Word: persia
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...fanatic nationalist, in 1935 he changed Persia's name to Iran, which had been its name as a nation even before the great days of Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes. Persia ("Pars") was merely one of Iran's provinces. In the same spirit, he chose to add Pahlavi to his name. It means "the Parthian." In classic times, the Parthians were famed mounted bowmen...
...such kidney was the ruler of Persia when Colonel Reza Khan took over. The treasury was empty, the Army little more than an armed rabble. Brigandage and tribal disaffection were rampant. The country's roads were hardly better than camel tracks, and so dreadful was transportation that fields of surplus wheat and barley might rot in one section while 600 miles away a bread famine would rage. The citizenry was saturated with corruption, ignorance and disease...
...land, fostered education, set up schools and colleges, tore down slums, erected beautiful buildings, updated agriculture, improved medical service and public health, founded Boy and Girl Scout movements, reconstructed roads and fomented trade and industry with all his being. His greatest accomplishment (next to getting Persia up on its feet) was the 870-mile railroad, which took eleven years to build, cost $160,000,000 and runs from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian...
...point to some of the flowers of civilization which have blossomed in the West since 1933. They recall that, unlike Kamâl Atatürk, he had no elite of European-educated intellectuals to help him.‡ "Reza Khan made Iran out of nothing," they say and, knowing Persia and Persians, they insist that force was the only way. As for opium, 60% of the population smokes it. Descended from generations of opium smokers, it is said they are largely immune to its effects...
Kismet, etc. One of the first acts of the new Government after the 1921 ride-in to Teheran was to tear up the treaty the bleak-brained Ahmad had signed with the U.S.S.R. The Bolsheviks condemned the aggressive policy of the Tsar, promised never to interfere in Persia's internal affairs, but reserved the right to occupy it temporarily in the event another power used Persia for an attack on Soviet Russia...