Iranian Revolution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Iranian Revolution ended in the early hours of the 11th of February 1979, when the Supreme Military Council declared itself neutral in Iran's political disputes and ordered all soldiers back to their barracks. In that single moment, 2,500 years of Persian monarchy collapsed. A country that had been experiencing relative prosperity, not war or financial ruin, had just produced one of the most rapid and sweeping political transformations in modern history. Who was Ruhollah Khomeini, and how did a cleric in exile bring down a shah backed by the most powerful nation on earth? What drove millions of Iranians, women and men, students and oil workers, Islamists and Marxists, into the streets together? And what replaced the monarchy they destroyed? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Century of Grievances

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  On the 20th of March 1890, the Iranian monarch Nasir al-Din Shah handed British Major G. F. Talbot a 50-year monopoly over the production, sale, and export of tobacco. At the time, more than 200,000 Iranians worked in the tobacco trade. The fury that followed was the first major demonstration that the Shia clergy could mobilize a popular uprising against both a shah and a foreign power. A fatwa from Mirza Hasan Shirazi drove a nationwide boycott, and within two years Nasir al-Din Shah cancelled the concession entirely.

  That pattern repeated itself across the following decades. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 forced a parliament into existence, but the new assembly never secured enough power to govern independently. In February 1921, a military officer named Reza Khan seized power, deposed the last Qajar shah in 1925, and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. His reign modernized Iran on a Western model: Islamic law was replaced with secular codes, the public hijab was banned, and police forcibly removed the chadors of women who resisted. In 1935, dozens died and hundreds were injured in the Goharshad Mosque rebellion against his policies. His own fall came in 1941, when British and Soviet troops invaded and installed his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place.

  From 1901 onward, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, held a monopoly on Iranian oil. It was the most profitable British business in the world. Most Iranians lived in poverty while Britain's position as a global power rested significantly on Iranian oil revenues. When Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the company in 1952, he became a national hero. Britain called it theft and imposed a crushing embargo. One European newspaper, the Frankfurter Neue Presse, reported that Mosaddegh would "rather be fried in Persian oil than make the slightest concession to the British." He ordered the British embassy closed in October 1952 and expelled all British diplomats. That decision briefly saved him, but it could not hold off what came next.

• 3. The CIA Coup and Its Consequences

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  On the 20th of January 1953, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles told their British counterparts they were ready to move against Mosaddegh. The newly elected president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had reversed Harry Truman's refusal to help. Cold War paranoia did the rest: Iran had vast oil wealth, a long border with the Soviet Union, and a nationalist prime minister. The Dulles brothers feared a "second China."

  The coup began on the 15th of August 1953. The Shah fled to Italy when the first attempt failed, but returned after a successful second attempt on the 19th of August. Mosaddegh was placed under house arrest. Lieutenant General Fazlollah Zahedi was appointed prime minister. American firms subsequently gained control over roughly 40 percent of Iranian oil profits. The CIA also provided both the funds and the training for SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, whose repression went largely unchallenged by Washington.

  The effects accumulated over decades. American companies took a large share of the country's oil wealth. The Shah, once mainly a figurehead, gradually imposed himself as an autocratic ruler backed by a foreign power. Many Iranians came to see him as a puppet of the United States, a perception the CIA's visible role in restoring him did nothing to dispel. These and later events in Iran are frequently cited as one of the most consequential strategic surprises the United States has experienced since the CIA was established in 1947.

• 4. The White Revolution Backfires

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  In 1963, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi launched the White Revolution, a sweeping program of land reform, women's suffrage, nationalization of forests, and profit-sharing for industrial workers. On paper it looked like modernization. In practice, as historian Ervand Abrahamian later noted, "The White Revolution had been designed to preempt a Red Revolution. Instead, it paved the way for an Islamic Revolution."

  The reforms more than quadrupled the combined size of the two classes that had historically challenged the monarchy: the intelligentsia and the urban working class. Those same classes were simultaneously stripped of the organizations that had represented them, including political parties, professional associations, trade unions, and independent newspapers. Land reform, meant to bind peasants to the government, instead created large numbers of independent farmers and landless laborers with no loyalty to the Shah.

