Shah of Shahs

by Ryzard Kapuscinski

  But finally it's no fun trying to predict just whose ambush is awaiting you, whose trap you'll fall into. People don't like surprises, so they barricade themselves in their homes at night. My hotel is also locked (at this hour the sound of gunfire mingles with the creaking of shutters rolling down and the slamming shut of gates and doors). No friends will drop by; nothing like that will happen. I have no one to talk to. I'm sitting alone looking through notes and pictures on the table, listening to taped conversations.

  DAGUERREOTYPES

  Photograph 1

  Here's the oldest picture I've managed to obtain. A soldier, holding a chain in his right hand, and a man, at the end of the chain. The two gaze intently into the lens. This is clearly an important moment in their lives. The soldier is an older man, on the short side, a simple, obedient peasant, wearing an oversized, clumsily stitched uniform, trousers rumpled like an accordion, a big cap tilted onto protruding ears—in sum, an amusing figure reminiscent of the good soldier Schweik. The man on the chain: thin, pale face, sunken eyes, bandaged head, obviously wounded. The photo's caption says the soldier is the grandfather of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (the last Shah of Iran) and the wounded man is the assassin of Shah Nasr-ed-Din. Accordingly, the photo must date from 1896, when Nasr-ed-Din, after reigning for forty-nine years, was killed. The grandfather and the murderer look tired, which is understandable, since they have been wandering for days from Qom to the place of public execution in Teheran. They have been trudging down the desert road in scorching heat and stifling air, the soldier at the rear and the gaunt killer before him on his chain, like a member of an old-time circus troupe and his trained bear working their way from village to village, earning food for themselves. At times the assassin complains about the pain in his injured head but for the most part they are silent, because finally they have nothing to talk about. The murderer has killed, and the grandfather is leading him to his execution. Persia is a country of extreme poverty; it has no railroads, only the aristocracy own horse-drawn conveyances, and thus these two men must walk to the distant goal established by sentence and order. From time to time they come across a few clay huts where haggard peasants surround the dusty travelers. "Who is that you're leading, sir?" they shyly ask the soldier. "Who?" the soldier repeats the question and holds his tongue for a moment to heighten the suspense. "This," he says finally, pointing to the prisoner, "is the Shah's murderer." The grandfather's voice betrays a note of unconcealed pride. The peasants gape at the assassin in horror and admiration. Because he's killed someone great, he also seems somehow great. His crime has elevated him to a higher realm of existence. The peasants cannot decide between glowering indignantly and falling to their knees. Meanwhile, the soldier ties the chain to a stake driven into the ground at the roadside, unslings his rifle (which is so long, it almost touches the ground when slung over his shoulder), and orders the peasants to bring water and food. They scratch their heads. There is almost nothing to eat in the village, because a famine is raging. We should add that the soldier himself is a peasant, just like them, and no more than they does he even have a surname of his own—he calls himself Savad-Kuhi, the name of his village—but he has a carbine and a uniform and has been singled out to lead the Shah's assassin to the place of execution, so he takes advantage of his high position and again commands the peasants to bring water and food, since he is excruciatingly hungry and, furthermore, cannot allow the man on the chain to perish of thirst or exhaustion. If that happened, the extraordinary spectacle of hanging the Shah's assassin in a crowded Teheran square would have to be canceled. Badgered ruthlessly by the soldier, the peasants end up bringing what they themselves would have eaten: withered rootlets dug from the ground and a canvas pouch full of dried locusts. The grandfather and the murderer sit down in the shade to eat, eagerly popping locusts into their mouths, spitting out the wings, and washing the remains down with water, while the peasants look on in silent envy. As evening draws near, the soldier chooses the best hut, throws out its owners, and turns it into a temporary jail. He winds the prisoner's chain around his own body, then, tired from countless hours of marching under the blazing sun, the two stretch out on the clay floor black with cockroaches and fall into deep sleep. In the morning they get up and continue on the road to the goal established by sentence and order, northward, to Teheran, across the same desert, in the same quivering heat, the murderer with his bandaged head, his long swinging tail of iron chain held up by the hand of the escorting soldier, in his clumsily sewn uniform, looking so comical with his large cap resting askew on his protruding ears that when I first saw him in this photo I thought it was Schweik himself.

