Five Years Less - Brezhnev dies in 1977

[Onkel Willie]

While I will continue updating my Dragonball Z timeline in the fandom section, I've also begun work on a more serious TL based in real 20th century history. I hope you'll enjoy the butterflies .

Five Years Less


Chapter I: Brezhnev’s Succession, 1977.​

By November 1977 Leonid Brezhnev had been General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, making him the de facto leader of the USSR, for thirteen years. Domestically, his tenure was marked by corruption, inefficiency, rapidly growing technological gaps with the West, the onset of economic stagnation and a cult of personality that catered to his love for medals and undeserved glory. Geopolitically, however, Brezhnev had seen successes: détente with the West had been established, the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States, the massive arms build-up and military interventionism expanded Moscow’s influence worldwide.

The US and the Soviets signed SALT I (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) in 1972: SALT I froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels and provided for the addition of new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers only after the same number of older intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and SLBM launchers had been dismantled. Additionally, one clause of the treaty required both countries to limit the number of sites protected by an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system to two each: the United States chose to protect a base of Minuteman ICBM fields in North Dakota against counterforce attack to thus allow an unimpeded US retaliatory strike (the Safeguard Program); the Soviets chose to protect Moscow and the surrounding missile fields.

Moreover, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was legitimized: after denouncing reforms in Czechoslovakia by Dubček’s government to liberalize communism, Brezhnev had denounced these reforms as “revisionist” and “anti-Soviet” before ordering the Warsaw Pact invasion of that country (opposed only by Romanian leader Ceausescu). He considered a turn toward capitalism by one “socialist” country to not only the problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern for all socialist countries. It was heavily implied that the privilege to define socialism and capitalism and to distinguish one from the other was solely reserved for the Kremlin. The Soviet clients in Eastern Europe were shown what happened if they fell out of line and they removed many of their dissidents.

A diplomatic success in regards to Eastern Europe was the signing of the Treaty of Moscow in 1970 by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt: this meant that, for the time being at least, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) abandoned its claims with respect to German self-determination and reunification, recognizing de facto the existence of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and the Oder-Neisse line. In the following Treaty of Warsaw, also signed in 1970 and ratified by the West German government in 1972, West Germany and the Polish People’s Republic committed themselves to nonviolence and accepted the Oder-Neisse line as the German-Polish border. A large portion of historically German territory was thereby hived off to Poland forever.

The third and final diplomatic success in regards to Eastern Europe of Brezhnev’s tenure was the Basic Treaty: signed in 1972 and ratified by Bonn in 1973, formal relations between the two German states were established for the first time since partition. Matters were complicated by the West German claim to represent the entire German nation, to which Brandt reiterated his 1969 statement: although two states existed in Germany, they couldn’t recognize each other as foreign countries. According to the Basic Treaty the two German states accepted each other’s de facto ambassadors, termed “permanent representatives” for political reasons. The mutual recognition opened the door for both states to join the United Nations, as the Federal Republic’s claim to representing the entire German nation was practically dropped by the act of recognizing its Eastern counterpart.

On Sunday November 27th 1977, Brezhnev’s health issues caught up to him: around noon he collapsed due to a massive heart attack and was declared dead later that day, aged 70. He’d been a heavy smoker until the early 1970s. He later became addicted to sleeping pills and tranquilizers around that same time whilst also descending into alcoholism (this was of course kept from the general public by state censors). The funeral was attended by numerous well known leaders from communist countries such as Erich Honecker, Edward Gierek, Nicolae Ceausescu, Kim Il-Sung and Fidel Castro. Western leaders like German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, British Prime Minister James Callaghan, French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and US Vice President Walter Mondale also attended. Other prominent figures to attend were Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Chairman Mengistu of Ethiopia. The funeral and cremation took place on Thursday December 1st 1977.

After Brezhnev’s funeral, the power struggle commenced in earnest. The question was if a Brezhnev-style hardliner or a reformer would become the new Soviet leader. Three men remained who had a seat in both the Secretariat of the Central Committee and the Politburo: Mikhail Suslov, Andrei Kirilenko and Fyodor Kulakov. Suslov was the ideological grey eminence of the Soviet leadership and he didn’t desire the leadership role, but could be a powerful backer to whoever did. Frustrated with Brezhnev’s policies, Suslov cautiously backed Kirilenko. Meanwhile, Kulakov had become a politburo member in 1971 without first serving as a non-voting candidate member; in the 1975 prestige order voted by the Supreme Soviet he was ranked seventh. By mid-1977, Kulakov’s influence was waning and he had little faith in a power play of his own. He therefore threw his weight behind Kirilenko, abandoning his previous backing of Konstantin Chernenko, who was younger than Kirilenko and Suslov and until then seen as a potential successor. Premier Alexei Kosygin, a reformist, was struggling with his own health issues and therefore no longer desired power, instead also throwing his weight behind Kirilenko. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov did the same. Only KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov backed Chernenko, who lost the bid for power. He remained a Central Committee member until his death in 1985 and Andropov held onto his position of KGB leader. Long story short: Andrei Kirilenko was the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its de facto leader by the end of 1977. Kosygin stayed on as Premier and Gromyko, Ustinov and Andropov held their respective posts.

 

[Onkel Willie]

No replies? I hope a fresh update can change that!

