Pahlavi Iran

Pahlavi Iran, officially the Imperial State of Iran, was the Iranian monarchy of the Pahlavi dynasty from 1925 to 1979. It had only two shahs, the soldier Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under them Iran was centralised and rapidly modernised, became a major oil producer and a close ally of the West, and was governed in an increasingly authoritarian way. The monarchy was overthrown in the revolution of 1979.

The last decades of Qajar Iran had left the country weak, divided into foreign spheres of influence and damaged by the First World War and famine. In February 1921 Reza Khan, a brigadier in the Persian Cossack Brigade, marched into Tehran with a few thousand troops and became commander of the army. He put down regional revolts, became prime minister in 1923 and had parliament remove the Qajars. In December 1925 a constituent assembly made him shah. He chose the name Pahlavi, recalling the Middle Persian language of the Sasanian era.

Reza Shah built a national army of about 100,000 men, a modern civil service and a centralised state. His reign saw the Trans-Iranian Railway, thousands of miles of new roads, state schools and the University of Tehran, the country's first. He required Western dress for men and from 1936 pressed women to give up the veil, policies that angered much of the clergy. In 1935 he asked foreign governments to call the country Iran rather than Persia. In August 1941, after he refused to expel German nationals, British and Soviet forces invaded, and he abdicated in favour of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

During the war Iran served as a supply route to the Soviet Union. Soviet troops stayed on in the north-west after 1945, supporting breakaway governments in Azerbaijan and Mahabad, until international pressure brought their withdrawal in 1946. In 1951 parliament voted to nationalise the British-owned oil industry and chose its leading advocate, Mohammad Mosaddegh, as prime minister. Britain responded with a boycott of Iranian oil. In August 1953, after the shah had briefly fled the country, a coup planned by the American CIA and British intelligence overthrew Mosaddegh; between 200 and 300 people are reported to have died in the fighting. The United States officially acknowledged its role in 2013. Historians have debated how much weight to give to Iranian royalists, army officers and clergy compared with the foreign agencies.

After 1953 the shah ruled with growing personal power and close American support. In 1963 he launched the White Revolution, a programme that included land reform, votes for women, a literacy corps and profit-sharing for industrial workers. Oil revenues paid for fast growth and a large military build-up, and in 1971 the monarchy staged lavish celebrations of 2,500 years of Persian kingship. The gains were unevenly shared, and inflation and the gap between rich and poor grew. Opponents, from communists to Islamists, were pursued by the secret police, SAVAK, and the Pahlavi state's use of torture and executions against political dissent is well documented.

The cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led opposition to the White Revolution, was exiled in 1964. Protests began in late 1977 and grew through 1978, joined by strikes across the economy. On 8 September 1978, a day called Black Friday by the opposition, troops fired on a crowd in Tehran's Jaleh Square. Khomeini spoke of thousands of dead, while later counts put the toll at fewer than a hundred. The shah left Iran on 16 January 1979, Khomeini returned on 1 February, and by 11 February the monarchy had collapsed. Estimates of those killed during the Iranian Revolution vary widely, from a researcher's count of 2,781 protesters in 1978–79 to the much higher figures given by Khomeini. The Islamic Republic of Iran took its place, and the last shah died in Egypt in 1980.

Our 1930, 1938, 1945 and 1960 maps label the Pahlavi state "Iran", bordered by the Soviet Union to the north and Turkey and Iraq to the west.