The abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the United States military and the subsequent threats by Washington to intervene in Iran during its recent upheaval have generated a tide of enthusiasm in hawkish pro-Ukraine circles in the West. If Moscow’s allies are weakened, then Russia also gets weaker, the simplistic logic goes.

Although he criticised US interventionism in the past, US President Donald Trump is newly infected with the regime change fever once spread by his Democratic predecessors.

What it reminds one of most is the export of revolution – a short-lived policy of Soviet Russia spearheaded by the father of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky. It resulted in several pro-Bolshevik governments emerging across Europe – in Hungary, Bavaria and Latvia. None of them lasted long.

One of the Bolsheviks’ lesser-known revolutionary projects was the Persian Soviet Socialist Republic, which existed in 1920-21 in Iran’s Gilan province on the Caspian Sea. The idea was to try to spread the proletarian revolution all the way to India, but eventually the Red Army had to retreat, and its local allies were quickly overthrown.

Fast-forward a century, and Iran again finds itself as a destination for revolutionary export, only now with American and Israeli hawks behind the attempt to foment something along the lines of Ukraine’s Maidan. Iran’s theocratic regime is hardly palatable, and resistance to it is organic, but the constant threat of US and Israeli intervention appears to be its strongest pillar and the source of immunity against domestic unrest. Iranians know better than to risk having their country transformed into another Syria or Libya.

Iran’s entire 20th-century history is that of constant resistance to subjugation by........

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