Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the second and last shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, and the last monarch of Iran. Placed on the throne by British and Soviet occupiers in 1941, he became a powerful autocrat after a 1953 coup, pushed through rapid modernisation financed by oil, and allied Iran closely with the United States. His secret police were widely accused of torture, and he was swept away by the revolution of 1979, dying in exile the following year.

He was born in Tehran on 26 October 1919, the eldest son of the army officer who in 1925 became Reza Shah, and was proclaimed crown prince in 1926. He grew up in awe of a stern father, was sent in 1931 to the Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland and later trained as an army officer at home. In 1939 he married Princess Fawzia of Egypt, the first of his three wives.

When Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran in August 1941 and forced his father to abdicate, the 21-year-old crown prince took the oath as shah on 16 September 1941. For more than a decade real power lay with parliament, prime ministers and foreign powers. In 1951 the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh led parliament in nationalising the British-controlled oil industry, and the two men struggled for authority. In August 1953 a first attempt to replace Mosaddegh by royal decree failed and the shah fled to Baghdad and then Rome. Days later, on 19 August, crowds and army units organised with funds from the American CIA and British intelligence overthrew Mosaddegh in the 1953 coup, and the shah returned.

Over the following years the shah outmanoeuvred rival politicians and, by the 1960s, governed personally. In 1963 he launched the White Revolution, a reform programme presented as an attack on a backward, feudal order, which brought land reform and the vote for women. Clerical protests against it, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, were put down with at least 200 deaths, and Khomeini was later exiled. Fuelled by oil, the economy grew fast: real GDP per head nearly tripled between 1950 and 1979, and after the 1973 oil boom spending soared. With American help he built the strongest military in the Persian Gulf.

He crowned himself Shahanshah, King of Kings, in 1967 and in 1971 staged a lavish celebration at Persepolis of 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy. In 1975 he abolished the existing parties in favour of a single state party, Rastakhiz, and in 1976 replaced the Islamic calendar with an imperial one dated from Cyrus the Great. Critics described his government as a police state; the security service, SAVAK, was accused of torturing thousands of political prisoners. Wealth was unevenly shared, and inflation and shortages followed the oil boom.

From January 1978, protests sparked by a government-inspired newspaper attack on Khomeini spread across the country. On 8 September troops fired on demonstrators in Tehran's Jaleh Square, killing at least 64 and perhaps 100 or more. Oil workers struck in October, and by December millions were marching against him. The shah, secretly treated for leukaemia since 1974, wavered between concessions and repression, appointing a military government, freeing political prisoners and finally seeking a prime minister from the opposition. On 16 January 1979 he left Iran. Within a month the monarchy collapsed and Khomeini returned to lead the Iranian Revolution and the new Islamic Republic.

The exiled shah moved between Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States and Panama. His admission to a New York hospital in October 1979 for cancer treatment was followed on 4 November by the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, beginning the Iran hostage crisis. Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, finally gave him asylum. He died in Cairo on 27 July 1980, aged 60, received a state funeral and was buried in the city's al-Rifa'i Mosque. His legacy remains bitterly contested among Iranians.

Our 1945 and 1960 maps show Iran during his long reign, and the 1985 map shows the Islamic Republic that replaced his monarchy.