Khosrow Golsorkhi (b. Rasht, Gilan Province 23 January 1944 – executed Tehran 18 February 1974) emerged as one of Iran’s most poignant poet-journalists and Marxist militants of the late Pahlavi era. Born into a devout Gilaki family, he lost his father in early childhood and was raised by his maternal grandfather, a noted Shiite cleric and veteran of the Jangal (Forest) movement in Gilan. After his grandfather’s death in 1962, Golsorkhi moved with his mother to Tehran, where he completed his education while working to support the family . In the early 1960s he began writing for Tehran newspapers – contributing art and literary criticism to journals such as Āyandegān, Ettelāʿāt, and Keyhān – and by the late 1960s he was a recognized voice in the capital’s literary world . In 1969 he married fellow poet and journalist Atefeh Gorgin (Atefeh Gorgin later recalled that the ordeal of his trial and “heroic death” felt like an honor both for her as his wife and for Iranian society as a whole ) and they had a son, Dāmun – a Gilaki word meaning “forest sanctuary,” a tribute to Iran’s anti-colonial Jangal uprising of 1917–21 that had inspired his family’s politics . Golsorkhi served as the arts editor of Kayhān newspaper and published poetry and articles in influential literary magazines such as Negin and the leftist journals Sahand, Argh, and Chāpār.
By the late 1960s, Golsorkhi’s poetry and essays were steeped in the revolutionary ferment sweeping Iran’s intelligentsia. The global surge of anti-colonial and leftist movements (Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.) and the clampdown on domestic dissent – culminating in the Shah’s ban of the Writers Association in 1970 – drove many young Iranian intellectuals to revolutionary ideologies . Golsorkhi’s work, with its blend of socialist and anti-imperialist themes, spread among radical student and guerrilla circles. His poems and theoretical writings on literature and art “were read by the young radicals, broadcast on the radio stations of the revolutionary groups, and beamed to Persia from the Socialist Camp” . This new genre of politicized verse, sometimes called še‘r-e čeriki (“guerrilla poetry”) or še‘r-e jangal (“forest poetry,” alluding to the 1970 Siahkal Fedayeen uprising in the Gilan forests), was characterized by fiery imagery and a call to collective action against injustice . In this milieu Golsorkhi became a prominent figure. Although the exact extent of any formal underground affiliation is disputed, by 1972–73 he and fellow filmmaker-poet Keramat-Daneshian were widely viewed as leaders of a small revolutionary circle loosely sympathetic to the Marxist-Leninist Fedāʾīān-e Ḵalq. Government prosecutors would later accuse them of plotting an armed kidnapping of the Crown Prince, but contemporary analysts agree the charges were fabricated by SAVAK to conceal the regime’s own failures in suppressing guerrilla cells .
As a poet and writer, Golsorkhi’s style fused romantic intensity with overt political content. He rejected “art for art’s sake” and insisted that literature must serve the people. In an unpublished essay he declared: “The place of a poem is not in libraries, but in tongues and minds. Literature must…retain the role it always had in social movements…The role of literature is to awaken. The role of progressive literature is to create social movements and to help attain the goals of historic development of peoples.” . His collected poems, published posthumously, teem with images of bread, chains, fire and sunrise – reflecting both the struggle of the working poor and the longing for freedom. While not regarded as a major innovator of form (one historian notes he was “neither a great poet, nor an acute journalist, and not even a knowledgeable literary critic” ), Golsorkhi was celebrated for the sincerity and fervor of his verse. As scholar Mohammad Shams Langarudi wrote, “the execution in 1974 of Khosrow Golsorkhi, the famous poet and writer…was the most influential incident in the arena of guerrilla poetry” because Golsorkhi’s final court defense epitomized “his consistent, sincere, and emotional revolutionary” commitment .
Golsorkhi’s political activities – coupled with his outspoken writings – eventually drew the attention of the Shah’s security services. In early 1973 he was arrested as part of a wide sweep of intellectuals and artists. By mid-1973 the regime announced the arrest of eleven writers, poets and filmmakers (including Keramat-Daneshian, Tayfur Bathaee, Abbas-Ali Samakar, Iraj Jamshidi, Maryam Ettehadiyeh, and others) accused of plotting to kidnap a member of the royal family . Golsorkhi, who had been detained earlier, was accused of belonging to this group. In fact, both friends and later inquiries revealed that this so-called conspiracy was a mise en scène by SAVAK to fake a major success against the guerrillas . The defendants were not an organized cell – some did not even know each other – and torture had been used to force “confessions” on flimsy evidence . Nonetheless, the trial was held by a military court before a live television audience in late 1973 and early 1974, during the Shah’s concurrent (and ironic) hosting of an international human-rights conference in Tehran.