  Ruhollah Khomeini had emerged as a vocal critic by 1963, and was arrested that year after declaring the Shah a "wretched, miserable man" who had "embarked on the path toward destruction of Islam in Iran." Three days of major riots followed across Iran. Then, in November 1964, Khomeini was re-arrested and sent into exile, mostly in Najaf, Iraq, where he would remain for 15 years. From exile, he developed the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, or guardianship of the Islamic jurist, arguing that rule by Islamic scholars was "more necessary even than prayer and fasting." His book Islamic Government, mosque sermons, and cassette tapes smuggled into Iran carried these ideas to a widening network of students, clergy, and traditional merchants.

• 5. The Year of Fire: 1978

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  On the 7th of January 1978, a government-planted article appeared in the national daily Ettela'at, calling Khomeini a "British agent" and a "mad Indian poet." Seminary students in Qom closed their schools that same day and took to the streets on the 9th of January. Security forces fired live ammunition. Between 5 and 300 people were reportedly killed. The 9th of January is still marked as a bloody day in Qom.

  Shia custom holds memorial services 40 days after a death. Khomeini instructed his network that the blood of martyrs must water the "tree of Islam," and radicals used the 40-day cycle to generate new protests each time. On the 18th of February, riots broke out in Tabriz, where protesters torched cinemas, bars, banks, and police stations. Forty days later, demonstrations spread to at least 55 cities. Then came the 19th of August and the Cinema Rex.

  In the southwestern city of Abadan, four arsonists barred the doors of the Cinema Rex theatre and set it alight. In what would stand as the largest terrorist attack in history before the September 11 attacks, 422 people burned to death. Khomeini immediately blamed SAVAK. The public believed him. Tens of thousands poured into the streets shouting "Burn the Shah!" After the revolution, evidence emerged that Islamist militants had actually set the fire, but the political damage was irreversible.

  By August a CIA analysis still concluded that Iran "is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation." That assessment was wrong. On the 8th of September, after protests of 200,000-500,000 people gathered to mark Eid al-Fitr, the Shah declared martial law at midnight. The following morning, 6,000 protesters gathered at Jaleh Square, either in defiance or unaware of the ban. After warning shots failed, troops fired directly into the crowd, killing 64. The opposition called it Black Friday. The death toll from additional clashes that day reached 89. Any chance of reconciliation between the Shah and the opposition effectively ended there.

  Oil workers struck in the fall, reducing crude oil production by 4.8 million barrels per day, about 7 percent of the world's supply. The Shah did not crack down. He offered wage increases and let strikers in government housing stay in their homes. By late October a nationwide general strike had taken hold across virtually all major industries. Meanwhile, the Shah pressured Iraq to expel Khomeini. Khomeini moved instead to Neauphle-le-Chateau, a village near Paris. French telephone and postal connections were far superior to Iraq's. The BBC, by its own later admission, had a critical disposition toward the Shah, and its broadcasts helped change public perception inside Iran. Khomeini, presenting himself as an Eastern mystic who sought only to free his people, rapidly became a household name in the West. In November, National Front leader Karim Sanjabi flew to Paris and signed a draft agreement with Khomeini for a constitution that would be "Islamic and democratic."

  The Muharram protests in December brought between 6 and 9 million people into the streets in the first week alone. About 5 percent of the entire Iranian population had taken to the streets. On the 10th and the 11th of December 1978, the days of Tasu'a and Ashura, between 6 and 9 million anti-Shah demonstrators marched throughout Iran. One historian described these as possibly representing the largest protest event in history, noting that it is rare for any revolution to involve even 1 percent of a country's population, as the French, Russian, and Romanian revolutions may have approached.

• 6. The Collapse

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  On the morning of the 16th of January 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family left Iran for Egypt, in tears. Opposition leader Shapour Bakhtiar had been appointed prime minister, promising free elections and the dissolution of SAVAK. He invited Khomeini to return, imagining a Vatican-like arrangement with Khomeini settled in the holy city of Qom. Bakhtiar declared, "We will soon have the honor of welcoming home the Ayatollah Khomeini."

