Relations between Tehran and Moscow, 1979-2014

Relations between Tehran and Moscow, 1979-2014 Clément Therme Abstract: English translation of Les relations entre Téhéran et Moscou depuis 1979, Paris, French University Press, 2012. Introduction At a time when Russia is playing a key role in the confrontation between Iran and the West over Iran's nuclear programme, it is more important than ever to take the long view of Russian-Iranian relations. Russia's attitude towards Iran's nuclear ambitions can only be understood by analysing the relationship between the two neighbours since diplomatic links were first established in the sixteenth century. Russia's influence in the conflict between Iran and the West can be read at least two ways. Russian diplomacy can be seen as the last bulwark standing in the way of the military action against Iran that Israel has called for from its Western allies; conversely, as Western governments have underlined, Russia's ambivalence has made it a somewhat unreliable partner in combating the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. It is likewise significant that Russia has also come out in favour of the status quo when it comes to the long-term survival of the Islamic Republic as a political entity: Moscow has historically been implacably opposed to the diplomatic projects to bring about regime change sponsored by American neoconservatives and the Israeli right. Given the importance of such issues in contemporary history, the present work is a timely contribution to a subject of vital significance for the future peace and stability of the Middle East. What sets the present study of contemporary Russian-Iranian relations apart from earlier works on the subject is my extensive fieldwork in Iran during President Ahmadinejad's first mandate (2005-2009). I immersed myself in Iranian society and was able to access sources in Persian first hand. For the Pahlavi period, I was able to conduct interviews with high-ranking officials of the imperial regime including Daryoush Homayoun, the shah's former Minister for Information, Akbar Etemad, the founding father of the Iranian nuclear programme, and Reza Khazaneh, former director of the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Centre. These interviews shed light on the shah's strategy as regards Moscow, including the existence of negotiations on Iran's nuclear programme between Moscow and Tehran in the 1970s. This aspect of the relations between the two countries has not, as far as I am aware, been explored in previous research. My intention has thus also been to provide a sense of historical depth for the analysis of Iran's policy towards Russia, with the aim of offering a different approach to that of history schoolbooks produced by the Islamic Republic, and more broadly, an alternative to the vision espoused by historians working within a Khomeinist ideological framework. For the post-revolutionary period, my interviews in Iran, some of which feature in the appendix, are precious sources that shed fresh light on Iranian foreign policy. My interviews not just with reformers and clerics, but also with ordinary men and women living in Tehran and elsewhere in the various provinces of Iran, particularly those in the north, meant that I was able to expand my research beyond the straightforward issue of inter-state relations to understand how Iranians see the Russians. The work thus has an empirical dimension, my fieldwork complementing the study of the relationship between the two states by emphasising social factors. In particular, it sheds light on the divergence between the Islamist regime's strategy and majority public opinion in matters of international strategy. The view from Tehran is likewise interesting in terms of the conflict between the Islamic Republic and the international community, rather than just the Western nations, as the country's leaders claim. Equally of interest are the Iranian regime's contradictions as regards Russia, seen sometimes as a positive diplomatic player in the Asian geopolitical triangle alongside China and India, generally as a way of explaining the relevance of Iranian international strategy, while at other times it is assimilated with the West, such as when Iranian analysts working for the Islamic Republic study the confrontation between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries, i.e. the five members of the Security Council and Germany. Highlighting the view from Tehran by no means limits the present book's analysis of Russian strategies as regards Iran. Russia's return to international centre stage since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 has led to a rise in the number of studies on contemporary Russian-Iranian relations, giving fresh impetus to a topic often studied in the history of international relations. Relations between the two countries – generally contentious in nature – date back to their respective origins in the state of Muscovy in the fifteenth century and the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth.1A vast range of sources is available, from diplomatic archives to accounts by travellers and Russian2 and other European 3 diplomats in Iran. While research in post-Soviet Russia is complicated for the period following the Islamic Revolution, some avenues remain open. The foundations of the Russian tradition of Iranian studies were laid by Peter the Great (1682-1725). 4 Oriental studies were institutionalised in the first half of the nineteenth century with the creation of the universities of Saint Petersburg and Kazan.5 The long tradition of Oriental and Iranian studies6 means that Soviet and later Russian attitudes to Iran can be studied in secondary sources in English. 7 A number of 1 The two factors that contributed to the Safavid construction of the Iranian state were the adoption of Shi'ism as the state religion and conflict with the Ottoman empire. See Rouhollah K. Ramazani, The Foreign Policy of Iran. 1500-1941. A Developing Nation in World Affairs. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966, pp. 13-15. 2 Over two hundred Russian travellers published accounts of their time in Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of them shared a negative opinion of Persia: see Elena Andreeva's major work Russia and Iran. Travelogues and Orientalism. London/New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 1, and Elena Andreeva, “Travelers in Persia to 1917. Russian travelers’ reports are a valuable source on the history of Persia and its relationship with Russia”, July 20, 2005, http://www.iranica.com/articles/russia-iii-travelers-in-persia (accessed 12 November 2010). For an example of such narratives, see Alexandra Kalmykow (ed.), Andrew D. Kalmykow, Memoirs of a Russian Diplomat. Outpost of the Empire, 1893-1917. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1971. 3 On the contribution made by such narratives to knowledge of Safavid Iran, see Rudi Matthee, “The Safavid under Western Eyes: Seventeenth-Century European Travelers to Iran”, Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009), pp. 137171, and Jean Chardin, Voyages en Perse (selected and edited by Claude Gaudon), Phébus, Paris, 2007, 277 p. For a travel narrative by a non-European, see Evliya Chelebi (tr. Hasan Javadi and Willem Floor), Travels in Iran and the Caucasus, 1647 & 1654. Washington DC: Mage, 2010, 279 p. For the Qajar period, see Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Trois ans en Asie (1855-1858). Paris: Métailié, 1980, 369 p. For a global view of travel narratives on Iran, see David Blow, “Persia Through Writers’ Eyes”, Asian Affairs, Vol. XXXIX no. III, November 2008, pp. 400-412. 