COLUMN ONE : In Iran, the Revolution Unravels : Economics, not ideology, is the Islamic Republic’s biggest threat as disillusionment spreads from the downtrodden to the middle class. Khomeini brought a taste of the good life, but it’s since gone sour.

In 1980, a year after the overthrow of the shah, Iran’s “construction jihad” swept through this farming hamlet deep in the foothills of the spiny Elburz Mountains, bringing modernity in the form of electricity, running water, a public bath and a nearby school. With a corps of engineers and laborers, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution had arrived.

“This was a lot more than we ever got from the shah,” said Mohammed Hussein Miveh, the 91-year-old village patriarch, as he sat cross-legged on the floor of his nephew’s mud-brick and log-roof home. Along the wall were a stainless steel sink and two battered Westinghouse refrigerators, one of them pink.

But 14 years later, the small army of workers hasn’t been back. And the wheat, potato and walnut farmers of Kordehnavard--like many of the mostazafin, or “downtrodden,” in whose name Iran’s 1979 revolution was carried out--are growing angry.

“We have no phones, no clinic and no roads,” said Reza Miveh, the patriarch’s nephew. “And everything’s so expensive. Who can afford sugar anymore or cooking oil? The government should be doing much more. Sometimes we wonder whether it’s forgotten us.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran, a modern theocracy, has reached a crisis point. Many of its most ardent backers believe the revolution has left them behind. Some feel it has already begun to collapse.

“The nation is in poverty and the country is on the verge of an explosion,” wrote a former general, Azizollah Amir Rahimi, in a letter circulated in Tehran.

For all the controversy over the religious fervor that animated Iran’s Islamic revolution, the force that is most threatening the regime is not ideology but economics.

The mostazafin are not the only ones who have soured. Two other groups vital to the regime’s survival--the young and the middle class--are increasingly dissatisfied.

With about 70% of Iran’s population younger than 25 and roughly half younger than 15, the country’s youth--most of whom don’t remember the monarchy as a basis of comparison--will be particularly important.

Meheri Fathi, 23, is one of a virtual suburb of young people in south Tehran who aren’t happy. “I want this baby so badly,” she said as she rolled her hand over a fully swollen abdomen. “But we don’t know where we’re going to find the 300,000 rials ($111) to have it or the money to raise it.

“I should be happy, but instead I’m sad and scared.”

Fathi and her husband, who earns $55 a month as a textile worker, live in a maze of crude single-room cement hovels at the foot of a power pylon--into which they are illegally tapped for electricity.

With the near-doubling of Iran’s population since the revolution--from 34 million to 62 million--housing has become critically short for young people. Increasingly they are postponing marriage because they can find nowhere to live.

The shanties built during the shah’s era along the desert fringe of Tehran now sell for up to $1,100--nearly two years’ pay for Fathi’s husband--and the government recently threatened to pull down these eyesore suburbs without offering alternatives. A similar move last year in the holy city of Mashhad triggered riots.

Unemployment among the young, ages 15 to 24, is also at least double the national average.

The older middle class hasn’t fared much better, thanks to skyrocketing prices. Many standard household items are beyond easy reach of the typical family, and cars are often out of the question.

“For the first time in my life, I feel really poor,” said a U.S.-educated political scientist who can’t afford new tires for his boxy, decade-old, Iranian-made Paykan.

The challenge facing Iran’s Islamic revolution is ultimately the same one that finally forced the failure of the Soviet Union’s Communist revolution. Despite its oil, Tehran is on a downward economic spiral.

“The regime is still closer to people than either the two Pahlavi kings were, but a lot of stomachs aren’t full,” said a Tehran businessman, referring to Iran’s last dynasty. “So the grumbling is pervasive.”

And there’s no relief in sight. Indeed, because its oil industry hasn’t been modernized, Iran faces the prospect within the next two to five years of declining production, according to Western diplomats and economists in Tehran. Income from foreign sales is further crimped by the burgeoning population’s domestic consumption, now growing by 3% to 5% annually.

With a daily quota of 3.6 million barrels, Iran is now OPEC’s second-largest producer. But if it doesn’t act soon, Iran could become a net oil importer in 25 years.

“Although it seems an unlikely scenario, it does reflect the depth of problems Iran now faces,” a European envoy said.

As its foreign debt soars above $33 billion--produced largely by a ravenous wave of consumer imports after the draining eight-year war with Iraq that ended in 1988--the mullahcracy is having to decide between the people who brought it to power and the foreign lenders who have kept it afloat.

“The crunch point is coming,” predicted a Western economist in Tehran. “The government either meets internal demand for imports or its foreign debt commitment. It can no longer do both. And either way, trouble lies ahead.”

So far, policy has flip-flopped.

Beginning last year, the regime restructured its foreign debt when it was unable to meet payment schedules. While that bought time, the debt will also now eat up as much as one-third of Iran’s foreign exchange revenues, in turn limiting its ability to import.

