The fall of the Shah and the 1979 Iranian Revolution: facts, figures, mysteries and competing versions

A note on method. The Iranian Revolution remains a live and divisive political subject, told in opposing ways by monarchists, supporters of the Islamic Republic, left-wing exiles, and Western and Iranian scholars. In this article I do not take sides: I report the documented facts, flag the conflicting versions and point out where figures have been inflated or minimised. It is a vast piece of research: some assessments may change with new sources. I stop at 1980: present-day Iran, which in 2026 is going through a period of war and severe tension, deserves dedicated verification and sources.

In January 1979 the "King of Kings" left Tehran by plane, officially for a holiday. He would never return. Two weeks later, an elderly cleric flew back from Paris to be welcomed by an immense crowd. Within weeks, a monarchy with one of the best-equipped armies in the Middle East collapsed, and a state without precedent in modern history was born: a republic led by a religious jurist.

How was it possible? As in an investigation, it pays to start far back, separate facts from narratives and ask, for every figure and every accusation, who is making the claim, with what evidence and with what interest.

Part one: the roots

A young dynasty

The Pahlavi dynasty was recent. Its founder, Reza Khan, an officer of the Cossack Brigade, seized power in a coup in 1921 and had himself crowned Shah in 1925. In 1941, during the Second World War, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran, suspecting pro-German sympathies, and forced him to abdicate in favour of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

1953: the coup against Mossadegh

The first great turning point is 1953. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a secular nationalist leader, had in 1951 nationalised the oil industry controlled by the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. An embargo, an economic crisis and a bitter clash with the Shah followed.

In August 1953 a coup overthrew Mossadegh and restored the Shah, who had briefly fled abroad, to full power.

For many Iranians, 1953 became the symbol of a monarchy "restored by foreigners". It is a wound that explains much of the distrust of the United States in 1979.

The Shah's regime: modernisation and repression

The human rights question: two narratives

Here method is essential, because figures have been used as weapons by both sides.

• In 1975 the secretary-general of Amnesty International, Martin Ennals, stated that no country in the world had a worse human rights record than Iran, citing a very high number of death sentences, the absence of valid civilian courts for political offences, and torture. Torture in SAVAK prisons is documented by numerous testimonies and by the work of historians such as Ervand Abrahamian.
• On the other hand, some figures on political prisoners and victims that circulated in the 1970s, coming from opposition circles in exile, were far higher than those reconstructed later. Historian Andrew Scott Cooper, seen by some critics as close to monarchist positions, argues that those figures were taken up unchecked by the Western press, and cites estimates by former SAVAK officials of about 3,200 political prisoners in the mid-1970s.

The investigator's lesson. That the repression was real and brutal and that some figures were inflated are two compatible statements. The problem arises when one is used to deny the other.

Part two: 1978, the year of revolt

The sparks

In the second half of the 1970s the Shah, partly under pressure from Jimmy Carter's administration over human rights, began a cautious liberalisation. Open letters from intellectuals, poetry evenings and university meetings opened up space for criticism.

In 1977 two important opposition figures died: in June, in England, the sociologist Ali Shariati, ideologue of a revolutionary Islam very popular with the young; in October, in Najaf, Mostafa Khomeini, the ayatollah's eldest son. Officially these were natural deaths; the opposition blamed SAVAK. Documentary proof of murder has never emerged, but the suspicions fuelled mobilisation.

The 1978 timeline

Black Friday: a case study in numbers

Black Friday is a perfect example of how death tolls are constructed and distorted:

The most interesting figure is the last one: it comes from a researcher working for an institution of the Islamic Republic, in other words from the side that would have had an interest in inflating the figures. His research does not reduce the gravity of the massacre, but shows how far the figures circulating at the time were from reality.

The cassette revolution

Khomeini, in Najaf and then in Paris, had no access to Iranian radio and television. His speeches, however, were recorded on audio cassettes, copied by the thousand and distributed through mosques and bazaar networks, as well as relayed by telephone. On top of this came foreign radio broadcasts in Persian, especially the BBC, which many Iranians listened to for news unfiltered by censorship.

It is one of the first historical examples of a revolution in which a decentralised medium defeats a state-controlled media system. A lesson that anyone working with open sources knows well.

Part three: January-February 1979, the collapse

The revolution after the revolution

The coalition that overthrew the Shah was vast: clerics, liberals, nationalists, communists of the Tudeh party, Marxist Fedayeen guerrillas, the Islamic-Marxist People's Mojahedin, students, the bazaar, workers. In the following months and years, the groups not aligned with Khomeini were sidelined and then repressed.

The figures for the later repression are grim. According to historian Ervand Abrahamian, more than 8,000 opponents were executed between June 1981 and June 1985; Amnesty International counted almost 3,000 executions in the twelve months after June 1981 alone.

Part four: the investigator's questions

Question 1: how many people did the revolution really kill?

Assessment. The figure of 60,000 is not borne out by later research, including research by scholars working for Islamic Republic institutions. The documented estimates are an order of magnitude lower. Every death remains a tragedy, but the difference between 3,000 and 60,000 is not a detail: it is the difference between history and propaganda.