4 See Muriel Atkin, “Soviet and Russian Scholarship on Iran”, Iranian Studies 20.2/4, 1987, p. 224. 5 Ibid., p. 225. 6 For an overview of research on Iran in the Soviet period, see “Review: Recent Soviet Works on Iran”, Middle Eastern Studies 8.3, October 1972, pp. 417-419; on the new wave of Orientalist Studies in the Soviet Union following the twentieth congress of the CPSU, see Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, La politique soviétique au Moyen-Orient. 1955-1975.Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1975, pp. 61-67. For a thorough study of relations between Russia and the East, see Lorraine de Meaux, La Russie et la tentation de l'Orient. Paris: Fayard, 2010. 7 For example, see quality Russian media in English such as Kommersant: http://www.kommersant.com/about.asp. The press agency RIA Novosti (http://en.rian.ru/) makes Russia's stance available internationally. The Kremlin website is similarly useful for information on the president's position: http://eng.kremlin.ru/. These sources form a striking contrast with the increasingly ideological way information is handled by Iranian news agencies – the main Iranian agency, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), has been under the president's direct control since 2010 – and by Iranian newspapers publishing in English, such as the Tehran Times. The official websites of the Iranian leadership are not updated regularly: see, for example, http://www.khamenei.ir/ sovietologists have specialised in relations between Moscow and Tehran as part of their broader research into relations between the Soviet Union and the third world or Moscow's Middle Eastern policy. Russian press sources are in fact more reliable than those from Iran for several reasons: firstly, Western journalists and academics have greater ease of access to Russia and more freedom to carry out research there than is the case in Iran. Secondly, information is less ideologically slanted in Russia than in Iran, and thirdly Russian think tanks are open to the West, with numerous partnerships with their Western counterparts,8 which is no longer the case for Iranian research institutes, especially since the end of Mohammad Khatami's presidency in 2005. However, some of the Qajar and Pahlavi elite were Russian-speaking9 and some members of the aristocracy even studied in Russian academies. The presence of a Communist movement among both the elite and the popular classes furthered links between the two countries. Few Iranian students, on the other hand, have taken a research interest in Russia, a trend that appears unlikely to change in the course of the next few years.10 While three Iranian universities offered Russian classes in 2006 – Tehran, the University of Guilan in Rasht, and the University of Mazandaran in Babolsar – but there is little uptake as students generally prefer to learn English.11 The dearth of Iranian students with any knowledge of Russian has led to a situation where only a tiny minority of the cultural, political and economic elite are familiar with the language. 12 Similarly, academics have by and large faced insurmountable difficulties in carrying out independent research on international relations in general 8 For example, the annual Franco-Russian dialogue organised jointly by the Institut Français des Relations Internationales and MGIMO. 9 See for example the work by Ahmad Mirfendereski, formerly the shah's ambassador in Moscow, (dar goftegu ba Ahmad Ahrar), Diplomasi ba siasat khareji iran az sevom shahrivar 1320 ta 22 bahman 1357. Dar hamsaiegi khers (Iranian Diplomacy and Foreign Policy from August 23 1941 to February 11, 1979. In the neighbourhood of the Bear). Tehran: ‘Elm, 1382 (2003). Her Majesty Farah Pahlavi has also shown a keen interest in Russian culture, studying the language in the 1960s: see Farah Pahlavi, tr. Patricia Clancy, An Enduring love: My life with the Shah. New York: Miramax, 2004. 10 The Iranian authorities are making efforts to improve the situation. The Faculty of World Studies founded in 2007 at the University of Tehran includes Russian Studies: see http://www.ut.ac.ir/en/contents/Colleges-Faculties/Worl-Studies/Departmentswordstucies/Departments...programs.html 11 The limited number of courses reflects a low level of student interest in learning Russian. In 2006-2007, for example, 100 students were learning Russian at the university of Guilan in Rasht, compared to 300 in English. Interview with academics at the University of Guilan, Rasht, January 2007. 12 See Mehdi Sanaie, “Problems and Prospects of Iranian-Russian relationships”, Russia in Global Affairs, JulySeptember 2007, p. 180. and Russian issues in particular. While relations with Moscow were indeed a topic for debate in the media, Khomeinism remained the principal ideological framework in research on international relations in post-revolutionary Iranian universities, despite the relative period of international openness initiated by Hashemi Rafsanjani in the late 1980s.13 The ideological limitations imposed by the Islamic Republic mean that it is vital for research to put forward an Iranian perspective on international relations that lies outside the Khomeinist ideological framework. The great originality and strength of the present book, studying relations with Moscow since 1979 from the Iranian perspective, lies in its awareness of the need for critical distance from a corpus shaped by Khomeinist ideology. Rather than acting as an intellectual framework for the study, the corpus itself becomes an object of study. As a result, the book offers an analysis that differs from those developed in Iran since the Islamic Revolution by shedding new light on Tehran's foreign policy vis à vis the Soviet Union and then Russia. It should be noted, however, that the research project ran into numerous obstacles, due in particular to the deteriorating political situation within Iran, where the authorities have been making increasing efforts since 2005 to control the flow of information out of the country, and look on independent research projects as attempts to overthrow the regime. Such obstacles notwithstanding, research in Iran remains a heuristically fascinating, rich experience. Knowledge of Persian and a broad range of contacts in Iranian societies and universities lead to a more fine-grained understanding of the internal political situation. That said, the challenges in establishing contact with the political elite are very real, and interviews with leading political 13 International relations became an object of study in Iran in the late 1960s when Iranian academics returned to the country after studying in the United States and Britain. The first decade of the revolution was marked by attempts to Islamise the social sciences, while the 1990s saw the advent of realist theories of international relations. By the turn of st the 21 century, politics and