Inside a massive warehouse in central Tehran a team of artists keeps the soul of the Islamic revolution alive. They paint the oil-on-canvas billboards—women in chadors, Iranian soldiers at the war front, portraits of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—that are then plastered along Tehran's highways, main squares and boulevards. Abbas Ganji, a master painter and former member of the Islamic militia, points to his favourite design: a tombstone symbolising the fallen Soviet Union, with the inscription, 1917-1990. This in turn symbolises the conservatives' battle cry: Iran will not end up like the Soviet Union, and President Muhammad Khatami is to be no Mikhail Gorbachev.
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