A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  NEW MASKS, SAME OLD UGLY SISTERS

  It is usually said that the British and the Russians took over in Iran in 1941 because Reza Shah had shown himself to be pro-German and pro-Nazi, and the Allies feared that if they did not move in, then the Germans would. But the situation was more complex than that. At the time of the Anglo-Soviet intervention of 1941, no German armed forces were threatening Iran directly. The German push to take Baku and the Caucasus oil fields only came later, in the summer of 1942. The shah himself, despite having encouraged the Germans earlier to a certain extent, had been resisting German influence within the country.

  But when Britain and the Soviet Union were thrown into alliance in 1941 by Hitler’s invasion of Russia (in June), Britain’s position in the Middle East was looking uncertain. The crucial interests for Britain were the Suez Canal and the Iranian oil fields. Having defeated an Italian effort to break into Egypt from Libya in 1940, British forces in North Africa were put on the defensive by the arrival of Rommel and the German Afrika Korps. In the spring of 1941 they had to retreat back toward Alexandria, leaving a garrison to be surrounded in Tobruk. At about the same time, in April, there was an anti-British revolt in Iraq, encouraged by the Germans and assisted by Luftwaffe aircraft. This necessitated an intervention by British troops, who completed their occupation of the country by the end of May. In June, rattled by these developments, Britain sent British and Free French troops into Lebanon and Syria to unseat the Nazi-aligned Vichy French governments there.

  Seen in that context, the British and Soviet takeover of Iran in August 1941 looks more like part of a rounding-out of strategic policy in the region, at a particularly dangerous and uncertain moment for the Allies—part of the inexorable totalizing logic of the war itself. But Iran did have major significance in another aspect. Hitler’s successes—from Norway to Denmark to Poland to France to Yugoslavia to Greece, in 1940 and the early part of 1941—meant that the avenues for Britain and the Soviet Union to support each other were restricted to the hazardous Arctic route to Murmansk in the north, or some southern alternative. And once Hitler’s Barbarossa offensive had swept all before it in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the Soviets urgently needed supplies from the West to help equip the new armies to replace the Soviet troops that had been herded off into German camps or slave-labor factories as prisoners of war. The route from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian, arduous and long though it was, appeared to be an answer. By the end of the war, more than five million tons had been taken to Russia through Iran, by both road and rail—though this was a relatively small part of the overall effort.

  Reza Shah had flirted with the Nazi regime in the 1930s, and German diplomats had encouraged what they saw as the shah’s Aryanization of the language. Through the 1930s more German technicians and engineers arrived in Iran—the shah favored them as an alternative to the British, who were disliked and suspected by many Iranians. But the shah was as hostile to possible German meddling in Iran as he was to foreign meddling of any other kind. He also had a strong dislike for any nascent political movements—fascist or communist—that might oppose his government. A small group of apparently pro-fascist students were arrested in 1937, and their leader was later murdered in prison. In 1940 the police shot a prominent Zoroastrian in the street because his son had made pro-Nazi broadcasts in Germany. A group of Marxists were also arrested in 1937; most of them were given harsh prison sentences, and later went on to form the pro-Communist Tudeh party.13 These developments reflected the bitter polarization of politics between fascism and communism in Europe at the time. Some of these radicals were from that small elite who had been educated at European universities at the government’s expense. An upsurge of ugly anti-Semitic journalism contributed to a period of increased anxiety for Iranian Jews in the 1930s—and may have contributed to an increase in Jewish emigration to Palestine—but the notion of a rising tide of pro-Nazi and pro-German feeling among people and government before August 1941 has sometimes been overstated. The historian Ervand Abrahamian has suggested that the Allied intervention may have been not so much to remove a pro-Nazi shah as to forestall a pro-German coup against the shah, as had happened in Iraq.14

  The Allied demand that Iran should expel German nationals was nonetheless the immediate casus belli. After the demand was refused, the Allied invasion of Iran in August 1941 met only token opposition from the army on which Reza Shah had spent so much attention and money (this is where a comparison with Nader Shah finally breaks down), and after three days he ordered his troops to cease further resistance. British and Soviet forces met in central Iran and entered Tehran on September 17, 1941.

