Stolen Revolution

Can Iran escape its history?

Coverage of the Iran war has mostly focused on Trump’s flailing about. There’s been much less discussion about what’s going on in Iran, partly because journalists can’t get into the country and the internet has been shut down. It is only just coming back on. To shed some light on this critical question we spoke to Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati, authors of a brilliant new book, Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran. It covers the country’s history since the 1978-79 revolution through the lives of six very different characters. We can’t recommend it highly enough.

Bozorgmehr began his journalism career in Iran, rising to editor-in-chief of the most popular youth political magazine in the country. In 2008, he left Iran for the BBC in London. He moved to Reuters in 2015, where he shared a National Press Club Award. He joined the Persian-language news service Iran International in 2023.

Yeganeh is an award-winning reporter at the New York Times with fifteen years of experience covering Iran, US national security, business and immigration. She was part of a Reuters team that uncovered the financial empire controlled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2013. The series received numerous awards. She was born in Oklahoma to Iranian immigrants.

We discussed Iran’s recent history and how it helps explain today’s events, as well as what might happen to the regime once the war is over.

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Lawrence: Obviously, lots has happened in Iran since you completed your book. How difficult is it to follow events at the moment? How good are your sources inside Iran, and are you able to communicate with them?

Bozorgmehr: Yeganeh and I were discussing this last week: if we wanted to do our book now it would be impossible because the internet is shut down. Getting connected to people inside the country, even via phone, is extremely difficult. Some basic research like going through government websites from outside the country is also impossible these days, so I think we got lucky. We used one of the last open windows to gather a lot of information.

Yeganeh: In terms of day-to-day news coverage, we have a sense of what’s going on. And we are able to reach some sources. People don’t have very robust internet right now, but we can send them written questions or voice memos, and they can answer back that way. But in terms of being able to really get deep with sources and understand more about like what their lives really feel like, that’s been a huge challenge, and just takes a ton more effort than it normally would.

Lawrence: We’ll come back to the present day. But let me go back to the start. One thing that struck me reading the book, and struck me at the time, was the speed with which Ayatollah Khomeini made Iran an Islamic republic after the revolution of 1978-9. All the other groups, the Tudeh party, the liberal intellectuals, and so on, that were part of the revolution, the speed with which they were excluded. Do you think that explains the longevity of the regime: they embedded themselves very quickly?

Yeganeh: One thing that really came out of researching the book is the meaning of the revolution has always been contested. From the very beginning, when people revolted, Khomeini had to form a broad coalition, so there were leftists, there were right-wing Islamists, there were liberals, nationalists. Once he came to power he systematically set about eliminating those critics. But that contestation has never really gone away. It’s gone dormant for times, especially during the Iran-Iraq War, during times of great repression, but in the late 1990s there was a re-emergence of this idea that maybe the revolution wasn’t exactly what Khomeini said it was. Maybe we can reinterpret it in different ways, and I think the conflict at the heart of the Islamic Republic for 47 years has been that whatever faction was ascendant, which generally has been the conservative Islamic side, they’ve never really been able to fully vanquish that.

There was a chance in the 1990s for another interpretation, but they completely refused to do that and instead sought to totally expel that from the system. In our view that ends up weakening the regime over time, sapping away its popular support. If even leftist clerics, as we show with the story of Karroubi, are considered enemies of this political system, then your base of support gets narrower and narrower [Mehdi Karroubi was a close ally of Khomeini, who became a reformer and ended up under house arrest after supporting protests in 2009 - he is one the main characters in the book].

Bozorgmehr: Just to add to that: the Islamic Republic has shown that when it comes to gaining power it always takes a maximalist approach, but when it comes to sharing power it takes a minimalist approach. So, Khomeini, before the revolution took that maximalist approach. He tried to appeal to nationalists, to communists, to leftists, and to Islamists. His victory was the result of combination of all these forces who were worried about Western influence, US influence, Israel, and modernization and economic situation, but after the revolution, when it came to sharing power, they were very strict about sharing it with anyone but Islamists. Another point is that the Islamic Republic has gone through phases of self-cleansing, or vaccination, as they phrase it. Usually those who cannot conform with the new needs of the ruling elite will be eliminated. So in the first decade of the revolution, it was nationalist, communists, and leftists who were gradually excluded. Then we can see that this self-cleansing happened through the ruling elite itself, and the clerics started sidelining other clerics as well, and this process has continued until now.

