Iran under Khatami and Iran under Ahmadinejad, in terms of civil liberties, are not all that different. If the Iranians vote against Ahmadinejad in the next presidential elections, I very much doubt that they will do so because of their burning desire to have satellite dishes (which most of them can't afford anyway) and wear short skirts (not particularly favored by many Muslim women) -- they will do so if they decide that he has not delivered on economic questions. If the Iranian power elite are culturally conservative, they mostly reflect where most of the Iranian people stand.
The only issue where the Ahmadinejad faction is _completely out of line_ with the populace, as far as I can see, is the Holocaust. I don't think hat any sector of the Iranian people want to give space to Holocaust revisionism at all, and on this issue reformists like Khatami are more correct than the populist anti-imperialist faction. Curiously, the Iranian power elite have managed to time both the Holocaust cartoon contest and revisionist conference with important moments in the international struggle over Iran's right to nuclear development!
As for Russia, unlike Venezuela, most Western leftists seem completely uninterested in it, for better or worse. I have yet to receive a single submission about Russia, though I'd be very much interested in a study of Russia's economy today. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>