Question 2: who set fire to the Cinema Rex?

This is the case closest to a criminal investigation. On 19 August 1978, shortly after 8 pm, the Cinema Rex in Abadan caught fire during a film screening. The doors were found locked or blocked; between 377 and 470 people died.

Assessment. The available evidence points to Islamist militants as the perpetrators, as established by the Islamic Republic's own tribunal in 1980. Questions about who ordered it remain open. What is certain is that blaming SAVAK in 1978 played a decisive role in turning protest into revolution.

Question 3: was the Shah ill, and who knew?

One of the regime's best-kept secrets: the Shah had cancer, a tumour of the lymphatic system, from at least 1974.

• From spring 1974 he was secretly treated by French and Iranian doctors; the main French physician, Professor Georges Flandrin, travelled to Tehran dozens of times. Chemotherapy began in September 1974.
• According to some accounts, the Shah himself was initially told that he had a less aggressive form, Waldenström's disease. He would only grasp the full gravity of his illness years later.
• Western governments, according to the available documents, did not know for certain: a 1977 American report assumed the Shah would remain in power into the 1980s.

The illness helps explain the Shah's indecision in 1978: a man who knew, or suspected, he was doomed, and who wanted to leave the throne to his son without a bloodbath. It is a variable that many analyses at the time ignored.

Question 4: did the West "abandon" the Shah?

This is where conspiracy theories cluster, on both sides.

The interpretations:

• Deliberate abandonment. Some authors, such as Ardavan and Arvin Khoshnood (2018), argue that the Shah's illness and contacts with the opposition led the West to drop him.
• Incompetence. Others, such as Andrew Scott Cooper, believe that Guadeloupe dealt mainly with other subjects, that the Shah had already given up on his own, and that Western choices reveal confusion and poor information rather than a plan.
• An autonomous revolution. Most historians, from Abrahamian to Kurzman, stress that a mobilisation of millions, general strikes and the collapse of the army cannot be explained by decisions taken in Washington or London.

Assessment. In the final weeks, the United States and its allies effectively stopped supporting the Shah and sought contact with those about to replace him: that is documented. That they caused the revolution is not proven and conflicts with the scale of the domestic mobilisation. Paradoxically, both monarchists and Islamic Republic propaganda have had an interest in overstating the role of foreigners: the former to explain defeat, the latter to portray all opposition as manipulated from abroad.

Question 5: the face on the moon

In November 1978 a rumour spread across Iran that Khomeini's face could be seen on the moon. Thousands climbed onto rooftops to see it; some said they could, others feared they lacked the faith to do so. The authorities issued denials, but the rumour kept spreading.

Scholar Shahla Talebi has analysed the phenomenon not as a sign of backwardness but as a modern one, in which rumour, faith and the media mix. For an open-source analyst it is a textbook case: an unverifiable report can have real political effects, regardless of whether it is true.

Part five: foreign eyes and the fate of the protagonists

Italian connections

• French philosopher Michel Foucault covered the revolution in 1978 as a correspondent for the Corriere della Sera. His enthusiastic reports on the movement's "political spirituality" were heavily criticised after the Islamic Republic was established, and remain a case study in how even a great intellectual can read events through his own wishes.
• Journalist Oriana Fallaci interviewed both the Shah, in 1973, and Khomeini, in September 1979 in Qom. During the Khomeini interview she removed the chador she had been made to wear: one of the most famous journalistic episodes of those years.

A photographer's view

One of the most terrible images of the revolution shows a firing squad executing Kurdish prisoners in August 1979. It was published by the newspaper Ettela'at without a byline, to protect its author, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 as the work of an "anonymous photographer". Only in 2006 did an investigation by the Wall Street Journal reveal the photographer's name, Jahangir Razmi, who received the prize in 2007. As a photographer, this story strikes me: sometimes documenting the truth means remaining invisible for decades.

Switzerland

• The Shah regularly spent his winter holidays in St. Moritz, at his villa in the Engadine, where he received journalists and politicians: for years he was one of the resort's most famous guests.
• Since 1980, after the break in diplomatic relations between Washington and Tehran that followed the hostage crisis, Switzerland has represented American interests in Iran as protecting power. It is one of the longest and most delicate diplomatic mandates in Swiss history.

What became of them

In short

The Iranian Revolution is a prime example of how historical truth is contested: each side has its martyrs, its figures and its foreign culprits. The method always remains the same: compare sources, favour those that can be verified, and be wary of round numbers and of explanations that attribute everything to a single hidden hand.

Main sources: E. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982) and A History of Modern Iran (2008); C. Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (2004); A. Milani, The Shah (2011); A. S. Cooper, The Fall of Heaven (2016) and "Enduring myths of the 1979 Iranian Revolution", Middle East Institute (2024); A. and A. Khoshnood, "The West's Role in the Shah's Overthrow", Middle East Quarterly (2018); M. R. Pahlavi, Answer to History (1980); CIA documents on 1953 declassified in 2013; E. Baghi's research on revolutionary casualties; S. Talebi, "From the Moon to Television", Association for Iranian Studies; Pulitzer Prize Board, on the Razmi case; Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Switzerland-Iran bilateral relations.