ABSTRACT

The decline and collapse of Soviet power in Transcaucasia has proven to be one of the major challenges facing the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), and one the long-term consequences of which will take many years to work through. Before the Gorbachev era, Iran, along with the rest of the world, had assumed that its northern frontier with the Soviet Union was secure and, economic interactions apart, closed. It faced turbulence on all three other frontiers-Iraq to the west, the Persian Gulf to the south, Afghanistan to the east —but on this northern frontier at least matters seemed to be settled, in a pattern established in the aftermath of the First World War, when the states of both Soviet Russia and Pahlavi Iran were created, and, after a period of initial conflict, and with the major interruption of the Second World War, fell into the pattern they were to exhibit till the late 1980s. The frontier itself was clearly defined. Neither Moscow nor Tehran were engaged in any significant interference in each other’s internal affairs. The hegemony of each precluded the entry of other, disruptive, third parties. All of this was to change from 1985 and more particularly from 1988 onwards, with ambivalent results for the IRI.