international relations were taught in over twenty-five university departments with a student body of nearly 5,500. See Mahmood Sariolghalam, “Relations in Iran: Accomplishments and Limitations”, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, March 17, 2004. However, since Ahmadinejad came to the presidency in 2005, a second cultural revolution has been afoot in Iran's universities, leading to the systematic purge of so-called infiltrated pro-Western elements. The policy has been pursued particularly vigorously in the social sciences, including international relations. For a fieldwork study of how international relations are taught in the Islamic Republic, see Amir M. Hajji-Yousefi, “Is There an Iranian Perspective on International Relations?”, Paper presented to the annual conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, May 27-29 2009, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. figures generally do not break new ground: the directives that limit what the press can report are also present in interviews with political figures close to, or active within, the regime. However, increasing fractures within the political oligarchy in power in Tehran since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to the presidency in 2005 have resulted in greater openness on the part of politicians close to the reformists, pragmatic conservatives, and Ebrahim Yazdi's opposition party Nehzat-e Azadi-e Iran (Freedom Movement of Iran), which, though officially outlawed, was tolerated until June 2009. Leading political figures, journalists and academics began gradually to distance themselves from the revolutionary ideologues from the late 1980s onwards. Most of those interviewed in Iran, including Ebrahim Yazdi, Saeed Leylaz, Mehdi Zakerian, and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, were able to talk relatively freely. The temporary arrest and subsequent conditional release between 2008 and 2010 of some of those interviewed were connected to their contacts with governments, think tanks, media, and universities in the West, once again highlighting the Iranian authorities' mistrust of any and all political contacts and cultural exchanges with Western institutions, considered “external enemies” and useful as such for keeping the country closed off from the West. The recurrent, if not permanent, state of tension that has characterised relations between Iran and the West since the Islamic Revolution must form the backdrop to any understanding of Russian-Iranian relations. After 1983, Moscow abandoned its policy of supporting ethnic minorities in Iran, while the Khomeinist revolutionaries set about definitively eradicating the Tudeh Party. The Soviets had hitherto been accused of plotting against the Islamic Republic by manipulating ethnic minorities or the Tudeh, despite the fact that several hundred Soviet technicians were at that time living in Iran under bilateral economic agreements. Once the Communists had been eradicated from the Iranian political scene after 1983 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a partnership between the two neighbours led to the development of bilateral relations, particularly in the cultural cooperation sector. Consequently, the political context of the early 1990s encouraged the development of cultural and diplomatic contacts between Russia and Iran, such as joint projects between the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS) and the Russian Institute for Strategic and International Studies (RISIS). Regular exchanges between think tanks in the two countries created friendship networks that strengthened bilateral relations in the political, cultural, and economic arenas. However, it should be noted that the participants in such bilateral exchanges discussing politics, culture, or human rights were not leading political figures in either country.14 Studying Iran's relations with a former imperial power, as is the case here for Soviet and postSoviet Russia, is a new departure from the current state of research into the history of Iranian foreign relations. Most specialists so far have approached the subject from the point of view of the major powers in studying relations between Iran and Russia,15 Great Britain, or, for the twentieth century, the United States. Whether their main focus is the Great Game or the Cold War,16 they present Iran as a pawn in the rivalry between the major powers: Russia and Britain until the early twentieth century17 and the Soviet Union and the United States from 1943 on.18 A number of works have also focused on Iranian-American relations for the period following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, most of which approach the issue from the American angle.19 14 For a list of participants in one such exchange, see “Iran-Russia Roundtable”, The Iranian Journal of International Affairs XII.1, spring 2000, p. 109. 15 On the Soviet period, see Miron Rezun, The Soviet Union and Iran. Soviet Policy from the Beginnings of the Pahlavi Dynasty until the Soviet Invasion in 1941. Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1981; Galia Golan, Soviet Policies in the Middle East from World War Two to Gorbachev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Robert O. Freedman, Moscow and the Middle East. Soviet policy since the invasion of Afghanistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Galia Golan, Moscow and the Middle East. New Thinking on Regional Conflict. New York: The Royal Institute of International Affairs/Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1992; and Nina Mikhailovna Mamedova, “Iranian-Soviet Relations (1917-1991)”, July 20, 2009, http://iranica.com/articles/russia-ii-iranian-sovietrelations-1917-1991 (accessed 12 November 2010). One noteworthy exception for the Soviet period is George Lenczowski, who lived in Iran from 1942 to 1945 and whose work offers a salient analysis from the Iranian point of view: see George Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran, 1918-1948. A Study in Big-Power Rivalry. Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press, 1949, and George Lenczowski (ed.), Iran Under The Pahlavis. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978. On the post-Soviet period, see Brenda Shaffer, Partners in Need. The Strategic Relationship of Russia and Iran. Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001, and John W. Parker, Persian Dreams. Moscow and Tehran Since the Fall of the Shah. Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2009. 16 See, for example, Roham Alvandi, “Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The Origins of Iranian Primacy in the Persian Gulf”, Diplomatic History 36.2, April 2012, pp. 337-72. 17 Firuz Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia. A Study in Imperialism, 1864-1914. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1968. 18 Kristen Blake, The U.S.-Soviet Confrontation in Iran, 1946-1962. A Case in the Annals of the Cold War. Lanham: University Press of America, 2009. 19 Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran. New York: Random House, 1985; James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; Mark J. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran. Ithaca / New York: Cornell University Press, 1991; Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. New York: Random House, 2004; Barbara Slavin, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the United States, and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. The issue of sources Though access to primary sources has improved since the Islamic Revolution, the authoritarian nature of the regime has made gaining entry to Iran more challenging. Working in the field on international relations in Iran is an interesting undertaking in a number of ways. First of all, the sources available in Iran shed new light on the Khomeinist approach to international relations; some knowledge of Persian is one way for researchers spending long periods in the country to explore the sources of dissonance between the regime and public opinion. These are particularly pronounced in the case of Russia, as the regime tends to downplay disagreements with Moscow to foreground their common cause against Western powers. To limit the negative impact of the way part of public opinion has become distanced from Iranian state propaganda, the regime has brought Iranian nationalism into its own propaganda, excluding only the pro-monarchy aspects. This appropriation of the nationalist heritage serves the aims of the Islamic Revolution, whose popular legitimacy has weakened since 2009. Since Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, the instrumentalisation of nationalist rhetoric has been central to the propaganda strategy developed by the Iranian political elite, as it acts as a prop to the legitimacy of the revolution. That is not to say, however, that the revolutionary dimension has been completely abandoned in favour of normalising Iran's behaviour on the international scene. The output of Iranian think tanks is of limited interest due to the many restrictions imposed by the regime both on the intellectual freedom of researchers and in the field of international expertise. Researchers working for the regime format their work according to the expectations enshrined in the ideology that structures the Islamic Republic. As a result, they cannot publish books or articles in specialist journals20 that challenge the regime's revolutionary basis. Analysing sources produced by 20 The journals in question, in English or Farsi, include Siasat khareji (The Journal of Foreign Policy), published the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), the think tank based at the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; faslname –ye motale’at-e asiai-ye va qafqaz (Central Asia and the Caucasus Review), likewise published by IPIS; Amu Darya (The Iranian Journal of Central Asian Studies), published by the Center for the Study of Central Asia and the such research centres or think tanks nonetheless remains fruitful in understanding the factors determining the country's foreign policy and how it has been shaped by events over the course of the regime. Given the significance of Khomeinist ideology in shaping Iranian diplomacy in general and policies towards Moscow in particular, the publications issued by the Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini's Works are of special interest. Likewise, history schoolbooks whose contents are shaped by Islamic revolutionary ideology are a vital source in understanding the regime's ambition to bring young Iranians into its ranks.21 The ambition met with only partial success, due in particular to the difficulties encountered by the regime in carrying out its project to Islamise Iran's schools despite the numerous government campaigns to indoctrinate the country's youth22 following the 1979 revolution.23 The failure was obvious, as the authorities constantly needed to implement new policies to Islamise the country's schools. The aim was to symbolise the "victory of the Islamic Revolution" (piruzi-ye enqelab-e eslami) since the debate surrounding it presupposed a challenge to the revolution and its achievements in the cause of Islamisation. For example, when President Ahmadinejad's Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei – a leading figure of the Islamist far right – declared at a meeting Caucasus at IPIS; Faslname motalehat manteqe-ye. Esraiil shenasi, amerika shenasi (Studies on Israel-US), published by the Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies; the Iranian Journal of International Affairs (IPIS); Discourse. An Iranian Quarterly (the Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies); Tarikh-e ravabet-e khareji (History of Foreign Relations), published by nashrieh markaz-e asnad va tahrikh-e diplomaci-ye vezarat-e omur-e kharedjeh-e jomhuri-ye eslami-e iran (the Centre for Documents and Diplomatic History at the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs). 21 Tarikh, sal-e sevom, dore-ye rahnamai-ye tahsili. (History, third year of secondary school) 136, sherkat-e chap va nashr-e ketabha-ye darsie-ye iran, Tehran, 1383 (2004-2005), 98 p. Tarikh-e mohaser iran. Kollie-ye reshteha (be estesnaye reshteha-ye adabiat va olum-e ensani, olum va ma’aref-e eslami) (Contemporary Iranian History for all options except literature, humanities, and Islamic studies), sal-e sevom-e amuzesh-e motavaseteh (third year of high school) 253, sherkate chap va nashr-e ketabha-ye darsie-ye iran, Tehran, 1385 (2006-2007), 182 p. Tarikh-e iran va jahan (2) nazari (reshteye adabiat va olum-e ensani) (History of Iran and the World 2 for the literature and humanities options), sal-e sevom-e amouzesh-e motavaseteh (third year of high school) 271/3, 1385 (2006-2007), 318 p. 22 The most recent education reform was launched by President Ahmadinejad shortly after his contested re-election in June 2009. See Saeed Paivandi, “kodam pochtavaneh ‘elmi baraye sanad-e tahavol-e amouzechi-e iran?” (What scientific basis should underpin the development of education in Iran?) radiofarda.com, 8 Mordad 1389, 30 July 2010. See also “Les rois renversés dans les livres d’école: les événements historiques relatifs aux rois et à leurs guerres seront enlevés des livres d’histoire à l’école”, (Kings overthrown in school textbooks: historical events relating to kings and their wars to be removed from history textbooks), Tehran Emrouz, 23 September 2009. 23 Saeed Paivandi, Religion et éducation en Iran. L’échec de l’islamisation de l’école. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. with Iranian expatriates in August 2010 24 that he preferred the broader term "Iranian school" (maktab-e irani) to the more restrictive "Islamic school", he sparked numerous reactions within the Islamist oligarchy. Several members of parliament and leading political and religious figures criticised his statement as blasphemous. The imam who led Friday prayers in Tehran, Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Khatami, roundly criticised Rahim Mashaei for what he called his "nationalist paganism". The fundamentalist member of parliament Ali Mohateri went even further, demanding a statement from the president, while Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi explicitly excluded Mashaei from the Islamist oligarchy, declaring that "he who refers to the Iranian school rather than the Islamic school is not with us".25 Ahmadinejad, however, defended his chief of staff, explaining that Iran represented a "school", a "culture", and a "path". Mashaei then detailed his vision of the Iranian school, arguing that the debate was based on false premises because Iran had been the spearhead of the ummah since the revolution, so that the adjective "Iranian" included the meaning "Islamic". There now exists a farright Islamist school of thought at the highest level of the state which seeks to use ultra-nationalism to build relations with expatriate Iranians, especially in the United States, as a means of achieving national reconciliation rooted in an heightened feeling of what it means to be Iranian. The expression of this national sentiment could draw on the transformation of the Islamic school into the Iranian school by means of the Iranianisation and de-Islamisation of the country's history textbooks. Given the many points of contact between Iranian and Russian history, studying the books used to teach history in Iran's schools is one means of exploring Iran's official historical discourse towards its vast northern neighbour. One such study has been carried out by an Israeli non-governmental organisation, the Centre for Monitoring the Impact of Peace.26 The study looked at 115 textbooks and teachers' manuals and concluded that "The Iranian school system prepares its students for war – 24 William Yong, Robert F. Worth, “Iran Expatriates Get Chilly Reception”, The New York Times, August 7, 2010. 25 Quoted in Aftab Yazd, 11 August 2010. He later declared that “spreading the Iranian school goes against Imam Khomeini's thinking” on 6 September 2010. 26 Arnon Groiss, Nethanel (Navid) Toobian (eds), The Attitude to ‘the Other’ and to Peace in Iranian School Books and Teacher’s Guide, Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, October 2006, 308 p. World War III, to be precise – in the name of Islam against American world hegemony ".27 This is an ideological approach to the Islamic Republic's vision of history. While the study is undoubtedly lacking in subtlety and mainly focuses on the question of Israel and attitudes towards Judaism, it is nonetheless relevant in terms of Russia's image in Iranian textbooks. First of all, the textbooks highlight the risk of self-alienation of the colonized countries – their becoming Westernized or Easternized [i.e., Communist] ".28 At the heart of the Islamic Republic's discourse on history lies the notion of Iran's victimisation by a hostile intellectual campaign driven by imperialist forces from both East and West. Similarly, the interviews I conducted in the offices of ayatollahs in Qom, including Mesbah Yazdi and Ali Sistani, led me to grasp the importance of Qom when it came to deciding foreign policy, though its role is that of a religious and ideological soft power rather than having any official position in the country's institutional structure. The question of inter-religious dialogue discussed during the interviews is of particular interest as dialogue projects are a key tool for Iranian diplomacy. One such dialogue has been set up between the Orthodox church and Shi'ite clerics.29 While the internal debate on foreign policy options in the Middle East takes place within strict parameters in the Islamic Republic,30 the issue of relations with Russia, though bound to a certain extent by Khomeinist ideology, 31 is by no means a taboo topic for public debate. The relative openness of debate sheds light on voices within the country criticising the direction of Iran's diplomatic relations with Moscow. The various points of view are available to researchers with some knowledge of Persian. The relevant sources are essentially the leading reformist media - 'Etemad-e Melli, 'Etemad, Arman, Shahrvande Emruz, Sharq, and Donya-e eqtesad. Similarly, the English- 27 Ibid., p. 6. 28 Ibid., p. 103. 29 See Clément Therme, “Iran and Russia: Towards an Alliance?”, in Stephanie Cronin (ed.), Empires and Revolutions: Iranian Russian Encounters Since 1800, Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 377-400. 30 See Mohammad Reza Djalili, Clément Therme, “Double défi à la puissance régionale iranienne: crises internes et nouvelle diplomatie américaine” (A twofold challenge to Iran's regional power: internal crises and the new US diplomacy), Maghreb/Machrek , autumn 2009, pp. 45-56. 31 The broad details of the khomeinist vision of the USSR are laid out in a letter from the Ayatollah to Gorbachev: er “Message de l’imam Khomeini à Michaël Gorbatchev pour le 1 janvier 1989”, (Message from Imam Khomeini to Mikhail Gorbachev for 1 January 1989), Vingtième siècle , October-December 1989, pp. 97-100. language Iran News takes a critical stance towards official discourse on the project for a strategic alliance between Iran and Russia. The key merit of the analyses put forward by one of Iran's leading specialists on Russia, Mehdi Sanaie, is to shed light on and justify the bases of Tehran's Russia strategy following the Islamic Revolution.32 Sanaie is also a member of the commission responsible for foreign affairs and national security at the Islamic consultative assembly.33 Similarly, the English-language Tehran Times, said to represent the views of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, generally reports positively on initiatives aiming to bring about a rapprochement between Russia and Iran. Alongside media sources and academic publications, private discussions and interviews have become part of the pioneering corpus underpinning the present work, which aims to do more than merely draw on the sources available to researchers based in the West. The working hypothesis The case of the Soviet Union and Russia illustrates the working hypothesis explored in the present book that Iran's revolutionary foreign policy was only partially intended to defend the country's national interests. It will be shown that the decision-making process, whether on issues of internal or external policy, gave precedence to the revolutionary superstructure over and above the country's elected institutions. The hegemony of the revolutionary bodies progressively led to a break between the regime and public opinion in the years after 1979. In other words, while the legitimacy of the revolutionary bodies initially sprang from a revolutionary movement that clearly arose from the 32 See Mehdi Sanaie, “The Need to Offer New Solutions”, Iran Review, 29 January 2010, http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/The_Need_to_Offer_New_Solutions.htm. (Accessed 22 May 2014); “Problems and Prospects of Iranian-Russian Relations”, Russia in Global Affairs 5.3, July-September 2007, pp. 171-181; “Neshast-e gourouh-e goft-o-gou-ye rahbordi rusie-jahan-e eslam” (meeting of the strategic dialogue group on Russia and the Islamic World), faslname –ye motale’at-e asiai-ye va qafqaz (Central Asia and the Caucasus Review) 54, 1385 (Summer 2006), pp. 226-230. 