Rebels with a Cause unearths new details and provides fresh insights into an enduring puzzle of modern Iranian political history, concluding that the Left’s demise came from a combination of Iran’s geopolitical setting, where both the Soviet and Western worlds saw advantage in the stability of Iran during the Cold War, as well as internal factors such as splits and factionalism, and–not leas–the Iranian Left’s over-enthusiastic devotion to a barren Stalinism with its poverty of philosophy and ideas. This book is based on primary and secondary Persian-language sources never before published in English.