Analyses the history of left-wing politics in Iran and its Russo-Caucasian origins during the Persian Constitutional Revolution. The book is also a history of the formative years of the socialist movement in Iran between the first Russian revolution of 1905 and the suppression of the Iranian constitutional regime by Tsarist forces in 1911.

Against conventional views of the unchallenged hegemony of a modernizing monarchy, this book argues that power was continuously contested in Riza Shah's Iran. Cronin excavates the successive challenges to Riza Shah's regime posed by a range of subaltern social groups and seeks to restore to these groups a sense of their historical agency.

The Caucasus is a strategically and economically important region in contemporary global affairs. This book provides the first comprehensive study of the impact of Soviet policy on the Caucasus, focusing in particular on the period from 1917 to 1955. It argues that understanding the Soviet legacy in the region remains critical to analysing both the new states of the Transcaucasus and the autonomous territories of the North Caucasus.

Even though the left has never held power in Iran, its impact on the political, intellectual and cultural development of modern Iran has been profound. This book's authors undertake a fundamental re-examination and re-appraisal of the phenomenon of leftist activism in Iran, interpreted in the broadest sense, throughout the period of its existence up to and including the present.

Rather than a centralized state, Iran in the nineteenth century was a delicate balance between tribal groups, urban merchant communities, religious elites, and an autocratic monarchy. While Russia gained an increasingly dominant political role in Iran over the course of this century, Russian influence was often challenged by banditry on the roads, riots in the cities, and the seeming arbitrariness of the Shah. Iran and Russian Imperialism develops a comprehensive picture of Russia’s historical entanglements with one of its most important neighbours in Asia. It recounts how the Russian Empire strived to gain political influence at the Persian court, promote Russian trade, and secure the enormous southern borders of the empire. Using hitherto often neglected documents from archives in Russia and Georgia and reading them against the grain, this book reveals the complex reactions of different groups in Iranian society to Russian imperialism. As it turns out, the Iranians were, in the words of the Russian orientalist Konstantin Smirnov, "ideal anarchists," whose resistance to imperial domination, as well as to centralized state institutions more generally, impacted developments in the region in the century to come. Iran’s troubled relationship with the wider world continues to be a topic of considerable interest to historians, yet little focus has been given to Russia’s historical connections to Iran. This book thus represents a valuable contribution to Iranian and Russian History, as well as International Relations.

A thorough in-depth analysis of the current and potential conflicts in the Caucasus, including the geographical, historical and ethno- linguistic framework of the Caucasus, the individual conflicts and the place of the Caucasus in world affairs.

Nationalism has played an important role in the cultural and intellectual discourse of modernity that emerged in Iran from the late nineteenth century to the present, promoting new formulations of collective identity and advocating a new and more active role for the broad strata of the public in politics. The essays in this volume seek to shed light on the construction of nationalism in Iran in its many manifestations; cultural, social, political and ideological, by exploring on-going debates on this important and progressive topic.