborate āsh.” I understood only that the coup had something to do with oil, with Mohammad Mosaddegh, whom my father spoke of with quiet admiration, and with the U.S. and the British who had removed him.

Sometimes a parent’s story touches a larger history and defamiliarizes them: you glimpse someone who belonged to a world before you, and who is now quietly offering you its interior. I tried to understand my father through the fragments he gave me: his hopes and disappointments, and their entanglement with Iran’s political fate. My older brother had a different relationship to all of it. He called our parents’ music old men’s music and dismissed it as songs of azādāri, or mourning, tied to a sad history. Whenever our parents left home, he played global pop loudly. He was not wrong about the sadness. What he heard as taste was also the emotional residue of a history he had not lived through. As Abbas Amanat shows in Iran: A Modern History, once the CIA’s role became clearer, Mosaddegh’s fall came to be seen as a violation of Iran’s sovereignty—the latest in a history of foreign interventions, from Russian imperial pressure in the nineteenth century to the Allied occupation in 1941.[1] Much of the literary gloom of the 1950s and 1960s, including “Zemestān,” appeared during years of rapid modernization and relative stability, as Amanat also shows.[2] The paradox makes more sense when that era is understood through the omnipresent cold: a historical wound hardening into a way of seeing.

By the 1970s, the cold had turned militant. Anti-imperialism did not mean the same thing to everyone who spoke its language: for nationalists, it meant independence from foreign domination; for many on the left, anti-capitalism and social justice; for Islamists, moral and political resistance to Western influence in the name of an Islamic political order. But the United States—now tied to the Shah, the coup, and the cultural order around the court—became the object through which nationalists, leftists, and Islamists could recognize one another as part of the same struggle. Khomeini’s leadership would make clear how much that language could conceal. The religious forces that later shaped the post-revolutionary state did not all stand in the same relation to Mosaddegh’s constitutional nationalism. As Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet shows in Heroes to Hostages, by early 1953 Ayatollah Kashani’s relationship to Mosaddegh’s movement had shifted from tactical alignment to fierce opposition, while Fadāʾiyān-e Eslām—a Shiʿi fundamentalist group founded in the mid-1940s and responsible for several political assassinations—was openly hostile to Mosaddegh.[3] As Kashani-Sabet also shows, Islamist suspicion of America was not only political but also cultural and moral: Sayyid Qutb, a leading Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood thinker, portrayed American society in 1951 as morally degenerate; his writings circulated among Iranian religious scholars and were later taken up in Persian Islamist circles.[4] A later recollection from within the clerical world sharpens the point about Khomeini’s relation to these currents. In a 1989 Harvard Iranian Oral History Project interview, the philosopher-cleric Mehdi Haeri Yazdi recalled Ayatollah Behbahani as a pro-court opponent of Mosaddegh, driven in part by fear that the Shah’s removal would open the way to communist takeover; Kashani as a former pillar of the National Movement whose rupture with Mosaddegh helped bring it down; and Khomeini as politically closer to Behbahani than to Kashani.[5] The revolutionary language of anti-imperialism did not simply inherit Mosaddegh’s legacy; it obscured the distance between political traditions that had once stood in deep tension with one another.

The recollection of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s first president after the 1979 Revolution, shows how that blurring worked in the revolutionary moment itself. When I interviewed him in January 2020, he recalled that during Khomeini’s stay in France, nationalist figures around him urged him to praise Mosaddegh, knowing such a gesture would tell Iranians where he stood.[6] Khomeini did. But Bani-Sadr’s account also suggests that Khomeini’s anti-coup position was partly an assumption others made about him: because clerics were imagined as defenders of national independence against the West, his opposition to Western domination could be read as continuity with Mosaddegh’s anti-imperialism. After the Revolution, during his 1981 confrontation with the National Front over the Qisas bill—Islamic penal law—Khomeini cast the National Front as enemies of Islam and described Mosaddegh’s fall as the slap he received, warning that had he remained, he would have struck Islam itself.[7] The pre-1979 anti-imperialist coalition made incompatible inheritances appear continuous: forces shaped by Mosaddegh’s constitutional nationalism could accept the leadership of a cleric outside that lineage. The danger was not that anti-imperialism displaced an already coherent democratic or feminist program; it was that it named a real injury while making the difference between political lineages seem irrelevant, teaching people to ask not what kind of freedom was being built, but who stood against American power. The revolution was not simply stolen after the fact, as popular convention often tells it; some of its possible democratic futures had already been weakened by the coalition that brought such disparate forces together.

