Iran-Russia Relations

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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Iran has become Russia's principal ally in the Middle East. The two countries have cooperated in a number of regional conflicts, and Russia is Iran's primary supplier of military equipment and nuclear technology. Both Moscow and Tehran oppose what they claim are U.S. efforts to create a unipolar world. While there are some areas of dispute between the two countries, primarily over the Caspian Sea, the durability of the relationship was underscored in November 2000, when Russia unilaterally abrogated an agreement with the United States to stop selling arms to Iran when existing contracts expired at the end of 2000.

Relations between Moscow and Tehran began to develop in the later part of the Gorbachev era (1985–1991). After alternately supporting first Iran and then Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1990), by July 1987 Moscow had clearly tilted toward Iran. The relationship between the two countries was solidified in June 1989 with the visit to Moscow of the Iranian president Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (b. 1934), when a number of agreements, including one on military cooperation, were signed. The military agreement permitted Iran to purchase highly sophisticated military aircraft from Moscow, including MIG-29s and SU-24s.

The Iranian air force had been badly affected by the eight-year war with Iraq and by U.S. refusal to supply spare parts, let alone new planes, to replace losses in the F-14s and other aircraft that the United States had sold to the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the shah of Iran (1919–1980). Soviet military equipment was badly needed. Iran's military-supply dependence on Moscow grew as a result of the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War. After that war, the United States, Iran's main enemy, became the primary military power in the Gulf. U.S. defense agreements with a number of Persian Gulf states included prepositioning arrangements for U.S. military equipment, and Saudi Arabia, Iran's most important Islamic challenger, acquired massive amounts of U.S. weaponry.

As Russia-Iran relations deepened, Moscow stepped up the quantity and quality of its arms sales, and by 1993 it had agreed to supply Iran with submarines that could be used to challenge the U.S. fleet operating in the region. Another Russian action angering the United States was the 1995 agreement to supply Iran with a nuclear reactor for the nuclear installation at Bushehr in southwest Iran. Under heavy U.S. pressure, Moscow did renege on a promise to provide a graphite reactor that could have been used to construct nuclear weapons. The Russian natural gas company, Gasprom, was also a major investor in Iran's South Pars natural-gas field, reaching an agreement to help develop the field in 1997.

In addition to supplying Tehran with military equipment and nuclear reactors and investing in one of Iran's major natural gas fields, Moscow, whose position in the world had been eroding as its economy and military power weakened, found Iran to be a helpful ally in dealing with a number of sensitive Middle Eastern, Caucasian, Transcaucasian, and Central and Southwest Asian hot spots. These included Chechnya, where Iran has kept a low profile during both Russian-Chechen wars, despite the Chechen rebels' use of Islamic themes in their conflict with Russia; Tajikistan, where Iran helped Russia achieve a political settlement of the civil war, albeit a shaky one; Afghanistan, where both Russia and Iran have stood together against the Taliban; and Azerbaijan, which neither Iran, with a sizable Azeri population of its own, nor Russia wishes to see emerge as a significant economic and militarypower, particularly as it develops closer relations with the United States. Furthermore, as NATO expands eastward, many Russians have called for a closer Russia-Iran relationship as a counterbalance. Turkey is seen by many in the Russian elite as closely cooperating with its NATO allies in expanding its influence in both Transcaucasia and Central Asia—areas that Moscow regards in its own sphere of influence. Finally, Moscow also considers Tehran as an ally in resisting what both the Iranian and Russian regimes see as an attempt by the United States to create a unipolar world that it would dominate.

Despite these areas of cooperation, the Russian-Iranian relationship has not been without its problems. First, with a chronically weak economy, Iran has not always been able to pay for its military and other imports from Russia and by the year 2000 had run up a trade deficit of $2.5 billion. Second, the Bushehr nuclear-reactor project has lagged badly. The then director of Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, Yevgeny Adamov, to spur on the project, signed an agreement with Iran in 1998 to transform Bushehr into a turnkey installation, in which Russian, not Iranian, technicians would build the project, whose completion date was set for 2003.

A third problem lay in the supply of Russian missile technology to Iran. The United States brought heavy pressure against Russia, including sanctions against Russian companies accused of supplying the technology. Iran, in the eyes of the United States, was a rogue state, and its development of the Shihab III intermediate range (1,300-kilometer) missile threatened a number of U.S. allies in the region. First Boris Yeltsin (b. 1931) and then Vladimir Putin (b. 1952) denied that supplying missile technology was official Russian policy. Nevertheless, the missile agreement severely damaged relations with the United States, especially with the Congress, and an economically weak Russia, particularly after the economic collapse of August 1998, was hard put to deflect the U.S. pressure. The rise in oil prices in 1999 and 2000 gave Iran some breathing room and allowed funds to pay down its debt to Moscow. Nevertheless, the missile-technology issue remains a serious problem in U.S.-Russia relations, which may well affect Russian-Iranian relations as well.

A fourth area of conflict lay in the issue of developing the oil and natural-gas resources of the Caspian Sea. Moscow initially shared Iran's opposition to the division of the Caspian into national sectors for the exploitation of oil and natural gas deposits (Iran called for joint development and joint sharing of the profits on a 20 percent basis for each of the five countries bordering the Caspian). By the mid-1990s, however, Moscow had changed its position and called for limited national sectors. By 1998, it had moved further and signed an agreement with Kazakhstan on the division of the Caspian. In January 2001, Moscow signed a similar agreement with Azerbaijan. The improvement in Russian-Azeri relations displeased Iran, which, unlike the other four Caspian riparian states (Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan), had found little oil or natural gas in its small portion of the Caspian shoreline.

A final Russian-Iranian conflict is more of a future possibility than a current problem for the relationship. It involves a rapprochement between Iran and the United States. Some Russian observers had first feared such a rapprochement following the overtures of the Iranian president Mohammed Khatami (b. 1943) to the United States in late 1997, and again after the overwhelming victory of the reformers in the February 2000 Majlis (Iranian parliament) election. On both occasions, a strong counterattack by Iran's conservative forces prevented any rapprochement. Nonetheless, should a reconciliation occur, Russia and Iran would become competitors in providing export routes for Caspian oil and natural gas. The major fruits of an Iranian-American rapprochement would be the lifting of sanctions on the construction of oil and natural gas facilities in Iran, including pipelines. And Iran, as many U.S. oil executives continue to point out, is the shortest, safest, and most secure export route for Caspian oil to travel to the outside world.

In sum, Russia and Iran enjoyed a fruitful relationship in the first decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether the relationship will remain as close in the second decade remains to be seen.

Avery, Peter et al., eds. (1968–1991) The Cambridge History of Iran. Volume 7. From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Chaqueri, Cosroe. (1995) The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920–1921: Birth of the Trauma. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press.

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