The day Ayatollah Khomeini invited Gorbachev to Islam 33 years ago

Two years before the fall of communism in the only letter addressed to a foreign leader by the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini invited Mikhail Gorbachev to adhere to Islam.

The last leader of the Soviet Union, a product of the communist system, died Tuesday at the age of 91 in Russia.

In early January 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini had sent a delegation to Moscow to send a letter to the President of the USSR, at a time when the communist regimes in Europe were greatly weakened.

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“Mr. Gorbachev, it is clear to all that communism must henceforth be sought after in the political history museums of the world because Marxism does not meet any of the real needs of humanity,” the ayatollah wrote in his letter. to Soviet number one.

FILE – Ayatollah Khomeini speaks to supporters at Behesht Zahra Cemetery after arriving in Tehran, Iran, ending 14 years in exile, February 1, 1979. (AP Photo/AF)

The Iranian leader had decided to send him this letter because, according to him, Gorbachev had “entered, as soon as [sa] assumption of office, in a phase of revision of the Soviet system”.

“Mr. Gorbachev, you have to face the truth: the main problem of your country is not the question of property, economy and freedom, but the lack of true belief in God. The same problem that has led or will lead the West to decadence and impasse,” Khomeini said.

For the ayatollah, communism has no future “because it is a materialistic school, incapable of saving man from the crisis of disbelief in spirituality, the most fundamental suffering of human society in the West and in the East”.

The solution, according to the Iranian leader, is Islam. “I call on you to seriously study Islam. The lofty and universal values of Islam can be the source of comfort and salvation for all nations and solve the fundamental problems of humanity”.

A few months later the Soviet system began to crack and communist regimes crumbled one by one in Eastern Europe.

On December 25, 1991, two years after the letter, Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation on television. Already dying, the USSR disappears when Russia, Belarus and Ukraine proclaim that the Soviet Union “no longer exists”.