After the 1979 Revolution, this language moved into the state and gradually narrowed into state anti-Americanism, becoming a way to govern. In Khomeini’s vocabulary, opposition to America belonged to a broader struggle against estekbār—arrogance, domination, and the power of the “world-devourers,” or predatory global powers. He insisted that the conflict was not a dispute between Iran and America, but a struggle between Islam and kufr—the rejection of divine truth—not a fight over territory or national interest, but an effort, in his terms, to raise the banner of lā ilāha illā Allāh.[8] The 1979–81 hostage crisis—the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the 444-day captivity of American diplomats—gave this new state anti-Americanism its image, the spectacle of the “Great Satan” confronted, and its instrument: a crisis through which rival political forces could be discredited and democratic demands made to sound like betrayal. Morad Farhadpour, the philosopher and translator, has argued that the revolution briefly opened a space in which suppressed forces and competing visions of the future could appear, before the emerging post-revolutionary state worked to close it. Together, the embassy occupation and the Iran-Iraq war helped turn the revolution’s open political energy into what Farhadpour calls the authoritarian reconstruction of the state, using revolutionary force to suppress the political dynamism that had filled the streets in 1978 and 1979.[9] Once anti-Americanism became the test of revolutionary virtue, other demands could be dismissed as secondary or complicit with the enemy. Foreign crisis and domestic repression became parts of a single machinery of rule. Anti-Americanism allowed dissent to be cast as betrayal, pluralism as weakness, and liberal-democratic demands as Western contamination.

Accounts of Iranian intellectual history often treat the Islamic Republic’s discourse of resistance—to the Western-led international order abroad and to what it marked as Western contamination at home—as the direct heir to pre-revolutionary critiques of Iranian modernity. In Post-Orientalism, Hamid Dabashi makes this claim most forcefully, arguing that Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s 1960s critique of Gharbzadegi—Westoxication—became an ideological framework for Khomeinism’s political purges.[10] Gharbzadegi was a critique of economic and technological dependency and failed modernization.[11] Dabashi is right that Al-e Ahmad’s critique shared certain targets with Islamist attacks on Western domination. But shared targets do not make the critiques the same: while one opposed dependency in the name of national modernization, the other opposed Western influence in the name of an Islamic moral and political order.

Post-1979 Islamist anti-Americanism had its own genealogy, closer to Fadāʾiyān-e Eslām’s program of Islamic law and Islamization of state and society than to Al-e Ahmad’s critique. In Dar Sāyeh-ye Eblīs, Hamid Shokat traces this overlap without reducing it to direct descent: figures close to Navvab Safavi later entered the Islamic Republic’s power structure, while elements of Fadāʾiyān-e Eslām’s agenda—Islamic law, moral policing, and the treatment of political opposition as religious corruption—reappeared in the new state.[12] The distinction matters because Khomeini’s anti-Americanism was never the same as the Left’s anti-imperialism, which understood imperialism through capitalism and imperial intervention. As Ervand Abrahamian has shown in Khomeinism, it was also a conspiratorial populism in which secular liberals, religious minorities, and the left itself could be cast as Western agents working to destroy Islam from within. Its target was not only American power abroad, but also the aspirations the post-revolutionary state could mark as Western at home: social liberties, secularism, pluralism, and women’s equality.[13] By marking liberalism as foreign contamination, the state produced the reversal that later gave normalization its emotional force: ending enmity with the United States could seem to loosen the political language that made democratic demands appear foreign in the first place.

