All autocratic systems fear their own people. Democrats wake up each day knowing when they will leave office; dictators awake each morning recognizing that today could be their last. The leadership’s fear of their own people permeates society. Dictators fear protests because they can spin out of control. To prevent this dynamic and smother dissent before it openly manifests itself, autocrats from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Russian President Vladimir Putin to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping create huge networks of informants and bureaucracies dedicated to cataloguing everything citizens say and, to the extent possible, think. Even nominal U.S. allies—Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, for example—tap every foreigner and insert informants into every secondary-school classroom to document disloyalty at an early age.
The quiet on Iranian streets after Khamenei ordered the indiscriminate slaughter of more than 40,000 men, women, and children is deceptive. Khamenei forfeited any remaining legitimacy. Victims of crackdowns will never reconcile, but only nurse resentment. It may now be the proverbial calm before the storm. If the revolution does not resume amidst seething anger or U.S. bombing, the 86-year-old Khamenei’s own mortality may set it off.
Victims of crackdowns will never reconcile, but only nurse resentment.
Given the bloodshed Iranians have suffered—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps killed more civilians in two days in January 2026 than Israel’s Gaza campaign did in two years—Iranians will demand accountability. Part of this might come in the form of a Nuremberg-like trial for those including Khamenei, his son Mojtaba, Revolutionary Guard chief Mohammad Pakpour, and Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, all of whom might hang for their crimes. Others might become subject to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When regime change comes, though, Iranians will face a broader problem: how to address the tens or hundreds or thousands, or even millions, of Iranians who informed on others to the regime’s various security and intelligence services.
While many proponents of the Islamic Republic and critics of the monarchy justify their positions in the abuses in which the Savak, the Pahlavi-era intelligence service, engaged, they ignore how revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini executed or assassinated the Savak’s top two levels, but then recalled third-tier professionals and many among the rank-and-file to rebuild the organization under a new name. There is nothing the Savak did that its successor, the Ministry of Information and Security (Vevak), did not. Indeed, the only difference is that the abuses of the post-revolutionary iteration were far greater.
Post-revolutionary figures parsed the Savak archives, often sealing truthful reports about their misdeeds while targeting those who informed upon them to the shah’s regime. Many Iranians will demand the same once this regime falls. Just as Syrians did, they will want to see the paperwork documenting their loved ones’ torture, sexual abuse, and execution inside the Islamic Republic’s declared and undeclared prisons. Other requests will be more mundane: Who informed on whom, often for cynical rather than ideological reasons? Did some Iranians report business rivals or neighbors?
As post-revolutionary Iran grapples with accountability for the past, it can embrace numerous models. After East Germany’s collapse, Berlin created a special agency to take possession of the Stasi archives, and allowed citizens to view their files. This led to numerous officials resigning after the exposure of their complicity.
If Germany embraced transparency, Russia went the other direction, keeping KGB archives under lock-and-key. In hindsight, its preference for opacity foreshadowed its tilt back to the old order under Vladimir Putin. Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu-era archives are disbursed across state agencies and so, more because of disorganization than policy, are inaccessible to ordinary Romanians. Post-Communist Poland passed “lustration” laws forcing politicians and would-be aspirants to office, journalists, and professors to declare if they ever collaborated with the secret police; if they lie, they face lifetime bans.
Important for both Iranians and the United States will be protecting records from those with an incentive to destroy them.
The Iraq Memory Foundation digitized Baath Party records and ultimately transferred the 10 million documents to Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, where researchers can access them. In 2020, it transferred many of the original documents back to Iraq, where they remain largely inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis. U.S. law forced the retraction of records suggesting those American academics, think tankers, and journalists who compromised themselves by accepting cash or other favors from the Baath.
Iranians now must decide which model they will embrace. The Islamic Republic’s bureaucracy is huge, but employment does not always mean complicity. Eighty percent of Iran’s population was born after the Islamic Revolution, so the idea that all those participating in Khomeini and Khamenei’s regime must step aside is unrealistic.
Important for both Iranians and the United States will be protecting records from those with an incentive to destroy them. The Stasi, for example, sought to destroy their records before Germans interceded. Some Iranian American lobbyists, or those who knowingly evaded U.S. law for ideology or profit, would like to see records destroyed. So, too, might some in the inner circle of prominent opposition figures like former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who do not want their subterfuge exposed. The same holds true for those who support Maryam Rajavi’s Mujahedin-e Khalq, some of whom coordinated their actions with Iranian intelligence to undermine and delegitimize other opposition initiatives.
U.S. administrations tend to be reactive, but no more so than President Donald Trump’s. Preservation and accessibility to documents might require U.S. intervention after the regime’s fall, whether with U.S. forces directly or separately with Iranians organized for that specific purpose. The situation might appear calm now, but when change comes, it will be rapid. Ordinary Iranians and the diaspora have no time to lose.