Chapter II: The Kirilenko Reforms and the Afghan Revolution, 1977-1979.​

Kirilenko had seen the need to reform the Soviet economy as early as the mid-70s, when most didn’t because the economy was still growing because it was floating on high oil prices. This couldn’t continue forever. When Brezhnev had still been alive, he’d blocked all discussion on economic liberalization. Kirilenko revived the 1965 Kosygin-Liberman reform. A centrepiece was the introduction of profitability and sales as key indicators of economic success. A second element that fulfilled a long-simmering wish of the mathematically oriented economic planners was a shift toward decentralization of economic planning. After being introduced in 1965, much of it was revised or reversed between 1969 and 1971.

Reintroduced in 1978, the Kosygin-Liberman reform had five main points: 1) Enterprises became the main economic units; 2) The number of policy targets was reduced from 30 to 9. The rest remained indicators: total output at current wholesale prices, the most important products in physical units, the total payroll, total profits and profitability, expressed as the ratio of profit to fixed assets and working capital normalized; payments to the budget and appropriations from the budget; total capital investment targets for the introduction of new technology, the volume of supply of raw materials and equipment; 3) Economic independence of enterprises: enterprises were required to determine the detailed range and variety of products, using their own funds to invest in production, establish long-term contractual arrangements with suppliers and customers and to determine the number of personnel; 4) Key importance was attached to the integral indicators of economic efficiency of production – profits and profitability. There was the opportunity to create a number of funds based on the expense of profits – funds for the development of production, material incentives, housing, etc. The enterprise was allowed to use the funds at its discretion; 5) Pricing: Wholesale sales prices now had to be profitable.

Besides these reforms, that had been part of the original failed 1965 Kosygin-Liberman reform, two more measures were included in the 1978 reform: 1) the 47 Regional Economic Councils abolished by Brezhnev in order to end Khrushchev’s decentralization experiment were reinstated. They strongly reduced the burden on the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), the superior state institution for economic planning; 2) Material and financial incentives were officially instated by the government in order to encourage productivity.

These reforms meant a liberalization of the Soviet economy and also an introduction of limited capitalistic elements in an otherwise state dominated socialist economy. The plan would greatly increase the standard of living and give a boost to the production of consumer goods, which had always been treated as being of secondary importance by Soviet leaders, until now. Kosygin also assumed a much more hard-line stance than Brezhnev toward corruption, Brezhnev having chosen a nonconfrontational policy (basically pretending the problem didn’t exist).

Kirilenko, despite the onset of health issues because of his age, energetically continued his reforms of the economy with two major experiments, despite encountering resistance from entrenched interests who had no gain from economic liberalization and deeply opposed what amounted to a decrease of their power. All kinds of economic planners and managers didn’t want to have to compete with free market forces, no matter how small. They defended their turf and Kirilenko had to attrite them and introduce his changes incrementally.

The first experiment was called the “links plan”. Developed by politburo member and Kosygin ally Gennady Voronov, the plan advocated for the division of each farm’s work-force into what he called “links”. These “links” would be entrusted with specific functions, such as to run a farm’s dairy unit. The argument was that the larger the work force, the less responsible they felt. This measure was accompanied by a tolerance policy that allowed the collective farms (kolkhozes) and state farms (sovkhozes) to sell any produce above the state required quota on local markets and to state-owned stores on their own initiative and to prices they determined themselves.

The second major experiment was the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in Murmansk, Kaliningrad, Sevastopol, Sochi, Baku, Alma Ata and Vladivostok in 1978. In these Special Economic Zones it was permitted to found privately owned businesses. These businesses were concentrated primarily in the tertiary or services sector and to a lesser extent in the secondary or manufacturing sector. Subdivisions included light industry, artisanal activity, wholesale, retail, entertainment and tourism. The size of these companies was restricted to midsized: i.e. with no more than 250 employees and/or an annual revenue limited to the equivalent of $15 million in 1978 (or over $60 million in 2019 dollars).

Activities ranged from the production and sale of shoes, clothes and furniture to travelling agencies, and in later years also call centres and IT support. Sochi’s privately owned travel agencies were highly successful in advertising their city, with its subtropical climate, as a “Riviera on the Black Sea” affordable to working class people and not just the jet set. The number of Western tourists skyrocketed in a few years. Tower cranes and construction sites dominated the skyline by the early 1980s as hotels, resorts as well as housing for all the new employees moving to Sochi were built. Western businesses and entrepreneurs were attracted by the combination of relatively low wages and a highly educated population. Kaliningrad, for example, became highly successful as IBM and Microsoft entered a joint venture to produce personal computers in a factory there. Factories producing the parts were set up around Minsk. These SEZ’s enjoyed economic growth 50% to 100% higher than the national average. The question was whether this experiment would outlive Kirilenko’s tenure.

Meanwhile, after continuing Brezhnev’s foreign policy of détente for the next two years, Kirilenko was faced with an important decision: Afghanistan had seen a communist revolution in 1978 and its leadership was requesting Soviet intervention to deal with a growing insurgency. Mohammad Daoud Khan had overthrown his cousin King Zahir Shah in a military coup in July 1973, after allegations of corruption and poor economic conditions against the latter’s government. Factions within the Marxist-Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) were opposed to Daoud Khan, and he responded with repression. After the mysterious death of leading PDPA member Mir Akbar Khyber, there were large protests in Kabul, prompting the arrest of major PDPA figures. In April 1978, the communists seized power with the support of the army, which sympathized with them, and executed Daoud Khan and his family.