The wound of 1953 had not disappeared, but for many it had been overlaid by another one: decades of anti-Americanism as statecraft. Many Iranians had come to read it not as resistance, but as a discourse through which the state survived—recasting economic and political corruption as the hardship of anti-imperialist struggle, marking dissidents as foreign agents, and offering anti-American defiance as compensation for the revolution’s unfulfilled promises. In that context, the reformist governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s drew much of their popular energy from the promise that confrontation with the United States might end alongside a less securitized political life: greater freedom of expression, political and legal reform, and an end to the violence that had culminated in the chain murders of dissident intellectuals in the late 1990s. For many, to want relations with America was therefore not to welcome American power, but to want release from the language of permanent emergency through which the state treated demands for rights as foreign infiltration, recast sanctions and economic strangulation as the cost of resistance, and made anti-Americanism the measure of political virtue.

During Ahmadinejad’s first presidency, one of my first political gatherings was a minibus trip to Ahmadabad, where Mosaddegh spent his final years under house arrest until his death in 1967. My classmate and I joined a group of Melli-Mazhabi activists—national-religious opposition figures who carried both Mosaddegh’s nationalist legacy and an Islamic political vocabulary. We entered through the yard and walked in silence into the square building. As we moved through its rooms, I looked out at the old, still plane trees, as though they had witnessed everything and survived the long aftermath. In his will, Mosaddegh had asked to be buried beside the martyrs of 30 Tir—the July 21, 1952 uprising in which protesters were killed defending his government. The Shah refused, and Mosaddegh was buried at home instead. The Melli-Mazhabi activists resembled reformists in their religious language and gradualist hopes, but came from a different lineage: closer to Mosaddegh and the National Front than to the Khomeini-aligned circles that later shaped reformist politics. Most were men over 60, marked by long histories of imprisonment and the hardships of political activism. Yet much of their remaining hope rested on reformists returning to power and opening enough political space for them to organize again. Reform had become both the only imaginable horizon and, gradually, another force the state learned to contain.

The 2009 Green Movement made the limits of the remaining reformist horizon visible. It followed the frustrated hopes of Khatami’s presidency and four years of Ahmadinejad. Even the hope invested in Mir Hossein Mousavi was modest: during his campaign, he remained tied to the first decade of the Islamic Republic and continued to invoke his admiration for Khomeini. Millions nevertheless protested Ahmadinejad’s announced reelection as electoral fraud, insisting, however precariously, that reform within the system might still be possible. One interpretation of the hardliners’ decision was that they refused to allow reformists back into power at a moment when the next administration would likely shape the future of U.S.-Iran relations. I remember one evening during the early days of the Green Movement, going out to dinner with friends while wearing green pants. Someone asked whether I had worn them for the movement, and I stopped walking; before I could stop myself, I was crying in the street. Its defeat brought killings, torture, imprisonment, and a wave of departures from Iran. After 2009, reform no longer seemed merely delayed; the state had shown that it would sacrifice its remaining legitimacy to prevent it. In the years that followed, the state’s “resistance,” or moqāvemat, hardened into a security architecture built around the nuclear program, missile deterrence, regional proxy warfare, and sanctions recast as the price of resistance. From there, the desire to escape permanent emergency began to take a different form: if reform from within had once promised normalization and political relief, U.S. pressure on the state’s security architecture began to appear to some as a possible path to the same end.

