ABSTRACT
Soviet sources contended that the Iranian revolution had no impact on the USSR’s Muslim regions. Both the greater Soviet openness and the considerable national discontent that became manifest, in the latter half of the 1980s, in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, with its undisguised religious motifs, made further denials irrelevant and absurd. In Turkmenia, another Soviet republic bordering Iran, the population was reportedly listening regularly to religious broadcasts from Iran in Turkmen, beginning after the revolution. These were said to be recorded on tape and played back by mullas before groups of believers throughout the republic, especially, apparently, in areas more distant from the Iranian frontier, where the broadcasts could not be heard directly. There can be no doubt that Khomeini intended bringing his radical Islamic message to his Soviet coreligionists and that materials of various sorts were reaching the Soviet Muslim population from Iran.
