TEHRAN: Two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, its leader Mikhail Gorbachev would receive an unusual letter from the Islamic republic of Iran’s founder, inviting him to embrace Islam.

The last leader of the USSR passed away in Moscow on Tuesday at the age of 91, leaving behind a legacy that polarised observers on either side of the Iron Curtain. But in January 1989, as Europe’s communist regimes were taking their last breath, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sent a delegation to Moscow to deliver a letter to Gorbachev.