Limit on revolution: what is the difference between the regimes in Iran and Russia

Boris Tolchinsky, writer, publicist

I have been reading Ayatollah Khamenei's blog for many years and remain a fan of His Lordship. Not so much as a ruler who has been in charge of Iran for much longer than the last shah. Rather, as a thinker, at the same time an active leader of the reactionary historical alternative. There are no number of tyrants in human history, but the true titans of thought among them can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In 2022, there is a lot of talk about the similarity of the regimes in Iran and the Russian Federation, that Russia is supposedly doomed to follow the path of Iran. I don't think so. Pay attention to the moment that fundamentally distinguishes these modes.

Khamenei's regime draws its legitimacy from the "Islamic revolution" of 1979-1980 and constantly appeals to it. In our country, on the contrary, the attitude of the authorities to revolutions is purely negative, which they generally deserve. Yes, the October Revolution is still dear to a significant part of post-Soviet people, but not as an armed uprising of workers and peasants, but as a symbol, as a warm and bright memory of the historical upheaval that marked the beginning of the era of socialism. Only notorious, frostbitten radicals on both sides of the borders of the Russian Federation want a new revolution. Sober-minded people have an understanding: "Russia's limit on revolutions has been exhausted". This is one of the strongest pillars of Putin's conservative consensus: we reject revolutions and return to our historical normality.

In Iran, the situation is quite different. The Mullah regime has nothing to rely on except for the Khomeinist revolution. The historical normality for Iran is a secular monarchy, a path of 2500 years, along which Mohammed Reza Pahlavi led the country not always skillfully, but stubbornly. This normality was destroyed by the Khomeinists. And now society - at least a large part of society - demands it back.

There are certainly similarities between the regimes in Iran and Russia. And this, as it is easy to see, is the similarity of the regime of the mullahs, who took power as a result of the revolution of 1979-1980, with the regime of the Bolsheviks, who took it as a result of the revolution of 1917. But there is no reason to believe that the path of the Iranian regime will be the same and will stretch for exactly the same 70 years old.