After the revolution, Taraki assumed the offices of President, Prime Minister and General Secretary of the PDPA. The government was divided along factional lines, with President Taraki and Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin of the Khalq faction against Parcham leaders such as Babrak Karmal and Mohammad Najibullah. Within the PDPA, conflicts resulted in exiles, purges and executions of Parcham members. The PDPA executed between 10.000 and 27.000 people, mostly at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. During its first 18 months of rule, the PDPA applied a Soviet-style program of modernizing reforms, many of which were viewed by conservatives as opposing Islam.

Much of the deeply traditional and religious rural population were terribly offended by all the changes and modernizations (which included land reform, offending the landowners, and changes to marriage customs). A first major revolt, known as the Herat uprising, took place in March 1979. After that, Taraki asked Soviet Premier Kosygin for “practical and technical assistance with men and armament”. Kosygin was unfavourable to the proposal on the basis of the negative political repercussions such an action would have for his country, and he rejected all further attempts by Taraki to solicit Soviet military aid Following Kosygin’s rejection, Taraki requested aid from Kirilenko, who declined and was adamant that full Soviet intervention “would only play into the hands of our enemies – both yours and ours”. By April 1979, large parts of the country were rebelling against the new regime. Later, in September, Taraki was killed on the orders of his second in command Amin.

Kirilenko was displeased by the assassination of Taraki and was strengthened in his resolve to oppose a direct Soviet military intervention. He repeated the advice he’d earlier given Taraki to ease up on the drastic social reforms and seek broader support for the regime. Hafizullah Amin failed to heed this advice and was assassinated in turn by plotters within the PDPA in January 1980 and was replaced by the moderate pro-Soviet Babrak Karmal. Karmal revised or withdrew many of the reforms that had angered the traditional, religious population. He also secured Soviet funding and aid: this consisted of loans, Soviet investment in infrastructural projects, supplies of weapons and ammunitions, detachments of trainers and advisors, and artillery and air support. All-in-all, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan would never exceed 5.000 men and none would ever see the frontlines in this conflict. As the Afghan regime continued its struggle to suppress the insurgents, their great power sponsor would soon have a much bigger problem on their southern flank to worry about.

 

[Windows95]

their great power sponsor would soon have a much bigger problem on their southern flank to worry about.

Oh yes. Iran.

I expected the USSR to go on a more Titoist, worker-self management path but eh.

 

[Windows95]

Oh man... imagine the reactions of Milton Friedman.

 

[TrashMan]

Interesting timeline, I'm going to follow this one.

 

[49ersFootball]

I do NOT think Brezhnev was cremated in real life.

 

[HBsennah94]

Interested. Don't lnow too much about the personalities involved, but seems to go in an interesting direction. Do you mean to make the USSR into a larger, but less populous China; or do you mean to explore a middle ground?

 

[TwisterAce]

Interesting story so far. It reminds me of your previous timeline Year of the Three Secretaries, which also followed a reformist USSR.

Andrei Kirilenko won't last as an effective leader past the early 1980s. In OTL he was suffering from arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and his mental state was deteriorating (probably dementia). He was removed from the Politburo in 1982 by Andropov and spent eight more years in poor health until his death.

I'm curious to see who will succeed Kirilenko. Perhaps Andropov, although his kidney problems would doom him to a short reign as in OTL unless he sought better or earlier treatment. Gorbachev, maybe. Perhaps Nikolai Ryzhkov, who was a reformist Soviet leader in Rumsfeldia. Or maybe a name we're not expecting.

 

[The Red]

It’s refreshing to a see a TL get into the nitty gritty of economics, looking forward to more.

 

[GeorgeUK]

Interesting story so far. It reminds me of your previous timeline Year of the Three Secretaries, which also followed a reformist USSR.

Andrei Kirilenko won't last as an effective leader past the early 1980s. In OTL he was suffering from arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and his mental state was deteriorating (probably dementia). He was removed from the Politburo in 1982 by Andropov and spent eight more years in poor health until his death.

I'm curious to see who will succeed Kirilenko. Perhaps Andropov, although his kidney problems would doom him to a short reign as in OTL unless he sought better or earlier treatment. Gorbachev, maybe. Perhaps Nikolai Ryzhkov, who was a reformist Soviet leader in Rumsfeldia. Or maybe a name we're not expecting.

A competent Yeltsin?

 

[Marc Anthony]

good to have another TL from onkel willie

 

[Changundramon]

Pity about the roll-back of Afghanistan reforms. These needed a hardliner backing them, protests be damned.

 

[Onkel Willie]

And a crisis erupts in Iran...

Edit: this is the most recent version of this chapter. It has experienced some rewrites based on comments.

Chapter III: The Iranian Soviet Embassy Hostage Crisis, November 1979.​

In October 1978, demonstrations and strikes commenced against the regime of Mohammad Shah Pahlavi that escalated into civil resistance that paralyzed Iran. These protests had several causes: 1) backlash against the Westernizing and secularizing efforts of the Western-backed Shah; 2) The 1953 coup d’état against Mossadegh; 3) A rise in expectations created by the 1973 oil revenue windfall; 4) an overly ambitious economic program that overheated the economy; 5) dissatisfaction among the impoverished peasantry, who had not benefited from the White Revolution vis-à-vis the landlords as intended; 6) anger over a short, sharp economic contraction in 1977-’78; 7) the corruption and opulence of the Shah where many highly educated Iranians struggled to find employment; 8) the brutal suppression of dissidents and opponents of the regime by the SAVAK and the regime’s general authoritarianism. These grievances united the urban working classes, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and Islamic scholars against a common enemy.

