Over decades of travel to Iran, I’ve regularly returned to symbolic sites of the Islamic Revolution as a way of assessing the national mood. One is the ornate mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which features a huge golden dome and four spiny minarets visible for miles, a sprawling parking lot with space for twenty thousand vehicles, and a mall of souvenir shops and kebab restaurants. The shrine remained well attended during official government events, but, as the years went on, I noticed fewer and fewer visitors—usually tourists and Shiite pilgrims, plus the “dusters” in charge of cleaning the elaborate enclosure in which the Imam is buried. I have also routinely attended Friday prayers at the University of Tehran, where senior clerics, and occasionally the Supreme Leader, give the sermon. Over time, the crowds got older and older.
“It is almost impossible to keep the revolutionary élan alive and to transmit it down generational lines,” Anne O’Donnell, a historian at New York University, told me. “There’s something about revolutions as social experiences, almost independent of the ideologies that they are engaged in, that leaves an imprint on the generation of people who make them.” But, she went on, that early enthusiasm or euphoria “has a shelf life, a time stamp.”
It’s been almost a half century since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi boarded the royal Boeing 727 at Tehran’s airport for an extended “vacation.” He reportedly wept while bidding farewell to his staff and inner coterie, and took a vessel of Iranian soil with him. At that point, after fourteen months of nationwide protests, his exile seemed inevitable, the culmination of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Now the theocracy that succeeded his rule is in its third generation—and in its own desperate struggle to survive.
After two weeks of anti-government demonstrations in all of Iran’s thirty-one provinces, more than five hundred people have reportedly been killed, and thousands more have been detained. “The Iranian regime has faced and brutally repressed repeated rounds of popular uprisings since 2009,” Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, posted on X. “Never has it struggled with the kind of perfect storm it’s sailed itself into.”
Iranians have plenty of reasons to feel angry, betrayed, vulnerable, or insecure. In the last two decades, several major protests have erupted. In 2009, millions took to the streets in a series of demonstrations dubbed the Green Movement over alleged political fraud in a Presidential election. Between 2017 and 2019, the soaring costs of basic items sparked protests in dozens of cities. (The price of fuel, managed in part by a government subsidy, rose by three hundred per cent.) In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for improperly covering her hair, produced the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, led largely by young women. The current protests erupted on December 28th, after merchants in Tehran’s lofty Grand Bazaar shuttered their shops as the value of the rial, the national currency, went into free fall. When I first went to Iran, in 1973, a dollar could be exchanged for roughly seventy rials; this month, a dollar bought 1.4 million. Annual inflation has exceeded forty per cent, and soared to seventy-two per cent for food. The revolution was carried out in the name of “the oppressed,” but Iran’s population has almost tripled since then, and the government has been increasingly unsuccessful in feeding, housing, educating, and employing them.
Politically, the regime has rotted from within, discarding, discrediting, or detaining its own kind. Ali Kadivar, a sociologist at Boston College and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said that the turning point happened last Thursday, the beginning of the Iranian weekend and the sabbath, when vast crowds joined the protests. “That’s the point where people saw each other,” he told me. (Kadivar’s father, Mohsen, was an outspoken critic who was imprisoned at Evin Prison and now teaches at Duke University. His aunt, Jamileh, was a reformist Member of Parliament who was put on trial for attending a conference in Berlin and banned from running for a second term. She now lives in London.)
The ideology invoked to justify Iran’s revolution has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of accusations of voter fraud in the 2009 election, which put a hard-liner in power, according to Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina sociologist and the author of “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran.” Since then, “people just didn’t buy what a leader was saying anymore, and were looking for a way out,” he said. Iranians have occasionally rallied around reformist candidates, but they, too, have been undermined by hard-line revolutionary purists. “Many Iranians who share the ideals and goals of the reformist movement no longer believe that reform is going to lead to those goals,” Kurzman said.