33 His research is academic as well as diplomatic and political in purpose. See, for example, Mehdi Sanaie, “Iran wants to maintain friendly relations with Russia”, Valdai Club, 20 May 2010, http://www.valdaiclub.com/content/dr-mehdisanaie-iran-wants-maintain-friendly-relations-russia (Accessed 12 November 2010). general populace, the revolution eventually grew hidebound and became distanced from the people: the revolutionary elite's belief in their own popular legitimacy appeared to be at increasing odds with the reality of the way power operated, and rather than enjoying popular support, they came to be feared.34 This has led to ideological stagnation and an inability to reform. Khomeini's charisma outlived him in his ideological and institutional heritage, which remains the key factor in political debate among the Iranian revolutionary elite. While the heritage came to be a factor of division35 rather than unity after the elections of June 2009, it remains the case that its importance cannot be overstated in understanding the development of revolutionary Iran. The difficulties faced by the political elite in moving on from the war of succession they have been embroiled in since the 1989 death of the first Guide – enshrined in the Iranian constitution as Imam Khomeini – reveal the extent to which academics, taking as their premise the fact that Iranian politics are now post-revolutionary, have perhaps been somewhat hasty in hypothesising such a structural evolution of the political system as a product of the 1979 revolution, as it would in fact appear not yet to have taken place. 36 Similarly, such analyses fail to bring any critical discourse to bear on the revolutionary elite's attitude to Iranian foreign policy. By remaining within the parameters of the descriptive nature of the arguments put forward by the revolutionary Islamists to justify the country's foreign policy, these analyses reveal the fragility of the argument that sets out to downplay the importance of the concept of the state in the so-called Western social sciences. How can foreign policy be studied without understanding the workings of the state? How can the revolution claim to be defending an ummah whose boundaries are vague and 34 Since the crisis in June 2009, the Supreme Leader Khamenei's partisans appear to be following Machiavelli's advice to the Prince: 'A controversy has arisen about this: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or vice versa. My view is that it is desirable to be both loved and feared; but it is difficult to achieve both and, if one of them has to be lacking, it is much safer to be feared than loved”. Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 59. 35 The divisions have been heightened since June 2009 by the stance adopted by Khomeini's descendants in favour of the reformists and pragmatic conservatives. 36 For a constructivist post-revolutionary approach to external and internal policy in Iran, see, for example, Arshin AdibMoghaddam, “Iran: this is not a revolution”, Comment Is Free, guardian.co.uk, 23 June 2009, and Iran in World Politics. The Question of the Islamic Republic. London: Hurst, 2007. shifting, depending on whether the viewpoint is Sunni or Shi'ite, for instance, when the starting point is a state entity? Contrary to analyses that seek to legitimise Iran's behaviour on the international stage, the main point of interest of research on Iranian foreign policy is rather comparing its revolutionary dimension with the national interest. While the national interest is by no means fixed once and for all, that is not to say that it escapes definition. The present book therefore aims to shed light on the contradictions and inconsistencies of Iran's revolutionary strategy, measuring them against the national interest in terms of security, culture, and the economy. Soviet and Russian relations thus offer a way in to exploring how the ambitions of the revolution intensified the asymmetry that was already a constant feature of relations between Moscow and Tehran in the Pahlavi period. The historical dynamics underlying bilateral relations between the two countries remain an ongoing barrier to any rapprochement. A mutual lack of trust and the history of the past thirty-five years suggest that it would be inappropriate to describe diplomatic relations between Russia and Iran as a strategic alliance.37 Adam Tarock has argued that the thaw in Russian-Iranian relations in the mid-1990s marked a new chapter in their tumultuous history. While there can be no denying that such a thaw took place, Moscow's political support for Iran in its conflict with Washington was by no means systematic. This suggests that it would be more appropriate to describe interactions between Moscow and Tehran since 1991 in terms of a tactical entente, drawing on Hervé Couteau-Bégarie's definition of alliances as “at their most basic (…) an agreement that unites powers in a common interest”, since “all alliances reflect the consent of international stakeholders – states, as a general rule – to work together to counter the threat posed by a common enemy. This last aspect is particularly significant: designating a common enemy underpins the legitimacy, if not always the credibility, of an alliance”.38 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tehran and Moscow have indeed had 37 For a definition of Iranian-Russian relations as a strategic alliance in the post-Cold War period, see Adam Tarock, “Iran and Russia in 'Strategic Alliance'”, Third World Quarterly 18.2, June 1997, pp. 207-23. 38 Hervé Couteau-Bégarie, “Alliances militaires”, in Thierry de Montbrial, Jean Klein (eds.), Dictionnaire de stratégie. Paris: PUF, 2000, p. 13. common interests in the region in general and in the Caucasus and central Asia in particular; yet it remains the case that their relationships with the “common enemy” – the United States – are very different. Russian-American relations clearly remain antagonistic on a number of fronts, such as the NATO's expansion into the “ near-abroad” and Washington's unilateral approach to handling international crises. Russian-Iranian relations are shaped by alternating freezes and thaws in relations between Moscow and Washington. For Tehran, anti-Americanism is a fundamental ideological tenet that structures the political system, going well beyond a simple issue of foreign policy. As a result, the only way Tehran can avoid the problems caused by the asymmetry of its relations with Moscow is to work towards a rapprochement with Beijing. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has often been obliged to rely on Russian partners whom it has good reason to mistrust. Quite apart from the structural tension underlying Russian-Iranian relations, the two neighbours also regularly find themselves in competition, particularly in the field of energy. For a fuller understanding of the difficulties involved in forging an alliance in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, it is also vital to look at the 1980s, which were decisive in shaping relations between Tehran and Moscow. It became clear in the period immediately following the revolution that its main enemy was to be the United States. Given the late Cold War context, the logical outcome was a more than merely temporary alliance between “red and black” (ettehad sork va siah) – the Communists and the Khomeinist Islamists, and this was indeed one of the second Pahlavi monarch's fears. However, once the objective of overthrowing the shah had been achieved, the Iranian communists were driven from the internal political stage, leading to a lengthy crisis in Soviet-Iranian relations (1983). Aside from the issue of clashes of ideology, the Islamist revolutionaries' belief that they represented the only