  Photograph 2

  Here we see a young officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade standing next to a machine gun and explaining the principles of the deadly weapon to his colleagues. This particular weapon is the updated 1910 model of the Maxim gun, so the photograph must be from about that year. The young officer, named Reza Khan and born in 1878, is the son of the soldier-escort we met leading the Shah's murderer across the desert less than two decades earlier. If we compare the two pictures, we immediately notice that Reza Khan, unlike his father, is a physical giant. He is taller than his colleagues by at least a head, has a bulging chest, and looks like the sort of muscleman who could break a horseshoe with ease. He has a military mien, a cold, piercing look, a wide, massive jaw, and clenched lips on which even the faintest smile would be out of the question. On his head sits a broad cap of black caracul, for he is, as I have mentioned, an officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade (the only army that the Shah of those days had) commanded by Vsevolod Lyakhov, a Tsarist colonel from St. Petersburg. Reza Khan is the protégé of Colonel Lyakhov, who has a fondness for born soldiers, and our young officer is the model of the born soldier. He joined the Brigade as an illiterate boy of fourteen (he will never learn to read and write well) and climbed gradually through the echelons of professional soldiery thanks to his Obedience, discipline, decisiveness, innate intelligence, and what the military likes to call leadership quality. Great promotions come his way only after 1917, however, when the Shah, (quite mistakenly) suspecting Lyakhov of Bolshevik sympathies, sends him back to Russia. Now Reza Khan becomes a colonel and the commander of the Cossack Brigade, which soon falls under British protection. At a reception the British general Sir Edmund Ironside stands on tiptoe to reach Reza Khan's ear and whispers, "Colonel, you are a man of great possibilities." They walk out into the garden where the general, in the course of their stroll, suggests a coup d'état and conveys London's blessings. In February, 1921, Reza Khan enters Teheran at the head of his brigade, arrests the capital's politicians (it is winter, snow is falling; the politicians will later complain about their cold damp cells), and forms a new government, in which he serves first as Minister of War and then as Prime Minister. In December, 1925, the obedient Constitutional Assembly (which fears the colonel and the Englishmen standing behind him) proclaims the cossack commander Shah of Persia. From now on our young officer—in the photograph explaining the principles of the updated 1910-model Maxim machine gun to his colleagues (all wearing belted Russian peasant shirts and quilted jackets)—will be known as Shah Reza the Great, King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, God's Vicar and the Center of the Universe, and also as founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, which begins with him and, destiny decrees, ends with his son, who, on a winter morning as chilly as the day his father seized power and throne, fifty-eight years later, will depart the palace and Teheran, by jet, to an ambiguous fate.