Tehran also cut back on costly subsidies for basic commodities--from meat to electricity, sugar to fuel--originated years ago to aid the mostazafin. Subsidies now cost up to $12 billion a year, about what Iran earns in oil exports, which are down to barely one-third of the revenues earned in the late 1970s.

As a result, consumers this year faced soaring prices and scarcities, while industrial production also declined as imported spare parts and raw materials grew hard to find. Production at a major television manufacturer is down to 30% of capacity; dozens of businesses have closed shops and moved into private homes.

Inflation reached at least 40% a year, with some items--sugar, butter, taxis--hitting 200%, local and foreign economists say.

Fury over hardships became rampant in the media, in parliamentary debates, in public discussions--even in casual conversations with total strangers.

“What do you think?” a telephone information operator asked a caller. “Should I go to Detroit? My brother’s there. I’ve never been out of Iran, and I hear it’s very dangerous there. But I can’t afford it here anymore.”

In October, Tehran reversed course, restoring subsidies for sugar and several other goods and imposing price controls. And the regime, launching an anti-profiteering campaign, unleashed vigilantes to search for hoarders and special courts to try them.

Iran’s colorful press has since been full of headlines chronicling the scandalous behavior of merchants such as one in Shiraz who stashed 56 sacks of sugar, 800 packs of tea and 224 tires--a crime eliciting an $8,000 fine.

But the restored subsidies and price controls only defer the problem and magnify the long-term cost.

“The subsidies are incredibly costly,” conceded Ali Naqi Khamooshi, president of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Mines and a member of Parliament. “But because of fluctuating oil prices, we haven’t earned what we expected, which hurt our ability to import. So we couldn’t prevent a sharp rise in prices, which brought us a real social problem.”

Up to 40% of Iran’s population, he said, is now considered low income--below the poverty line or barely above it. And the latest state intervention won’t significantly lighten the average family’s burden.

There is no systematic way to compare conditions now with those that prevailed under the shah, whose regime kept no accurate economic data. But here is a straw in the wind: Many Iranians, even in senior positions, have resorted to second and third jobs to make ends meet. Several Cabinet ministers also head groups such as sports federations, while members of Parliament usually have outside jobs as teachers, in business or at mosques. Parliament this year banned government workers from holding second jobs.

Even the Islamic Republic’s successes have become as much burden as benefit. The number of students in primary schools has almost tripled from 7 million to 19 million since the revolution, and university students have skyrocketed from fewer than 100,000 to more than 1 million. “We’re proud of the numbers. But it also means education uses more than a quarter of our national budget--much more than defense,” Khamooshi said.

With vast shortages of classrooms and teachers, many schools are on double or triple shifts. Since private schools are banned, the ever-ingenious Iranians launched alternative “nonprofit” schools in 1992. They now account for at least 10% of primary education, and the government is encouraging their growth.

Social conditions are visibly deteriorating: a middle-aged violinist, his case open on the pavement for donations, plays elegantly in the midst of heavy pedestrian traffic on Tehran’s tree-lined Vali Asr Avenue; an older man sleeps on the sidewalk across the way.

Underpaid police have taken to knocking on doors of wealthy north Tehran’s villas and bungalows to ask for “tips,” which residents say they’re afraid not to pay.

Crowded, noisy and horribly polluted as Tehran is, it became one of the world’s safer cities after the revolutionary government imposed the strict Islamic penal code.

Crime is now back. Even guarded diplomats are vulnerable. A Scandinavian envoy and his wife have been repeatedly robbed. The wife of a Hungarian diplomat was murdered this fall during a robbery; her husband remains in a coma.

For all Iran’s problems, vast numbers are still living better than most of their Third World counterparts, diplomats say. The shops and boutiques on Vali Asr Avenue are still filled with the fancy dresses and high heels Iranian women wear under their chadors. The Qodssupermarket has stocked up on large plastic bottles of Wesson Oil.

Many Iranians seem to recognize that the piper may soon have to be paid, although, at least in this farming village, the citizenry is glad to be rid of the shah.

“The only thing the Pahlavis gave us were our names,” patriarch Mohammed Hussein Miveh said with a wry smile.

Like most Iranians, he got his last name by royal edict as part of the monarchy’s modernization campaign. His was selected by officials who arrived just as local orchards bloomed; Miveh means fruit.

The situation here is probably typical.

“Most people are probably better off in some way,” reflected a well-known Iranian journalist. “Very little is exclusive anymore. The mostazafin share the benefits of society. They have access to education. They have appliances. They expect to travel, if only to a religious shrine.

“The basic problem for this revolution, like any revolution, is that it created enormous expectations--and an insatiable appetite for things it never could have provided. In that sense, it was always doomed to be disappointing. But no one thought it would get quite this bad. And I think most people realize it’s probably going to get worse.”