The abdication of Reza Shah

Early on the morning of 16 September 1941, in the Marble Palace in Tehran, Reza Shah Pahlavi signed a short document drawn up for him by the prime minister, Mohammad Ali Foroughi. In it the sixty-three-year-old monarch, who sixteen years earlier had seized the crown himself, declared that he had exhausted his strength in the service of his country and that the time had come for “a younger force” to take charge of the affairs of state. He handed power to his eldest son and heir, the twenty-one-year-old Mohammad Reza, and called on “the whole nation, civilians and soldiers” to recognise him as shah from that day forward. The same day the old ruler left Tehran for Isfahan. Meanwhile columns of the Red Army were advancing on the capital from the direction of Qazvin.

It is usually said that the shah was “forced to step down” in favour of his son under pressure from Britain and the Soviet Union. That description is accurate. Formally it was a voluntary abdication, announced by the monarch himself and accepted by parliament; in reality it was imposed by the occupiers, who had invaded Iran three weeks earlier and had no intention of dealing with its ruler any longer.

A ceasefire that settled nothing

The fighting lasted only four days. On 27 August the shah dismissed the government of Ali Mansur and appointed as prime minister Mohammad Ali Foroughi, an educated and ailing politician, philosopher and translator who had already twice headed the government but had been in disgrace since 1935. On 28 and 29 August the order to cease resistance reached the troops, and on 30 and 31 August British and Soviet spearheads met at Sanandaj and near Qazvin, some 150 kilometres from the capital. The country was cut into a Soviet zone in the north and a British zone in the south and west.

The Allied terms, which Foroughi accepted at the beginning of September, provided for the departure of the German minister, Erwin Ettel, and his staff; the closure of the German, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian legations; the handing over of all Reich citizens; free transit for troops and supplies; and the continued presence of the occupying forces in the zones they held. The government agreed to everything, but the shah procrastinated. He regarded the surrender of the Germans, many of whom had worked for him for years, as a humiliation; he allowed some of them, above all women and children, to leave through Turkey, and several German intelligence agents managed to go into hiding in the country. According to British accounts, by mid-September most of the Germans were still not in Allied hands.

For London and Moscow this was proof that it was impossible to work with Reza Shah. The British were convinced that he was universally hated in Iran and that his removal would be greeted with relief. The British minister in Tehran, Reader Bullard, had long been reporting to London on the despotism and greed of the shah, who in the space of twenty years had become the largest landowner in the country. In the first half of September the BBC’s Persian service, on the air since December 1940, began broadcasting programmes about his rule: about political prisoners, forced expropriations and the fortune he had amassed at his subjects’ expense. They were widely listened to in Tehran. They sounded like a signal that Britain would no longer defend a monarch whom it had itself helped to power twenty years before.

The last days of the reign

According to some accounts, on 11 September Bullard demanded that Foroughi remove the shah in favour of the heir to the throne. The British also considered other solutions: a restoration of the Qajars, overthrown by Reza in 1925, or a regency. The Qajar pretender, however, was Hamid Mirza, a nephew of the last shah of that dynasty, Ahmad; he had been brought up in England, served in the Royal Navy and spoke no Persian. The idea was soon dropped. Moscow saw no need for a change of dynasty; what the Soviet Union wanted above all was quiet in its rear and an open supply route.

On 14 September London informed its commanders that the troops of both powers would enter Tehran as soon as this had been agreed with the Russians. According to Iranian accounts, on the same day the British and Soviet ministers presented the shah with an ultimatum: if he did not abdicate, the capital would be occupied and the monarchy abolished. The shah knew he no longer had anything to defend himself with. The army he had been building since 1921 had disintegrated, and during the invasion senior officers had discussed capitulation behind his back. Apart from himself and the heir, the royal family had been in Isfahan since the end of August. According to Iranian accounts, Reza Shah had told Foroughi and his ministers as early as 1 September that he was ready to abdicate; his chief concern was that the throne should pass to his son rather than into foreign hands.

On the morning of 16 September Soviet units set off from Qazvin towards the capital. Fear had already gripped Tehran; wealthy residents were leaving the city, afraid that the Red Army would bring reprisals with it. Foroughi, confined to bed with heart disease, concluded that the only way to save the monarchy and the state was an immediate abdication. He wrote the text himself and presented it to the shah, who signed it without delay.

