?
Особенности формирования внешнеполитических решений СССР в отношении Исламской Республики Иран
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 Republic of Iran in its initial form, allowing for the
diversity of expert perspectives that emerged in the early years after the Islamic Revolution, and
tracing their reflection in the practical domain. The paper also examines the decision-making
mechanism on Iran in the period 1979–1983 and the influence 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 ideological 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 carried out in recent decades, as well as ego-documents authored by participants 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 contemporary work from different countries.