possible alternative to the capitalist model was rooted in the vision of the Supreme Leader, Imam Khomeini, who predicted the collapse of Communism in a letter to Gorbachev: The main problem confronting your country is not one of private ownership, freedom and economy; your problem is the absence of true faith in God, the very problem that has dragged, or will drag, the West to vulgarism and an impasse. Your main problem is the prolonged and futile war you have waged against God, the source of existence and creation. It is clear to everybody that from now on communism will only have to be found in the museums of world political history, for Marxism cannot meet any of the real needs of mankind. Marxism is a materialistic ideology and materialism cannot bring humanity out of the crisis caused by a lack of belief in spirituality―the prime affliction of the human society in the East and the West alike.39 He also informed the Soviet leader that the Islamic Republic was ready to “fill the vacuum of religious faith in your society”.40 The anti-American aspect of Russian-Iranian relations can be described as ideological if its raison d’être is considered to be anti-Americanism, and strategic if its aim is rather to oppose American hegemonism – a stance justified by Washington's adoption of policies hostile both to Iran and to the Russian Federation. Such a fine-grained analysis of bilateral Russian-Iranian relations by no means invalidates the fact of a certain thawing in relations between Tehran and Moscow since the end of the Cold War. The relationship can thus be described as strategic in terms of an interpretation of Russian and Iranian foreign relations as reactions against the US's hegemonic ambitions, which they share a longterm interest in countering. However, the term “tactical” appears more fitting, given the instability of Soviet-Iranian and later Russian-Iranian relations, which have repeatedly been at crisis point since 1979. The alternation of periods of crisis and thaws can be partly explained by differences in the prioritisation of bilateral relations between the two countries. 39See http://en.imam-khomeini.ir/en/news/4181/News/Imam_predicted_the_collapse_of_communism (accessed 13 May 2014) 40 Ibid. The objective pursued by Tehran in its relations with Moscow, at least since the end of the Cold War, has been strategic in nature. Moscow does have an interest in maintaining peaceful relations with its southern neighbour in terms of regional politics, but its diplomatic relations with Iran remain secondary to its global strategic ambitions. On the one hand, Tehran plays into Moscow's interests when, for example, the Kremlin aims to play up its image as a key international power independent from the US by acting as a mediator on the issue of Iran's nuclear programme. Yet Moscow has no intention of sacrificing its status as a responsible world power in terms of nuclear proliferation, which explains Russia's ambivalence to Iran's ambition to achieve nuclear sovereignty. Russia's equivocal attitude towards Iran makes the relationship one of tactics rather than strategy. The present book does not set out to read Islamic Iran's foreign policy as a reaction against external pressures and the imperialism of the major powers, described as “arrogant” by Islamic propaganda. Rather, it highlights the significance of the revolutionary dimension in analysing Tehran's policy towards the Soviet Union and Russia. Furthermore, the Moscow-Tehran axis can be defined by ideological criteria by taking account of Iran's national interest in defining its diplomatic stance towards Russia. The national interest has been sacrificed by the Islamic elite in power in Tehran to protect the Khomeinist ideological corpus underpinning its definition of international strategy, as a means of ensuring the regime's survival. It is, admittedly, paradoxical to present Iran's relations with the Soviet Union and later Russia as a facet of the ideological and revolutionary dimension of Iran's foreign policy: there is undeniably a pragmatic aspect to Iran's diplomacy in Moscow, particularly as regards the Caucasus and central Asia in the post-Soviet period. Tehran's diplomatic pragmatism echoes Moscow's Realpolitik, which strives to further its political and economic ties with Iran as a means not only of promoting its interests on the international stage against US unilateralism, but also of strengthening its influence over the “near abroad” to guarantee stability on its southern borders. Moscow's aim is also to hinder the emergence of a new rival with the potential to undermine its own regional and international energy strategy, which is a key aspect of its foreign policy. Consequently, Russia strives to shape Tehran's energy policy towards its own interests. Muriel Atkin has noted that the pan-Islamist rhetoric of Iranian policy on Russia's “near abroad” is not matched by a will to export the Islamic Revolution or to destabilise the country. In other words, she underlines Islamic diplomacy's pragmatism on this issue. 41 Iran's pragmatic approach to relations with Moscow has similarly been highlighted by Brenda Shaffer, 42 while Nina Mamedova, head of Iranian Studies at Moscow's Institute of Oriental Studies, argues that Tehran and Moscow share a “communality of geopolitical interests” rather than a “strategic alliance”, the relationship being based on a Realpolitik approach in which, from the Russian angle, “the two countries' interest in broadening political and economic ties outweighs the existing contradictions”.43 Though the softening of Tehran's diplomacy in the 1990s is an undeniable geopolitical fact, it would appear that the sacrifice of Islamic ideology to protect the interests of the state was intended to maintain two aspects of the Khomeinist ideological heritage in matters of foreign policy: its antiZionism and its anti-Americanism. In other words, since 1991, the dynamic of convergent interests in Iranian-Russian relations happened with Tehran's consent, but it was a diplomatic direction taken by default rather than by choice. Given the lack of credible alternatives to its relations with Russia, Iranian diplomacy's decision to turn to Moscow seems to have been rooted first and foremost in the desire to protect the Khomeinist heritage in matters of foreign policy. Anti-Americanism also made it vital to keep working towards compromise and more intense co-operation with Moscow on sensitive issues such as weaponry, the nuclear programme, and cutting-edge technology, particularly as exchanges with the West in these fields were limited by restrictions due either to unilateral sanctions imposed by the West or to UN Security Council sanctions. The issues explored in the present book are threefold. It aims first to determine the extent to which the relationship is affected by ideology, looking at questions including anti-Americanism and 41 Muriel Atkin, “Iran, Russia and Tajikistan’s Civil War” in Stephanie Cronin (ed.), Empires and Revolutions, op. cit. 42 Brenda Shaffer, Partners in Need, op. cit., p. 1. 