Sam: I’m interested in this point about the 1990s. There’s a strong sense in the book that there was this moment when the reformists had a lot of electoral support. Mohammed Khatami won the presidency in 1997 and there was this opportunity to change things. But it was squandered by an overly cautious approach from Khatami and others. Do you think there was a moment where things could have gone very differently had the reformers acted differently, or would there always have been too much pushback for that to really change things?

Bozorgmehr: Absolutely. The reform movement in Iran was a pure accident. Khatami’s election victory was a big shock to the conservatives but also the reformists. They didn’t expect to win the election. By nominating Khatami in the election, they were testing the waters. They thought they could win a few millions votes, create a base, and then plan for the next elections. But as we said in the book, quoting a reformist politician, they expected rain but woke up to a flood. They were not ready for that. Khamenei used all tools in his power to limit the reformists, and after that we don’t see elections that produce shocking results [the first supreme leader Khomeini died in 1989 and was replaced by Ayatollah Khamenei].

The Islamic Republic corrected that bug in the system. For my generation, there was this once in a lifetime opportunity. We hacked the system from an angle that it didn’t expect, but that chance was wasted, I believe, by the timid approach of the reformists.

Lawrence: The portrait of Khatami is very telling. He appears as extraordinarily cautious, given the possibilities of the moment. Is this because he was still enthralled to the original idea of the revolution? He couldn’t quite bring himself to break as much as he had an opportunity to do, because the influence of Khomeini lingers, even though he was long dead by this point?

Yeganeh: With Khatami it’s a combination of his loyalty to Khomeini and to the revolution, and his personality traits. So he doesn’t like conflict. He’s a very amicable person. When people meet him in person, they’re charmed by him. He has a way with people and a great personality by all accounts. But when it comes to hand to hand combat, the kinds of things you need to do in a system like Iran to come out on top, he was not the right choice for that moment.

There were others who maybe had the personality for that. For instance, Karroubi is a little bit more stubborn and willing to fight. Mousavi might have been that person, and that’s why he was seen as such a threat and thwarted in the 2009 elections [Mir-Hossein Mousavi was, like Karroubi, an ally of Khomeini, and Prime Minister of Iran during the 1980s but became a reformer and stood for election as president in 2009. Protests followed his dubious loss and he also ended up under house arrest.]

There were millions of people who genuinely wanted change. But the leaders were men who had helped institute the system, had helped build it to begin with, and so perhaps asking them to lead more fundamental demands for change was a bit unrealistic, a fatal flaw at the heart of this project of reformism.

I will say, though, that the reformists get a lot of criticism, that they’re just part of the same system, and they were never really going to fight for change. I think Karroubi’s career shows us that we can’t paint with that broad of a brush. He and Mousavi, in particular, paid a really severe price for holding fast to their ideals, and that tells us they really did believe in these things, like civil liberties, and having kind of a greater say for the people within this system.

Bozorgmehr: Two anecdotes from meeting Khatami at that time. I remember once he made a joke in our gathering that we people from Yazd, he’s from the city of Yazd, we are known to be cautious and timid, so he was aware of this criticism that he wasn’t doing enough with his 20 million votes. But another time in a gathering of students, during a very heated debate, he said that ‘look, if I, if we confront them, the streets of Tehran will be full of blood. There will be blood flowing in the streets, and I don’t want to push the push towards that confrontation.’ Khatami and his allies wanted to keep the price low by being non-confrontational.

Lawrence: The tragedy is that if you can’t make the direct political route work, then you force people onto the street. It’s a reflection of the failure to provide an outlet at the top.