The Shah left Iran for exile on January 16th 1979 and, in the wake of this power vacuum, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Teheran two weeks later to a greeting by several million Iranians. The Shah’s regime collapsed shortly after on February 11th when guerrillas and rebel troops overwhelmed the last remaining troops loyal to the Shah in armed street fighting. Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic Republic on April 1st 1979 and to approve a new democratic-theocratic hybrid constitution whereby Khomeini became Supreme Leader of the country, in December 1979.

The admission of the Shah to the United States intensified Iranian revolutionary anti-Americanism and spawned rumours of another US backed coup and re-installation of the Shah. Khomeini, who had been exiled by the Shah for fifteen years, heightened rhetoric against the “Great Satan”, the United States, talking of what he called “evidence of American plotting”. In addition to putting an end to what they believed was American plotting and sabotage against the revolution, the hostage takers hoped to depose the provisional revolutionary government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, which they believed was plotting to normalize relations with the United States and extinguish Islamic revolutionary enthusiasm.

The students were divided on the issue of seizing either the US embassy or the Soviet embassy, America being the “Great Satan” and the Soviet Union being a “godless, atheist Marxist nation”. One was only slightly less evil than the other and which one was more evil depended almost entirely on the position on the individual revolutionary Muslim. It was put to a vote and it was decided to take the Soviet embassy to punish the atheist USSR for the deaths of thousands of Muslims in neighbouring Afghanistan, not distinguishing between the Afghan communists and their Soviet patron. Therefore, strangely enough, the American embassy was spared despite the virulent anti-Americanism of the Islamic revolutionaries (though that didn’t mean they didn’t have plans for measures against the Americans later on). This decision would prove to be fateful.

By approving of hostage taking Khomeini rallied support and deflected criticism from his controversial Islamic theocratic constitution, which was due for a referendum vote in less than one month. There is no doubt that it happened with his blessing. Revolutionaries, starting with students, took over the embassy on November 4th 1979 at 6:30 AM and Khomeini’s regime soon became involved as the matter escalated. Though initially only planning to sit in, busses full of protestors arrived and things turned into a hostage crisis as the embassy staff were told they weren’t free to go.

At 9:00 AM (9:30 AM in Iranian time) an emergency politburo meeting commenced in the Kremlin and a heated debate took place, with several politburo members suggesting radical steps such as nuking Iran to show the “superstitious imbeciles in charge in Teheran who is boss” (to quote one politburo member). Cooler heads prevailed, taking into account the possible American response to that, and instead Moscow issued an ultimatum: Iran had 48 hours to release the hostages or face serious consequences. The Soviet leadership and public opinion in that country were riled up further when images of hostages being paraded in front of booing, chanting crowds reached national television. Unbeknownst to the media, the hostages were being subjected to beatings, theft, being forbidden to speak to each other, being forced into solitary confinement, being blindfolded, their captors playing Russian roulette with them, and to mock executions.

When 48 hours had passed and nothing happened, the hostage takers initially believed the Soviets had lost their nerve. They were wrong: Kirilenko had authorized the execution of “Operation Bear Fang”. At 09:00 PM on November 6th twelve Mil Mi 24 helicopter gunships with sixty Spetsnaz commandos crossed into Iranian airspace, flying below radar until they reached Teheran. The fanatical hostage takers fought back rather than running away as the Spetsnaz had expected and many of them lost their lives against the crack Soviet commandos. However, the Soviet relief force quickly attracted the attention of the Revolutionary Guard, which used RPGs to shoot down four of the helicopters. After that, they stormed the embassy. Dozens of hostages were killed either in the crossfire or because several hostage takers took the quick decision to execute their hostages to prevent them from being rescued. To relieve the Spetsnaz as they were trying to rescue the hostages, the helicopters fired their 12.7 mm Yak-B Gatling guns and their missile pods into the crowd storming the embassy, killing 128 people and wounding 457, according to official Iranian numbers, while causing untold destruction. The Soviet embassy in Teheran ended up as a burned out ruin. The rescuers returned with about half the hostages, the other half being dead.

The Kremlin was outraged and kept open the option of military action to not only punish but cripple Khomeini’s regime. To Soviet commanders it was very convenient that the forces to be utilized in a potential invasion had already been sent on their way even before the rescue operation, in anticipation of a possible failure and the subsequent demand for vengeance. Fact of the matter was that the politburo had initially decided the hostages were a lost cause, but agreed to a rescue operation on Kirilenko’s insistence. Their eagerness to take military action had been great from the get-go. In total, the Soviets mobilized 390.000 men, 6.000 tanks, 7.300 armoured fighting vehicles, 2.800 artillery guns, 710 helicopters and 770 aircraft. It was the largest Soviet military build-up since 1945.

Near the town of Mary in the Turkestani Military District (encompassing the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs) a force was assembled composed of the Fortieth Army which, among others, included the 103rd Guards Airborne Division, the 5th Guards Motor Rifle Division, the 68th Motor Rifle Division, the 108th Motor Rifle Division, the 201st Motor Rifle Division, the 860th Separate Motor Rifle Regiment, the 56th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade and the 36th Mixed Air Corps. This force commanded by Marshal Sergei Sokolov had a strength of 90.000 men, 2.000 tanks, 2.300 armoured fighting vehicles, 700 artillery guns, 160 helicopters and 170 aircraft.

A second, much larger, force was being assembled in the Transcaucasian Military District. It was under the direct command of Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the Chief of Staff of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. This illustrated the importance the Kremlin attached to this operation and demonstrated their awareness of the delicacy of the matter of US interests in the Persian Gulf. They wouldn’t allow some cocky younger officer to get the country in a shooting war with the Americans. Ogarkov instructed his men to steer clear of the Americans, if they showed up.

