Reza Shah

Reza Shah Pahlavi (previously Reza Khan; 15 March 1878 – 26 July 1944) was an Iranian military officer and monarch who was the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty and Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941. Originally an army officer, he became a politician, serving as minister of war and prime minister of Iran, and was elected shah following the deposition of Ahmad Shah, the last monarch of the Qajar dynasty.

Joining the Persian Cossack Brigade at age 14, he rose through the ranks, becoming a brigadier-general by 1921. In February 1921, as leader of the entire Cossack Brigade based in Qazvin province, he marched towards Tehran and seized the capital. He forced the dissolution of the government and installed Zia ol Din Tabatabaee as the new prime minister. Reza Khan's first role in the new government was commander-in-chief of the army and the minister of war. Two years after the coup, Seyyed Zia appointed Reza Pahlavi as Iran's prime minister, backed by the compliant national assembly of Iran. In 1925, the constituent assembly deposed Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last Qajar shah, and amended Iran's 1906 constitution to allow the election of Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran. He founded the Pahlavi dynasty that lasted until it was overthrown in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution.

In an effort to reduce British and Russian influence, Reza Shah initially sought partnerships with the United States and Weimar Germany until 1931. Thereafter, he turned to the First Republic of Czechoslovakia and Denmark, drawing on the Czech industrial firm Škoda Works and Scandinavian engineering consortium Kampsax to advance the development of Iran’s infrastructure, military, and industry during the 1930s. Reza Shah's reign ended when he was forced to abdicate after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, during the Second World War; he was succeeded by his eldest son, Mohammad Reza Shah. A modernizer, Reza Shah clashed with the Shia clergy and introduced social, economic, and political reforms during his reign, ultimately laying the foundations of the modern Iranian state. Therefore, he is regarded by many as the founder of modern Iran.

His legacy remains controversial to this day. His defenders say that he was an essential reunifying and modernising force for Iran, while his detractors (particularly the Islamic Republic of Iran) assert that his reign was often despotic, with his failure to modernise Iran's large peasant population eventually sowing the seeds for the Iranian Revolution nearly four decades later, which ended over 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy. Moreover, his insistence on ethnic nationalism and cultural unitarism, along with forced detribalisation and sedentarisation, resulted in the suppression of several ethnic and social groups. Although he was of Iranian Mazanderani descent, his government carried out an extensive policy of Persianization trying to create a single, united and largely homogeneous nation, similar to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's policy of Turkification in Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In the spring of 1950, he was posthumously named as Reza Shah the Great (رضا شاه بزرگ) by Iran's National Consultative Assembly.

Reza Khan was born on 15 March 1878 in the town of Alasht in Savadkuh County, Mazandaran province, to Major Abbas-Ali Khan and his wife Noush-Afarin. His mother, Noush-Afarin Ayromlu, was an immigrant from Georgia or Yerevan (then part of the Russian Empire), whose family had emigrated to Qajar Iran when it was forced to cede all of its territories in the Caucasus following the Russo-Persian Wars several decades prior to Reza Shah's birth. His father was a Mazanderani, and a member of the Palani clan, who was commissioned in the 7th Savadkuh Regiment, and served in the Second Herat War of 1856.

Abbas-Ali died suddenly on 26 November 1878, when Reza was 8 months old. Upon his father's death, Reza and his mother moved to her brother's house in Tehran. She remarried in 1879 and left Reza to the care of his uncle. In 1882, his uncle in turn sent Reza to a family friend, Amir Tuman Kazim Khan, an officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade, in whose home he had a room of his own and a chance to study with Kazim Khan's children with the tutors who came to the house. When Reza was sixteen years old, he joined the Persian Cossack Brigade. In 1903, when he was 25 years old, he is reported to have been guard and servant to the Dutch consul general Fridolin Marinus Knobel. Maurits Wagenvoort, who met and spoke to Reza at a meeting of the "Babi-circle of Hadsji Achont" in Tehran in 1903, in a publication from 1926 speaks of him as the "gholam of His Presence the Dutch Consul" and noted his very keen interest in Western politics.

Reza served in the Imperial Army. His initial career started as a private under Qajar Prince Abdol-Hossein Farman Farma's command. Farman Farma noted that Reza had potential and sent him to military school where he gained the rank of gunnery sergeant. In 1911, he gave a good account of himself in later campaigns and was promoted to First Lieutenant. His proficiency in handling machine guns elevated him to the rank equivalent to captain in 1912. By 1915, he was promoted to the rank of Colonel. His record of military service eventually led him to a commission as a brigadier general in the Persian Cossack Brigade. In November 1919, he chose the last name Pahlavi, which later became the name of the dynasty he founded.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Persia had become a battleground. In 1917, Britain used Iran as the springboard to launch an expedition into Russia as part of their intervention in the Russian Civil War on the side of the White movement. The Soviet Union responded by annexing portions of northern Persia, creating the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic. The Soviets extracted ever more humiliating concessions from the Qajar government, whose ministers Ahmad Shah was often unable to control. By 1920, the government had lost virtually all power outside its capital: British and Soviet forces exercised control over most of the Iranian mainland. In late 1920, the Soviets in Rasht prepared to march on Tehran with "a guerrilla force of 1,500 Jangalis, Kurds, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis", reinforced by the Soviet Red Army. This, along with various other unrest in the country, created "an acute political crisis in the capital".