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By last summer, excessive bureaucracy, credit difficulties, erratic cash flow, transport and communications bottlenecks were prevalent. Once again, the expectations of the poor and middle class were frustrated. Rent for a modest two-room apartment in Tehran rose to $1,000 a month. For luxury villas in the northern part of the city, a monthly rent of $5,000 was not considered extravagant. There was a year's wait for a $6,000 Iranian-manufactured automobile; imported Mercedes 280s sold for $60,000.
The effects of "progress" were often disastrous. Hundreds of thousands of peasants fled their native villages for the lure of more profitable work in the cities, leaving formerly cultivated farm land to revert to desert. At the same time, Iran, which for ages had been all but self-sufficient, suddenly had to import more than 60% of its food products. Along with imports of food came more than 1 million foreign workers: Pakistani and Filipino truck drivers, Indian engineers, Korean and Japanese workers — to say nothing of the more than 40,000 American military and civilian personnel whose advice and training were needed for the new weapons and industries. But for most Iranians the pattern of life changed slowly, if at all. Most villages still lack piped water, sewers, electricity and doctors.
Much of the trouble stemmed from the fact that commercial projects were designed by a small group of Western-educated technocrats, who failed to take into account the profound effect that such changes would have on the Persian psyche. Housing projects, for example, are depressing to most Iranians, whose tradition demands an architectural style that emphasizes seclusion and privacy. Many residents of such projects feel as though they are living in public view, and they detest it. Tehran Sociologist Ehsan Naraghi, who received his doctorate from the Sorbonne, believes that under the pressure of economic development there has been a tragic and costly neglect of Iranian culture. "We have stressed the material aspects of life," he says, "and have lost our cultural identity." Adds Amir Taheri, 38, editor in chief of Kayhan, Iran's largest daily (circ. 700,000): "What does this Westernize-or-bust program give us? Western banks, Western guns, Western secret police, Western buildings. They are supposed to solve our problems. But do they? I don't think so. We need to get to our own culture and then use what can be integrated from the West."
Explaining why she joined the National Front, a coalition of leftist parties opposed to the Shah, Dr. Homa Darabi Keyhani, 38, a New York City-trained pediatrician and child psychiatrist, recalls her experiences as a doctor in a small Iranian village ten years ago. The people had a saying that the first child belonged to the crows — because of the likelihood that it would not survive. "That is bitter and terrible to hear," she says. "Millions were spent to build big gambling casinos. Corruption thrived around us while kids died because they drank contaminated water, and there was no vaccine for infectious diseases. Do you wonder that we are desperate?"
Belatedly, and at great cost, the Shah himself has begun to comprehend the real nature of Iran's malaise and his role in its creation (see Interview page 43). In other societies run by strong rulers — Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, Leopold Senghor's Senegal, Tito's Yugoslavia — literate and cultivated populations have succeeded in matching political progress with economic and cultural development. But Iran's unique society, so influenced by its religious structure and rooted for centuries in a different world, simply could not adjust to such radical change. The Shah failed to realize that the dramatic alterations he envisioned for the economic advance of his nation required the development of an acceptable political system. He concentrated on the army and the institutions that related to executive power. He ruled as an absolute monarch — no matter how worthy his goals — and depended on repressive measures to keep disparate forces in line while he and the technocrats proceeded with the modernization of Iran. Parliament, the press, city councils, the judiciary, trade unions, professional associations were never given a chance to develop.