Why Communist Romania’s Endgame Has Lessons for Iran

Romania’s revolution over Christmas 1989 severely embarrassed Iran’s ruling clerics — and now holds lessons for how a spiraling political crisis in the Islamic Republic could play out.

As things spun out of his control in Romania, dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu was being fêted as an honored guest in Tehran. When he returned home and was promptly shot, Iran’s leadership found themselves squirming over why they had rolled out the red carpet for a brutal despot loathed by his own people. Newspapers and parliamentarians turned up the heat on then-President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati.

It fell to the newly anointed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to clear up the mess. He called for unity over the Ceauşescu debacle, and Iran’s ambassador to Bucharest was fired for not having warned that the knives were out for Romania’s tyrant.

Thirty years on, Khamenei and his senior adviser Velayati are still running the show in Tehran, and should be reflecting on the startling symmetry between the Iran of 2020 and the Romania of 1989. Just like Romania during the 1980s, Iran has fallen hostage to a sprawling, Mafia-like security apparatus, which has found ways to get rich while the rest of the economy cracks. That makes it uncomfortable to be the face of the regime, particularly when you are 80 years old and there is already talk of succession. The leader is the obvious fall guy for security apparatchiks and oligarchs, who want to hang onto their illicit cash cows.

Throughout the 1980s, Romania’s economy was running on empty thanks to Ceauşescu’s fanatical desire to slash foreign debt. On the home front, hunger was widespread, there were queues for food and energy was rationed. Securitate agents, however, were on to a good thing: They had control of foreign trade, smuggling and hard currency. When the Berlin Wall fell, they realized, like other intelligence services across Eastern Europe, that they needed to make a power grab from the inside. Many Romanians today describe the events of 1989 as less of a revolution and more of an internal putsch (and act of grand larceny), with the Securitate as the big winners.

Which brings us to Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

For most Iranians, the economic outlook is bleak, under all-out assault from U.S. President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure.” Strangled by sanctions, oil exports have reduced to a small fraction of regular levels, inflation is soaring over 30 percent and the International Monetary Fund estimates an economic contraction of 9.5 percent over 2019.

But the Revolutionary Guards have a privileged position because they control border traffic. This means they can not only smuggle fuel and drugs, but can also build intricate patronage networks with factory managers who want to avoid paying tariffs on vital components. Through their engineering unit, Khatam al-Anbiya, the Guards’ tentacles latch onto everything from offshore gas to the Tehran metro.

Like the Securitate in 1989, they will now have seen the writing on the wall. Street protests are spreading across broad social and ethnic groups in Iran and the economic damage of sanctions is so intense that even they must be feeling the pinch. The nightmare for the Revolutionary Guards is that the whole edifice crumbles and they are robbed of their revenue streams.

Sensing the tensions, Khamenei told the Guards back in 2018 that they needed to loosen their grip on business, but Khatam al-Anbiya's powerful boss, Saeed Mohammad Islami, shows every intention of doubling down and this Saturday said he was looking to do more refinery and petrochemicals work, according to a report on Radio Farda, a U.S.-backed news service.

Khamenei in the crosshairs

After hundreds died in protests in November and the regime was exposed as lying about an airliner it shot down this month, there has never been such pressure on Khamenei.

Working as an Iran correspondent in the early and mid 2000s, I found direct attacks on the leader at protests were taboo. If one person in a crowd shouted “Death to Khamenei,” he or she was usually told to shut up by others, for fear the whole demonstration would be discredited. The striking thing about the latest round of demonstrations is how personalized they have become against Khamenei himself, with chants of “Death to the tyrant” and protesters torching his portrait.

To an extent, it’s easy to explain this ad hominem rage: People have had enough of a cruel, corrupt police state. But that also plays into the hands of Revolutionary Guards in the wings, who will seek to fill the void if the leader needs to be toppled as Ceauşescu was — a convenient scapegoat for the crimes of a far broader system.

Naturally, as in many revolutionary regimes, Iranians have sometimes required a chameleon-like ability to forge a new order out of the personalities of the old one. I remember one Tehrani hospital worker describing the story of her brother, who had been an interrogator-cum-torturer for SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded secret police. In the revolution of 1979, he disappeared and she admitted she hoped he had died in the bloodletting. He re-emerged a few months later, performing his former role, but for the Islamic Republic.

This is one of the biggest challenges of potential regime change in Iran. Affable, multilingual men in ties will present themselves to the outside world as a new order of outward-looking Iranian “businessmen,” jetting in and out of Dubai. In reality, they could well be just part of a Revolutionary Guards network that will refuse to let go of prize assets.

No plan

The Romania scenario for Iran is not inevitable, but it would be prudent to prepare for it.

Pessimists will argue that a hardliner such as Ebrahim Raisi, the judiciary chief, could succeed Khamenei and keep the nation under repressive lockdown for years to come. Many in the regime will see how Bashar al-Assad held on in Syria, albeit bloodily, and will reckon they can do the same.

Optimists will counter that Iran will be able to shake off the Guards, judiciary and basij paramilitaries and make the same success of its journey away from autocracy as Spain or South Korea did.

While protesters may dream of the latter course, the Romanian and Soviet experience shows that the international community needs to spend more time considering the risk of an internally orchestrated regime change. Trump is applying “maximum pressure” and praising anti-regime protesters, but does the U.S. or the EU actually have any plan for what happens next?

When Eastern Europe emerged from the grip of communism, Western companies sought to make money in new markets without asking tough ethical questions about who the new regimes really were. In the case of Iran, it would be a mistake to pursue the same uncritical model.

The British advertising executive Martin Sorrell has described the country as one of the last great investment opportunities “short of Mars and the moon.” And of course, Iran is thirsting to engage. It wants to play catch-up on the Turks and Qataris.

But foreign engagement cannot be limited to high-tech steels for liquefied natural gas facilities, or to one-off Big Pharma investments. Foreign money flowing into the country must work in tandem with demands for Norwegian-style accountability over oil income. It should also be made contingent on electoral reform, a judicial overhaul and some kind of truth and reconciliation process.

For many Romanians, the fall of Ceauşescu never delivered. They argue that their revolution was stolen, like the nation's wealth.

There needs to be a plan to prevent the same in Iran.