Young Turks and Angry Iranians
Several Western-educated Iranian economists, known as the Young Turks, advanced successful development policies in the 1960s, a period later termed the “Golden Decade.” During this period, Iran enjoyed high economic growth and low inflation. From 1960 to 1976, Iran’s national income grew at a rate unmatched worldwide. By the end of this period, however, some of these same economists warned the Shah that the economy could not absorb the volume of investment he demanded. They predicted social unrest, and their forecasts proved correct. The problem was that the Shah’s modernization program involved massive spending, which fueled inflation and, in turn, eroded the living standards of average Iranians. Rising unemployment in the 1970s widened an already deep economic chasm between rural and urban residents. Years later, observers of Iran speculated about why so many Iranians wanted the Shah removed when he was determined to better their lives. Much of the answer lies in the socioeconomic divide. Despite a rising middle class, mass destitution persisted. By the end of the 1970s, Tehran's slum dwellers were desperate and had little to lose from any regime change.
A similar picture would reemerge decades later, when Iranians protested against desperate economic conditions under the mullahs’ rule. Compounding the problem, approximately 100,000 Iranian university students were abroad in the late 1970s. More than one-third of these students were studying in the United States, making Iranians the largest group of students from any single country. For many, the contrast between domestic living standards and those abroad led them to be swayed by the charismatic Khomeini, who they came to regard as feckless and unresponsive to the needs of their countrymen.
The shah’s position weakened as merchants, shopkeepers, and business owners—known as bazaaris—joined their religious countrymen in nationwide protests. Workers and university students followed, and strikes began crippling oil production. Strike leaders organized through neighborhood committees (komitehs), and neighborhood mosques became centers of revolutionary activity. Iran’s diverse ethnic groups, social strata, and educational cohorts found a common language in Khomeini's words.
His sermons stirred a renewed sense of Islamic identity and unity. The students were estranged and angry; the clergy were disappointed; and the bazaaris were fatalistic. The shah no longer controlled the megaphone of popular opinion, which was increasingly concentrated in Ayatollah Khomeini’s hands. Competing philosophies and organizations challenged Khomeini’s leadership as the Tudeh Party resurfaced and gained renewed popularity.
As the army began to disintegrate, communist activists promoted mutiny. Revolutionary elements attacked police stations and seized armories and weapons depots. The once-proud military began to collapse from within. Mass defections across all ranks sapped the military’s capabilities. Some army leaders changed sides, including the top commanders of the Imperial Guards. Police deserted the streets, and their stations were ransacked by street demonstrators and the Komiteh, which were likened to the committees led by Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917–21.
Perhaps because of this communist aspect, left-wing Western intellectuals were initially sympathetic to the revolutionaries. They were more drawn to the Islamic elements in Khomeini’s religious philosophy than to his anti-Americanism. With the shah’s overthrow, which they saw as the fall of a Washington satrap, Western progressives celebrated the street demonstrations as marches against imperialism, repression, and capitalism. French philosopher Michel Foucault went so far as to write that revolution was a “magnificent political creation.”
This Western apologia for the Iranian Revolution persisted even after its Islamist direction became irrevocably entrenched; indeed, over the years, American hard-leftists and some Muslims continued to laud the events of 1979. In 2016, leading a Nation of Islam delegation to Iran to mark the Revolution’s anniversary, Louis Farrakhan expressed the view that “the black people of America are in the mud of civilization,” while Iranian mullahs were at the head of a force of liberation.
Today, Guardian-run media celebrate Western intellectuals who lambaste their countries and praise or exonerate Iran, creating a seemingly absurd situation in which the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, praised Iran’s Press TV as the only station that gives him regular airtime. At the same time, many Western observers viewed the revolution as a disaster and regarded the shah as a misunderstood and tragic leader. Sir Anthony Parsons, London’s last envoy to the royal court, wept at his final meeting with the shah. The shah’s future biographer, Abbas Milani, opined that Mohammad Reza Pahlevi was neither a hero nor a villain. Rather, he was an Iranian tragedy, in Milani’s paraphrase of Shakespeare, “one that loved not wisely but too well.” The social edifice he and his father had built crumbled quickly, revealing many cracks in its foundation.
In the wake of the revolution, diplomats, intelligence professionals, politicians, journalists, and many others in Washington tried to make sense of what had happened. Ironically, it was the shah’s final appeal to liberalism that gave Khomeini the opportunity to organize and gather newly released political prisoners. The “King of Kings” and his family fled. Bulldozers leveled the first Pahlevi Shah’s mausoleum. In place of Machine Gun Reza Shah’s tomb, the revolutionary regime built public toilets. The U.S. embassy, from which fifty-two American hostages were abducted, faced a different fate. Known as the “den of spies,” it was later converted into a museum. At the entrance stands a painted-bronze plastic statue of a United States Marine surrendering to Iranian students.
The Shah and the Ayatollah
The Iranian Revolution shared similarities with its Russian predecessor, which pitted the Russian tsar against an obscure, angry revolutionary. The vacillating tsar lost his throne and his life, changing the world. After Ayatollah Khomeini drove Shah Mohammad Pahlevi from Iran, the world would change once again. Mohammed lived in his father’s shadow, lacking the charisma, shrewdness, or luck of his progenitor. The younger Pahlevi made choices that would haunt him, including an alliance with the United States. He made enemies in the Islamic world by inviting Israeli scientists and educators to help modernize his country. He was part of an international jet set and felt at home in Europe, which provided fodder for his opponents, chief among them Khomeini. Much like Nicholas II, Pahlevi was often aloof and indecisive.
Like the Russian tsar, the Iranian shah was haunted by his choice of wives, particularly his third. Empress Farah skied in St. Moritz and mingled with Western royalty. Yet many Iranians believed she promoted cultural corruption and hoped to rid the country of her. The shah, however, supported her efforts as part of his broader plan to modernize Iran’s society and economy. In his final years, the shah was stricken with cancer and bewildered by events he could no longer control. His last recorded words were “I wait upon Fate, never ceasing to pray for Iran and for my people. I think only of their suffering.”
If the shah shared many personality traits with Russia’s last tsar, his chief nemesis, Khomeini, who was wholly dedicated to the revolution, might have found a kindred soul in Lenin. Like the Soviet leader, Khomeini was relentlessly driven to destroy his enemies and forge an unforgiving radical system. Both men scowled often, and it is difficult to find pictures of either smiling. Both men generated emotional lava among their followers. Like Lenin, Khomeini spoke of smashing his enemies. In one sermon in 1964, he threatened to “smash parliament up” and “punch” its deputies “in the mouth.” Like Lenin, whose speeches evinced a profound hatred for Nicholas II, Khomeini called the shah a “wretched, miserable man.” And if memories of the Russian Revolution conjure up images of Lenin giving fiery speeches, inciting his followers with an angrily raised fist, the popularity of Khomeini’s political philosophy of Velayat-e faqih owed much, if not everything, to his exceptional oratory skills.
In vindictiveness, too, Khomeini mirrored Lenin, settling scores after he took power by targeting a long list of enemies, including secularists, Jews, the Baha’i community, Israel, and the United States. Like Lenin, he created an intelligence and security service to identify and eliminate enemies at home and abroad. During his ten-year rule, Khomeini executed far more prisoners than the Shah did in his thirty-seven-year reign, much as Lenin was responsible for the deaths of many thousands more people than the allegedly Bloody Nicholas. Nonetheless, when Khomeini died, he was, like Lenin, hailed as a national hero and is still mourned by millions.