  On the 1st of February 1979, Khomeini landed in Tehran aboard a chartered Air France Boeing 747. Several million people came to greet him. The crowd was so vast that the car carrying him from the airport was overwhelmed, and he was transferred to a helicopter. When a reporter asked how he felt returning to Iran after 15 years, Khomeini replied: "Nothing." That same day, in a speech, he promised to kick the teeth in of Bakhtiar's government: "I appoint the government. I appoint the government in support of this nation."

  On the 9th of February, pro-Khomeini air force technicians at Doshan Tappeh Air Base rebelled. Armed Islamic-Marxist guerrillas joined the fight. Rebels attacked a weapons factory and distributed nearly 50,000 machine guns to civilians. At 2 pm on the 11th of February, the Supreme Military Council declared itself neutral and ordered all soldiers back to their barracks. Revolutionaries seized government buildings, television and radio stations, and the palaces of the Pahlavi dynasty. Bakhtiar escaped under fire and fled Iran in disguise. He was assassinated by an agent of the Islamic republic in 1991 in Paris.

  The period from the 1st to the 11th of February is now celebrated in Iran every year as the Decade of Fajr. The 11th of February is Islamic Revolution's Victory Day, a national holiday with state-sponsored demonstrations in every city.

• 7. Women and the Revolution

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  Thousands of women were mobilized across the revolution itself, from doctors who opened their homes to the wounded to guerrilla fighters in groups like the Fida'iyan-i Khalq and the Mujahedin. Women marched carrying children. Their presence was, by accounts at the time, one of the main factors that caused some soldiers to lower their weapons rather than fire.

  Khomeini's rhetoric toward women was notably different from what came after. He declared that "you ladies here have proved that you are at the forefront of this movement" and credited women with leading the men. He said that "men get their inspiration from you, the men of Iran have learnt lessons from the honourable ladies of Iran." When an aide suggested banning women from group audiences, Khomeini refused: "I threw the Shah out with these women, there's no problem in their coming."

  The women who participated came from across Iranian society. Western-educated professionals marched alongside women from working-class and rural backgrounds. Even members of the Women's Organization of Iran, closely tied to the Pahlavi government, turned against the Shah after he dropped the cabinet position on Women's Affairs to appease Islamists. Organized feminism had existed since the Pahlavi era; it joined the revolutionary coalition and then found itself in tension with the new government's stance on women's clothing almost immediately after the Shah fell.

  Some scholars argue that the mass political mobilization of women during the revolution made it structurally difficult for the new regime to push them entirely out of public and political life. The revolution created what some authors describe as an unprecedented opening for Iranian women into politics, with lasting effects on their role in the public sphere that outlasted Khomeini's own intentions.

• 8. The Republic and Its Reckoning

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  In March 1979-98 percent of voters approved the shift to an Islamic republic in a referendum. By December 1979, Khomeini had emerged as supreme leader under the new constitution, embodying the velayat-e faqih doctrine he had developed in exile. The new state declared the destruction of Israel a core objective and began backing Shia militancy across the region to expand Iranian influence in the Arab world.

  The revolution's human cost is still disputed. Some sources, including a researcher at the Martyrs Foundation, place the number of protesters and revolutionaries killed during 1978-79 at 2,781. Khomeini claimed 60,000 martyrs. Military historian Spencer C. Tucker rejected that figure as grossly overstated for propaganda purposes, placing the consensus of historians at between 532 and 2,781 deaths for the January 1978-February 1979 period. What followed was worse. According to historian Ervand Abrahamian, 8,000 opponents were executed between June 1981 and June 1985 by revolutionary courts, a number exceeding those killed by the royalist government in trying to stop the revolution.

  In 2025, the Iranian government paved over a section of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran, destroying land estimated to hold the remains of 5,000 to 7,000 victims of mass executions that followed the revolution. The year before, United Nations Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman described the regime's pattern of destroying graveyards as an attempt to "conceal or erase data that could serve as potential evidence to avoid legal accountability." The cemetery at Behesht-e Zahra is where Khomeini gave his first speech after returning from exile in 1979.