Researching Reza Shah

At the age of 14 he joined the Cossack Brigade, and also served in the army. In 1911, he was promoted to First Lieutenant, by 1912 he was elevated to the rank of Captain and by 1915 he became a Colonel. In February 1921, as leader of the entire Cossack Brigade based in Qazvin he marched towards Tehran and seized the capital. He forced the dissolution of the government and installed Zia al-Din Tabatabaie as the new Prime Minister. Reza Khan's first role in the new government was Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Minister of War.

Two years after the 1921 Persian coup d'état, led by Zia ol Din Tabatabaee, Reza Pahlavi became Iran's prime minister. The appointment was backed by the compliant national assembly of Iran. In 1925, Reza Pahlavi was appointed as the legal monarch of Iran by decision of Iran's constituent assembly. The assembly deposed Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last Shah of the Qajar dynasty, and amended Iran's 1906 constitution to allow selection of Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran. He founded the Pahlavi dynasty that lasted until overthrown in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution.

In the spring of 1950, he was posthumously named as Reza Shah the Great by Iran's National Consultative Assembly.

His legacy remains controversial to this day. His defenders assert that he was an essential reunification modernization force for Iran (whose international prominence had sharply declined during Qajar rule), while his detractors assert that his reign was often despotic, with his failure to modernize Iran's large peasant population eventually sowing the seeds for the Iranian Revolution nearly four decades later, which ended 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. Moreover, his insistence on ethnic nationalism and cultural unitarism, along with forced detribalization and sedentarization, resulted in the suppression of several ethnic and social groups. Although he himself was of Iranian Mazandarani descent, his government carried out an extensive policy of Persianization trying to create a single, united and largely homogeneous nation, similar to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's policy of Turkification in Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.