  Photograph 3

  Whoever scrutinizes this photo of father and son, taken in 1926, will understand a lot. The father is forty-eight and the son seven. The contrast between them is striking in every respect: The huge, powerful Shah-father stands sulkily, peremptorily, hands on his hips, and beside him the small pale boy, frail, nervous, obediently standing at attention, barely reaches his father's waist. They are wearing the same uniforms and caps, the same shoes and belts, and the same number of buttons: f
ourteen. The father, who wants his son—so essentially unlike him—to resemble him in as many details as possible, thought up this identity of apparel. The son senses this intention, and, though he is by nature weak and hesitant, he will try at all costs to resemble his despotic, ruthless father. From that moment two natures begin to develop and coexist in the boy: the inborn one and the parental one that, because of his ambitions, he starts to acquire. Finally he falls so totally under his father's domination that when he becomes Shah many years later, he automatically (but also, often, consciously) repeats Daddy's behavior and even, toward the end of his reign, invokes his father's authority. But at this moment the father is assuming power with all his inborn energy and drive. He has an acute sense of mission and knows what he is after—in his own brutal words, he wants to put the ignorant mob to work and build a strong modern state before which all will beshit themselves in fear. His are the Prussian's iron hand, the slavedriver's simple methods. Ancient, slumbering, loafing Iran (on the Shah's orders, Persia will hereafter be called Iran) trembles to its foundations. He begins by creating an imposing army. A hundred and fifty thousand men get uniforms and guns. The army is the apple of the Shah's eye, his great passion. The army must always have money. It must have everything. The army will make the nation modern, disciplined, obedient. Everyone: Attention! The Shah issues an order forbidding Iranian dress. Everyone, wear European suits! Everyone, don European hats! The Shah bans chadors. In the streets, police tear them off terrified women. The faithful protest in the mosques of Meshed. He sends in the artillery to level the mosques and massacre the rebels. He orders that the nomadic tribes be settled permanently. The nomads protest. He orders their wells poisoned, threatening them with death by thirst and starvation. The nomads keep protesting, so he sends out punitive expeditions that turn vast regions into uninhabited land. A lot of blood flows. He forbids the photographing of that symbolically backward beast, the camel. In Qom a mullah preaches a critical sermon, so, armed with a cane, the Shah enters the mosque and pummels the critic. He imprisons the great Ayatollah Madresi, who had raised his voice in complaint, in a dungeon for years. The liberals protest timorously in the newspapers, so the Shah closes down the newspapers and imprisons the liberals. He orders several of them walled up in a tower. Those he considers malcontents must report daily to the police. Aristocratic ladies faint in terror at receptions when this gruff unapproachable giant turns his harsh gaze on them. Until the end Reza Khan preserves many of the habits of his village childhood and his barracks youth. He lives in a palace but still sleeps on the floor; he always goes around in uniform; he eats with his soldiers from the same pot. One of the boys! At the same time, he covets land and money. Taking advantage of his power, he accumulates incredible wealth. He becomes the biggest landowner, proprietor of nearly three thousand villages and the two hundred and fifty thousand peasants living in them; he owns stock in factories and banks, receives tribute, counts, totes, adds, calculates—if a splendid forest, green valley, or fertile plantation so much as catches his eye, it must be his—indefatigably, insatiably he increases his estates, multiplying his enormous fortune. No one may even approach the borders of the Shah's lands. One day there is a public execution: On the Shah's orders a firing squad kills a donkey that, ignoring all warning signs, entered a meadow belonging to Reza Khan. Peasants from neighboring villages are herded to the place of execution to learn respect for the master's property. But apart from his cruelty, greed, and outlandishness, the old Shah deserves credit for saving Iran from the dissolution that threatened after the First World War. In his efforts to modernize the country he built roads and railways, schools and offices, airports and new residential quarters in the cities. The nation remained poor and apathetic, however, and when Reza Khan departed, an exultant people celebrated the event for a long time.

