The January protests in Iran were suppressed with inhumane brutality in the name of a regime that proclaims the primacy of religious morality. Yet such brutality contradicts any morality and any religion. At what point does the religious and moral motivation of the Iranian authorities become necrophilic? Is the degeneration of ideological totalitarianism in Iran into necro-imperialism inevitable – by analogy with what has occurred in Russia?
The Scale of Violence in Iran Is Unknown: What We See Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg
The Iranian authorities imposed a strict information blockade and shut down the internet, leaving us without a full picture of what is happening – the true scale of repression and the number of victims. Nevertheless, even fragmentary data indicate that the level of violence and cruelty is unprecedented, even by Iranian standards. The number of those killed is estimated in the thousands, the wounded in the tens of thousands.
According to the human rights network HRANA (Human Rights Activist News Agency), as of January 18–19, 2026, 3,766 deaths had been confirmed during the suppression of the protests; more than 2,000 people were seriously injured, and approximately 24,000 were detained. And this is only the tip of the iceberg: the real number of victims may be several times higher. After the protests were crushed, the death toll is likely to continue rising due to those tortured in prisons and executions.
There is extensive evidence of shoot-to-kill tactics aimed at the head and torso, as well as cases in which the wounded were deliberately shot. One documented incident involved security forces storming a hospital in the city of Ilam, where patients and doctors were beaten. These episodes – mere fragments of a much larger tragedy – demonstrate that the authorities treat their own country as an occupied territory.
Why Does the Iranian Government Perceive Its Own Country as Hostile?
As in the Soviet system, the state in Iran is subordinated to a suprastate ideological hierarchy. Real power belongs not to the president, elected by universal suffrage, but to the rahbar – the supreme religious leader. This position is currently held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He exercises direct control over the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij organization – a youth paramilitary force under IRGC authority – as well as key judicial and religious institutions.
The IRGC functions as a “state within a state,” accountable to neither the president nor parliament. It constitutes a parallel power structure with its own ground forces, intelligence services, and judicial-investigative bodies.
It was precisely the IRGC and the Basij that treated the people of Iran as “alien hostile,” with whom they shared neither a national nor a religious bond. A dictatorship that proclaims the defense of religion and morality as its priority eventually comes to view the population of its own country as enemies to whom moral norms do not apply. This means that there is no longer any shared identity – neither national nor religious – between the Iranian authorities and Iranian society. These two Irans – the Iran of power and the Iran of citizens – are no longer capable of peaceful coexistence.
History has already seen a precedent for such a split in the country: the Red Terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in Russia. They treated the population of their own country as the inhabitants of an occupied territory, physically destroying clergy, entrepreneurs, and other “hostile elements” merely on the basis of their belonging to a particular social group. What distinguished them from the Iranian theocratic regime was only the atheistic nature of their ideology; the structure of ideological power itself was essentially the same.
The Bolsheviks succeeded in destroying old Russia and building a totalitarian Soviet Union in its place, founded on a new ideological identity. However, historical logic led to its subsequent transformation into the form embodied by contemporary Russia.
The historical logic of the evolution of a totalitarian regime can be described as follows:
- an ideological superstructure is formed above the state (the party, the rahbar), which justifies total control over state institutions and the everyday lives of people through some “higher” idea (communism, Shiite theocracy);
- for the practical implementation of this control, a repressive apparatus and security services are created (the Cheka, NKVD, KGB, IRGC);
- over time, ideology loses its capacity to mobilize and subordinate society, while the security services free themselves from ideological oversight and begin to be guided primarily by the instinct of self-preservation and the retention of power;
- representatives of the regime’s security services come to power but prove incapable of solving complex social and economic problems and therefore instinctively seek to simplify the social system through violence and the destruction of the disloyal;
- social necrophilia takes shape – a worldview in which death becomes a universal means of solving problems. As a result, ideological totalitarianism is transformed into a necro-imperialism that is devoid of a clear ideological direction and cynical in its essence.
Iran: Threats and Hope
Historical logic is the inertia of the course of events; it does not determine the specific decisions people will make. It can be likened to the current of a river, which must be taken into account in order to navigate, yet from the current alone it is impossible to predict where and when ships will arrive. That is precisely why one should caution against arbitrary generalizations: in any historical process, different – sometimes opposing – tendencies coexist, and it is only the decisions of people themselves that determine which of them will prevail.
Unlike the late Soviet Union, Iran’s population remains young. This is evident from population growth – from approximately 37–38 million at the time of the Islamic Revolution to 88.5 million today. Political opponents and activists can be destroyed, but it is impossible to destroy an entire generation of youth – active, dynamic, and unwilling to live in a totalitarian society. Whether this new generation will be able to prevail remains an open question.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appears as decrepit as Iran’s state ideology, which in many respects recalls that of the late Soviet Union. However, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other repressive institutions are far stronger and more aggressive than the security services of the late USSR, and in their struggle to retain power they will stop at nothing. It is possible that the authorities will succeed in suppressing the protests and freezing the regime along a North Korean model. Another scenario is also possible – a repetition of the Russian path: after the fall of the dictatorship of the ayatollahs, the country may move for a time toward democratic forms of government, only for the heirs of the IRGC to seize power and establish a new dictatorship, as happened in Russia – one based not on ideology but on a necrophilic instinct. The historical logic of such a development is not a predetermined future, but a threat we are already confronting today. At the same time, the historical logic in which a new generation rejects the theocratic totalitarianism of contemporary Iran does not guarantee a better future; it merely offers hope for one.
