Survive under sanctions. Iranian lessons for Russia

The other day, the domestic media covered the news with reference to the results of an analysis of user search queries for various categories of housing in the period from December 30 to January 8, conducted by the Russian travel planning service OneTwoTrip. It turned out that the leader among foreign destinations where Russians are looking for hotels for the New Year holidays is... the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“The list of popular foreign countries for spending the New Year holidays has changed significantly over the year. Iran became the leader in the number of search queries for hotels - it accounts for 20%, and in 2021 the country was not even in the top,” OneTwoTrip said in a statement.

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It is clear that the analysis of search queries in itself, not supported by real changes in entry statistics, is nothing. Nevertheless, the trend of growing interest among Russians in Iran as a tourist destination is obvious. At the same time, the level of awareness of Russian society about what kind of animal this is – Iran – leaves much to be desired. Basically, this is a mixture of old prejudices and myths, relayed by the Western, and through them, our media, and various horror stories about Islam.

In the minds of, if not the majority, then very many of our people, Iran is something dense and medieval, led by bearded ayatollahs in turbans. For the mass consciousness, Iran, Taliban Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia are all the same. Meanwhile, reality, as usual, is much more multifaceted than myths and deep-rooted prejudices.

First of all, Iran is a modern country, whose residents have access to all technological innovations and the benefits of civilization. Smartphones and iPhones of the latest models are as commonplace in Tehran as in Moscow. However, local authorities are waging a stubborn struggle for the sovereignty of the Internet, with varying success they are fighting Western social networks and instant messengers, well, they are fighting in Russia, and in China, and in Myanmar, and in general - in many places.

A person arriving from Moscow to Tehran on one of the many direct flights between countries now operated by Iranian airlines is unlikely to notice any significant infrastructural difference between the Mother See and the Iranian capital. In both places, the main transport artery is the metro. Both here and there have modern roads, overpasses and bridges, and here and there there is dense traffic with large traffic jams - yes, imagine, Iranians do not travel on donkeys.

Paradoxically, the main merit of transforming Iran into a modern urbanized society of industrial Modernity belongs to the conservative in spirit of the Islamic Revolution, which was clothed in a religious shell. Which did not turn back time, but provided a breakthrough into the future.

_{True, the price paid for this by Iranian society was the total domination of local “grinds” in all spheres of public life and public morality. An indicative illustration: today Tehran and residents of other cities with a population of over a million travel to and from work on a state-of-the-art metro, only the carriages for women and men are separate.}

In modern Iran, alcohol, gambling and miniskirts are prohibited, but the decade of Prohibition was also experienced in the bastion of Western liberalism - the United States. On the other hand, the author of these lines had the opportunity to personally observe surrealistic paintings in Iranian cities - local women in traditional Muslim capes, under which the most ordinary jeans and stilettos can be easily seen.

By the way, about women. Iran's ayatollahs are a country of naturally victorious feminism, judging by such an indicator as the level of women's education, including higher education. Today, 56% of Iranian university students are women and girls. Saudi Arabia will only dream of such a level of women's emancipation for a long time. What about Saudi Arabia? In Russia itself, during the post-Soviet years, the number of women with university degrees decreased from 70 to 30%. So in this regard, we have to grow and grow even before Iran.

Taking into account the above figures and facts, it is not at all surprising that women and girls have become the core of the current protest unrest in the country. From a sociological point of view, everything is objective: in the country of the victorious Islamic revolution, its own youth have grown up, who have long been cramped within the framework set by the old people. This circumstance was recently noted by French President Macron, who spoke about the “children of the Iranian revolution” who are making “their own revolution.”

_{Another thing is that these protests cannot be called a revolution in the classical sense of the word. Revolution is a very complex process that requires much greater resources and ideological content than what we see now. The protesters have no leaders, structures, money or clear external support.}

At the same time, you need to understand that the current ones, like any protests in any country, have a specific reason and trigger, and there are real, objective reasons that have matured over the years. And under no circumstances should they be confused. What the Western press writes about - I mean the murder of Kurdish student Mahsa Amini - is precisely a formal reason, just like the self-immolation of the merchant Bouazizi, which launched the revolution in Tunisia, or the murder of journalist Gongadze, after which unrest began in Kuchma’s Ukraine .

The real reasons for the Iranian events are that the country is simply tired of the confrontation with the collective West that has become routine, the meaning and goals of which Iranian youth and the impoverished middle strata understand less and less, and the post-revolutionary elite, isolated and closed in on itself, is incapable of intelligible dialogue with “the children of their own revolution in a language they understand.

This did not work for the former progressive president Rouhani, and it is even less true for the ultra-conservative Raissi, whose presidency itself is the fruit of a consensus course of “tightening the screws” in the circles of the ruling mullocracy. Alas, tightening the screws seems to be the only thing the current government can offer to the opposition part of society.

