In brief. After the Anglo-Soviet occupation of 1941, the young Mohammad Reza Shah faced a freer press, new political parties and pressure from foreign powers. The decade ended with a wave of repression after an assassination attempt in 1949.
In August 1941, British and Soviet forces entered Iran from the south and the north. The Allies wanted a secure route to supply the Soviet Union and to protect the oil fields. Reza Shah left the throne in September, and his son, Mohammad Reza, who was twenty-one, became shah.
A more open politics
With the strong hand of Reza Shah gone, politics opened up. Newspapers multiplied, and political prisoners were released. New parties appeared. The most important was the Tudeh Party, a left-wing party founded in 1941, with a strong base among workers and intellectuals. The Majlis, the parliament, regained influence, and the new shah had to share power with politicians, landowners and the military.
Many historians treat the years from 1941 to 1953 as a rare period of political pluralism in 20th-century Iran. Others stress that the state was weak, divided and under heavy foreign pressure.
Foreign troops and a first Cold War crisis
At the Tehran Conference in 1943, the Allied leaders issued a declaration promising to respect Iran’s independence and to withdraw after the war. When the war ended, Soviet troops did not leave at once. In 1945–46, local governments in Azerbaijan and in Kurdistan, backed by the Soviet Union, declared autonomy. After diplomatic pressure, including at the new United Nations, Soviet troops withdrew in 1946, and by the end of the year Iranian forces had retaken the two areas.
Oil
Most of Iran’s oil was in the hands of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, with the British government as its main shareholder. Many Iranians felt that the terms were unfair, and that feeling grew after the war. Calls to renegotiate became a call to nationalise, a story that continues into the next decade.
The end of the decade
In February 1949, a man shot at the shah at Tehran University. The shah survived. The government blamed the Tudeh Party, banned it and declared martial law. The shah used the occasion to strengthen his own position, including calling an assembly to give him the power to dissolve parliament. Meanwhile a group of politicians and intellectuals around Mohammad Mossadegh formed the National Front, which called for free elections and the nationalisation of oil.
Ideas and culture
The decade also saw new publishing, literature and debate. Writers explored social themes, and the university grew. How much of this was due to real reform and how much to a temporary weakness of the state is still discussed.
Notes and sources
- Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982).
- Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (Yale University Press, 2017).
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