Bozorgmehr: Yes we saw that in Arab uprising, Tahrir Square, many Eastern European countries. That’s been the usual formula. Maybe the failure of the Green Movement leaders [in 2009] was that they failed to keep people on the street. But then look at what happened in January 2026. People came to the streets and were killed in tens of thousands. That puts Khatami’s view into perspective, if you know there is a system that won’t blink in killing thousands of people, then the concept of the street as a tool might not be as strong as in other countries around the world.

Lawrence: How well organized, by the late 1990s, was the system of repression against mass demonstrations. The regime now clearly know what to do, they’ve done it a number of times, and they have no hesitation about killing their own people, but was a system of repression as well organized at that point as it later became?

Bozorgmehr: Nowhere close to where it is now. We now have special units within the police, within the Revolutionary Guards, trained for that. They use technology and surveillance cameras. That was almost non-existent back then. We see the evolution of an oppressive system in the in the Islamic Republic, which means creating change is becoming more and more difficult.

The same thing is happening with Iran’s nuclear file. The file was much simpler when Iran could only enrich uranium to 3% (far from what is necessary for a nuclear weapon), but when you can enrich above 60% (close to the levels required for weapons) then it makes the nuclear negotiations very difficult, because the breakout time becomes very short, some say just over two weeks.

Lawrence: On the nuclear issue, the 2015 agreement was famously was torn up by President Trump, and many people would say that things got an awful lot worse as a result. There’s a sense in the book that there was a moment just before that when things looked like they might open up. Not because of political change within the country, but because of economic change and entrepreneurs coming in as a result of the nuclear deal. What you show is the regime saw that as a threat immediately.

Yeganeh: We felt this was a really important contribution of our book: to examine what happened after the nuclear deal and what possibilities they were and how those were stolen. We found that almost immediately after the deal, Khamenei started working to limit its effects. Iran needs a vast amount of investment in its infrastructure and economy to get it to where it needs to be. We’re talking trillions of dollars, and that has to come from outside the country.

For the first time that was available to Iran, if it was open enough to allow that. For Khamenei, the idea that there would be foreign money and with it foreign influence coming in was threatening. Then there’s a whole apparatus around him of financial conglomerates that he controls. The security forces have their own investment funds and their own companies that don’t want competition. They don’t believe that they could compete with the likes of Siemens or Amazon, or whoever, being able to come in and build businesses inside Iran. So they used ideology to limit these companies.

Khamenei gives a speech where he talks vaguely about not wanting this nuclear deal to lead to a lot of infiltration in the country. Then, well before Trump is even elected, much less ends the deal, the institutions underneath Khamenei go about systematically destroying this new startup sector, the tech sector, which had really flourished as a result of the nuclear deal. They make accusations of them being agents of the West and spies. They start arresting people, they interrogate people, and these tech companies are faced with this onslaught, this terrifying phenomenon that they didn’t quite understand. Why are we being attacked?

Then, they start getting approached by people close to the regime, and get this offer of, ‘give us some of your shares and we’ll protect you’. Some of them take that offer and we show how very systematically the regime has figured out how to take over a sector and today that project is very much complete.

Sam: One of the through lines of the book is the way the Revolutionary Guards have taken control of very large parts of the economy, step by step, over this whole period. So now it’s quite difficult to untangle what’s about ideology and what’s just about economic self-interest. What was the process by which that happened?

Bozorgmehr: That’s exactly the core of this book. Six years ago, Yeganeh called me with the idea of a book about how the Revolutionary Guards gained economic advantage in the Islamic Republic. The thesis of the book gradually evolved into how a revolution that came to power with a promise of forming an egalitarian society turned to its exact opposite by becoming a mafia state. We wanted to show what went wrong, what were the turning points where people could have stood firm to prevent that.

