Reza Shah Pahlavi (; ; 15 March 1878 – 26 July 1944) was an Iranian military officer, politician (who served as minister of war and prime minister), and first shah of the House of Pahlavi of the Imperial State of Iran and father of the last shah of Iran. He reigned from 15 December 1925 until he was forced to abdicate by the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran on 16 September 1941. A modernizer, Reza Shah clashed with the Shia clergy, but also introduced many social, economic, and political reforms during his reign, ultimately laying the foundation of the modern Iranian state. Therefore, he is regarded by many as the founder of modern Iran.
At the age of 14 he joined the Iranian Cossack Brigade, and also served in the army. In 1911, he was promoted to first lieutenant, by 1912 he was elevated to the rank of captain and by 1915 he became a colonel. In February 1921, as leader of the entire Cossack Brigade based in Qazvin, 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, Seyyed Zia appointed Reza Pahlavi as Iran's prime minister, backed by the compliant national assembly of Iran. In 1925, Reza Pahlavi was appointed as the legal monarch of Iran by the decision of Iran's constituent assembly. The assembly deposed Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last Shah of the Qajar dynasty, and amended Iran's 1906 constitution to allow selection of Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran. He founded the Pahlavi dynasty that lasted until overthrown in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution.
In the spring of 1950, he was posthumously named as Reza Shah the Great () by Iran's National Consultative Assembly.
His legacy remains controversial to this day. His defenders assert that he was an essential reunifying and modernizing force for Iran, while his detractors (particularly the Islamic Republic of Iran) assert that his reign was often despotic, with his failure to modernize Iran's large peasant population eventually sowing the seeds for the Iranian Revolution nearly four decades later, which ended 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy. Moreover, his insistence on ethnic nationalism and cultural unitarism, along with forced detribalization and sedentarization, 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.
Early life
Reza Shah Pahlavi was born in the town of Alasht in Savadkuh County, Mazandaran Province, in 1878, to son of Major Abbas-Ali Khan and wife Noush-Afarin. His mother was a Georgian Muslim immigrant from Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), whose family had emigrated to Qajar Iran when it was forced to cede all of its territories in the Caucasus following the Russo-Persian Wars several decades prior to Reza Shah's birth. His father was a Mazanderani, commissioned in the 7th Savadkuh Regiment, and served in the Siege of Herat in 1856. Abbas-Ali died suddenly on 26 November 1878, when Reza was barely 8 months old. Upon his father's death, Reza and his mother moved to her brother's house in Tehran. She remarried in 1879 and left Reza to the care of his uncle. In 1882, his uncle in turn sent Reza to a family friend, Amir Tuman Kazim Khan, an officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade, in whose home he had a room of his own and a chance to study with Kazim Khan's children with the tutors who came to the house. When Reza was sixteen years old, he joined the Persian Cossack Brigade. In 1903, when he was 25 years old, he is reported to have been guard and servant to the Dutch consul general Fridolin Marinus Knobel. Maurits Wagenvoort, who met and spoke to Reza at a meeting of the "Babi-circle of Hadsji Achont" in Tehran in 1903, in a publication from 1926 speaks of him as the "gholam of His Presence the Dutch Consul" and noted his very keen interest in Western politics.