Iran: Empire of the Mind (38 page)

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 south-east to take Baku and the Caucasus oilfields 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 oilfields. 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, and in the spring of 1941 had to retreat back towards 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, necessitating 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 totalising logic of the war itself. But Iran did have major significance in another aspect. Hitler’s successes from Norway to Denmark to Poland and France, Yugoslavia and 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 masses of Soviet troops that were being herded off into German camps or slave-labour 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 5 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 Aryanisation of the language. Through the 1930s more German technicians and engineers arrived in Iran—the Shah favoured them as an alternative to the British, who were disliked and suspected by Shah and people alike. But the Shah was as hostile to possible German meddling in Iran as to any other kind of foreign meddling, and he disliked nascent fascist groups as much as any other communist or other political movements 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, like others on whom the Shah’s displeasure had fallen. In 1940 a prominent Zoroastrian was shot in the street by the police 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 polarisation of politics between fascism and communism in Europe at the time. Some of these radicals were from that small élite that
had been educated at European universities at the government’s expense. There was an upsurge of ugly anti-Semitic journalism that 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 overdone. 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 favour 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
¹⁵
(even if he had accepted that arrangement). Reza went into exile in South Africa and died there in July 1944. The USA joined the Allies against Germany and Japan in December 1941 and American troops joined the British and Russian forces occupying Iran in 1942. At the end of 1943 Tehran hosted the first great conference between the leaders of the three Allied powers, who (among the arrangements they set up for the conduct of the war, including the undertaking to
open a second front in Western Europe in 1944) made a commitment to withdraw from Iran within six months of the war’s end.

Fig. 16. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in the first of their great conferences in Tehran in 1943, and made promises to respect the sovereignty of Iran that were only patchily observed.

Ripples from the terrible events of the Holocaust also reached Iran. 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 released with other Poles and sent out of the Soviet Union by train southwards, arrived in Iran on the Caspian coast after many bitter hardships and were brought to Tehran, where they were given help by the Iranian Jewish community there and by Zionist organisations. 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 removed 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 to issue them to Iranian Jews (a number 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, desperate for help. Becoming aware of the enormity of the crime being perpetrated by the Nazis, Sardari gave his passports (more than 500 of them) to those Jews as well. Sardari was charged with misconduct over these passports by the Iranian government after the war, but was given a personal pardon by Mohammad Reza Shah. He died in 1981, and was posthumously given an award by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in 2004. After the war, when asked about what he had done for the Jews in Paris, Sardari had apparently said it had been his duty to help Iranian citizens. When asked about the Jews that had not been Iranians, he said ‘That was my duty as a human being’.
¹⁷

In the meantime Allied troops maintained their control in Iran and the powers of the Pahlavi government were severely limited. But 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 Tabataba’i and Mohammad Mossadeq; many of them were the same nationalist landowners and officials that had been active in politics before Reza Khan became Shah, except they had grown older. Mohammad Reza Shah had confirmed at his coronation that he would rule as a constitutional monarch.

The humiliation of the invasion, the presence of the Allies, the food shortages and economic disruption caused by the war and the weakness of the government helped to stimulate another upsurge in political activity, and especially nationalistic feeling. One focus of this was again the unequal distribution of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s profits. The Iranian-based industry was still much 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 1932-1950
¹⁸
). 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, trying to end food subsidies and to privatise state institutions (which eventually made him unpopular, and led to his resignation two years later).

The Shah tried to appeal to pro-American feeling, and to the US for support. He made a speech drawing a comparison between Iranian nationalism, and Iran’s struggle for independence, and American nationalism (implying a reference to US declaration of independence from the British Empire in the eighteenth century). The young Shah felt the need to appeal to popular opinion in the heightened intensity of political debate that had developed under the Allied occupation. As during the Constitutionalist period, new newspapers, and this time, new political parties, proliferated. By 1943 there were forty-seven newspapers in Tehran; 700 by 1951.
¹⁹
Most significant of the new parties was the founding of the pro-communist Tudeh (The Masses) in 1941; there was a reorientation among intellectuals 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 the departure of Soviet troops 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 to bring on the confrontation of the Cold War, encouraging 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 recreating there something like the old Russian sphere of influence of 1907-1914, in another form. By the beginning of January 1946 British and American troops had left Iran, but the Soviet troops 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 north-west was intense. Respected intellectuals like Ahmad Kasravi wrote of the danger that the country could split up entirely.

Kasravi was 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 rejected his religious training when he learned that the comet he saw there 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. The title of his pamphlet
What is the Religion of the Hajjis with Warehouses?
speaks for itself. Another, entitled
Hasan is Burning his Book of Hafez
attacked the disposition, as he saw it, of many Iranians to substitute quotation from the great poets for genuine thought. Kasravi was devoted to the principles of Constitutionalism and secular government—he was a nationalist, and 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
.