THE COUP

In the early hours of February 21, 1921, General Reza Khan, commander of the Cossack garrison in Qazvin, took control over Tehran with three thousand men and eighteen machine guns. This coup, hailed later as the glorious 3rd Esfand (February 21) liberation, launched a new era. Reza Khan, who had risen through the ranks, was self-educated – some claim semi-illiterate. He came from a military family that fled Russian advance into the Caucasus and received a fief in the fertile village of Alasht in the Sefid Rud region of Mazanderan. His relatives, including his father and grandfather, had served in the provincial regiment – the latter had been killed in the 1848 siege of Herat. Reza Khan himself had enrolled as a teenager in the Cossack Brigade. Rumor had it that he had at one time or another served as a stable boy, either for the royal palace, the Farmanfarmas, the Dutch legation, or the American Presbyterian Mission. During the civil war and the subsequent upheavals, he made his mark as an up-and-coming officer nicknamed “Reza Khan Maxim.” In later years when he built himself a palace in Mazanderan, he decorated the entryway with a large mosaic depicting a Maxim machine gun.