Interviews with Nima Rashedan

I was so fascinated with the personality of Andrei Sakharov [the Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner]. I was reading many, many times his memoir when he was in the point that he had absolutely no hope in the things which he was doing. He was completely isolated by the KGB.

He was discredited by the KGB, even in the West. When he came to Washington D.C. – now, we have the documents from KGB – they paid journalists in the West to write in Western journal newspapers that how can the West morally argue support for somebody who made the hydrogen bomb. This is morally wrong.

And these are the things you can see right now. Sometimes when you are supporting somebody who used to be part of the establishment, and now he just chooses not to be, you get these comments which are pretty demoralizing; that, “You were part of them, you killed a lot of people, now you are democrat, huh?” And so this was the case of Sakharov. And he never lost the faith.

And he was the subject of the most complicated manipulation information, disinformation, campaigns by KGB, but he never lost the hope. He was traveling once with his wife, Elena Bonner, and he said later they understood that all people on the train, they were agents. And they were fighting with each other; they were giving comments and stuff.

Imagine living 30 years in sort of a virtual reality that they plant around you. They’re manipulating, they’re doing all this; but he never genuinely lost the hope. And just, you know, a very, very short time before his death, he saw that the whole regime collapsed. The KGB collapsed; they could never succeed. And then people could read and they see. So, just one person inside a united country of 130-150 million, he never lost the hope; and at the end things happened which history always promises us.

Nima Rashedan was among the first Iranian cyber-activists. Born in Tehran in 1974, his father was a leftist opponent of the government headed by the Shah, so the family was forced into exile in the United States but returned to Iran after the 1979 revolution.

Upon his return, Rashedan became a member of student organizations and worked as a journalist, becoming one of the first writers to publish articles in Farsi on the Internet. In the late 1990s, after the election of President Khatami, he began writing pro-democracy articles.

In 1998, Rashedan was arrested and served time in prison, including a month in solitary confinement. After his release, Rashedan immigrated to Switzerland. He now lives in the Czech Republic and continues his work as a cyber-journalist and advocate. A frequent focus of his work is the similarity between the methods and objectives of the current Iranian regime and those of the former Soviet Union.