When I was reading Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam, the book said that there were alternate plans to seize the Soviet embassy instead of the American one, owing to the USSR’s state ideology of godless Communism.
This made me think: what if it had been the Soviet embassy in Tehran that was seized and Soviet staff taken hostage, rather than the American one.
At the time, the USSR was already in serious economic trouble, with an aging Politburo under Brezhnev, and the problem of defending the PDPA regime in Afghanistan. If the USSR had had a hostage crisis to deal with as well as the mujahideen in Afghanistan, there would be danger that its strained economy would have collapsed much more rapidly. The USSR could have collapsed in 1982 or 1983 instead of 1991, and there comes the possibility of bordering republics falling to theocratic regimes à la Khomeini’s Iran (though except for Azerbaijan they would have been Sunnite).
Would Brezhnev have tried to rescue the hostage by force immediately?
Would Moscow have sought alliances to fight Iran with traditional enemies of Russia?
Would Washington have seized on an occupation of the Soviet Embassy to end the USSR and the Cold War?
This made me think: what if it had been the Soviet embassy in Tehran that was seized and Soviet staff taken hostage, rather than the American one.
At the time, the USSR was already in serious economic trouble, with an aging Politburo under Brezhnev, and the problem of defending the PDPA regime in Afghanistan. If the USSR had had a hostage crisis to deal with as well as the mujahideen in Afghanistan, there would be danger that its strained economy would have collapsed much more rapidly. The USSR could have collapsed in 1982 or 1983 instead of 1991, and there comes the possibility of bordering republics falling to theocratic regimes à la Khomeini’s Iran (though except for Azerbaijan they would have been Sunnite).
Would Brezhnev have tried to rescue the hostage by force immediately?
Would Moscow have sought alliances to fight Iran with traditional enemies of Russia?
Would Washington have seized on an occupation of the Soviet Embassy to end the USSR and the Cold War?