IRAN Between Two Revolutions:This
work began in 1964 as a study on the social bases of the Tudeh
party,
the main communist organization in Iran. Focusing on the short
period
between the party's formation in 1941 and its drastic repression
in
1953, the original work tried to answer the question why an organization
that
was clearly secular, radical, and Marxist was able to
grow
into a mass movement in a country noted for its fervent Shi'ism,
traditional
monarchism, and intense nationalism. The study, however,
gradually
expanded as I realized that the Tudeh success could not be
fully
assessed without constant references to the failures, On the one
hand,
ofits many contemporary nationalistic parties; and, on the other
hand,
of its ideological predecessors, especially the Social Democrats
of
1909-1919, the Socialists of the 1920s, and the Communists of the
1930s.
The study further expanded as the 1977-1979 revolution unfolded,
shattered
the Pahlevi regime, and brought to the fore not the
Tudeh
but the clerical forces. Thus the study has evolved into an
analysis
of the social bases of Iranian politics, focusing on how socioeconomic
development
has gradually transformed the shape of Iranian
politics
from the eve of the Constitutional Revolution in the late
'nineteenth
century to the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in February
1979.
The
book is divided into three parts. Part I provides a historical
background
to the understanding ofmodern Iran, surveying the nineteenth
century,
the Constitutional Revolution, and the reign of Reza
Shah.
Part II analyzes the social bases of politics in the period between
the
fall of Reza Shah's autocracy in August of 1941 and the establishment
ofMuhammad
Reza Shah's autocracy in August 1953. These
thirteen
years are the only major period in the modern era in which
the
historian can look below the political surface into the social infrastructure
of
Iranian politics, and thereby examine in depth the
ethnic
as well as the class roots of the various political movements.
Readers
who are not interested in the internal workings of the communist
movement
in this period are advised to skim Chapters 7 and
8, which
examine in detail the class and ethnic bases of the Tudeh