Because interestingly, when you go to those turning points, you see that many of those decisions were made with good intentions. One example is when Karroubi establishes a foundation to take money from the wealthy and distribute among the poor. That’s in line with the idea of the revolution. So far so good, but then they see that, oh the bureaucracy is slowing us down, they can’t help the poor as fast as we want. So they avoid auditing, they avoid regulations passed by the parliament. They try to separate these foundations from the government bureaucracy, and that’s how these foundations later turn into conglomerates that owned the majority of Iran’s economy without being accountable to anyone but the Supreme Leader.

The Revolutionary Guards got involved in the economy after the Iran-Iraq War. President Hashemi Rafsanjani [1989-1997] thought that there are these people who are unemployed, let them run some state industries, let them get into construction projects, maybe they can become independent in their budget. Another decision with good intentions, but then this military organization started devouring big chunks of the Iranian economy. Because it had access to guns, it used its military muscle to take over economic projects. Then it establishes its own intelligence department as well. As a result of that, we are in this situation that if you combine the share of the Iranian economy owned by the Supreme Leader’s foundations and the Revolutionary Guard, it would be the majority share.

Yeganeh: Some people say 80%. So the true private sector in Iran is maybe 10% to 20% and that’s largely folks that operate under the radar, your local bakery, things like that. A big lesson of this book is that military forces and business really don’t mix. If your business competitor can throw you into solitary confinement, your business will fall apart. Rafsanjani had good intentions, perhaps, but it was a huge, huge misstep, and it paved the way for a lot of what we see today.

Lawrence: One of the consequences of the foundations and Guards controlling 80% of the economy is it’s wholly dysfunctional. They’re not a productive entrepreneurial force. By the end of last year the country was falling apart. The banking system couldn’t cope. People were not getting properly fed, there were water shortages, and so on. How much of that was actually the cause of the of the uprising we saw in January?

Yeganeh: Since 2017 there have been multiple rounds of protests, four at this point, and all them, except the “Woman Life Freedom” round were sparked by explicitly economic grievances. This issue of the economy is one that the Islamic Republic has faced basically since it was instituted, because Khomeini made a lot of promises about all the things he would do for the poor, and once they were in power, they found out that things were much more difficult than they had promised, and Khomeini really wasn’t actually all that interested in economics. He used that rhetoric of the oppressed and the oppressors to unite people and widen his coalition. then once he was in power, he did a bait and switch, and said, ‘we didn’t revolt for economics, we revolted for Islam’.

From the beginning that took people aback, and that anger has only grown over the last few decades. You know, the 1999 protests and the 2009 revolts, those were very much political, but since 2017 the economic situation in Iran has gotten so bad, because of sanctions, but also the Iranian government’s own mismanagement and hoarding of wealth. Iran is a wealthy country. There’s a great deal of opportunity, but that is more and more limited to a small group. People can see that, and they resent it, and that pushes people out into the streets, and that’s going to continue. The prices have only gone up since December when those protests started. Now we’re seeing job losses as a result of the war. Those grievances have not been addressed at all. They’ve gotten worse, and that portends more unrest to come.

Sam: So does the war that’s going on at the moment make it more likely that the regime will hang on for at least a good while longer, because it gives them more opportunity for repression and unites more people behind a nationalistic, anti-American, position? Or because it makes the economic position even more perilous, does it make the regime weaker and more likely that it’s going to fall sooner?

Bozorgmehr: The war has made the Islamic Republic weaker than before. But that doesn’t mean the regime is close to collapse anytime soon. We should not underestimate the resilience of totalitarian regimes. Economic hardship is one reason for revolt, but we’ve seen many examples, including in Iraq after the Gulf War, where people are very hungry, but Saddam had a grip of power. That didn’t lead to the fall of Saddam, despite all the sanctions and all the economic troubles.

I have no doubt that Iranians will stand up, they will try to push for change. A big part of our book is that, despite all the obstacles, the Iranians try to innovate and reinvent themselves and find new methods to stand up against the Islamic Republic and voice their demands. We will see a more energized democratic movement, and people will push for change after the war, but it’s very difficult to see how that will be translated into tangible changes in the near future.