  Photograph 4

  Here's a picture that circulated around the world in its time: Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill sitting in armchairs on a spacious veranda. Stalin and Churchill are wearing uniforms, Roosevelt a dark suit. Teheran, a sunny December morning, 1943. Everybody in this picture is putting on a serene face meant to cheer us; after all, we know that the worst war in history is underway and the expression on these faces is crucial: It has to encourage us. The photographers finish, and the three great ones move into the hall for a moment of private conversation. Roosevelt asks Churchill what has become of the ruler of this country, Shah Reza (if, Roosevelt adds, I'm pronouncing it correctly). Churchill shrugs his shoulders and speaks reluctantly. The Shah admired Hitler and surrounded himself with Hitler's people. There were Germans all over Iran, in the palace, the ministries, the army. The Abwehr became a force to reckon with in Teheran, and the Shah looked on approvingly—Hitler was at war with England and Russia, and our monarch could not tolerate England and Russia; he rubbed his hands gleefully as the Führer's armies advanced. London was worried about Iranian oil, which fueled the British fleet, and Moscow was afraid the Germans would land in Iran and attack in the region of the Caspian Sea. But the major concern remained the trans-Iranian railroad, which the Americans and the British needed to transport food and weapons to Stalin. Then, at a moment of crisis, as German divisions were advancing farther and farther eastward, the Shah suddenly refused the Allies use of the railroad. They moved decisively: Units of the British and Red armies entered Iran in August, 1941. The Shah received with disbelief, as a personal humiliation and defeat, news that fifteen Iranian divisions had surrendered without much resistance. Some of his troops dispersed and went home, while others were locked up in their barracks by the Allies. Deprived of his soldiers the Shah no longer mattered, no longer existed. The British, who respect even those monarchs who betray them, left Reza Khan an honorable way out: Would His Highness kindly abdicate in favor of his son, the heir to the throne? We have a high opinion of him and will ensure his position. But His Highness should not think there is any other solution. The Shah agreed and in September of that year, 1941, his twenty-two-year-old son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi ascended the throne. The old autocrat was a private person now, and for the first time in his adult life he put on civilian clothes. The British sent him to Africa, to Johannesburg (where he died after three years of a dull, comfortable life about which there is not much to say). Empire giveth; empire taketh away.

  From the Notes 1

  I see I'm missing or have misplaced a few pictures. I don't have the shots of the last Shah in his early youth. I don't have the one from 1939 when he was attending officers' school in Teheran: On his twentieth birthday his father promoted him to general. I don't have a picture of his first wife, Fawzia, bathing in milk. Yes, Fawzia, King Farouk's sister and a girl of striking beauty, bathed in milk—but Princess Ashraf, the young Shah's twin sister and, as some say, his evil genius, his black conscience, poured caustic detergent into the bathtub: yet another palace scandal. But I do have a picture of the last Shah on September 16, 1941, when he succeeded his father and was crowned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Slender, in a dress uniform, a sword at his side, he is standing in the chambers of parliament and reading the text of the oath from a sheet of paper. This picture was repeated in all the published commemorative albums devoted to the Shah, of which there were scores, if not hundreds. He loved reading books about himself and looking through albums published in his honor. He loved unveiling his monuments and portraits. Catching a glimpse of the monarch's likeness was nearly unavoidable. To stand in any given place and open your eyes was enough: The Shah was everywhere. Since height was not his strong point, photographers always shot from angles that made him seem the tallest person in the picture. He furthered this illusion by wearing elevator shoes. His subjects kissed his shoes. I have just such a picture, where they are prostrating themselves and kissing his elevator shoes. On the other hand, I don't have a photo of a certain uniform of his, from 1949. That apparel, pocked with bullet holes and stained with blood, was displayed in a glass case at the officers' club in Teheran as relic and reminder. The Shah was w
earing it when a young man pretending to be a photographer but with a gun built into his camera got off a series of shots that wounded the monarch gravely. There were five attempts on his life, in all. Thus around him grew an atmosphere of danger (finally real), and he had to be surrounded by policemen wherever he went. The Iranians resented the fact that, for security reasons, only foreigners were invited to certain celebrations in which the Shah took part. His compatriots also said bitingly that since he traveled almost exclusively by airplane and helicopter, he saw his country only from a lofty vantage point that obliterated all contrasts. I don't have any photographs of Khomeini in his early years. When he appears in my collection, he is already an old man, and so it is as if he had never been young or middle-aged. The local fanatics believe Khomeini is the Twelfth Imam, the Awaited One, who disappeared in the ninth century and has now returned, more than a thousand years later, to deliver them from misery and persecution. That Khomeini almost always appears in photographs only as an aged man could be taken as confirmation of this belief.