After the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, which killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, IRGC Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Pakpour, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani, and a number of other figures from the highest ranks of power, many believed that the Islamic Republic had entered a phase of irreversible disintegration. All the more so because the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, never appeared in public, instantly fueling rumors ranging from serious illness to covert palace infighting.
But something else happened. Iran’s system did not collapse. It continues to wage war, continues to negotiate, and continues to display a degree of political resilience that repeatedly leaves both the regime’s enemies and its domestic critics baffled. What stands before us is not merely an authoritarian state. It is a structure assembled out of blood, fear, religious legitimacy, institutional duplication, supervised political competition, and a constant readiness for internal violence.
To understand why this regime is so difficult to topple from the outside and almost impossible to dismantle from within, one has to return to its origins. The Islamic Republic did not emerge as a system built according to a carefully drafted blueprint. It grew out of the chaos of revolution, out of betrayed alliances, bureaucratic struggles, assassinations, terrorist attacks, purges, compromises, and an unbroken war over who, exactly, had the right to speak in Iran’s name.
A Revolution Without a Single Design
In 1978, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, faced with massive protests, tried to save the situation by addressing the nation. He promised to end repression and corruption, restore social justice, hold free elections, and at the same time announced the formation of a military government.
By then, this was no longer a strategy but a belated gesture. Public trust in the shah had nearly vanished. Nationalists and moderate opponents of the monarchy saw the rise of generals to power as yet another sign that the regime was incapable of genuine political transformation. The left regarded the shah’s speech as an attempt to steal their slogans and defuse the revolution. The Shiite clergy saw it as a desperate but doomed attempt by the monarchy to prolong its own agony.
That was how the anti-shah coalition took shape: deeply heterogeneous, internally contradictory, yet united by one common goal, removing Pahlavi.
Its loudest and best organized voice was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. For the shah, Khomeini had long since become more than just an opponent; he was a symbol of uncompromising resistance. Behind Khomeini stood the mosques, networks of religious mobilization, and also the bazaar, that social stratum of merchants, intermediaries, and small and medium property holders that had repeatedly served as a political engine in Iranian history. It was precisely this alliance between the clergy and the bazaar that gave the ayatollah not only moral authority but also financial, кадровый, and organizational support. Khomeini himself was at that time living in exile in Paris, from where he effectively coordinated the revolutionary movement.
Even then, he was promoting the idea of Islamic rule under the supervision of a faqih, an expert in Islamic law. Yet for many participants in the anti-shah coalition, these ideas remained either vague or secondary. A great many simply did not understand how far Khomeini intended to go once the monarchy fell.
An Alliance of Those Who Hated the Shah but Did Not Understand One Another
In addition to Khomeini’s supporters, other forces also operated within the anti-shah coalition.
The National Front represented the interests of the educated middle class, students, and part of the intelligentsia. It was the most prominent liberal-democratic force of the revolution. Its supporters wanted to restore real power to parliament, curb authoritarianism, and make Iran more independent from outside pressure. One of the key figures here was Shapour Bakhtiar, the man who would later accept the shah’s offer to head the government and in doing so would definitively break with part of the revolutionary opposition.
Alongside them stood the Freedom Movement of Iran, led by Mehdi Bazargan, Yadollah Sahabi, and Mahmoud Taleghani. These politicians were closer to religious society than the National Front and advocated a kind of Islamic democracy, that is, a combination of religious ethics and representative institutions.
The left existed as a separate camp. But it, too, was not a single bloc. The Tudeh Communist Party, the Maoist Peykar, the Marxist Fedayeen-e Khalq, and the left-Islamist Mujahedin-e Khalq all differed from one another in ideology, organizational culture, and their visions of the country’s future. Some dreamed of a socialism rooted in Islamic rhetoric. Others wanted a revolutionary popular order led by a militant vanguard. Still others thought in terms of an anti-imperialist front.
In other words, the anti-shah coalition was united only in its rejection of the monarchy. On the question of what Iran should become after the shah’s fall, its participants had neither a common language nor a common project, nor even a shared horizon of expectations.
The Monarchy’s Last Chance, Which Could Change Nothing
In 1978, Pahlavi was forced to make concessions. He released political prisoners and appointed Shapour Bakhtiar, a social democrat and one of the leaders of the National Front, as prime minister. For the shah, this was an act of late liberalization. For Bakhtiar, it was a tragic wager that the monarchy could still be transformed into a transitional form leading to a freer political order.
