Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 5 – If the Iranian
protests succeed in overthrowing the ayatollahs, that will constitute a
crushing defeat for Russia’s foreign policy line and undermine its hold on the
population, Aleksandr Skobov says; but even if they do not succeed, they show
the fragility of any effort to engage in authoritarian modernization, the course
the Kremlin has decided on.
“Without exaggeration,” the Russian commentator says, “the current events n Iran have a tectonic character and are
capable of significantly changing the entire situation in the world” both in
the region and more generally and both now and in the decades to come (graniru.org/Politics/World/Mideast/m.266746.html).
According to
Skobov, “the possible fall of the regime of the ayatollahs would be a crushing blow
to the entire foreign policy construction of the Kremlin – and that means as
well the domestic political stability of the Putin regime.” That is why the regime’s media have tried to hard
to dismiss the Iranian protests as marginal and the work of Western conspirators.
Were
the regime in Iran to change, Russia would have to pull back from Syria and its
plans for a military base there, something that “by itself” would involve “a
serious psychological trauma for the vaunted ‘Putin majority,’” which sees in
these things a marker of Putin’s and their own recovered greatness.
Moreover, he continues, “Kremlin
propaganda” has become so defensive of any regime in power that “this same ‘Putin
majority’ views any revolutionary overthrow of any cannibalistic regime in any
part of the globe as a shameful defeat of the Kremlin.” And for the Kremlin, Iran is “the only
significant non-virtual ally of the Putin Kremlin” in its campaign against the
West.
But as important as these
developments would be, the Iranian events already carry a larger and even more
disturbing message to Putin and the Russian people. They show that a people with a great culture
can give rise to a horrific despotism and then the popular revolutionary
movements that can overthrow it.
That was what happened at the end of
the shah’s rule and opened the way for a moment when the ayatollahs could seize
power. Many in Moscow today are
breathing easier now that the protests in Iran appear to be ebbing; but that is
a mistake, Skobov argues, noting that in 1979 protests ebbed and flowed until
they finally won out despite repression.
“The Islamic Revolution in Iran has much
in common with the Russian Revolution,” he says. Both show “how a genuinely popular,
democratic and it would seem victorious revolution can degenerate into the blackest
and most obscurantist reaction” and give rise to a regime even more repressive
than the one it overthrew.
And the two revolutions were also a revolutionary
response to “the wild archaism” of efforts at “authoritarian modernization”
that destabilized society but did not produce the results their leaders
promised. Indeed, they showed that that strategy is ultimately a failure, that
it fails to produce genuine stability and can “at any moment” collapse into the
most reactionary forms.
But at the same time, Skobov says,
the history of Iran for all the tragedies it contains also provides the basis
for optimism. “It is a threatening
warning about the fact that regimes based on the suppression of the human
personality are ultimately condemned to failure.”
“Any authoritarianism, be it ‘progressive’
or traditionalist, involves the use of force against human nature. And sooner
or later, that nature rises against the regime which is killing its life. The
history of Iran shows that a people can rise for freedom” and that this rising
can be general and not the work of some small minority.
Forty
years ago, “the people of Iran rose against the forces of the modernizers from SAWAK.
Now it is rising against the medieval ayatollahs.” That is the larger threat that the Iranian
events present to Putin’s regime, and it explains why his media mouthpieces are
doing all they can to suggest otherwise.
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