43 Nina Mamedova, “A communality of geopolitical interests”, Bitterlemons-International 43, Vol. 7, December 3, 2009, http://www.bitterlemons-international.org/previous.php?opt=1&id=297#1210 (accessed 12 November 2010). the respective Russian and Iranian visions of the international system. It then turns to the burdensome heritage of past conflict in shaping the Pahlavi and Islamic regimes' policies towards Moscow, looking at which aspects have changed and which have been characterised by continuity. It explores whether this heritage continued to play a role after the end of the Cold War in the dynamic underlying Russian-Iranian relations. The study then turns to the extent to which the bilateral relationship was affected by changes in the nature of the international system over the course of three periods: a bipolar system from 1979 to 1991, which became unipolar from 1991 to 2003, when America's hyperpower began to crumble as civil war broke out in Iraq, leading to a heterogeneous multipolar system from 2003 to 2012. The book begins with a study based mainly on secondary sources of the importance of Russia in forging Iranian foreign policy since diplomatic relations were opened between the two countries in the Safavid period. This forms an indispensable backdrop to the post-revolutionary period of the title (1979-2012) for a number of reasons. First of all, Russia and later the Soviet Union played a key role in the formation of the Iranian state, in shaping its borders for example, and in the emergence of the concept of Iran as a nation – mellat-e iran, or mellat-e eslami in post-revolutionary discourse.44 The second reason ties in with major historical events that have played out across the two countries: the 1905 revolution in Russia triggered the constitutionalist revolution in Iran from 1906, while the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took place not long after Khomeini's death in 1989. These ideological upheavals and regime changes have never interrupted diplomatic relations between the two countries, although it should be noted that Russian and Soviet diplomatic staff in Tehran came under threat on several occasions, such as when the entire Russian delegation was massacred alongside Aleksander Sergeevich Griboyedov, Russia's plenipotentiary minister in Iran, at the embassy in 1829. The Soviet embassy was likewise targeted during the Islamic Revolution in 1979 by demonstrators angered by the Red Army's invasion of Afghanistan. There can be no denying that 44 The discourse of the revolutionary elite reveals a gradual shift in usage from mellat-e eslami to mellat-e Iran after the founder of the Islamic Republic died in the late 1980s. The authorities in the Islamic Republic often express nationalist or even ultra-nationalist opinions, at least in public diplomatic speeches. See for example “Regional airlines snub demand by Iran to rename Gulf”, MEED, February 28 2010. Russia played a decisive role in the spread of modern ideas in Iran, and during the Soviet period, Marxism had a powerful influence on the political ideologies in vogue. The second chapter then sets forth the theoretical framework for studying Iran's foreign policy towards the Soviet Union (for the period 1979 to 1991) and Russia (1991-2012). It becomes clear that since the Islamic Revolution, Tehran's foreign policy has only partially reflected Iranian public opinion, focusing more heavily on the Shi'ite dimension; the example of Soviet and Russian relations underlines the difficulty faced by the Islamic authorities in reconciling the country's national interest with a diplomacy that is still revolutionary in nature. Much of the explanation lies in the influence of ideology on the decision-making process. The increasing influence of ideology in Iranian diplomacy is also apparent in the choice of diplomatic staff. The chapter then turns to an exploration of how all revolutions lead to the implementation of contradictory foreign policies, the Islamic Republic being no exception to the general rule. It then concludes with an analysis of the interaction between a given international system and a revolutionary foreign policy. The third chapter focuses on an analysis of the ideological incompatibilities in Soviet-Iranian and then Russian-Iranian relations as regards the converging interests that emerged in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, in particular in terms of its anti-Americanism. In the first decade after the revolution, any rapprochement between Iran and the USSR remained an unobtainable objective due both to the Islamic Republic's foreign policy watchword - “neither east nor west, Islamic Republic! ” - and to the bilateral tensions that arose as a result of the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet Union's military occupation of Afghanistan. The period was nonetheless decisive for an understanding of relations between Moscow and Tehran in the contemporary period. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the aim became to establish a strategic partnership. Iran's stance towards defining a strategy on post-Soviet Russia was shaped in particular by factionalism within the country's political elite. More broadly, the analysis of Iran's relationship with Moscow confirms the limits of the alternation between reformists and conservatives in defining new lines in the Islamic Republic's foreign policy. More broadly still, the convergences between the post-Soviet Russian state and the Islamic Republic after the death of its founder are of interest in comparative political terms. Yet the remarkable parallels in how the two states function were not the key factor in determining a rapprochement between them in the post-Cold War international system. Rather, the implementation of a regional partnership was down to the way Tehran bowed to Russia's interests in the former Soviet space. The chapter analyses the bases of the entente, which initially came about in reaction to the Tajik civil war and the conflict in Afghanistan. Furthermore, Tehran and Moscow's common opposition to the ethnic demands of the Chechens and their joint alliance with Armenia were factors that encouraged growing mutual trust between the two partners. It remains the case, however, that when divergences of interest came to light, such as dividing the Caspian Sea, Tehran takes a back seat to Moscow's interests. The fourth and final chapter focuses on the viewpoint of Moscow. As seen from the Kremlin, relations with Iran are closely bound up with perceptions of the West. Consequently, political parties adopt positions on the Iranian issue that depend on their perception of the necessity or otherwise of making the search for alliances with Western countries in general and the US in particular a foreign policy priority. It will also be seen that relations with Israel, Turkey, and Syria have an impact on the Russian-Iranian partnership. The study concludes with key points for a rapprochement – co-operation on military issues, energy, and the space programme. In the final analysis, these are revealed to be more important in understanding the rapprochement between Iran and Russia than the two countries' respective visions of the international system. They are more tools of public diplomacy enabling the two countries to underline their differences from the West than the manifestation of a genuine commonality of vision resulting in the affirmation of an alternative to what the Iranian revolutionary elite refers to as the Western international order.