Shah of Shahs

by Ryzard Kapuscinski

  Photograph 5

  This is undoubtedly the greatest day in the long life of Doctor Mossadegh. He is leaving parliament high on the shoulders of an elated crowd. He is smiling and holding up his right hand in greeting to the people. Three days earlier, on April 28, 1951, he became Prime Minister, and today parliament has passed his bill nationalizing the country's oil. Iran's greatest treasure has become the property of the nation. We have to enter into the spirit of that epoch, because the world has changed a great deal since. In those days, to dare the sort of act that Doctor Mossadegh just performed was tantamount to dropping a bomb suddenly and unexpectedly on Washington or London. The psychological effect was the same: shock, fear, anger, outrage. Somewhere in Iran, some old lawyer who must be a half-cocked demagogue has pillaged Anglo-Iranian—the pillar of the Empire! Unheard of, unforgiveable! In those years, colonial property was a sacred value, the ultimate taboo. But that day, whose exalted atmosphere the faces in the photograph reflect, the Iranians do not yet know they have committed a crime for which they will have to suffer bitter painful punishment. Right now, all Teheran is living joyous hours of its great day of liberation from a foreign and hated past. Oil is our blood! the crowds chant enthusiastically. Oil is our freedom! The palace shares the mood of the city, and the Shah signs the act of nationalization. It is a moment when all feel like brothers, a rare instant that quickly turns into a memory because accord in the national family is not going to last long. Mossadegh never had good relations with the Pahlavis, father and son. Mossadegh's ideas had been formed by French culture: A liberal and a democrat, he believed in institutions like parliament and a free press and lamented the state of dependence in which his homeland found itself. The fall of Reza Khan presented a great opportunity for him and those like him. The young monarch, meanwhile, takes more interest in good times and sports than in politics, so there is a chance for democracy in Iran, a chance for the country to win full independence. Mossadegh's power is so great and his slogans are so popular that the Shah ends up on the sidelines. He plays soccer, flies his private airplane, organizes masked balls, divorces and remarries, and goes skiing in Switzerland.

  Photograph 6

  Here are the Shah and his new wife Soraya Esfandiari in Rome. But this is no honeymoon, no fun-filled carefree adventure far from the worries and routines of everyday life; no, this is their exile. Even in this posed shot the thirty-four-year-old Shah (tanned, dressed in a light double-breasted suit) cannot hide his edginess—small wonder, since he doesn't know whether he is going to return to the throne he left so hurriedly, or lead the life of an emigré wandering the globe. Soraya, a woman of conspicuous but cold beauty, daughter of the tribal leader of the Bakhtiars and of a German woman who settled in Iran, looks more in control: Her face reveals little, especially with dark glasses hiding her eyes. Yesterday, August 17, 1953, they flew here from their homeland in their own airplane (with the Shah at the controls; flying always relaxed him) and checked into the swank Hotel Excelsior, to which dozens of paparazzi have flocked to immortalize each appearance by the imperial couple. Rome is full of tourists in this summer vacation season and the Italian beaches are packed (the bikini is just coming into fashion). Europe is resting, vacationing, sightseeing, dining well in good restaurants, hiking in the mountains, pitching tents, gathering strength for the chill autumn and snowy winter. Teheran, in the meantime, has neither calm moments nor relaxation because everyone can already smell the gunpowder and hear the knives being sharpened. Everyone is saying that something must happen, will happen (everyone senses the wearying pressure of ever thickening air portending explosion), but only a handful of conspirators knows who will begin it and how. Doctor Mossadegh's two years of rule are drawing to a close. Constantly threatened with coups (the democrats, the liberals, the Shah's people, and the Islamic fanatics all are plotting against him), the Doctor has transferred his bed, a briefcase full of pajamas (he is used to working in his pajamas), and a bag full of medicines to parliament, where he thinks he will be safe. He lives and works here, never venturing out, already so broken that those who visit him always tell of the tears in his eyes. All his hopes have vanished, all his calculations have proven wrong. He has eliminated the English from the oilfields, for each nation has the right to its own resources, but he forgot that might makes right. The West proclaims a blockade of Iran and a boycott of the country's oil, which becomes forbidden fruit on the world market. The Shah cannot decide: Should he obey those officers closest to the palace who are advising him to eliminate Mossadegh so as to save the monarchy and the army? For a long time he has been unable to take the final step that would burn once and for all his flimsy bridges to the Prime Minister (they are bound in a struggle that admits of no compromise because it is the conflict between two principles: the autocracy of the Shah and the democracy of Mossadegh), and perhaps the Shah is continuing to delay because he feels some sort of respect for the old Doctor, or perhaps simply because, unsure of himself, of his own will to uncompromising action, he lacks the courage to declare war on Mossadegh. The Shah would doubtless prefer that someone else carry out the whole painful, even brutal operation for him. Still undecided and continually anguished, he travels from Teheran to his summer residence in Ramsar on the Caspian Sea, where in the end he signs a sentence against the Prime Minister. But when it develops that the first attempt to finish off the Doctor has come to light and ended in a setback for the palace, the Shah does not wait for further (and, as it turns out, favorable) events but instead flees to Rome with his young bride. He returns to Teheran a few weeks later, only after the army has deposed Mossadegh and delivered all authority into the monarch's hands.

