Peculiarities of the USSR’s Foreign Policy Decision Making towards the Islamic Republic of Iran

Abstract

This paper examines the earliest stage of the formation of Soviet foreign policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran. The study offers a critical analysis of the state of the international scholarly field on the Islamic Re-public of Iran in its initial form, allowing for the diversity of expert perspec-tives that emerged in the early years after the Islamic Revolution, and trac-ing their reflection in the practical domain. The paper also examines the decision-making mechanism on Iran in the period 1979–1983 and the in-fluence of the views of different groups of Soviet experts on the process. In the context of realpolitik, the USSR tried its best to preserve the unexpected gift of fortune in the form of the new Islamic regime's rabid anti-Americanism, but at the same time it concentrated its efforts on trying to implant local leftist forces into Iranian power structures, following ideolog-ical dogma and being confident in the imminent leftist transformation of the Iranian revolution. The debacle of the Iranian Tudeh Party in 1983 forced the USSR to largely reconsider its policy towards the Islamic Republic and to definitively change its ideological approaches to purely practical ones. This paper draws on English-, French- and Russian-language studies car-ried out in recent decades, as well as ego-documents authored by partici-pants in the events from the main actor countries: diplomats, intelligence officers and scholars of Iran. The author situates the analysis of these ego-documents in the context of a thematically broader critical synthesis of con-temporary work from different countries.