Parliament and the oath

Still on the morning of 16 September, Foroughi and the foreign minister, Ali Soheili, appeared at an extraordinary sitting of the Majlis. The prime minister read out the act of abdication and announced that the shah had left the capital. Parliament, which for sixteen years had obeyed Reza Shah’s every word, received the news without objection. For Foroughi the most important thing was that the succession should take place quickly and in accordance with the constitution of 1906, before the occupiers had time to impose a different solution. According to Iranian accounts, the heir to the throne was brought to the parliament building in civilian clothes, hidden in a car, and taken in through a service entrance for fear that he might be detained.

Mohammad Reza took his oath on the Quran before the deputies on the afternoon of 17 September; according to some Iranian sources this happened as early as the afternoon of 16 September. He swore to safeguard the country’s independence and borders and to rule in accordance with the constitution. On his way back to the palace he was greeted by crowds, more warmly than the Allies would have liked. The British minister noted, however, that the ovation was probably an expression of relief at the father’s departure rather than of attachment to the son. The same day, 17 September, at around 3 p.m., British troops entered Tehran from the south and Soviet troops from the west and east. General Archibald Wavell wrote in his report that relations between the allies had been “most cordial”. The forces of both powers withdrew from the capital a month later, on 17 October; the country remained divided into occupation zones.

In the very first days of his reign the new shah announced an amnesty for his father’s political prisoners and promised constitutional government. Censorship was relaxed, and soon women were again permitted to wear the chador, banned since 1936. For the first time in two decades Iran came alive politically: the press revived and parties were founded, among them the communist Tudeh Party, established at the end of September 1941. Real power, however, lay with the prime minister, parliament and, above all, the occupiers.

The old shah’s exile

Reza Shah hoped to leave with his family for South America, preferably Argentina. From Isfahan he travelled via Kerman to the port of Bandar Abbas, from where he sailed with his closest relatives on a British ship on 27 September. It soon became clear that in British hands he was more a prisoner than a guest. In Bombay he was not allowed ashore, and in October he was taken to Mauritius, where he lived under supervision. In 1942 he obtained a transfer to the Union of South Africa, and he died in Johannesburg on 26 July 1944. His son never saw him again; they kept in touch by letter, and in a recorded message brought to him by one of his son’s trusted men, the father urged him to be steadfast and not to let himself be intimidated, since the slightest mistake could undo twenty years of the family’s work.

Place in the war

The abdication closed the political side of the invasion. The powers now had in Tehran a ruler who was young, unsure of himself and dependent on their goodwill, and Iran became a rear base of the anti-Hitler coalition. On 29 January 1942 Iran, Britain and the USSR concluded a treaty of alliance: London and Moscow undertook to respect Iran’s territorial integrity and independence and to withdraw their troops no later than six months after the end of the war, while Tehran undertook to make its railways, roads and ports available. Along the Trans-Iranian Railway and new roads, expanded by the Americans from 1942, millions of tons of equipment, fuel and food flowed to the USSR – by various calculations between a quarter and almost half of the tonnage of American Lend-Lease deliveries to the Soviet Union. By the same route, across the Caspian Sea, some 115,000 soldiers and civilians left the Soviet Union in 1942 with the army of General Władysław Anders, for whom Iran became the first refuge. For the Iranians themselves the occupation meant high prices, requisitions and hunger.

On 9 September 1943 Iran declared war on Germany. A few weeks later Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Tehran for the first Big Three conference. In a declaration on Iran published on 1 December 1943 they confirmed its independence and territorial integrity. The young shah, a host in name only, received Stalin, who was guarded exclusively by Soviet soldiers. After the war the British and Americans withdrew on time, but the Soviet Union delayed and backed separatists in Iranian Azerbaijan; its troops left Iran only in May 1946, after Tehran complained to the UN Security Council. The Iran crisis was one of the first confrontations of the Cold War.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, placed on the throne by the occupiers, reigned until 1979, and the memory of September 1941, when two foreign powers broke his father’s army in a few weeks and removed him from the country, stayed with him all his life. From that sense of humiliation grew his later obsession with a powerful army, and from the lesson that Iran’s fate was decided in London and Moscow came his search for support from a third power, this time the United States. For many Iranians, by contrast, Reza Shah’s abdication remained proof that it was foreigners who decided who ruled their country – a conviction that returned with full force in 1953 and in 1979.