  Cassette 1

  Yes, of course—you can record. Today he is no longer a prohibited subject. Before, he was. Do you know that for twenty-five years it was forbidden to utter his name in public? That the name "Mossadegh" was purged from all books, all history texts? And just imagine: Today, young people, who, it was assumed, should know nothing about him, go to their deaths carrying his portrait. There you have the best proof of what such expunging and rewriting history leads to. But the Shah didn't understand that. He did not understand that even though you can destroy a man, destroying him does not make him cease to exist. On the contrary, if I can put it this way, he begins to exist all the more. These are paradoxes no tyrant can deal with. The scythe swings, and at once the grass starts to grow back. Cut again and the grass grows faster than ever. A very comforting law of nature. Mossadegh! The English nicknamed him "Old Mossy." He drove them crazy, and yet they respected him in a way. No Englishman ever took a shot at him. In the end it was necessary to summon our own uniformed goons. And it took them only a few days to establish their kind of order! Mossy went off to prison for three years. Five thousand people went up against the wall or died in the streets—the price of rescuing the throne. A sad, bloody, dirty re-entry. You ask if Mossy was fated to lose? He didn't lose. He won. Such a man can't be erased from people's memories; so he can be thrown out of office but never out of history. The memory is a private possession to which no authority has access. Mossy said the land we walk on belongs to us and everything we find in that land is ours. Nobody in this country had ever put it that way. He also said, Let everybody speak out—I want to hear their ideas. Do you understand this? After two and a half millennia of tyrannical degradation he pointed out to the Iranian that he is a thinking being. No ruler had ever done that! People remembered what Mossy said. It stayed in their minds and remains alive to this day. Words that open our eyes to the world are always the easiest to remember. And so it was with those words. Could anyone say that Mossy was wrong in what he did and said? Today everyone says that he was right, but that the problem is he was right too early. You can't be right too early, because then you risk your own career and at times your own life. It takes a long time for a truth to mature, and in the meantime people suffer or blunder around in ignorance. But suddenly along comes a man who speaks that truth too soon, before it has b
ecome universal, and then the ruling powers strike out at the heretic and burn him at the stake or lock him up or hang him because he threatens their interests or disturbs their peace. Mossy came out against the monarchical dictatorship and against the country's subjugation. Today monarchies are falling one after the other and subjugation has to be masked with a thousand disguises because it arouses such opposition. But he came out against it thirty years ago, when nobody here dared say these obvious things. I saw him two weeks before his death. When was that? It must have been in February, '67. He had spent the last ten years of his life under house arrest on a little farm outside Teheran. Visiting him was forbidden, of course, and the police watched the whole area. But you can arrange anything in this country if you know the right people and have the money. Money changes all the iron rules into rubber bands. Mossy must have been close to ninety then. I think he lasted so long because he wanted to see the time when life would admit he had been right. He was a hard man, hard on others because he never wanted to back down. But such a man couldn't back down even if he wished to. Until the end he thought clearly and knew exactly what was going on. Yet he could get around only with difficulty, leaning on a cane. He would stop and lie down on the ground to rest. The police who watched him said later that he was out walking like that one morning and lay down on the ground to rest, but he stayed there for a long time and when they went up to him they could see he was dead.

  From the Notes 2

  Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. To discover and possess the source of oil is to feel as if, after wandering long underground, you have suddenly stumbled upon royal treasure. Not only do you become rich, but you are also visited by the mystical conviction that some higher power has looked upon you with the eye of grace and magnanimously elevated you above others, electing you its favorite. Many photographs preserve the moment when the first oil spurts from the well: people jumping for joy, falling into each other's arms, weeping. Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts. People from poor countries go around thinking: God, if only we had oil! The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky accident, through a kiss of fortune and not by sweat, anguish, hard work. In this sense oil is a fairy tale and, like every fairy tale, a bit of a lie. Oil fills us with such arrogance that we begin believing we can easily overcome such unyielding obstacles as time. With oil, the last Shah used to say, I will create a second America in a generation! He never created it. Oil, though powerful, has its defects. It does not replace thinking or wisdom. For rulers, one of its most alluring qualities is that it strengthens authority. Oil produces great profits without putting a lot of people to work. Oil causes few social problems because it creates neither a numerous proletariat nor a sizable bourgeoisie. Thus the government, freed from the need of splitting the profits with anyone, can dispose of them according to its own ideas and desires. Look at the ministers from oil countries, how high they hold their heads, what a sense of power they have, they, the lords of energy, who decide whether we will be driving cars tomorrow or walking. And oil's relation to the mosque? What vigor, glory, and significance this new wealth has given to its religion, Islam, which is enjoying a period of accelerated expansion and attracting new crowds of the faithful.