During the televised proceedings, Golsorkhi used his speaking time not to recite a rote defense but to denounce the Pahlavi regime and champion the very ideals he was accused of “crime” for espousing. In one outburst he began by invoking Islam’s own martyrdom tradition: “I will begin my talk with a quotation from Hussein, the great martyr of the people of the Middle East. I, a Marxist-Leninist, have found, for the first time, social justice in the school of Islam and then reached socialism.” He declared that he had no interest in saving his own life: “I am but a drop in the great struggle of the Iranian people…I am not bargaining for my life, because I am the child of a fighting people.” . He went on to point out parallels between Shiite and Marxist thought – quoting Marx on class society and Imam Ali on social inequity – concluding that “we too approve of such Islam, the Islam of Hussein.” . When the presiding colonel bellowed that Golsorkhi stick to the charges, he shot back disdainfully, “Don’t you give me any orders. Go and order your corporals and squadron leaders” – underscoring that the court’s bayonets, not moral authority, enforced its proceedings. Finally, Golsorkhi proclaimed to the judges and television cameras: “In the glorious name of the people…I will defend myself in a court which I neither recognize its legality nor its legitimacy…The more you attack me… the more I am proud…I doubt if my voice is loud enough to awaken a sleeping conscience here. Even if you bury me—and you certainly will—people will make flags and songs from my corpse.” . His fervent address – at once ideological and poetically charged – turned the staged trial on its head, making Golsorkhi himself the protagonist of an anti-regime spectacle. (“In that courtroom,” one observer later noted, “he upstaged not only his judges but the rotting monarchy they were there to uphold.”) .
When death sentences were announced for Golsorkhi and Daneshian, the two men simply smiled and embraced. Later accounts describe them on their final night in jail singing revolutionary songs, refusing blindfolds so they could see the dawn, and even giving the order to the firing squad themselves . They went to the execution ground on 18 February 1974 hand in hand, and gave the salute of the fedāʾī (martyr’s) resolve as they faced the gun . Golsorkhi’s grave was unmarked in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, but in 1978 leftist activists unearthed his remains and declared the site a memorial. By then, he had already become a legend among Iran’s socialists – so much so that Tehran’s censors even feared the innocuous children’s book We Wake the Rose Bush, noting drily: “In a country where a colonel is running the cultural section, how can you answer such reasoning?” . Hooman Majd, in his study of modern Iran, likened Golsorkhi to a “Che Guevara–like figure” for his generation, observing that “his bravery…only served to make him a hero and a symbol of the Shah’s merciless dictatorship.” .
In the years that followed the 1979 revolution, Golsorkhi’s legacy passed through several phases of remembrance and suppression. His poems and essays were collected and published, notably in volumes Ey Sarzamin-e Man (“O My Land”) and Bišā-ye Bidār (“Wider Awake”), ensuring his verses lived on among Iran’s youth . The military trial in which he spoke so passionately was shown on television during the early revolutionary era – an emblem of Pahlavi injustice – until it too became inconvenient and was later withdrawn from public view . On the left, Golsorkhi is invoked as a martyr who fused Persian poetic tradition with Marxist ideals. As Mohammad Shams Langarudi put it, the execution of Golsorkhi was “the most influential incident in the arena of guerrilla poetry,” not because his verse was technically brilliant, but because it expressed the “impeccable defense of the deprived masses” and the ultimate sacrifice of one of their number . In Iran’s collective memory the phrase he thundered – “Even if you bury me…people will make flags and songs from my corpse” – remains hauntingly prophetic. To this day Golsorkhi is remembered in leftist circles as a symbol of resistance: his unmarked tomb became a clandestine shrine, and his name (literally “red head” or “red kingfisher”) circulates in poetry readings and protest songs. As his widow reflected, carrying “the burden of Khosrow Golsorkhi” has been, for those who knew him, “a matter of pride” – a testament to a man who fused artistry with uncompromising belief . Through his writings and the legend of his final stand, Khosrow Golsorkhi left an indelible imprint on Iranian literature and revolutionary thought, one that continues to inspire debate about the role of the poet in politics and the meaning of martyrdom in modern Iran.