The 1953 coup has cast such a long shadow over Iranian political life that it remains tempting to read the present through it: the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program as another oil nationalization. But the analogy fails. Oil nationalization was a public question: Iranians knew what was being taken and why reclaiming it mattered. The nuclear program has never carried that democratic meaning. Pursued through secrecy and militarization, it has imposed sanctions and war on Iranians without allowing them to decide what it was for or whether it was worth the price. In a May 6, 2026 editorial in Donya-ye Eqtesad, “The Priority of National Interest,” the economist Musa Ghaninejad cited an IRIB poll in which 56 percent of respondents named sanctions relief as their priority in negotiations with the United States, while only 5 percent prioritized recognition of Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy.[14] Coming from state media, the poll was unlikely to have been designed to weaken the official language of nuclear rights; the gap it revealed was therefore all the more striking.

The 2026 war damaged a fragile sense that had developed among parts of Iranian society: despite the hardship of U.S.-imposed sanctions, their desire to escape the Islamic Republic’s permanent crisis might converge with U.S. pressure on the state over the nuclear program, proxy warfare, and regional militarization. But the U.S.-Israeli war struck universities, healthcare facilities, factories, and civilian infrastructure, while the language of “help is on its way” gave way to threats of bombing Iran back to the Stone Age, wiping out Iranian civilization, and destroying water and power plants. Masoud Tajrishi, president of Sharif University of Technology, one of the campuses struck during the war, reversed the phrase: making campuses unsafe and choosing the destruction of scientific life over dialogue, he said, was itself the logic of the Stone Age.[15] U.S. concerns remained almost entirely strategic—nuclear activity, missiles, proxies, and regional policy—while Iranians’ own demands, from the release of political prisoners to an end to political executions, went unacknowledged. Even the old imperial language of women’s liberation and human rights, however cynical it had been in Iraq, was replaced by a language of annihilation, in which Iran appeared as a civilization to be pushed into darkness or wiped away.

Those who had believed that the United States’ confrontation with the Islamic Republic might carry some concern for Iranians’ democratic aspirations alongside its strategic interests now faced something harder. The war had not only killed civilians and damaged infrastructure and the basic conditions of life; its rhetoric also gave the Islamic Republic’s hardliners what they needed: proof that America was the eternal enemy, committed to Iran’s ruin, and that Iran had to remain governed through permanent crisis. What had looked, for some, like a possible dawn now appeared differently. The redness was not sunrise. It was another mark left by winter’s slap.

The memorandum announced on June 14, 2026, may nevertheless reopen a horizon that should not be dismissed, even if its terms and consequences remain uncertain. If the war staged one fantasy of order through devastation, the memorandum suggested another: the reintegration of the Islamic Republic into a regional order shaped by American and Israeli security interests, where nuclear limits and the containment of Iran’s military networks remain the central priorities. Iranians’ own demands—for rights, accountability, and the ordinary conditions of democratic life—are not part of that framework. Yet if a durable end to U.S.-Iran enmity weakens the language of permanent crisis through which the Islamic Republic governs, it may create possibilities none of the negotiating states intended. If it does not—if damaged infrastructure and economic hardship deepen while reform remains closed—this war too may settle into Iran’s accumulated wounded time. Iranian democratic desire remains caught between two exhausted languages: one that calls repression and deprivation resistance, and another that calls destruction rescue. An end to permanent crisis might create space for a third language, one in which Iranians can demand rights and development without speaking either in the name of the state’s enemies or in the name of the state’s survival.

The 1953 coup may no longer occupy the same place in Iranian political imagination that it did before the 1979 Revolution. Its memory has been revised, contested, and partly displaced by the catastrophes that followed. But Akhavan’s poem has remained, returning through several prominent musical interpretations after Parvin’s version. Years after my father first told me about the poem and Parvin’s song, I became fascinated by Shahram Nazeri’s performance of “Zemestān,” set in classical Iranian music. The music and his vocal performance feel unusually theatrical, treating the poem almost like the script of a play. His singing is intensely embodied: his voice shivers through the cold, pleads at the closed door, brightens toward the tavern, and mourns the false dawn. I practiced a few sections of his āvāz, the improvised, unmetered vocal singing of Persian classical music, when I was taking singing lessons in Iran. But later, going through videos on my phone, I noticed that whenever I was humming “Zemestān,” it was Parvin’s version that returned: the one I first heard with my father. I had filmed many foggy windows during my years in Berlin, where winter often settled in as a long grayness, and in several of them, without having decided to, I was singing the old line back to myself: “No one wants to answer your greeting… The weather is painfully cold.”

