by Oleg Shevchenko
[REGNUM] One hundred years ago, General Reza Khan ascended the throne of Iran—then known to the world as Persia—and became Reza Shah. He founded the Pahlavi royal family, the shortest-lived dynasty in the history of the thousand-year monarchy.
The penultimate Iranian Shah was a dualistic figure, and his policies boiled down to attempts to exploit the contradictions between the great powers. It can't be said that this helped Reza Pahlavi.
By the time he seized power, Persia had been the "sick man of the Middle East" for over a century, just as Turkey had been called the "sick man of Europe."
From the late 17th century, Iran was ruled by the Qajar dynasty, descendants of Turkic nomads who settled in the Caucasus. The Qajars appointed fellow Turks to high positions, which irritated the ethnically Persian elites. Meanwhile, the empire repeatedly lost to its neighbors—first the Ottomans, then the Russian Empire.
The domains of the shahanshahs (kings over kings) were shrinking, the economy was stagnating, large feudal lords reigned in the provinces, and the central government was "directed" by agents of influence from European countries and Russia. The Qajars' failure to modernize led to a political explosion.
From 1905 to 1911, the country was in the grip of a constitutional revolution. The Shah succeeded in suppressing uprisings by nationalists, democrats, and ethnic minorities (primarily southern Azerbaijanis). But in the early 1920s, chaos, imported from Russia, once again engulfed the country.
The Qajars suppressed the rebellions with the help of the Persian Cossack Division, created in the 19th century by Russian specialists based on the model of our Cossack troops. Until 1920, the officers were mostly "specialists" from Russia. One of the most promising local commanders was Reza Shah, who made no secret of his Bonapartist ambitions.
As a politician, he relied on Persian nationalism. It's telling that he took the surname Pahlavi, which translates as "Parthian" (the Parthians were an ancient Iranian people who founded a powerful kingdom in ancient times). But the origins of this true Iranian were ambivalent.
His father was of Mazandaran descent, an Iranian-speaking ethnic minority, while his mother was Azerbaijani (according to some sources, from a family of emigrants from Russian Georgia). Reza Khan also communicated with his Turkic Cossacks in one of his native languages, Azerbaijani.
But when, under the slogans of fighting chaos and corruption, he launched an attack on the weak Qajars, he placed his bets on the idea of an indivisible Persia speaking a single language – which he demanded be called exclusively Iran, the land of the Aryans.
While rocking the crumbling Qajar empire, he flirted with anti-Shah forces—socialists and separatists. But by wresting the post of Minister of War from the Shah, he proved his worth by crushing both the leftists and the tribal militias.
In December 1925, the Shah was forced to give Reza Khan the post of prime minister. And in the spring of 1926, he sent the last Qajar into retirement.
And here again, Reza Pahlavi's duality became apparent. His role model was the first president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a Westernizer and modernizer who abolished the Ottoman monarchy. But Reza himself decided that he would modernize by becoming an autocratic ruler, styling himself after the ancient Persian kings.
Pahlavi was a Shiite, but he staged his coronation in the style of the Sassanids, the last pre-Islamic dynasty. Reza Shah's crown was adorned with a multi-rayed sun set with diamonds—a symbol of the ancient prophet Zoroaster.
The aesthetics of the new dynasty harked back to the Zoroastrian past—after all, during the time of the Parthians and Sassanids, the country of the Aryans was considered by the superpower of the time, Rome. It was said that the Pahlavis awakened Iran, freeing it from dependence on the new superpowers, Britain and Russia. But the ideological vision and reality were at odds.
The country was not so much returning to its roots as beginning to copy Europe.
On the one hand, the Shah did initiate modernization along the Turkish lines: factories and roads were built, new schools and universities opened, and jazz and foxtrot began to resound in the capital. But on the other hand, Western influence persisted in the economy, particularly in oil production, which was at odds with the proclaimed course toward sovereignty.
It seemed as if the Shah had fulfilled his promise to his subjects: the British, who had effectively ruled the country under the Qajars, were being forced out of both the banking and oil sectors. Reza Pahlavi attempted to build a multi-vector approach, working with the elites of the United States, France, and even Czechoslovakia.
But just five years after his rise to power, the country began to fall into one-sided economic and political dependence on Germany. A photograph of Adolf Hitler appeared on the desk of the "king of kings."
Reza Shah, who loved to talk about his Aryan ancestors, was neither a Germanophile nor a National Socialist. Ordinary citizens were arrested for openly sympathizing with the NSDAP, and German cultural influence was limited. For example, films supervised by Goebbels's office were not released in Iran, especially since Reza Shah himself preferred Czechoslovakian cinema.
And again, there is duality: in the official magazine “Ancient Iran,” portraits of Reza Shah and Crown Prince Mohammed Pahlavi alternated with laudatory articles about Hitler.
By the end of the 1930s, Germany began actively weaning Tehran away from its multi-vector strategy, as Iran was becoming one of the main exporters of oil, which was critically important for the Reich and the Wehrmacht.
In 1936, financier Hjalmar Schacht, one of the men who brought Hitler to power, president of the Reichsbank, and Minister of Economics, arrived in Tehran. Following his visit, German firms began to seize the positions in the Iranian economy previously held by the British. In 1938, a visit by Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth, cemented Berlin's growing political influence.
Yet Reza Shah's desire to navigate between centers of power never faded. Iran did not join the Axis powers, and with the outbreak of World War II, the country continued to declare neutrality. When a pro-Nazi coup occurred in neighboring Iraq in 1941, the British, who suppressed it, also sent troops into southwestern Iran. The Shah did not object to this and did not ask Berlin for assistance.
On the other hand, the Shah did not abandon trade with Germany (although he reduced its volume) and did not expel German specialists and agents of influence from the country. Continuing to play the "both sides" game was a colossal mistake.
Britain and the USSR, united, deployed troops simultaneously from the north and south during Operation Entente in 1941. The Shah was arrested, and control of the country was assumed by the Allied military administrations, and later by government bodies fully accountable to them.
An attempt to please many influential forces immediately led to no one standing up for the Shah. The Shiite clergy did not forgive Reza Pahlavi for flirting with the pagan past; the intelligentsia for his authoritarian style of rule; the peasants for the lack of social reform; and the army for its neutrality, which resulted in a double occupation.
On September 16, 1941, Reza Shah Pahlavi abdicated in favor of 22-year-old Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The British planned to restore the Qajar dynasty under Prince Hamid Hassan Mirza, who lived in London. But the Qajars were unpopular, and the young Mohammad Reza assessed the situation and supported London and Moscow in their struggle against Berlin.
The final ambivalence in the elder Pahlavi's biography manifested itself in the fact that he, who had promised to liberate Iran from British rule, lived out his last days peacefully in British possessions—first in Egypt and then in South Africa. When the former Shah died in Johannesburg in 1944, his son brought his father's remains back to his homeland and erected a mausoleum for him.
After the Islamic Revolution, the mausoleum was destroyed. As one ayatollah explained, "People cannot bear the thought of the body of such a person being so close to the mausoleum of Shah Abdol-Azim" —a true, devout Shiite who remained steadfast in his beliefs.