According to the recollections of contemporaries, Bakhtiar told the shah something close to a programmatic phrase: your father killed my father, and you put me in prison; I have no reason to be personally loyal to your regime, but in his view Iran was still not ready for a democratic republic, and the main task was to stop “these barbarians.” By barbarians he meant the Islamists.
The warning was timely, but useless.
In January 1979, the shah’s entourage persuaded him to leave the country, supposedly for a vacation. For the system, this was already a fatal symbolic blow. The next day, newspapers, which Bakhtiar’s liberal government had allowed to publish again, came out with the historic headline: “The Shah Has Gone.” The masses read this as a declaration of the monarchy’s end. After that, the street ceased altogether to obey the state.
On February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned to Tehran. Millions welcomed him. He was no longer an opposition leader in exile. He was a man who had come to take possession of the country. With him returned his closest associates, the future кадровый framework of the new regime. When Western journalists asked him what he felt on returning after fourteen years of exile, he answered with a single word: “Nothing.” Ten days later, he seized power in a country of tens of millions.
When an Army Stops Being an Army, a Regime Stops Being a Regime
After Khomeini’s return, the country still formally had a lawful prime minister in Bakhtiar, the army still obeyed him, and the state still possessed institutions. But legality had already fallen behind political reality.
On February 10, Bakhtiar imposed martial law and announced a curfew. But the streets did not obey. The next day, the army declared neutrality. It is February 11, 1979, that is considered the day of victory for the Islamic Revolution.
From that moment, what began was not simply a change of power, but a total reconstruction of the very logic of political rule.
Bakhtiar later fled, became one of the symbols of the struggle for Iran’s democratization in exile, but did not escape there either: in 1991 he was assassinated in France. For the Iranian system, this was not only vengeance against a specific enemy, but also a message: the regime has a long memory and a long reach.
Still, at the beginning of the revolution, many others were even less fortunate. On the roof of a school in Tehran, where Khomeini had set up his temporary headquarters, revolutionaries executed former and current high-ranking officials, generals, and representatives of the old order. Among the victims was the former head of SAVAK, the very intelligence service whose chief had once persuaded the shah not to execute Khomeini but to send him into exile.
The history of revolutions rarely knows gratitude. The Iranian Revolution least of all.
Two States Within One State
After the revolution’s victory, the participants in the anti-shah coalition began dividing power. Formally, Mehdi Bazargan became the head of the provisional government. His cabinet included representatives of the moderate camp: nationalists, Islamic liberals, and people who hoped to combine revolution with constitutional statehood.
But at the same time, Khomeini and his circle were building a parallel, informal, yet far more effective vertical of power.
The Revolutionary Council, dominated by the clergy, became the real center of decision-making. Revolutionary committees replaced the police and suppressed dissent. Revolutionary courts legalized reprisals at high speed, bypassing complex legal procedure. At the same time, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps emerged, an armed structure subordinated personally to Khomeini and created precisely as a counterweight to the old army and to any possible alternative centers of force.
Thus, from the very first months of the Islamic Republic’s existence, two levels of power took shape inside the country. One was formal, governmental, and state-based. The other was revolutionary, ideological, and coercive. And it was the second that gradually began to devour the first.
The American Embassy as the Point of No Return
For Bazargan’s government, the fatal mistake was its attempt to preserve an informal channel of communication with the United States. On November 4, 1979, he met in Algiers with U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. For the pragmatists inside Iran’s elite, this was a rational step: revolution was one thing, but a state still had to speak with great powers.
For the radicals, however, photographs of that meeting were enough to launch the political execution of the moderate camp.
That very same day, radical students seized the American embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six people hostage. They demanded the extradition of the shah. Washington refused. Khomeini’s son gave a press conference from inside the occupied embassy and declared that the students’ actions were supported by the entire Iranian nation. Khomeini himself called the event another revolution, this time against America.
Within hours, Bazargan resigned. It was the moment when the moderate phase of the revolution ended for good. Full power passed into the hands of the Revolutionary Council.
Work then began on a new constitution. The original draft, prepared by the provisional government, did not satisfy Khomeini. It granted no special status to the clergy, and the presidency stood as the central institution. The Islamists responded by convening an Assembly of Experts, effectively rewriting the text and enshrining the principle of velayat-e faqih, the rule of the religious jurist over the state. That principle transformed theocracy from political practice into constitutional doctrine.
The public voted on the revised version.
Thus the Islamic Republic became not merely a revolutionary government with religious coloring, but a regime in which supreme political legitimacy was permanently placed beyond the reach of ordinary electoral politics.
