Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations invited me to a roundtable discussion it will be hosting Tuesday with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, who will be in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. As a longtime member of the council, I wrote back to decline the invitation and published a brief statement about why I believe that Raisi, a man who ought to be behind bars for mass murder, must not be accorded this legitimacy.

Last year, a court in Sweden found a prison official guilty of war crimes in one of the worst atrocities ever committed in the history of modern Iran. That verdict directly implicated Raisi, who was a central enforcer of the policy of exterminating prisoners of conscience, which resulted in thousands of executions carried out over about five months starting in July 1988. This judicial finding mirrored the result of an earlier prosecution in Germany, where a court ruled that Iran’s top leaders were responsible for the state-sponsored assassination of four regime opponents in Berlin in 1992.

I spent four years researching a book about that case, which set this vital precedent: In response to the judgment, all but one member of the European Union withdrew its ambassador from Tehran (as did Canada). The diplomatic blackout delivered a grave blow to the regime, forcing Iran to end its efforts to eliminate dissidents and opponents in the West for more than a decade. After that, none of Iran’s leaders whom the presiding judge said had “ordered the crime,” including the late President Hashemi Rafsanjani, ever set foot again in the EU.

[Roya Hakakian: To war criminals who believe they have impunity, think again]

In an email to me, the CFR’s president, Michael Froman, wrote that “over the decades, CFR has hosted numerous leaders representing governments with policies many members and most American citizens objected to,” but that “a dialogue of this kind is consistent with CFR’s longstanding tradition and mission” and does not “represent an endorsement or approval of a government or its policies.” He also pointed out that “other Iranian leaders who have spoken at CFR include the shah of Iran in 1949 and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.” Although Ahmadinejad’s invitation was controversial at the time because of his record of Holocaust denial, I have no argument with Froman on that invitation. As reprehensible as Ahmadinejad’s views are, no court has fingered him as a mass murderer. There is an important distinction between Ahmadinejad, who denies an evil, and Raisi, who has committed one.  

That is a distinction that I believe the Council on Foreign Relations should make. Even though it is not a government, the council relies on American democratic values and the rule of law in delivering its mission of promoting dialogue. If one Iranian president, Rafsanjani, was declared an international persona non grata by Western allies for his part in state killings in the German precedent, then another Iranian president, Raisi, should be accorded the same treatment by virtue of the Swedish case.

In 1988, the then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa that ordered the killing of thousands of prisoners of conscience. The job of carrying out that fatwa fell to four regime officials who made up what is now commonly known as the “death committee.” Raisi, Iran’s deputy chief prosecutor at the time, was one of them. Within a few weeks, an efficient killing machine was set up at several major prisons throughout the country. Prisoners were interrogated about their religious views: whether they believed in God, Islam, the Prophet Muhammad; whether they prayed; and so on.

Although the majority of the prisoners had already stood trial and received custodial sentences, their fate now depended on how they responded to the questions. One negative answer to any of the questions sent them to the gallows. The dead, estimated to number at least 2,800 and perhaps as many as 5,000, were covertly buried in mass graves. Some families went to the prisons expecting to pick up their loved one whose sentence was up; instead, they were handed a bag containing their loved one’s few belongings. All families were denied the right to hold a funeral, lest the grieving crowd turn angry and riotous.  

[Graeme Wood: Who’s afraid of Masih Alinejad?]

The executions caused a permanent rupture between Khomeini and the cleric he had named as his successor, Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri. When Montazeri received the news of the fatwa, he wrote two scathing letters to Khomeini, describing the act as “malicious” and “vengeful.” A third letter was addressed to the members of the death committee, including Raisi, calling their work “mass murder.” When he met with them, he told them, in a chilling recording that has since become public, that they would “go down in history as criminals.”

Montazeri’s dissent ultimately cost him the succession, which went to a far more hard-line cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who still holds the post. Great evils have a way of changing the course of a nation’s history. The 1988 massacre did that for Iran.

In 2019, the Swedish authorities, through the exercise of the law of universal jurisdiction, arrested a former Iranian prison guard named Hamid Nouri, who had worked for the death committee. Some of the witnesses of that bloody summer were finally able to testify at Nouri’s lengthy trial and feel that a modicum of justice had, at last, been served. At its conclusion, in July 2022, the court found Nouri guilty of participating in the mass killings. For his part, 35 years later, Raisi boasts of his role in them, declaring the atrocity “praiseworthy” and necessary for “the nation’s security.”

