After losing his erstwhile allies and clients in Syria and Venezuela over the past 13 months, Vladimir Putin ought to be breathing a sigh of relief at the bloody suppression of the protests in Iran. Russia and Iran are natural bedfellows – a marriage of inconvenience, if you will. Both languish under Western sanctions, though Iran’s are stricter and have endured longer. Both economies depend heavily on China hoovering up their sanctioned oil at a discount and Beijing flogging them technology. Both deploy shadow fleets to export their oil. Neither has access to global financial markets.

The brutal suppression of Iran’s protests ought to reinforce Putin’s calculus that if dissent cannot be bought off, it must be crushed

There are, naturally, crucial differences. The Russian economy is more sophisticated and modern, less tethered to oil, and suffering not from rising youth unemployment but rather the opposite: an ageing population and labour shortages. The sanctions against Russia are softer than those throttling Iran, and its finances are in rather finer fettle.

Nevertheless, what lessons might the Kremlin have gleaned from how Iran has handled its protests? First, the idea that low inflation trumps economic growth when it comes to maintaining social stability. Inflation in Iran has been stratospheric for decades, rarely dipping below 10 per cent annually since the revolution in 1979. It’s been in double figures since the Covid pandemic, peaking at 46 per cent two years ago before dropping to 33 per cent at the start of last year – amid 4.5 per cent economic growth. The World Bank expects plummeting oil prices and war with Israel to propel inflation back up to 44 per cent in the current financial year while the economy contracts. It was the latest in a series of food price hikes that lit the fuse in Iran in December.

On this front, Russia has relatively few worries. Thanks to a set of draconian measures from its central bank, inflation is running at roughly a tenth of the........

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