During an event at the Atlantic Council on Friday, Rob Macaire, a former British Ambassador to Iran, said that the regime in Tehran “does not have the answers to any of the challenges that it’s facing.” The inner circle of power has become “tighter and tighter,” so the government “finds it very difficult to do anything other than to circle the wagons and to double down on a repressive policy.” Guy Burgess, a sociologist who studies conflict and co-founded the blog Beyond Intractability, said that prospects of the Islamic regime collapsing have increased. “These are the sort of things that happen when, all of a sudden, people decide that the brutal force that kept the regime in power can be overcome.”
But the Islamic Republic still has the forces—in the hundreds of thousands—to repress the current uprising. And it has been ruthless. Videos circulating online from one medical center showed a computer screen displaying digital images of the deceased in its morgue for families to identify. Other videos published on social media have shown the dead zipped up in black body bags, laid outdoors for families to claim. The BBC quoted Iranian medical staff who described people blinded by pellets, a tactic used by Egyptian security forces during the Arab Spring, in 2011.
In the days, weeks, and months ahead, much will depend on sentiment within these security forces. In June of last year, Israel and the U.S. destroyed military installations and nuclear sites in Iran and killed key leaders and scientists, leaving the Iranian military feeling vulnerable. In addition, the rank and file share the same (increasingly existential) economic challenges faced by most Iranians. While the security forces are often lumped into an ideological monolith, there is a wide diversity among their members, as nearly all men are required to serve. Some opt to join the Revolutionary Guard because they get off earlier in the day than conventional soldiers, and thus can earn money at a second job. For others, having the I.R.G.C. on their résumés helps them later when applying for jobs in government or at government-funded universities.
O’Donnell noted that a critical juncture in the fall of the Berlin Wall was when upper-level officials in East Germany were no longer assured that the Soviet Union had their backs. Mid-level officials, in turn, were no longer convinced that their superiors would protect them. “So then they started to ask questions whether they should fire on crowds or not and think to themselves, ‘I’m certainly not going to put my neck out if no one’s going to cover me,’ ” she said. Ultimately, the erosion of morale at mid-level positions was what ended Communist rule in East Germany. “It was very unexpected.” Burgess added, “Once you get to the point where some of the regime’s forces decide that they’d be better off siding with the uprising, then the regime collapses quickly, and you find guys like [the former Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad suddenly finding new housing in Russia.”
The first generation of Iranian revolutionaries—including octogenarians like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—have long fooled themselves about their future. In September, during the U.N. General Assembly, I was part of a group of journalists and scholars who met with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, a political centrist, at a hotel in New York. He explained that the U.S. and Israel wrongly believed that, after the attacks in June, “people would take to the street and things would come to an end.” This assumption, he argued, did not “understand the Islamic Republic.” But on Sunday, faced with nationwide protests, he had to acknowledge his government’s shortcomings. “Our responsibility is to solve and address people’s grievances,” he said in an interview on Iranian state television. Other government officials have branded the demonstrators “terrorists,” which qualifies them for the death penalty.
The main obstacle for the protesters is that they have not yet formed a cohesive movement with an easily articulated goal. Nor have they established infrastructure or announced some form of centralized leadership. As with the Arab Spring, which toppled leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen but failed to establish democratic governments or address economic inequality, protesters in Iran know what they are opposing but haven’t landed on a viable alternative. In the short term, any action taken by the Trump Administration may do little to provide clarity to the situation. On Saturday, the President posted on Truth Social, “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!” Later, Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a golfing buddy of the President, posted that the Iranians’ “long nightmare” was “soon coming to a close.” He continued, “President Trump understands Iran will never be great with the ayatollah and his henchmen in charge. To all who are sacrificing in Iran, God bless. Help is on the way.”
Another site I’ve often visited while in Tehran is the Paradise of Zahra—or Behesht-e Zahra, in Farsi—the sprawling cemetery on the southern outskirts of the city. A big section of the graveyard is devoted to “martyrs” from the eight-year war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties. Martyrdom, a commitment to die fighting for justice, has been central to Shiite Islam since the seventh century. Over the weekend, CNN and other media posted a video of mourners carrying the body of a protester into the Paradise of Zahra for burial. The mourners shouted, “Death to Khamenei” and “I will kill the one who killed my brother.” Security forces reportedly used tear gas to disperse them. A new generation of martyrs is being created. ♦
