Prince Hamid Reza Pahlavi in Evin Prison

As Persia chauvinistically bore the name of one Iranian ethnical group and not all of them and the name of Iran was always called by all inhabitants of the country for thousands of years. Reza Shah tried to minimize involvement with Britain and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; formed from the Russian Empire in 1922), although Britain, through its ownership of the Angelo-Iranian Oil Company, controlled all of Iran's oil resources.