Of course, first a good reason to go to war had to be found and the Soviets believed that the events at their embassy wouldn’t cut it in the West. First they began firing missiles at Iranian air force bases and other military targets whilst supporting the communist Tudeh party and other leftist opposition to the Islamic Republic until a full-fledged insurgency had been produced in the north of Iran in a matter of weeks. At some point the insurgents would call for Soviet help and Kirilenko, who was reluctant to go any further than he already had, definitively lost the vote in the politburo against intervention when they did.

Finally, on December 1st, in the city of Rasht on the Caspian Sea coast, First Secretary of the communist Tudeh Party Noureddin Kianouri proclaimed a “Government of National Unity” and invited all opponents of the Islamic Republic to join, denouncing the latter for its religious zealotry, intolerance to dissent and plunging the country into a disastrous war against a superpower (Rasht was capital of the historical, short-lived and ultimately unrecognized 1920-’21 “Persian Socialist Soviet Republic). Other leftist forces such as the Islamic Marxist “Mojahedin-e Khalq” (MEK, People’s Mujahedin) and the Organization of Iranian People's Fadaian (Majority) joined them. They were followed by social democrats, centrist parties and secular conservative liberals (i.e. supporting laissez-faire policies/free market capitalism whilst advocating a separation of church and state). Parties advocating any kind of involvement of the clergy in government affairs, however, was excluded from the Government of National Unity. Within this government, the Tudeh Party secured the premiership and the portfolios of defence and internal affairs, securing control over the military, the police and government TV and radio studios. This government began recruiting leftist and/or secular Iranians for the Iranian People’s Liberation Army (IPLA). It also recognized the Azeri Autonomous Republic and the Autonomous Kurdish Republic to get their support (but not the Republic of Khuzestan later proclaimed under Iraqi patronage). Kianouri’s government immediately requested Soviet support and they were glad to give it: Iran’s oil and a warm water port in the Persian Gulf now came within reach.

The Fourth Army and the reactivated Seventh Army assembled near Nakhchivan, the capital of the eponymous Nakhchivan ASSR (an autonomous republic and exclave of the Azerbaijan SSR). The reactivated Ninth Army and the 3rd Shock Army, an elite unit pulled from East Germany, assembled in the southernmost part of the Azerbaijan SSR just across the border, merely 50 kilometres away from Ardabil. These four armies had a combined strength of 300.000 men, 4.000 tanks, 5.000 other armoured fighting vehicles, 2.100 artillery guns, 550 helicopters and 600 aircraft. Ogarkov’s and Sokolov’s forces obediently awaited instructions. Orders from Moscow set zero hour at 06:00 AM Moscow Time on Sunday December 2nd, the beginning of the end for the theocracy of Khomeini.

It was also a Cold War flashpoint from the get-go. In a statement to the press President Jimmy Carter first revealed that he was aware of the Soviet military build-up on Iran’s borders, taking away the element of surprise. To encourage restraint on the part of the Soviets, he announced the United States would use military force, if necessary, to defend its interests in the Persian Gulf in order to deter the Soviets. Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski included a key sentence into the statement modelled after the Truman Doctrine: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” This later became known as the Carter Doctrine. What happened next clearly illustrates this didn’t discourage the Soviets from military steps.

 

[Maeglin]

Brezhnev dying five years earlier turns him into one of the most successful Soviet leaders. The stagnation thing (which in OTL he gets associated with) was more his final, senile years.

 

[Dalradia]

This is gonna spike the oil prices for sure, and if the politburo plays their cards right they may benefit from the prices indirectly,

 

[Marc Anthony]

This is gonna spike the oil prices for sure, and if the politburo plays their cards right they may benefit from the prices indirectly,

i see all the memes in TTL 2010's regarding russia invading for oil

 

[Pera]

[QUOTE="Onkel Willie, post: 19796962,

The second major experiment was the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in Murmansk, Kaliningrad, Sevastopol, Sochi, Baku, Alma Ata and Vladivostok in 1978. In these Special Economic Zones it was permitted to found privately owned businesses. These businesses were concentrated primarily in the tertiary or services sector and to a lesser extent in the secondary or manufacturing sector. Subdivisions included light industry, artisanal activity, wholesale, retail, entertainment and tourism. The size of these companies was restricted to midsized: i.e. with no more than 250 employees and/or an annual revenue limited to the equivalent of $15 million in 1978 (or over $60 million in 2019 dollars).​

Activities ranged from the production and sale of shoes, clothes and furniture to travelling agencies, call centres and IT support. [/QUOTE]

Isn’t 1978 much too early for call-centers and ICT support ?
For call-centers in the USSR:,what you gonna sell and who you gonna call ? Most USSR citizens had no private phone but a communal phone at best.
Same with ICT support: the only computers were in important governmental activities like the military and ministries. No way private companies are buying computers in USSR 1978. Even a fax and a copying machine had to be registered and monitored by the government because of the possibility of spreading information.

 

[Onkel Willie]

@Pera, I edited the last chapter based on your comment. Here's a fresh update.

Edit: this is the most recent version of this chapter. It has experienced some rewrites based on comments.

