In January 2026, protesters in Tehran and the diaspora marched against the Islamic Republic — many carrying portraits of Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran.
This is the story of his father.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was born in October 1919 to a Cossack Brigade commander in an Iran weakened by Qajar decline and foreign interference. By the time he was six, his father had taken the throne and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. At eleven, they sent him to Switzerland — the first Iranian heir educated in Europe.
He returned to a country his father was rebuilding from the ground up — railways, schools, a new national identity. Then in 1941, the Allies invaded. Within four days the Iranian army had collapsed. His father was forced into exile. On September 17, 1941, his twenty-one-year-old son took the oath of office.