Reza Shah

Reza Shah Pahlavi (previously Reza Khan; 15 March 1878 – 26 July 1944) was Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941 and founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. 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, Reza Pahlavi became Iran's prime minister, backed by the compliant national assembly of Iran. In 1925, the constituent assembly deposed Ahmad 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.