Chapter IV: The Iran War, November 1979-February 1980.​

With operations already underway, the morning edition of Pravda announced that the government had decided to take military measures against the regime in Iran in retribution for the hostage taking, the deaths of many said hostages and the destruction of the Soviet embassy in Teheran. The politburo vote had been unanimous as the echo chamber that it was. As a casus belli the Kremlin cited the 1921 Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship, which bound both parties to do the following: “Prohibit the formation or presence within their respective territories, of any organisation or groups of persons […] whose object is to engage in acts of hostility against Persia or Russia, or against the allies of Russia. They will likewise prohibit the formation of troops or armies within their respective territories with the aforementioned object.” Clearly, Iran had violated these terms.

With confirmation coming from Moscow that “Operation Jacobin” (a name referring to a particularly violent, anticlerical phase of the French Revolution) was to go ahead as planned, Marshal Sokolov did his part. Upon zero hour, 6:00 AM Moscow Time, a pair of Tu-16 twin-engine jet strategic heavy bombers obliterated Mashhad International Airport and nearby fuel storages and military barracks with heavy conventional ordinance. This denied the Iranian air force the use of the airfield and the air fuel there while destroying aircraft that were irreplaceable because Iran couldn’t procure replacements and spare parts from its former supplier: their F-14 Tomcats and F-4 Phantom IIs had been supplied by the US when the Shah was still in charge and Iran was still pro-American.

Whilst this took place, a massive artillery bombardment was unleashed and the Soviets deployed 152 mm M1955 towed gun-howitzers, 122 mm D-74 field guns and BM-21 “Grad” 122 mm truck mounted multiple rocket launchers among others. The screening force of Basij volunteer militiamen (some as young as 12 or as old as 70) the Iranians had managed to position near the border to face the expected Soviet advance was smashed by this bombardment and withdrew in chaos. Soviet soldiers and tanks with helicopter gunship support advanced across the border.

The Basij militia brigades received reinforcements from the 16th Armoured Division “Qazvin” and the 88th Armoured Division “Zahedan” plus six Revolutionary Guard brigades. These underequipped units together numbered 70.000 men, 200 tanks, 400 armoured fighting vehicles, 150 artillery guns, 85 aircraft and 130 helicopters (there were more tanks and aircraft that were in various states of disrepair). The opposing force numbered 1.5 times as many men and had many more tanks, artillery guns and aircraft, but the Iranians held them up for a few days in the mountainous border region and withdrew to the city of Mashhad after the enemy breakthrough. The Iranian defenders built makeshift defences with sandbags, barbed wire and abandoned vehicles, laid minefields, blasted trenches in the roads with explosives and fortified any buildings that had armed concrete in them. The defending force was mostly limited to infantry as most of their tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery guns and aircraft had already been lost. The Soviets probed the city’s defences and encountered machine gun fire and RPGs. In close quarters urban combat they experienced sensitive losses, particularly relatively severe losses of tanks and armoured vehicles in ambushes and infantrymen lost to sniper fire.

Particularly the Basij militiamen and Revolutionary Guardsmen offered fanatical resistance, even forcibly conscripting civilians and giving them M1 Garand bolt-action rifles after running out of Type 56 and KL-7.72 assault rifles (a Chinese derivative of the AK-47 and a locally produced copy thereof respectively). After conquering some costly beachheads from which his forces could advance further into the city, Sokolov instead decided to surround the city rather than take it fighting house-to-house (an exodus of civilian refugees was thereby cut off, and hundreds of thousands were stuck in the city). He did seize the city’s airport and had his engineers patch it up so his helicopters and aircraft could use it. Sokolov’s artillery guns as well as Su-17 fighter-bombers and Su-24 attack aircraft kept pummelling the city and its defenders. The encirclement of Mashhad had been completed in ten days by December 12th, but its defenders wouldn’t surrender for another five weeks.

In the meantime, more flights with Tu-16 bombers took place to devastating effect: able to carry 9.000 kg of free-fall ordinance, they obliterated the hardened aircraft shelters and the aircraft stored in them as well as radar installations, command and communications facilities, fuel storages, ammunitions storages and army bases. Smaller facilities were targeted by the Su-17s and Su-24s. After these targets were all taken care of, the bombing campaign was expanded to infrastructural and economic targets like bridges, railway shunting yards, power plants, oil pipelines, oil refineries and heavy industry. The Iranians attempted to intercept with their F-14s and F-4 Phantom IIs, encountering MiG-21s and MiG-23s. Khomeini authorized the release of all of those pilots and air force officers who had been imprisoned for their loyalty to the previous regime, despite being excellent professional soldiers. Anyway, it didn’t turn the tide. The Soviet numerical advantage was insurmountable and even every Iranian pilot magically becoming a fighter ace wouldn’t have altered that fact. Soviet air superiority was inevitable.

With the aerial battle still ongoing, phase two was initiated by Ogarkov’s forces invading north-western Iran with a far superior force on December 11th. With 300.000 men and 4.000 tanks at their disposal, the Soviets outnumbered the forces under the command of Major General Valiollah Fallahi by far. Fallahi had managed to convince Minister of Defence Mostafa Chamran that the invasion in the northeast was a feint, pointing out that the key political and economic targets were located in the west and south of the country. The east had smaller Iranian cities of lesser economic importance and large swathes of uninhabited deserts and mountains. Fallahi was able to assemble 150.000 men, composed of 80.000 regulars, 40.000 Revolution Guard men, 20.000 Basij and 10.000 militiamen. He had 300 tanks, 600 armoured fighting vehicles, 150 artillery guns, 130 operational aircraft and 300 helicopters at his disposal. Purely in manpower the Iranians were outnumbered 2:1 and the material disparity was much worse. The situation seemed hopeless and Khomeini’s decision to release all the army officers previously loyal to the Shah from prison and to recall those who’d been forced into early retirement did little to change that. Tabriz fell in ten days and, once there, Ogarkov positioned his forces to advance southeast toward Teheran. His advance was methodical but nonetheless had a brisk pace, though he faced determined resistance. Teheran was 500 kilometres away and it estimated that it’d take four months at the current speed.