Lawrence: One of the ways regimes like this fall is because of divisions within the elite, and there’s been some talk of that. The first layers of leaders have been killed. But you also get a sense that the Guards have just used the war to consolidate its power, and those actually trying to run the government, including the President, are a bit marginalized at the moment. Is that fair? At some point you have to govern the country. You can’t keep the internet off forever, and there’s not very much income coming in at the moment. I don’t think the Strait of Hormuz will provide a saviour in that regard. So are there any signs of divisions within the leadership, or are they all so much in it together that all they can imagine is clinging on to power as ruthlessly as they’ve done in recent years?

Yeganeh: I don’t see any signs of significant division within the Iranian elite. There’s always some contestation, and so there will be people who disagree with each other and maybe criticize, but only a really unified regime can carry out what they did in January. There were no defections. There was no one that we know of saying, “I’m not going to do this”. If there was it clearly wasn’t an obstacle. It’s true the elected government is more marginalized. The guards are more ascendant, although that’s just an acceleration of a long trend. But I don’t see significant divisions, and I think the war is helpful for the regime in that regard, because there is a larger enemy to worry about.

Bozorgmehr: The Guards are running the country and are in full control of the government and the negotiations. In that sense, I agree that the Islamic Republic is much more unified when it comes to governance, but there are huge obstacles ahead. For example, to give a sense of continuity, they made much about appointing Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader. But that will come with a cost. You can’t appoint the son of the previous Supreme Leader in a system that claims that it’s against hereditary forms of governance without pushback.

Also you can’t run a country from a bunker. Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah, was living in hiding for years, but at least we could see some video broadcasts from him. We don’t see any, even audio messages, from Mojtaba. Nasrallah had established legitimacy before going underground. Mojtaba has started his leadership in the underground. He doesn’t have any legitimacy. These are the big challenges for the new leadership. Despite all the unity, it’s going to be very difficult for them to run the everyday affairs of the country and to keep their support base connected to them.

Lawrence: We’ve talked a lot about managing the Iranian economy, the politics, society. Another key feature of the regime has been the axis of resistance, Hamas, Hezbollah the Houthis, Assad’s Syria. As of last year that whole project had almost fallen apart. It has been seen as a complete waste of money in some respects, yet it’s part of the demands of the current regime in the negotiations that this can continue. Do you see a similar effort being funneled into Hezbollah and Hamas in the future, has this strategy run its course?

Bozorgmehr: I think even the Islamic Republic can see that was a bad investment. They invested a lot in the proxies as a deterrent, but when it came to the moment of the war, those proxies didn’t help. They were one of the main reasons why the war happened. This is why the Islamic Republic is so fascinated with the control of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime thinks it has discovered a new deterrent.

Sam: Has the unity of the elite been helped by the fact that there’s been so much emigration from Iran of educated people who in other countries have been so critical to overthrowing totalitarianism. Are there enough people left in the country to lead an opposition, or would people come back if there was a real moment of opportunity?

Yeganeh: There’s such a hunger among the Iranian diaspora to come back and rebuild the country. To help it catch up to where it should be economically and its integration with the world, I think that there’s an enormous store of energy there. But every time there’s been a possibility of change, those people have been under great threat from the government itself.

Bozorgmehr: We have had the waves of emigration in the history of the Islamic Republic. The first wave started at the beginning of the revolution, and those who were absolutely shocked with an Islamist regime left the country. The second wave of emigration was during the Iran-Iraq war, people who didn’t want their children to go to the battlefield started sending them abroad in order to not go to the military service. During the Reform movement and Green Movement, we had a new immigration wave by people who gave up hope for any change.

Now we see emigration by the children of the ruling elite as well, so that is another sign of collapse. We saw this with the Soviet Union, and it’s one of the signs that the current Russian government is weak. Because when even the children of the ruling elite do not believe in this idea that their parents are preaching, that shows the foundations are becoming weaker and weaker.