How a Republic Was Built Inside a Theocracy
The new constitution of 1979 formalized the dual nature of Iran’s system. On one side stood republican institutions: a popularly elected president, parliament, and government. On the other stood the rahbar, the Supreme Leader, endowed with sweeping powers, control over the security apparatus, authority to appoint key figures, and the right to determine the country’s strategic course.
On paper, it resembled a sophisticated balance. In practice, it was a built-in mechanism for the permanent limitation of popular sovereignty.
It quickly became clear that such a design could not avoid internal conflict.
The First President and the First Great Clash Within the Regime
In 1980, Iran held its first presidential election. The clear winner was Abolhassan Banisadr, a member of Khomeini’s circle since the Paris exile years, a former economics minister, and a secular politician who was not a cleric. He had also sharply criticized the seizure of the American embassy.
At first, Banisadr enjoyed Khomeini’s visible support. After his election, he was even granted the powers of commander-in-chief. He received 75.6 percent of the vote. He believed he possessed a direct mandate from society and therefore began acting as an independent center of authority.
That became his sentence.
The Islamic Republican Party, which controlled parliament, had no intention of tolerating a strong president. Its leaders included the heavyweights of Iran’s clerical establishment and future pillars of the regime: Mohammad Hossein Beheshti, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, and Ali Khamenei. For them, the president was meant to be a ceremonial figure, not a political force. Banisadr, by contrast, claimed the right to embody the people’s will while also interpreting Khomeini’s line.
Conflict became inevitable.
After the war with Iraq began, Banisadr tried to assume real command of the military, but parliament and the party clergy constantly restricted him. Military setbacks were blamed on the president. Khomeini outwardly maintained the role of arbiter, calling for unity, but the system was already moving toward rupture.
In April 1981, a dispute erupted between the president and Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Rajai over who truly controlled executive power. The constitution left room for interpretation, meaning the struggle was no longer about personal ambition but about the very model of the state.
In June, parliament began impeachment proceedings against Banisadr, while the necessary procedures were effectively invented as events unfolded. The Majlis declared him politically incompetent, and the very next day Khomeini signed the decree removing him from office. An arrest order followed.
Banisadr called on the people to rise against dictatorship. Protests did indeed break out in Tehran. But the regime responded in the way it would respond many times in the future: with force. After clashes with the IRGC, dozens were killed and around a thousand arrested. Soon Banisadr went underground and later fled to France disguised in military uniform aboard a plane piloted by the very Air Force officer who had earlier flown the shah out of the country.
Thus the first popularly elected president of the Islamic Republic ended his political career in exile. The regime drew an important lesson: electoral legitimacy was acceptable only so long as it did not become an independent force.
Terror as a Means of Cementing the System
After Banisadr’s expulsion, a wave of terrorist attacks swept the country. Responsibility was assigned to the left-radical organization known as the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, which had allied with him.
On June 27, 1981, an assassination attempt targeted Ali Khamenei. A bomb hidden inside a tape recorder exploded beside him. He survived but suffered grave injuries, and his right arm remained paralyzed for life.
The next day, a massive explosion tore through the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party. Ayatollah Beheshti and more than seventy senior officials were killed. Two months later, another attack killed the new president Rajai and the prime minister.
The logic of the Mojahedin was to decapitate the system and trigger a new uprising. The opposite occurred. Terror did not weaken the regime, it strengthened it. After those blows, the clergy penetrated even deeper into the state apparatus, and any call to reduce control began to be viewed as a threat to the Republic’s survival itself.
It was then, amid fear, war, and mobilization, that Ali Khamenei gradually transformed from a vulnerable politician into a symbol of the regime.
The Last Prime Minister and the Long Duel Over Executive Power
After the bombings and assassinations, Ali Khamenei became president. Yet even then, the presidency remained relatively weak, almost ceremonial. Parliament imposed Mir-Hossein Mousavi as prime minister, a technocrat, trained architect, and a man with his own political style and his own vision of the state.
Their conflict became one of the defining episodes in Iran’s institutional history.
During the war with Iraq, Mousavi began shifting the economy into a system of strict state control. He fought speculation, expanded the state’s role, and created management mechanisms that bypassed presidential authority. In doing so, he challenged not only economic policy but also the interests of the bazaar and conservative clergy.
In 1985, after winning a second term, Khamenei decided to remove Mousavi. He argued that the president, as the only nationally elected figure, bore responsibility for the condition of the state and therefore had to be able to form the government. The irony of history was that only recently the exiled Banisadr had made nearly identical arguments.
