Shah of Shahs by Ryzard Kapuscinski

with their bare hands because they reached a point at which they could no longer stand the terror. It might look like desperation to you, but to us it was all the same.
    "Do you know that if anyone mentioned Savak, whoever was talking to that person would look at him hours afterward and start thinking, Perhaps he's an agent? The one I was talking to might have been my father, my husband, my best friend. I would tell myself, Keep cool, it's nonsense, but nothing helped and the thought kept returning. Everything was sick—the whole regime was sick, and I have to say, I don't know when we will recover our health, our equilibrium. Years of a dictatorship like that broke us, psychologically, and I think it'll take a long long time before we can begin living normally."
Photograph 8
    This picture was hanging alongside slogans, proclamations, and a few other photographs on the bulletin board in front of a revolutionary committee building in Shiraz. I asked a student to translate the handwritten statement thumbtacked below the photo. "It's written here," he said, "that this little boy, three years old, Habib Fardust, was a prisoner of Savak." "What?" I asked. "Three years old and a prisoner?" He answered that sometimes Savak locked up a whole family, which is what happened in this case. He read the statement to the end and added that the boy's parents had died during torture. Now, a lot of books are being published about Savak's crimes, along with various police documents and personal accounts by people who survived torture. And, the most shocking thing for me, I saw color postcards being sold in front of the university showing the bodies of Savak victims. Six hundred years after Tamburlaine, the same pathological cruelty remains, unchanged except perhaps for the degree of mechanization. The most common instrument discovered in Savak quarters was an electrically heated metal table called "the frying pan," on which the victim was tied down by his hands and feet. Many died on these tables. Often, the accused was already raving by the time he entered the torture chamber—few people could bear the screams they heard while they waited, and the smell of burning flesh. But technological progress could not displace medieval methods in this nightmare world. In Isfahan, people were thrown into huge bags full of cats crazed with hunger, or among poisonous snakes. Accounts of such horrors, sometimes, of course, propagated by Savak itself, circulated among the populace for years. They were so threatening, and the definition of an enemy of the state was so loose and arbitrary, that everyone could imagine ending up in such a torture chamber.
Photograph 9
    This was taken in Teheran on December 23, 1973: The Shah, surrounded by a bank of microphones, is giving a speech in a hall crowded with journalists. On this occasion Mohammed Reza, usually marked by a careful, studied reticence, cannot hide his emotion, his excitement, even—as the reporters note—his feverishness. In fact, the moment is important and fraught with consequences for the whole world: The Shah is announcing a new price for oil. The price has quadrupled in less than two months, and Iran, which used to earn five billion dollars a year from its petroleum exports, will now be bringing in twenty billion. What's more, control of this great pile of money will belong to the Shah alone. In his autocratic kingdom he can use it however he likes. He can throw it into the sea, spend it on ice cream, or lock it up in a golden safe. No wonder he looks so excited—how would any of us behave if we suddenly found twenty billion dollars in our pockets and knew, additionally, there would be twenty billion more each and every year, and eventually even greater sums? No wonder the Shah acted as he did, which was to lose his head. Instead of assembling his family, loyal generals, and trusted advisers to think over together the most reasonable way of using such a fortune, the ruler—who