  The shah abdicated in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza, and the Allies maintained their control over the country until after the end of the war in 1945. It seems that Reza Shah’s relationship with his son had been something like that between a senior officer and a subordinate. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was educated in Switzerland in the 1930s, which did not bring him any closer to his parents or to the people he was going to rule. Mohammad Reza had a sharp mind but was socially shy and diffident—a legacy from his education and his relationship with his harsh father.

  The Allies were the immediate cause of Reza Shah’s abdication, but his removal was welcomed by most Iranians, and some have suggested that his unpopularity would have made it impossible for the Allies to rule with him still on the throne—even if he had accepted that arrangement.15 Reza went into exile in South Africa (where he died in July 1944).

  In December 1941 the United States joined the Allies against Germany and Japan, and in 1942 American troops joined the British and Russian forces occupying Iran. At the end of 1943 Tehran hosted the first great conference of the leaders of the three Allied powers. Among the arrangements that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt agreed upon for the conduct of the war—including opening a second front in western Europe in 1944—was the commitment to withdraw from Iran within six months of the war’s end.

  Ripples from the terrible events of the Holocaust also reached the country. In 1942 a group of orphaned children—refugees from the Jewish ghettoes and shtetls of Poland who had escaped into Russia only to be interned in Siberia and then sent by train southward—arrived in Iran on the Caspian coast, after many bitter hardships. They were brought to Tehran, where they were given help by the Iranian Jewish community and by Zionist organizations. Having recovered from the poor condition in which they arrived, 848 children eventually made their way to Palestine.16

  At the same time, a descendant of the Qajar royal family—Abdol-Hosein Sardari Qajar, who has been called the Iranian Schindler—was looking after the Iranian Embassy building in Paris after the embassy’s main functions had moved to Vichy. Sardari was left a supply of blank passports, and when Jews in Paris began to be rounded up by the Nazis in 1942, he began issuing them to Iranian Jews, many of whom had lived in Paris for some years. He also secured an assurance from the German authorities in Paris that Iranian citizens would not be detained or harmed. But as the measures against Jews in Paris intensified, French Jews with no Iranian connections began to come to him too, desperate for help. Becoming aware of the enormity of the crime being perpetrated by the Nazis, Sardari gave his passports —more than five hundred of them—to those Jews as well. After the war, Sardari’s government charged him with misconduct over these passports, but he was given a personal pardon by Mohammad Reza Shah. When asked later about what he had done for the Jews in Paris, Sardari apparently said it had been his duty to help Iranian citizens. When asked about the Jews who had not been Iranians, he said, “That was my duty as a human being.”17 Sardari died in 1981 and, in 2004, was posthumously given an award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

  While the war continued, Allied troops maintained their control in Iran, and the powers of the Pahlavi government were severely limited. But Mohammad Reza Shah had confirmed at his coronation that he would rule as a constitutional monarch, and in 1944 elections were held for the first genuinely representative Majles
since the 1920s. Many familiar figures from the constitutionalist period reappeared—notably Seyyed Zia Tabatabai and Mohammad Mossadeq, as well as some of the same nationalist landowners and officials who had been active in politics before Reza Khan became shah. They had just grown older.

  The humiliation of the invasion, the presence of the Allies, the food shortages, the economic disruption caused by the war, the weakness of the government—all of it helped to stimulate another upsurge in political activity, especially nationalistic feeling. One focus of this was again the unequal distribution of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s (AIOC) profits (the company had changed its name from Anglo-Persian in recognition of the Shah’s request that the country be known as Iran). The Iranian-based industry was the biggest and best developed in the Middle East at the time. But through taxation of the AIOC in the United Kingdom, the British government garnered more profit from the Iranian oil industry than the Iranian government did (nearly double over the period 1932–195018). The Allied occupation was unpopular, but the British and Russians were more unpopular than the Americans. A sign of this was that another figure from the past, Arthur Millspaugh, returned in November 1942 to his old job of running Iranian state finances. Although Millspaugh set to work with his usual diligence, he showed a lack of sensitivity to the political and social conditions of Iran at the time. His attempts to end food subsidies and to privatize state institutions eventually made him unpopular, and led to his resignation two years later.