But Khomeini backed Mousavi. He did not want to replace a prime minister during wartime. He did so, however, in his characteristic style: diplomatic, ambiguous, leaving room for multiple interpretations. That ambiguity itself was the political style of supreme arbitration in the Islamic Republic.
The conflict dragged on for years. Only in 1989, during the final weeks of his life, did Khomeini initiate constitutional revision. The office of prime minister was abolished, and much of its authority transferred to the president. At the same time, however, the position of Supreme Leader was strengthened even further. The system did not liberalize, it merely redistributed levers of power within itself.
Mousavi entered history as the last prime minister of the Islamic Republic.
Why the System Did Not Collapse After Khomeini’s Death
In 1989, Khomeini died. For any personalist regime, the death of its founder is a moment of mortal danger. Yet the Islamic Republic survived that transition as well.
The struggle unfolded on two levels. First, whether a new Supreme Leader was needed at all, or whether the country should instead be ruled by a collective body. Second, who exactly could occupy the position of rahbar.
Ali Khamenei prevailed. To make that possible, the constitutional criteria had to be changed, because under the law in force at the time only a Grand Ayatollah could become Supreme Leader, and Khamenei was not even an ayatollah. First the office was adjusted to fit the man, and only afterward was the religious rank elevated to fit the office. He was declared a Grand Ayatollah only in 1994.
That episode says much about the nature of the regime. In Iran, theology does not dictate politics. More often, politics rewrites theology when necessary.
Once he became rahbar, Khamenei sought to preserve a model of controlled competition. He played the role of arbiter who permitted factional struggle, but only within boundaries drawn by him. The system proved remarkably durable: it was not a simple vertical chain of command, but a multilayered mechanism of mutual restraints, safeguards, and parallel centers of coercion.
Reforms That Allowed Speech but Not Change
In 1997, Mohammad Khatami became president of Iran. His rise to power was seen as the opening of a window of opportunity. Before the presidency, Khatami had already become known as culture minister, where he pursued a relatively liberal line: easing censorship and opening space for the press, cinema, and public debate.
Dozens of new publications emerged under him, discussing subjects once considered nearly forbidden: the limits of clerical power, the nature of the Islamic Republic, the boundaries of public criticism. Iranian cinema also began producing themes that irritated conservatives. The scandal surrounding the film A Time for Love, which touched on adultery, was only one episode in a broader cultural war. Khatami defended the right of art to be judged on its own merits rather than by clerical-ideological verdicts.
That was why youth, intellectuals, and urban classes saw in him a chance for gradual evolution.
But Khatami’s problem was that he tried to reform the regime without breaking its foundations. He wanted to change the logic of the Islamic Republic from within, without engaging in a decisive confrontation with its core. As a result, nearly all of his institutional reforms met resistance. He failed to significantly expand presidential powers, failed to curb the arbitrariness of the Guardian Council, and failed to turn constitutional norms into real instruments of oversight over security and supervisory bodies.
Yet his era changed society. Women gained more visible access to politics and public life. Young people acquired a taste for political participation. The press learned to ask questions it had never asked before. That was precisely what made Khatami dangerous in the eyes of the system.
When the IRGC Fully Entered Politics
The late 1990s became a decisive moment in the evolution of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC was ceasing to be merely a military or security institution. It increasingly claimed the role of a political actor.
In 1998, journalists obtained a recording of a closed speech by IRGC commander Yahya Rahim Safavi. In it, the reformist press and Khatami’s allies were linked to the People’s Mojahedin and described as threats to national security. It also contained a chilling formula: “We must cut the throats of some and cut out the tongues of others. The sword is our strength.”
Later, the IRGC claimed the phrase had been taken out of context, but never released the full text. Soon afterward, Khamenei joined the pressure campaign against the press, accusing newspapers of abusing freedom.
Khatami tried to strike back. In January 1999, he created a commission to investigate a series of murders of dissidents and politicians. Under pressure, the intelligence services were forced to admit involvement. Several individuals were convicted. But here too, the system retreated only one step in order to recover its position later. Those who ordered the crimes were never named, and within two years the sentences were reduced.
It was a classic Iranian logic: partial admission without altering the fundamental balance of power.
University, Newspaper, Street - and the Limits of the Permitted
In the summer of 1999, the newspaper Salam published a letter from an intelligence official outlining plans to tighten control over the press. The paper was swiftly shut down. Then police and the IRGC-linked Basij militia attacked Tehran University, a symbol of student opposition. That became the detonator of mass protests.
The unrest quickly spread beyond the university environment. It became the largest upheaval since the 1979 revolution. It was then that the IRGC sent Khatami its famous letter signed by twenty-four commanders. Its message was unmistakable: if the president did not suppress the crisis, the security forces would do it themselves.
Khatami retreated. He called on students to disperse, effectively leaving them alone before the machinery of repression. A crackdown on the reformist press followed, one the president could no longer prevent.
By 2005, most of his reforms had either been blocked or partially dismantled. But what he had awakened could not be returned to the archives. Youth, urban classes, women, intellectuals - all retained a political memory of another possible public life.
Ten years later, that memory would return to the streets.
The Green Movement as the Last Major Internal Challenge
In 2009, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister and longtime rival of Khamenei, returned to major politics as the reformist candidate. Khatami stepped aside for him. Another prominent reformist, Mehdi Karroubi, also ran, speaking even more boldly by demanding constitutional revision, reduced pressure on the press, and limits on the powers of the Guardian Council.
Mousavi did not receive what had long been an almost essential condition for success in Iranian politics: informal approval from the Supreme Leader. More than that, Khamenei openly favored incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Nevertheless, authorities allowed Mousavi to run. The campaign became the most open since the revolution. Posters, rallies, street organizing, social media - all created the sense of genuine political life. Green became the movement’s symbol, while Mousavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavard attracted youth and women, transforming the campaign into something far larger than a struggle between two bureaucratic camps.
According to official figures, on June 12, 2009, Ahmadinejad won with 62 percent of the vote. Khamenei quickly endorsed the result. But Mousavi refused to recognize it. His supporters were convinced that large-scale fraud had occurred. Within three days, hundreds of thousands filled the streets.
At first, it was a protest against stolen elections. Then it became a protest against the very logic of the regime.
After several days of confrontation, Khamenei again confirmed the official results and declared further protests a challenge to his own authority. After that, the IRGC and special police opened fire on demonstrators. Dozens were killed, thousands arrested.
The Green Movement became the culmination of a long process. Society showed that it was capable of mass mobilization. But the regime demonstrated something even more important: it was ready to answer any challenge at any cost and knew how to turn every political crisis into grounds for strengthening the security core.
As a result, the reformist camp was almost entirely pushed out of the institutions of power. The positions of Khamenei and the IRGC only grew stronger.
Why Every Internal War Ends in Victory for the System
The history of the Islamic Republic is not the story of a monolithic dictatorship. Nor is it the story of democracy crushed by clerics. It is the story of a hybrid regime that learned to use limited political competition as a mechanism of self-preservation.
The destruction of Bazargan’s government. The removal of Banisadr. The conflict between Khamenei and Mousavi in the 1980s. The suffocation of Khatami’s reforms. The crushing of the Green Movement. Each of these crises outwardly looked like a battle for Iran’s future. But almost every time, they ended the same way: it was not one politician or another who won, but the system itself.
Its strength lies in the fact that it does not reduce power to a single center. It has elected institutions, but above them stand unelected ones. It has an army, but also the IRGC. It has courts, but also a revolutionary logic of punishment. It has parliament, but also structures able to nullify the very meaning of parliamentary politics. It has a president, but also a rahbar. It has elections, but also filters determining who may stand in them. It has public politics, but the limits of that politics are defined not by society but by a sacred and coercive superstructure.
Each of these elements emerged as an answer to a previous crisis. Every new conflict did not break the system, but completed it, making it more layered, more suspicious, harsher, and more durable.
Stability Built on Fear, Memory, and Redundancy
Iran’s regime is stable not because society loves it. Nor because it is flawlessly efficient. It is stable because it knows how to survive shocks by distributing power among competing yet interconnected institutions, through permanent mobilization in the face of external threat, through habit of repression, and through the fact that in a critical moment there is always some body, structure, command, or ideological center able to seize control.
In that sense, the Islamic Republic resembles not a pyramid that can be toppled by striking the summit, but a complex network of nodes, many of which duplicate one another. That is why even the elimination of top figures does not by itself guarantee collapse. The system was designed from the beginning to survive conspiracies, mutinies, assassinations, terrorist attacks, wars, street uprisings, and elite splits.
For nearly half a century, this structure was formed under conditions of permanent political emergency. That is why today’s Iran is not merely a theocracy and not merely a republic. It is a regime that survived because it turned crisis into normality, conflict into a method of governance, and violence into one of the mechanisms of institutional stability.
And so far, neither external strikes nor internal protests have managed to break this architecture completely. It may sway, it may change faces, it may lose symbolic peaks, but each time it reassembles itself in the same old form - brutal, complex, and in its own way almost frighteningly rational.