The Pahlavis, Oil, and the 1953 Coup

At dawn on the third of Esfand 1299, a column of Cossacks set out from Qazvin toward the capital and seized a defenceless Tehran almost without bloodshed. At the head of the soldiers stood a tall and taciturn officer named Reza Khan Mirpanj, and beside him the politically minded journalist Sayyid Zia al-Din Tabatabai, who became prime minister for a few days. The Iran of those days was exhausted by world war, famine, foreign occupation, and the collapse of central authority; the treasury was empty and the provinces were effectively autonomous.

Reza Khan first became minister of war, then commander-in-chief, and in 1302 prime minister. Within a few years he put down scattered rebellions and built a unified army. In 1304, the Constituent Assembly declared the Qajar dynasty deposed and handed him the crown; he styled himself Reza Shah Pahlavi. According to scholars such as Ervand Abrahamian, part of the nationalist elite supported this transfer of power in the hope of stability and modernity, while the idea of a republic—which Reza Khan had for a time considered—was set aside in the face of opposition from the clergy and their fear of Turkey's secular model.

Reza Shah's programme was the rapid transformation of the country from above. The Trans-Iranian Railway, which linked the Caspian north to the Persian Gulf south and was financed mainly by domestic taxes on sugar, was the symbol of this resolve. The University of Tehran was founded in 1313, a modern judiciary and civil codes drawn from European law crowded out the religious courts, compulsory conscription was instituted, and factories, roads, and the National Bank came into being. The uniform dress code and the Pahlavi cap were the outward sign of this standardization.

But this modernization had another face as well: the ruthless concentration of power. Powerful tribes were forcibly settled and disarmed, the autonomy of the nomads and the influence of the clergy in education and the judiciary were broken, the press was censored, and opponents were imprisoned or exiled. The suspicious death of a number of notables in custody—including, according to the common account, Teymourtash—cast a shadow over this atmosphere of suffocation. In 1314, the suppression of protesters at the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad ended in a massacre and deepened the rift between the state and the institution of religion.

On the 17th of Dey 1314, Reza Shah officially proclaimed the decree of unveiling: women's traditional dress in public was banned, and police officers in the streets would pull the veil from women's heads. Defenders of modernization regarded this measure as a step toward women's presence in education and society; critics count it an authoritarian assault on personal belief and dignity that drove many religious women into the seclusion of the home and left behind a bitter memory.

This fundamental tension—between a modern outcome and a coercive method—marks Reza Shah's entire record. The infrastructure, education, and centralized state that he built endured; but these achievements were won at the price of repression, the extensive seizure of estates in the Shah's name, and the silencing of independent voices. The assessment of this legacy remains a matter of dispute to this day.

In Shahrivar 1320, British and Soviet forces simultaneously invaded Iran from the south and the north. The ostensible pretext was the presence of German experts, but the strategic aim was to open the "Bridge of Victory" for delivering aid to the Soviet Union in the Second World War. The army on which Reza Shah had spent two decades collapsed within a few days.

Reza Shah was compelled to abdicate in favour of his twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammad Reza, and was sent into exile; he eventually died in 1323 in Johannesburg. In the early years the young Shah held limited power: the parliament, the parties—including the leftist Tudeh Party—and the press came to life, and a relatively open atmosphere emerged. The Azerbaijan crisis of 1324–1325, in which the Soviet Union supported autonomous republics and then withdrew, was one of the first Cold War confrontations in Iran.

In the midst of this new atmosphere, the long-standing demand to control the wealth of oil reached its height. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, heir to the D'Arcy concession, had for years given Iran a paltry share and did not open its accounts transparently; according to critics, the tax this company paid to the British government exceeded Iran's entire royalty. The movement for the nationalization of oil, led by the jurist Mohammad Mossadegh and the coalition of the National Front, turned this discontent into a national demand.

In Esfand 1329 the parliament approved the nationalization of the oil industry, and in Ordibehesht 1330 Mossadegh became prime minister. Britain responded with a global boycott of Iranian oil, the seizure of exports, and a complaint to the court in The Hague; the oil-dependent economy came under pressure. Mossadegh's dispute with the Shah over military authority in Tir 1331 led to his brief resignation, and then to the uprising of the thirtieth of Tir and his triumphant return—but the coalition behind him, comprising the bazaar, the clergy, and the left, gradually fell into division.

In Mordad 1332, the effort to remove Mossadegh reached its climax. The first coup attempt on the 25th of Mordad failed, and the Shah briefly fled to Baghdad and then Rome. But on the 28th of Mordad, with the marches of street factions, the intervention of sections of the army and aligned officers, Mossadegh's government was overthrown and he was arrested; Lieutenant General Fazlollah Zahedi became prime minister and the Shah returned.

The role of foreign services was for years denied or downplayed, until in 2013 the CIA, by releasing documents, formally acknowledged that it had designed and carried out an operation known as TPAJAX, in cooperation with Britain's intelligence service (MI6), to overthrow Mossadegh. Kermit Roosevelt was the CIA's man on the ground for this operation. Even so, the weight and share of the foreign factors relative to the domestic actors remains a subject of scholarly debate.

After 1332, Mohammad Reza Shah gradually concentrated power in his own hands. A new consortium of Western companies—with a significant American share alongside Britain—took over the management of oil, although its nominal ownership remained with the National Iranian Oil Company. Strategic dependence on the United States deepened, and in 1335 the State Organization for Intelligence and Security, SAVAK, was founded with the help of American and Israeli advisers.

In Bahman 1341, the Shah put a programme of reforms called the "White Revolution" to a referendum: land reform and the distribution of the large landowners' land among the peasants, the right to vote for women, the Literacy Corps for rural education, and a share of profits for workers. Its defenders called it social modernization; critics, including the opposition clergy, regarded parts of it—especially women's suffrage—as contrary to religious law and as a showy measure for legitimization. The protests of Khordad 1342, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, were harshly suppressed and he was eventually exiled.

The 1350s were the years of the oil boom. After the leap in the oil price in 1352, revenues multiplied and a wave of industrial, urban, and military projects was launched; Iran became one of the largest buyers of arms in the world, and the Shah nurtured the dream of a "Great Civilization." The costly celebrations of the 2,500 years of the monarchy in 1350 were the symbol of this ambition—and, in the eyes of critics, of its gap with the everyday life of the people.

But beneath this prosperity, tensions accumulated: inflation, the rapid migration of villagers to the margins of the cities, inequality, and corruption around the court. The single-party Rastakhiz system in 1353 closed the political space, and SAVAK, with its extensive network of arrest, torture, and censorship, cast a shadow over dissidents—leftist, nationalist, and religious; the reports of human rights bodies in those years bore witness to this repression. On the eve of 1357, a country that appeared strong from the outside stood on the edge of explosion from within—a storm that the next chapter will recount.