  The shah tried to appeal to pro-American feeling, and to the United States for support. He made a speech drawing a comparison between Iranian nationalism and Iran’s struggle for independence, and American nationalism and America’s struggle for independence—from the British Empire, of course. In the heightened intensity of political debate under the Allied occupation, the young shah felt the need to appeal to popular opinion. As during the constitutionalist period, new newspapers—and this time, new political parties—proliferated. By 1943, there were forty-seven newspapers in Tehran (there would be seven hundred by 1951).19 Of the new parties, the most significant was the founding in 1941 of the pro-Communist Tudeh, which reoriented the intelligentsia in a pro-Tudeh, Marxist-leaning direction.20 Radio ownership was also expanding rapidly, exercising a further integrating influence and focusing the attention even of isolated villagers on national events and discussions.

  As the war came to an end, doubts began to arise over whether or not the Soviet troops would depart from Azerbaijan. Making use of the social democratic tradition in the region and the strong position of the Tudeh party there, the Russians pursued an imperialistic policy that prefigured and helped bring on the confrontation of the Cold War. They encouraged pro-Soviet secessionist movements in Azerbaijan—Kurdish as well as Azeri (there was more serious enthusiasm for secession among the Kurds than among the Azeris), with the aim of re-creating there something like the old Russian sphere of influence of 1907–1914. By the beginning of January 1946 British and American troops had left Iran, but the Soviets were still there in Azerbaijan, posing as protectors for Tudeh and the secessionists (there had been some attacks on Tudeh offices elsewhere in the country) and confronting the Iranian army on the margins of the province. Nationalist feeling in Tehran about the situation in the northwest was intense. Respected intellectuals like Ahmad Kasravi wrote of the danger that the country could split up entirely.

  Kasravi, born in Tabriz in 1890, was initially trained in a seminary and was involved in the dramatic events of the Constitutional Revolution in Azerbaijan. But he rejected his religious training when he learned that the comet he saw in 1910 had been predicted by European astronomers as the return of Halley’s comet, last seen in 1835: “I was pleased and happy that in Europe, knowledge had fallen into such a lucid path.” Kasravi turned from a clerical postulant into a wickedly intelligent critic of the ulema—but also a critic of many other aspects of contemporary Iranian society. His pamphlet What Is the Religion of the Hajjis with Warehouses? attacked the pious posturing of merchants who shamelessly pursued the sharpest of practices in their commercial dealings. Another, entitled Hasan Is Burning His Book of Hafez, attacked the disposition, as he saw it, of many Iranians to substitute quotations from the great poets for genuine thought. Devoted to the principles of constitutionalism and secular government, Kasravi was a nationalist who attacked the linguistic and other divisions that divided Iranians and, in his opinion, had made them weak. He worked for many years in the Ministry of Education and as a journalist and writer. In 1946 he was assassinated by a group of Islamic extremists, followers of a man who had chosen to call himself Navvab Safavi.21

  Kasravi is significant for a number of reasons. He stands for a certain strand of thinking in Iran, typical of the Pahlavi period in some ways, that became important again in the 1960s and 1970s, which rejected the backwardness of Shi‘ism and blamed it for many of the weaknesses and failures of the country. His thinking was influential among the middle classes who benefited from the opportunities that arose under the Pahlavis.

