Khatami and Gorbachev: Politics of Change in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the USSR (review)

In this book, Zhand Shakibi applies the comparative historical method to analyze the similarities and differences in the roles played by former presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Muhammad Khatami in the USSR and Iran respectively. The comparative historical method is not one that is generally favored by historians, who (unlike social scientists) tend to see the subjects of their inquiry as unique, and thus as not comparable. This method, however, has been previously applied by social scientists — particularly sociologists — studying revolution, including Theda Skocpol, Jack Goldstone, and Tim McDaniel. Like McDaniel (Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991]), Shakibi compares the Russian and Iranian revolutionary experience. But whereas McDaniel's book looked just at the downfall of the old monarchical regimes and the rise of the new revolutionary ones, Shakibi's book examines not just these periods, but how the two revolutionary regimes evolved afterward.

Shakibi sees the late Tsarist and the Pahlavi monarchies as similar in that they both pursued revolutionary Westernization from above. While resulting in some notable accomplishments, these two efforts failed to achieve integration with the West, aroused great internal opposition, and resulted in the downfall of the two monarchies. Shakibi then sees the Lenin/ Stalin and the Khomeini regimes as similar in attempting the utopian transformation of their societies under the guidance of anti-Western, revolutionary elites. It was the recognition that these efforts had stagnated that led Gorbachev and Khatami to attempt to return to the original goals of their revolutions through liberalization. Both of their efforts, of course, failed.

They failed, though, in different ways. While Gorbachev was strong and decisive (at least during his first Ave years in office), Khatami was weak throughout his eight years as president. While Gorbachev dominated both the revolutionary and republican institutions of the USSR (again, until 1990), Khatami had no control over the revolutionary institutions in Iran (which were dominated by Supreme Leader Khamenei instead), and exercised only partial control over the republican institutions. While Gorbachev was domestically strong enough to make foreign policy concessions to Washington which eventually resulted in improved Soviet-American relations, Khatami was not.

In evaluating comparative historical analyses such as this one, the first question that arises is whether the author has made an appropriate comparison. Some might argue that instead of resembling Gorbachev, Khatami is far more similar to Imre Nagy of Hungary in 1956 or Alexander Dubcek of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — both prime ministers (i.e., heads of republican institutions) who lost control of reform efforts aimed at and opposed by communist party chieftains (i.e., heads of revolutionary institutions) both in their own countries and the USSR. Or to return to the Soviet analogy, Khatami may not resemble Gorbachev but Nikita Khrushchev — a failed reformer who was replaced by conservatives.

Shakibi insists that Gorbachev and Khatami cannot be judged on whether or not they achieved their goals because their goals changed over time, their supporters had differing goals, and Gorbachev and Khatami may have been politically unable to openly discuss the full extent of their goals. The author instead sees as "more useful" evaluating their responsibility for the achievement of outcomes that they clearly sought to avoid: "Gorbachev certainly did not have as a goal the collapse of the USSR. Khatami certainly did not have as goals the elections of a hard-line president as his successor, the establishment of conservative control of all major branches of the republican and non-republican governmental institutions for the first time in the history of the IRI ..." (p. 19). It is not clear, though, why they should not be evaluated on some combination of how much they achieved, what they wanted to achieve, and how much they avoided what they wanted to avoid.

But even if we accept Shakibi's argument that...