Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the Communist government declared martial law and fought back against its own people more effectively than the Shah’s forces had done, some two years previously and some three thousand kilometers to the southeast.
Kapuściński tells of the Iranian revolution mostly through a series of stories inspired by photographs he looks at while locked in a hotel room in Tehran, interspersed with accounts gleaned from his own daytime reporting in the city, before he again locks his hotel door against the armed bands that rule the night. The photos allow him to sketch the recent history of Iran, while the stories from his notes cover how the revolution came to pass, and what it meant to people he encountered.
The oldest photo he has acquired shows, according to its caption, the grandfather of the last Shah as a soldier holding another man — the assassin of Shah Nasr-ed-Din — prisoner at the end of a heavy chain. The two had made their way across the countryside from the site of the assassination to the Persian capital where the prisoner was to be executed. Thus began the ascent of the Pahlavis to the height of power in their country.