  His disapproval of the cult of Persian poetry is interesting because it again shows the cultural centrality of the great Persian poets—and points to the ambiguity in Iranian culture that they expressed and perhaps sustained. Roy Mottahedeh wrote:

  In fact, Persian poetry came to be the emotional home in which the ambiguity that was at the heart of Iranian culture lived most freely and openly. What Persian poetry expressed was not an enigma to be solved but an enigma that was unsolvable. In Persian poetry of any worth nothing was merely something else; the inner space of the spirit in which Persian poetry underwent its thousand transformations was ultimately a place where this ambiguous language reached a private emotional value that had to remain private, because to decode it as mere allegory, to reexpress it in any form of explanatory paraphrase would be to place it back in the public domain and, therefore, in the realm in which it was intended to remain ambiguous.22

  Eventually, after a tense period of negotiations and pressure from the United States and Britain, the Soviets announced their intention to withdraw from Iran. By the end of May 1946, their forces were gone. Iranian troops then marched in and reimposed central government control—with some brutality. The episode discredited the Soviet Union for many Iranians, but not so the members of Tudeh. The party grew in influence, took places in the government cabinet and helped to bring forward new labor laws, set maximum working hours, and established a minimum wage. But in 1949 Tudeh members were accused of instigating an assassination attempt against the young shah. After that the party was banned, and could only make its influence felt through underground activity or through sympathetic writers and journalists. The United States, profiting from the Russians’ unpopularity, increased its presence by bringing in advisers and technicians and by supplying training assistance to the army, as well as other aid. Nationalist feeling was gratified by the restoration of Iranian territorial integrity in Azerbaijan, and attention turned back to other grievances—especially to the question of oil.

  MOSSADEQ

  The assassination attempt of 1949 against the Shah precipitated an extended period of crisis, demonstrations, and martial law. In 1950 the shah appointed a new prime minister, Ali Razmara, but Razmara was not popular; he was suspected of pro-British sympathies, and his military background encouraged concern that the shah intended a return to the militaristic, autocratic style of government his father had favored in the 1930s. Over the same period, Mohammad Mossadeq assembled a broad coalition of Majles deputies that came to be called the National Front. It was organized around a central demand for oil nationalization, and Mossadeq was also widely believed to have reached an accommodation with Tudeh. The shah’s government attempted to negotiate with the AIOC for a revision of the terms of the oil concession, but the AIOC were slow to accept the fifty-fifty split of profits that had become the norm in oil agreements elsewhere in the world. The National Front and its demand for oil nationalization were greatly strengthened in Majles
elections in 1950, and in March 1951 Razmara was assassinated by the same extremist Islamic group that had murdered Kasravi. It was inevitable that Mossadeq, as the most popular politician in the country, would become prime minister.

  Mossadeq was nearly seventy in 1951. He had Qajar ancestry and had studied in Paris and Switzerland, taking a doctorate in law. Having left the country in protest at the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919, he had opposed Reza Shah’s accession to power and had been imprisoned for it, before returning to prominence in the 1940s. His whole life had been dedicated to the cause of Iranian national integrity and constitutional government. Under his leadership, the Majles voted on March 15, 1951, to nationalize Iranian oil. On April 28 they named Mossadeq prime minister.

  But nationalization created an impasse, as British technicians left the oil installations in Khuzestan and the British government imposed a blockade. No oil could be exported. Instead of contributing to the national revenue, the maintenance of oil installations and the salaries of oil workers became a drain on finances, gradually creating a large debt and wider economic problems. Mossadeq traveled to the United States in hopes of getting a loan, but he was refused. U.S. oil companies joined a boycott of Iranian oil, and the U.S. government was increasingly concerned at the apparent involvement of communists in the oil nationalization movement (Tudeh had led strikes and demonstrations). In hindsight, the U.S. position seems strange, given the plain fact that nationalization enjoyed broad support across most classes and shades of opinion. But the movement was vocally anti-British, and some voices anti-Western. In the atmosphere of the times, especially after the advent of the Eisenhower administration and of Senator Joe McCarthy, the involvement of an underground communist movement with Soviet support was enough to damn the whole phenomenon in U.S. eyes.