_{Generational problems and the growing gap between “fathers” and “sons” in Iran are aggravated by growing socio-economic problems, rising prices and unemployment, water shortages amid unresolved water supply problems for entire provinces and frequent droughts.}

What are the prospects for the current protests in Iran? If there is a successful confluence of external factors, these unrest can overthrow the government. But changing the political regime and bringing something qualitatively new, giving Iran a better future than the current present, is not at all a fact. So far, the unrest has much more destructive potential than its potentially creative one.

The only two opposition forces that currently have structures, funding from external donors, people and connections in the West are in exile - these are supporters of the overthrown Shah from the Pahlavi dynasty in the United States and the “Organization of Iranian Mujahideen” (MEK) in Albania (militants, who previously participated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and then quarreled with colleagues and left, were on the US “terrorist” list until 2012).

Both organizations are not about democracy and liberal values, but about power and revenge, without a normal vision of the future of the country. Perhaps in the crucible of protests in Iran a truly new internal opposition will be born, but so far this has not happened.

_{Today's Iran, in terms of the coexistence of conservative bonds imposed from above and the real demands of new generations, is strikingly reminiscent of the late Brezhnev USSR, in which, under the cover of the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism and mandatory political information, a society parallel to the officialdom took shape and gained weight, the interests and values ​​of which, in the end, prevailed over Marxism turned into a ritual.}

The personal opinion of the author of these lines is that changes in Iran do not need to be spurred artificially or grown using the broiler method in some revolutionary laboratories. You just need to wait a little, and the natural change of political generations will itself bring the desired changes. This will happen after the generation of ayatollahs who made the 1979 revolution leaves the political arena.

In the meantime, the situation is reminiscent of the proverb about a scythe that found a stone. The Iranian authorities have a difficult task: to stop the unrest using force and at the same time extinguish the wave of protest sentiments, offering new generations some acceptable alternative to the present. So far, official Tehran is coping with this task with a C grade. In any case, judging by reports from the fronts of the internal war, the stick prevails in the state’s arsenal, and the carrot is not at all visible.

An important factor, the pressure of which worsens the standard of living in the country and indirectly contributes to the growth of protest sentiments, is Western sanctions. The problem with them is that they are a long-term tool of influence, and they undermine the economic tree like wood-boring beetles - slowly but inexorably.

This is especially obvious for rental economies, whose place in the global division of labor is associated with the sale of raw materials and resources abroad. Iran's experience is a guarantee of this - the negative impact of sanctions can be mitigated, but a truly effective antidote against it is associated with changing the very structure of the economy, developing new export niches, conquering new export markets, and moving from exporting raw materials to exporting higher value-added products.

_{Plus to this is the weakening of our own dependence on industrial imports, the policy of real import substitution and industrialization, the emergence of our own production facilities from scratch, providing the country with everything it needs, bypassing any sanctions. It is clear that all this takes time, and most importantly, money. As export revenues decline, a real choice arises. What should the money be spent on - maintaining the previous standard of living that was familiar to the Shirnar masses (in the case of Iran, these were subsidies that made it possible to keep prices for the same fuel at an unusually low level) or on investment projects for the construction of industrial facilities.}

Having neglected the first, the authorities end up with a wild rise in prices, and with it, protest sentiments spilling out onto the streets. Saving on the second takes away hope for any clear future - the gradual drying out of oil and gas revenues, together with increasing dependence on critical industrial imports, creates a truly explosive mixture.

After all, what a country can offer to foreign markets is placed under strict and politically determined external control. And what the country needs from the outside world, it is still not able to produce itself.

For Iran, the price for living under sanctions was a rollback of GDP in absolute numbers to the level of 2010–2011, when the main package of tough Western sanctions was introduced. If we talk about GDP per capita, then in Iran today it is completely at the level of 2004–2005. In other words: it’s as if the last ten to twelve years for the country’s economy never happened at all.

_{It is clear that this does not contribute to either social stability or support for the policy of the authorities. Moreover, in a situation where the government itself has clearly given up on the illusions of its own nationality, taking a course of relying exclusively on “its own” - social strata associated with the beneficiaries of the Islamic Revolution and the institutions that arose during it.}

First of all, we are talking about the phenomenon of the IRGC - the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Then - about the morality police, about the Islamic clergy, about the military, and so on. Together with family members, there is a rather large support base - millions of people. But on the scale of the entire society, it is still not the majority.

The main problem with the implementation of the Iranian experience in Russian reality is not even the critical shortage of people in the Russian government at the level of Iranian ayatollahs - and this circumstance cannot be corrected even by an order from the Kremlin with the instruction to Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev to temporarily act as ayatollah.

_{The main problem is that external forces simply will not give Russia a chance to become the second Iran. Tehran has been moving toward its current niche in the political world order for years, if not decades. And he fit into it not as a result of some cunning plan being implemented step by step. It just happened that way.}

The pros and cons of surviving in this format for the West, out of spite and in spite of it, have been perfectly studied, calculated and weighed on apothecary scales not only in Tehran itself, but also in the think tanks of Western intelligence services. And the emergence of a second Iran, especially one that is much richer in terms of resources, will not be allowed there.