Kirilenko and Carter were arguing over the Moscow-Washington hotline (contrary to popular thought not a phone line, but a duplex telegraph link between the Pentagon and the Kremlin, at the time). Meanwhile, someone else decided to milk the situation before the Americans could intervene. In 1975, Iraq had signed the Algiers Agreement to settle several border disputes between it and Iran, particularly concerning the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The agreement put the border at the centreline of said waterway, but Iraq’s goal was to control the entirety of it. Besides correcting this perceived wrong, the motivations of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein included annexing the Arab province of Khuzestan, becoming the dominant regional power and supplanting Egypt as the leader of the Arab world. In preparation for such an opportunity he’d purchased state of the art Soviet and French equipment, such as Mirage F1 fighter aircraft and T-62 tanks.

Saddam ordered the mobilization of 200.000 men, 2.400 tanks, 3.000 armoured personnel carriers, 350 helicopters and 450 aircraft the same day the Soviet offensive began. On Friday December 14th 1979, the Iraqis attacked before dawn, facing only several understrength battalions and a handful of company sized tank units. Five Revolutionary Guard brigades arrived as reinforcements while gendarmerie and other police forces were added to the defending force. Despite all of that, the Iraqi invaders still had a numerical advantage of 5:1. In ten days, by early December, Iraqi forces had conquered a roughly 100 kilometre deep “buffer zone” and took control of the cities of Dezful, Ahvaz and Bandar-e Mahshahr (over half of Khuzestan province). At that point Saddam’s forces halted and dug in, creating an elaborate system of trenches reminiscent of those on the Western Front in WW I. Machine gun posts, artillery strikes and helicopter gunships decimated Iranian counteroffensives and the Iraqi air force cooperated with the Soviets to solidify their air superiority.

By now a US Navy taskforce centred on aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Coral Sea had arrived in the Persian Gulf, bringing with them the “Rapid Deployment Joint Taskforce” formed for this occasion. The ground element was composed of the 9th Infantry Division, the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), the 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division, the 6th Cavalry Brigade (Air Combat) and the 1st Marine Division. On December 1st, F111D Aardvark strategic bombers from the 27th Tactical Fighter Wing bombed ships and installations of the Iranian navy at Bandar Abbas and Bushehr, encountering little resistance from the decimated Iranian air force. The 9th Infantry, the 24th Infantry and the 82nd Airborne took control of Bushehr while the 101st Airborne, the 6th Cavalry and the 1st Marine Division seized Bandar Abbas in the next few days. They carried out threatening manoeuvres in the Persian Gulf which Khomeini condemned as “satanic” and he ignored the US ultimatum to withdraw from the coast within 24 hours and allow in Iranian forces supporting Mehdi Bazargan as the interim head of a democratic government.

Khomeini gave foolish orders to repulse the American invaders, and the attempts to do so predictably failed and incurred massive casualties. President Carter unilaterally created a buffer zone stretching out from the coast 200 kilometres inland and threatened he would take military action against Soviet forces violating it. Bazargan announced a “legitimate government will soon be restored and Iran will not remain under the yoke of communism any more than it remained under the yoke of intolerant Islamism.” It gave the US and their supporters in Iran some kind of legitimacy in future negotiations, but extremely unpopularized Bazargan among the Iranian people as they saw him as an American puppet. The American plan had had a chance at succeeding, resulting in either a democratic unified Iran or a communist north and a pro-Western south, but Bazargan insisted on a lot of independence from US force so he wouldn’t be viewed as a puppet. He was already seen that way, so that didn’t work.

As a result from being under attack on three sides, Iranian resistance collapsed and the Soviets managed to rapidly advance toward Teheran, standing at 50 kilometres from the city limits by February. Khomeini responded by recalling all surviving military forces and armed supporters of the regime to Teheran for some kind of heroic last stand and the hope that Allah would somehow intervene and turn the tide and smite the Great Satan and the Lesser Satan (the US and the USSR respectively). The defenders had few tanks and armoured vehicles, few artillery guns, only a handful of helicopters and almost no aircraft and were mostly equipped with small arms, hand grenades, RPGs, mortars, Molotov cocktails and knives. They did prepare the city for defence with minefields, barbed wire entanglements and anti-tank obstacles, blasted trenches into the roads and fortified buildings with sandbags.

Urban combat reduced or nullified a lot of the advantages the Soviets had over their adversaries. Soviet commanders were hesitant to get sucked into the Middle Eastern version of Stalingrad Khomeini and his zealots were obviously preparing for them in the most populous city of not just Iran but all of western Asia. They estimated the fighting would take six to eight weeks and result and result in up to 50.000 killed in action, which was three times as much as the entire conflict had cost so far. Besides the major losses, the political officers in the Soviet Army anticipated the galvanizing effect that giving Khomeini a martyr’s death would have on his followers.