  From the Notes 3

  He says that what later happened with the Shah was quintessentially Iranian. Since time immemorial the reigns of every monarch have ended in lamentable, shameful ways. They died beheaded or with knives in their backs or—if they were luckier—had to flee the country, to die, exiled, abandoned, forgotten. He does not remember, although there may have been such exceptions, a Shah ending his days on the throne surrounded by respect and love, dying a natural death. He cannot remember the nation weeping for one of its rulers and bearing him to the grave with tearful eyes. In the last century all the Shahs, and there were quite a few of them, lost their crowns and their lives in unpleasant circumstances. The people regarded them as monsters, denounced their vilenesses, accompanied their departures with the curses and abuse of the crowd, and made news of their deaths the occasion for joyful holidays.

  Of course, he says, we have had excellent Shahs like Cyrus and Abbas, but that was long ago. The last two dynasties spilled a great deal of innocent blood in order to win or keep the throne. Imagine the monarch Agha Mohammed Khan, who orders the entire population of the city of Kerman murdered or blinded—no exceptions. His praetorians set energetically to work. They line up the inhabitants, slice off the heads of the adults, gouge out the eyes of the children. In the end, despite taking regular breaks, the praetorians grow too exhausted to lift their swords or knives anymore. Only thanks to this fatigue do a remnant of the people preserve their lives and eyesight. Later, processions of blinded children leave the city. Some, wandering around the countryside, lose their way in the desert and die of thirst. Other groups reach inhabited settlements and, singing songs about the extermination of the citizens of Kerman, beg for food. News travels slowly in these days, so the people they meet are shocked to hear a chorus of barefoot, blinded children singing about whistling swords and tumbling heads. They ask what crime Kerman committed to earn such cruel punishment. At that question, the children break into a song about the offense, which was this: Because their fathers had sheltered the previous Shah, the new ruler could not forgive them. The spectacle of processions of blinded children arouses universal pity and the people do not refuse them sustenance, but the wanderers have to be fed discreetly and even secretly, since the little blinded ones, having been punished and stigmatized by the Shah, constitute a sort of peripatetic opposition and all support for the opposition is punishable to the highest degree. Gradually, sighted urchins attach themselves to these processions as guides for the blind children. Then they wander together, seeking food and protection from the cold and carrying the tale of the destruction of Kerman to the farthest villages.

  These, he says, are the grim and brutal histories we hoard in our national memory. Tyrants won the throne by force, climbing toward it over corpses, amid maternal lamentations and the moans of the mortally wounded. The issue of succession was often settled in distant capitals, and the new pretender to the crown would enter Teheran with the British and Russian envoys supporting his elbows on either side. People treated such Shahs as usurpers and occupiers, and when one knows about that tradition one can understand how the mullahs managed to spark off so many uprisings against them. The mullahs would say: He, the one sitting in the palace, is a foreigner taking his orders from foreign powers. He is causing all your miseries; he's making a fortune at your expense and selling out the country. The people paid attention to this because the words of the mullahs struck them as the most obvious truths. I don't mean that the mullahs were saints. Far from it! Many dark forces lurk in the shadows of the mosque. But the abuses of power and the lawlessness of the palace made the mullahs into advocates of the national interest.

  He returns to the fate of the last Shah. Back then, in Rome during his exile of a few days, Mohammed Reza has to face the fact that he could lose the throne forever and swell the exotic regiment of dispossessed royalty. That thought sobers him up. He wants to cast off the life that he has been squandering amid pleasures and distractions. (Later, he writes in his book that in Rome the sainted AM appeared to him in a dream and said: Return to your homeland so that you can save the nation.) Now a great ambition is born in him, a yearning to demonstrate his strength and superiority. This trait, too, my interlocutor says, is most Iranian. One Iranian will never yield to another. Each believes in his own superiority, wants to be first and foremost, wants to impose his own exclusive I. I! I! I know better, I have more, I can do everything.
The world begins with me, I am the whole world in myself. I! I! (To demonstrate, he stands up, rears his head high, peering down at me with exaggerated, haughty, oriental pride in his eyes.) Any group of Iranians immediately organizes itself according to hierarchical principles. I'm first, you're second, you're third. The second and third ones don't go for that, but immediately start trying to nose ahead, intriguing and maneuvering to unseat number one. Number one has to dig in to keep on top.

  Dig in and get out the automatic rifles!

  Similar rules apply elsewhere—for example, in the family. Because the man has to be superior, the woman must be inferior. Outside the home I might be a nonentity, but under my own roof I make up for it—here I am everything. Here my power admits of no division, and the more numerous the family, the wider and mightier my authority. The more children, the better: They give a man more to rule over. He becomes the monarch of a domestic state, commanding respect and admiration, deciding the fate of his subjects, settling disputes, imposing his will, ruling. (He stops to see what sort of an impression he is making on me. I protest energetically: I oppose such stereotypes. I know many of his fellow countrymen who are modest and polite, who have never made me feel inferior.) Quite true, he agrees, but only because you don't threaten us. You're not playing our game of seeing whose I is superior. This game made it impossible to create any solid parties because quarrels about leadership always broke out immediately and everyone would want to set up his own party. But now, upon his return from Rome, the Shah too throws himself body and soul into the game of trying to be the supreme I.