Khalil Maleki

Khalil Maleki (; 1901–1969) was an Iranian socialist political figure and intellectual affiliated with the National Front.

Political career and activities During the early 1940s, Maleki was one of 53 left-wing intellectuals who had been imprisoned by Reza Shah. After his release, he was one of the original founders of the Tudeh Party (i.e. party of the masses), a communist and pro-Soviet organization that desired to transform Iran into a socialist state modeled on that of the Soviet Union. The group played a significant role in organizing labor unrest and pushing for improved wages and living conditions for the working class of Iran, particularly those working in the oil fields of Khuzestan (then under the control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company or AIOC). But the party was widely believed to be taking its orders from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and because of this, many Iranians regarded them as traitors. In time, Maleki came to believe that the Tudeh Party was a proxy force of the USSR and for this reason he broke off from the group and began to denounce them. Along with Dr. Mozzafar Baghai, he helped to create the Toilers Party of Iran, an organization ostensibly dedicated to establishing socialism and democracy in Iran which rallied to the cause of oil nationalization,

Maleki was a Marxist, and, as noted, a former Communist. He was one of the first, if not the first, world Communist leader to reject Stalin's leadership after World War II. Instead, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he identified with democratic socialism, and the non-aligned movement. Third Force party offices prominently displayed a picture of Jawaharlal Nehru, with whom Maleki identified politically. Maleki hoped for peaceful change through elections in Iran, but the Shah's repression in the late 1960s doomed those hopes. The Third Force has been described as prefiguring the third-worldism of the Bandung Conference.