The decision was made to send the Iranians a message: a 9K52 Luna-M (NATO reporting name: FROG-7) short range artillery rocket was launched from a wheeled 9P113 transporter erector launcher on the 8x8 ZIL-135 army truck and it carried a nuclear payload. Using a 5 kiloton tactical nuclear warhead, the Soviets heavily damaged Mehrabad International Airport in Teheran, which was also an air force base, on Sunday February 17th 1980. The world was in shock by the first nuclear attack since 1945 and the US Armed Forces went to DEFCON 2 and subsequently NATO and Warsaw Pact forces across Europe were mobilized. SAC-NORAD ordered the B-52s into the air with nuclear payloads. This was the closest the world had gotten to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

 

[Pera]

Was the target chosen to minimize casualties ? With the Soviet air superiority I imagine Mehrabad airport to be a crater field after three months of war.

 

[Shevek23]

Thread watched!

Regarding officers of air force and army imprisoned or driven into retirement, do you have any statistics on that?

At the time I was in high school. As an Air Force brat I paid attention to the Iranian crisis and had met some Iranians before--a royal air force officer and his family visited our house in Montgomery, Alabama where the Air University on Maxwell AFB is; this officer was of course a foreign exchange student. That was in 1975; the three and four years later crisis made me think of them and I assumed as a matter of course that that officer surely was not among the revolutionaries and assumed a fate more dire than these prisoners you mention--that or exile.

But on the other hand, as is often the case even in quite radical revolutions, it turns out a great many officers simply stayed on to serve the new regime.

That man might well have died well before 1985 but if he did, it was probably fighting Saddam Hussein's attack for the Islamic Republic.

So while I would imagine some people surely meet the descriptions of the jailed or forced out officers you mention, my impression nowadays is that these would have been few and outliers, and I suspect many who would be drummed out of their services would anticipate that and flee. Do you have statistics to say how many these officers were that Khomeini could belatedly summon forth, or are you just guessing there would be a few?

I feel the narrative gives the impression he massively purged the military and left it with an unprofessional skeleton crew of ideological hacks. I don't think that was the case though, so I was wondering if you had some hard numbers giving a sense of the actual scale of this category of former imperial officers not accepted for the Republic.

Frankly I think anyone who was deemed such a bad actor as not to be trustworthy in uniform would have been tried and executed instead of just kicked off the bases or even jailed--I would think any who were doing jail time were doing it for stuff any nation would regard as criminal, like corruption in various forms, the revolutionaries turned up evidence of. But I have not seen any accounts categorizing the fates of the officers. I just know it is somewhere between the extremes of "they were all shot or fled" and "they all served the Republic to a man." My impression nowadays is closer to the latter than former though.

I also wondered just why the US task force struck at Iran too. I rather assumed their major purpose in steaming into the Persian gulf was to deter the Soviets, not gang up on Iran in conjunction with them! I certainly recall the Iranian crisis as noted, and there was no love lost between Carter and the Islamic Republic. But I would have thought the US fleet would keep its powder dry but not actually use it unless struck at first, and that Carter would be asking Soviet and Iranian troops to stand down in a cease-fire, to contain the otherwise inevitable Soviet curbstomp. As you noted, "the resources" meaning not exclusively but let's be frank here, mainly, the oil, was in the southwest, most distant from Soviet (though not Iraqi of course) attackers and most reachable by a US Naval task force. For US troops to land would be insanely reckless and unless I overlooked something, none did. But why open fire? Why issue an ultimatum against Iran even? (I don't recall an ultimatum but that would at least be expected before US missiles and bombs start joining in the general kicking the stuffing out of Iran).

I'd actually think this might have been a moment for Carter to position himself as peacemaker, by offering good offices to the Iranians with all the high-minded unction Carter could dispense. I'm not saying it would work or be expected to work, I am saying I'd think the USA would want to be seen angling to quell the fighting, while actually securing the Iranian coast to deny it as a Soviet client port, and to put some limits on Saddam Hussein's schemes. By no means was Iraq considered the adversary it became later, but I had the impression back in high school Iraq was more or less a Soviet client--I was not aware then of how much help he'd be getting from the USA and other NATO powers in the following decade of course. So what I would expect is for the US security people to be very very concerned about a Soviet takeover in effect (via Hussein as ally in Iraq) of both the major northern Persian Gulf regional powers.

The partitioning of the narrow Shatt al Arab disfavored Iraq and was imposed as an accomplishment of Henry Kissenger's after all. Impeding it with half the channel going to Iran would tend to limit the potential of Iraqi naval power. Now that Iran was a lost cause, perhaps the US would wish to court rather than impede Hussein, and so perhaps would want to make concessions to him--but just jumping into the fighting seems to give him, and the Soviets, what they might have negotiated for, for free, and gain the USA no leverage and much infamy.

I'd think Carter would be declaiming a desire for cease fire and mediation, pretty confident that Khomeini would never humble himself or the Islamicist movement to take the patronage of the Great Satan, even if it means martyrdom--if the USN came in and were not observed doing anything violent, just standing by prepared, if as predicted the Islamicist revolutionaries scorned up despite their goose being already cooked, the resulting chaos in Iran would be cover for covert agents to infiltrate in, seeking to organize an ostensibly spontaneous domestic appeal for help from the Navy on the level of securing the port cities. If no substantial numbers of people living in Iran would flock to the US banner for protection, Carter could still turn to the heir to the Pahlavi throne to bless a limited coastal occupation as aiding the true royal government of Iran. If the USN could control the coastal ports that would be both bases of operation and leverage to negotiate with both Soviets and Iraq.

No doubt Khomeini would declare all such maneuvers "satanic" and die affirming that being mauled by the Lesser Satan is no excuse for submitting to the Great Satan.

Why then does the USN have orders to act so---satanically?