When Western nations have joined together to deliver a firm message to Tehran, the clerics, however recalcitrant, have backed down. Just such a powerful show of unity came at the conclusion of a comparable trial, in April 1997, in Germany. Several Iranian and Lebanese members of the Hezbollah militia were accused of carrying out the assassination of three Iranian-Kurdish leaders along with another Iranian opposition figure at a Berlin restaurant. In their verdict, the judges found Iran’s senior leadership—including the supreme leader, the president, and the foreign minister—responsible for the crime. Earlier in the trial, the court had issued an arrest warrant for the intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian, who has since been on Interpol’s wanted list. I later interviewed the German attorney general, Alexander von Stahl, who had overseen the case. He had not, he said, been “willing to let his homeland become the playpen of thugs.”

[Mary Louise Kelly: Why I went to Iran]

If democracy is to survive the current wave of authoritarianism, Western nations must band together to uphold the rule of law. Sweden showed the way last year. Once, America led the establishment of modern democracy as we know it; today, it needs to show that sustaining democracy depends on a collective defense of its laws and judicial decisions. That means exercising an equal commitment to upholding dialogue with our adversaries and ending dialogue with those who are recognized as outlaws. So I do not believe that the Council on Foreign Relations, in this context, can stand to one side and claim that its invitation does not confer endorsement or approval: It does confer legitimacy, by treating this criminal as a reasonable interlocutor.

As the philosopher Karl Popper warned: “If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” To invite Raisi to one of our most prestigious venues, to let him sit among us, and to listen courteously to what he has to say would be to let him think he has gotten away with murder. And he would be right.

“Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore.

Then things began to change. Within a few years of her first speech, she was giving lectures in schools quite regularly. She was invited to Downing Street and talked with the prime minister about knowing the Franks, and about her father’s work fighting fascism and his encounter with Hermann Göring. The BBC made a documentary in which my mother met the daughter of a prominent Nazi. She was forever telling her story.

No one, however, ever asked Dad to tell his. The interest in what happened to him never came. It still hasn’t come.

Yet my father was the victim of one of the war’s greatest crimes: Stalin’s attempt to eradicate the Polish nation by murdering its elite and scattering its leadership. It was a crime that saw hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their homes and deported to become slave laborers, and saw hundreds of thousands more imprisoned in terrible conditions. It’s a story little told, often denied, and, even now, to most people, entirely unknown. My father’s story is one that history has half hidden.

Decades later, we are living with the consequences of this occlusion.

[Nicholas Burns: The lasting lesson of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact]

In 1938, my grandparents—Dolu and Lusia Finkelstein—moved into a beautiful contemporary house on a hill in the city of Lwów in what was then eastern Poland (today, the city is known as Lviv and is in western Ukraine). The house was a symbol of their wealth, their progressive spirit, and their solid confidence in the future. Finkelsteins had been in the area for hundreds of years; now they had built a home that the family could live in for hundreds more. They would live in it for little more than a year.

Dolu and Lusia had built more than just their own house. They had played a big part in building the city in which it was located. During the First World War, Lwów had been fought over by Austrians, Russians, and Poles in conflicts that had destroyed its economy, infrastructure, and social life. Dolu’s iron-and-steel business and his membership in the city council helped with the reconstruction, while Lusia made her mark in Lwów high society.

They expected their one son, Ludwik, my father, to inherit the business and the social obligations. He would come of age, they anticipated, in a modern European city, liberal in spirit and prosperous.

All of this, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were to destroy. All of this, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was to destroy.

When my nephew Simon was about 10 years old, he took part in a television documentary in which young British people returned to the places their family had come from. The filmmakers took him back to where my dad was born. They filmed him at what had been the Finkelstein business premises and at the lovely house on the hill.

In the film, the narrator informs viewers about the Nazi takeover of the city and how they had killed all the Jews who lived there. And this was indeed a fate that befell many members of my family. My grandmother was one of seven children—and the only one to survive the war.

Yet, on what had actually happened to my father, Simon’s grandfather, the documentary is silent. This silence is typical of so many accounts of the place and the period. Viewers are not told that when the Germans originally invaded Poland, they did so in cooperation with the Soviets. Under the nonaggression pact agreed upon between Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and signed on August 23, 1939, the two powers secretly arranged for the city of Lwów to come under control of the U.S.S.R.

Barely a week later, Hitler’s forces invaded western Poland, and Stalin’s army soon followed suit, taking over the east. So it was that, within weeks, my father’s city was overrun by Soviet soldiers. The Polish officers who resisted were captured and later secretly shot. The bodies of thousands of Poles eventually turned up in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in western Russia. For decades afterward, the Soviets lied about what they had done.

[Jonathan Freedland: The unheeded warning]

The truth of what happened to my own family I was able to learn from the video testimony my father provided after the war and from a cache of letters, kept in a plastic bag, that I found in the study at my parents’ home when they both had died. Scraps of paper with Polish writing all the way to the edge, which had traveled to hell and back. Together with my dad.