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Notes

[1] Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 561.

[2] Ibid., 603.

[3] Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Heroes to Hostages: America and Iran, 1800–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 196–97.

[4] Ibid., 195–96.

[5] Mehdi Haeri Yazdi, interview by Zia Sedghi, tape 2, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, Bethesda, Maryland, January 28, 1989 / Bahman 8, 1367.

[6] Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, interview by Mina Khanlarzadeh, January 21, 2020.

[7] Ruhollah Khomeini, Sahifeh-ye Imam: Majmūʿeh-ye Āsār, 22 vols. (Tehran: Moʾasseseh-ye Tanzīm va Nashr-e Āsār-e Emām Khomeini, 1384), vol. 14, 450.

[8] Ruhollah Khomeini, Sahifeh-ye Imam: Majmūʿeh-ye Āsār, 22 vols. (Tehran: Moʾasseseh-ye Tanzīm va Nashr-e Āsār-e Emām Khomeini, 1384), vol. 12, 147–48; vol. 21, 81, 447–48. See also Qodratollah Effati, “Estekbār az Didgāh-e Emām Khomeini” [Estekbār from Imam Khomeini’s Perspective], Imam Khomeini website, n.d., accessed June 23, 2026; and Ruh al-Amin Saeidi, “Estekbār-setīzī dar Sāḥat-e Andīshe-ye Ḥażrat-e Emām Khomeini” [Anti-Arrogance in the Thought of Imam Khomeini], 10 Ābān 1395 / October 31, 2016.

[9] Morad Farhadpour, “Rokhdād-e 57 va Bayān-e Performative-e Sīyāsat: Goft-o-gū bā Morad Farhadpour” [The Event of 1979 and the Performative Expression of Politics: Interview with Morad Farhadpour], interview by Amin Doroudgar, Radio Zamaneh, 10 Esfand 1397 / March 1, 2019.

[10] Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 259–60.

[11] See Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell, annotated by Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1984).

[12] Hamid Shokat, Dar Sāyeh-ye Eblīs: Zendegī-ye Sīyāsī-ye Navvāb Safavī va Jamʿīyat-e Fadāʾiyān-e Eslām (Cologne: Forough Publishing, 2025), 170–76, 373–92.

[13] On Khomeinism as a populist discourse and its construction of internal enemies as agents of foreign domination, see Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chaps. 2 and 5.

[14] Musa Ghaninejad, “Olaviyat-e Manafeʿ-e Melli” [The Priority of National Interest], Donya-ye Eqtesad, no. 6558, 16 Ordibehesht 1405 / May 6, 2026.

[15] Farzaneh Salamatbakhsh, “Hamleh beh Dāneshgāh, Nāshi az Negāh-e ʿAsr-e Ḥajarī-ye Doshmanān-e Īrān Ast” [Attack on the University Stems from the Stone Age Outlook of Iran’s Enemies], IRNA, 18 Farvardin 1405 / April 7, 2026. 

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About the Author

Mina Khanlarzadeh (PhD, Columbia University) is a cultural and intellectual historian. Before joining the faculty of Deep Springs College, she held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. This essay is part of her second book project, which examines how collective emotions organize historical experience after political rupture in modern Iran. Several articles from this project are forthcoming, including “The Temporal Architecture of Rupture: Gender and Affect in National Crisis Narratives” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

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Citation: Mina Khanlarzadeh, The Cold That Stays. The 1953 Coup and its Afterlife in Iranian Political Memory, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 18.06.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/66177 

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