This groundbreaking study examines the Soviet response to the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution to reveal how Soviet foreign policy actually functioned in the late Cold War. Drawing on newly declassified archival sources, Dmitry Asinovskiy shows that far from reflecting a single coherent strategy, Soviet decisions emerged from a complex bureaucratic system shaped by competing institutions and individuals. At its heart was a shared belief in anti-imperialism – a concept that functioned not as a fixed doctrine, but as a flexible, often contradictory ideological framework that nonetheless shaped practical policy choices. The new regime in Iran – at once strongly anti-imperialist and radically theocratic – posed a unique ideological challenge to this array of Soviet decision-makers.

  Following Soviet decisions from the inside, this book demonstrates how ideological frameworks led Soviet policymakers to interpret Ayatollah Khomeini as a progressive anti-imperialist leader and to support the Islamic Republic after the revolution. However, the Iranian regime would soon confound many Soviet actors' expectations of a shared anti-imperialist position. Tracing the growing dissonance between the Soviet interpretation and the political reality in Iran, Asinovskiy shows how, as the limits of their strategy became clear, the failure to build an anti-imperialist alliance with revolutionary Iran exposed deeper tensions within the Soviet system and contributed to a broader rethinking of foreign policy. Through the case of the Iranian Revolution, this book offers a transformative new understanding of Soviet foreign policy and its relationship to ideology in the late Cold War.