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This week, as opposition supporters in Iran marked the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran by protesting outside the active Russian Embassy instead of the abandoned American one, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad failed to mention that, as a student leader in 1979, he had voted against the plan to seize the U.S. compound and suggested taking the Soviet Embassy instead.

Now that Mr. Ahmadinejad is strongly supported by the Russian government and seeks to keep the anti-American sentiment of the Iranian revolution alive, he has little to gain from reminding the current generation of student activists opposed to his rule that he was more worried about Russian than American influence when he was their age.

In 2005, when Mr. Ahmadinejad first became Iran’s president, amid more muted accusations of electoral fraud, some former American hostages insisted that he had been one of their captors during the long embassy siege. While it remains unclear if he actually was at the embassy during the occupation, Mark Bowden — the author of “Guests of the Ayatollah,” a history of the crisis — reported in The Atlantic in 2005 that before Iranian students scaled the U.S. Embassy’s walls, Mr. Ahmadinejad had objected to the idea. In an article about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s student days, Mr. Bowden wrote:

In 1979, as a student at the University of Science and Technology, he was one of the five founders, with Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, of Strengthen the Unity, an umbrella organization that was trying to unify the various revolutionary student factions. When Asgharzadeh proposed occupying the U.S. embassy, he was supported by two other founders — Mohsen Mirdamadi, who until recently was a member of the Majlis (Iran’s congress), and Habibullah Bitaraf, now the country’s minister of energy. Ahmadinejad and the fifth founder objected, arguing that the protest ought to be directed at the Soviet embassy, but they were outvoted.

This account is supported by the recollections of Mr. Asgharzadeh, the former student radical who came up with the idea to take the embassy. In an interview for the documentary “Iran and the West,” which aired on the BBC earlier this year, Mr. Asgharzadeh, who later evolved into a reformist politician, explained why the young Mr. Ahmadinejad said he was against the action: