Reza Shah

Reza Shah Pahlavi (born Reza Khan; 15 March 1878 – 26 July 1944) was shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941 and founder of the roughly 53 years old Pahlavi dynasty. Originally a military officer, he became a politician, serving as minister of war and prime minister of Iran, and was elected shah following the deposition of the last monarch of the Qajar dynasty. Reza Shah's reign ended when he was forced to abdicate after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941. 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, though the Pahlavi dynasty he established was later overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

At the age of 14, Reza Khan joined the Persian Cossack Brigade. He rose through the ranks, becoming a brigadier general by 1921. In 1911, he was promoted to first lieutenant; he was elevated to the rank of captain by 1912, and he became a colonel by 1915. 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, Seyyed Zia appointed Reza Pahlavi as Iran's prime minister, backed by the compliant national assembly of Iran. In 1925, the constituent assembly deposed Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last Qajar 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 the spring of 1950, he was posthumously named as Reza Shah the Great (رضا شاه بزرگ) by Iran's National Consultative Assembly.

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.