people's republic Iran

Thursday, 1 February 1979 at an altitude of 25,000 feet a bomb place by the KGB explodes on an Air France 747 caring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. 12 February 1979 Persian army troops back by KGB agent and the Spetsnaz storm the Tehran Parliament Building. 13 February 1979 The people's republic Iran is declared by the army an all party besides the Communist Party of Iran are banned. Do the USSR end up in Iran like they do in Afghanistan? Can the people's republic Iran survive the fall of The USSR and what would that me for today in the Middle East.
 
You gotta remember the Afghanistan-invading Soviets were as much a Great Satan to revolutionary Iran as the US was. Iran is a huge country with a huge population. The USSR barely held on to Afghanistan for a few years. How could they also hold on to Iran?

And don't sell Jimmy Carter and SecDef Harold Brown short. The Soviets might give the hostages back as a gesture of goodwill, but we might just see a lot of cruise missles being "tested" in Iran. Carter might be re-elected, F117s might fly over Iran. The Berlin wall falls in 1985 over internal unrest in the USSR.

Intervention in Iran is doom for the Soviets.
 
Contrary to Afghanistan, the communists had a significant popular support in revolutionary Iran. Tudeh was an important fraction of the revolutionaries; only that Khomeini managed to consolidate power before them, and then turned on his former allies.

With Khomeini dead and the Islamic part of the revolutionaries in disarray, the more probable situation is a mix of Algerian and Czechoslovakian one: Tudeh wins, spends some time in power consolidating, then organizes an election, loses it, and gets back to power nevertheless in a coup (financed and logistically supported by the Soviets).

If they don't manage to stay in the saddle after that and call Soviet Army, then we have an Iranian Civil War on our hands and the outcome described by Catmo is not improbable. But my stomach feeling is that with the large poor and lower-middle-class urban population, the Communists should be able to get enough power base even without direct Soviet intervention.

Afghanistan, by contrast, is mostly a village country with only Kabul deserving the name of a real big city - and most occupying powers or foreign-supported regimes in Afghanistan did not have a lot of trouble holding Kabul.
 

CalBear

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Thursday, 1 February 1979 at an altitude of 25,000 feet a bomb place by the KGB explodes on an Air France 747 caring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. 12 February 1979 Persian army troops back by KGB agent and the Spetsnaz storm the Tehran Parliament Building. 13 February 1979 The people's republic Iran is declared by the army an all party besides the Communist Party of Iran are banned. Do the USSR end up in Iran like they do in Afghanistan? Can the people's republic Iran survive the fall of The USSR and what would that me for today in the Middle East.

Do you mean before or after the nuclear exchange?

The U.S., with Carter as President or Reagan who would be in office a year later, could NOT have allowed the Soviets to control Iran, and by extension the global oil supply.

This is one of the many scenarios that lead straight to Global Thermonuclear War.

The Cold War was actually pretty close to Room Temperature in '79-80.
 
I remember the backstory in the BBC film Threads was similar to this: US-backed coup overthrows the then-young Islamic government, hoping to restore the Shah back to power. The Soviets hope to put Tudeh in during the chaos and in this scenario, bite off more than they can chew.
 

Art

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Reminds me of the Richard P. Herman book . . .

War Birds, in which the Ayatollah is killed and a Russian backed coup succeeds. A group called the P. S. I. invades Iraq and Kuwait. The U. S. A. sets up a A. V. G. like squadron in a fictional airfield called Ras Assanya. They proceed to smash every attack the P. S. I. makes with old F-4 Phantoms. Then the P. S. I. pretends to negotiate and the base is attacked and overrun, and the personel became prisoners of war. There was a sequel called Force of Eagles that was about the rescue of the prisoners.
 
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