Within months of the Soviet takeover, Polish Lwów had become Soviet Ukrainian Lviv, the Finkelstein business had been nationalized, the family had been evicted from their home, and Dolu had been arrested. He was found guilty of being “a socially dangerous element” under Article 54 of the Ukrainian Criminal code, which dealt with “counterrevolutionary” offenses, and sent away to the Gulag in the Arctic Circle to begin a sentence of eight years’ hard labor.

Following my grandfather’s arrest, my 10-year-old father and his mother were arrested too. The Soviets deported all the families of the civic leaders they had shipped to the Gulag. Hundreds of thousands of people were sent to work on state-run collective farms. This was both a means of suppressing dissent and a way of populating the Soviet interior. On the day of my father’s departure to the frozen wastelands, every other person packed into the cattle truck with him was, like him and my grandmother, either a woman or a child.

Many of the deportees died on the journey to the border of Siberia; others died in the fierce winter to come. But living in a hut they had made of cow dung, entirely without fuel and almost entirely without food, my father and grandmother somehow made it through the winter.

They were still alive when, in the summer of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact collapsed. Forced to make a deal with the Allies, Stalin agreed to an amnesty for the Poles he had deported and imprisoned. Told that they were free to go but given no money or help to leave, many Poles remained stranded in the Soviet wastelands. Attempts to reunite families were hazardous and usually doomed. But there was one source of hope.

[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]

Stalin had agreed to the establishment of a Polish free army under General Władysław Anders, a Polish officer whom, quite by accident, he hadn’t had shot. Deportees who got lucky linked up through Anders, and that is what my father and grandmother were able to do: In the fall of 1941, Dolu—by then a second lieutenant in Anders’s army—learned that his wife and son were still alive, and the family was reunited.

Anders somehow persuaded Stalin to let his army leave the U.S.S.R. and come under British command. Thus my family made it to Iraq, and, eventually, after much political argument, to England.

My father died in 2011, but what lessons would he have been able to impart to his audiences if he were still alive and the silence was broken? What would he have said if ever he had been asked to speak about his experiences?

First, that although the fascists and the Communists of the 1930s and ’40s are seen as counterposed, they in fact shared many of the same doctrines and interests. And this was what their pact reflected. Fascists and Communists both believed that the will of the people was being thwarted by elites, and that the individual members of these elites needed to be eliminated by force. Fascists and Communists each had their own particular notion of who these elites were, but many of these ideas converged. The Soviets might regard as suspect the Jewish owner of a shop, because he owned a shop while happening to be Jewish, while the Nazis regarded him as suspect because he was Jewish while happening to own a shop. And for both groups, the concept of the elites was broad enough to encompass my father and mother—even though, at the time the pact was signed, they were under the age of 10.

Second, that the populist idea of sweeping away institutions, denying property rights, and elevating the “spirit of the nation” over the rights of individuals is calamitous. The bombastic claims of would-be dictators must always be resisted and the rule of law upheld.

Third, that because the Soviets found themselves on the winning side in the Second World War, they have never been held to account for their crimes. When the Nuremberg Tribunals were celebrated, on their 75th anniversary in 2020, as the birth of international justice, it wasn’t much commented on that the crimes the tribunal had determined the Nazis were guilty of, the Soviets were guilty of too.

The Nuremberg defendants had been charged with crimes against peace; the Soviet invasion of Poland was a crime against peace. They had been charged with crimes against humanity; the Soviet deportation of my father and the enslavement of Dolu were crimes against humanity. They had been charged with war crimes; the murder of the Polish officers found at Katyn was a war crime. They had been charged with a conspiracy to commit these crimes; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is among the many documents that prove a Soviet conspiracy.

[From the December 1946 issue: Nuremberg in retrospect]

Already under Soviet occupation at war’s end, Eastern and Central Europe fell fully under Moscow’s sway after Nuremberg. Because the Jews of Lwów had been massacred and its remaining Polish residents had been driven westward, the city became Lviv and its population almost entirely Ukrainian. The Soviets smoothly moved into the road where my father had once lived, and closed it off to all except senior officials. They used Dolu and Lusia’s home and neighboring houses as residences for Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and his comrades when they visited from Moscow.

Lastly, I’m sure that if my father were speaking to audiences now, he would explain that the long silence over the Soviets’ crimes had its consequences. My mother and father were never much interested in trying to establish a moral equivalence between what the Nazis did and what the Soviets did. “It’s not a competition,” my mother always used to say. The point is that there has simply never been any reckoning over what the Soviets did. (Even a belated acknowledgment of the Katyn massacre came without an apology.) They have never been forced to see what they did as shameful. This vacuum of historical truth and accountability has allowed Vladimir Putin to write his own version of Russian and Ukrainian history. That in turn has helped him justify, at least to himself, a new war against the people of my father’s city.