20th-CENTURY
REVOLUTIONS!

1917 · 1949 · 1959 · 1968 · 1979 · 1989 — six decades of crowds in the streets, governments overthrown, and assumptions shattered. A century told through its hinges.

In this issue

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. What is a revolution, anyway?
4. 1905 — Russia's first try
5. 1911 — Mexico
6. 1917 — October in Petrograd
7. 1949 — Mao at Tiananmen
8. 1959 — Castro & the 26 July Movement
9. 1968 — the global year of fire
10. 1973 — Chile and counter-revolution
11. 1979 — Iran & the rest
12. 1986 — People Power, Manila
13. 1989 — annus mirabilis
14. 1991 — the post-Soviet wave
15. 2011 — the Arab Spring
16. What revolutions teach
17. Read & watch

What's a revolution?

Theda Skocpol, the political sociologist who wrote States and Social Revolutions in 1979, defined a social revolution as "rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures…accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below." That is stricter than common usage. Most events called revolutions in the twentieth century — the Iranian, the Cuban, the various 1989s — fit Skocpol's definition with varying degrees of strain.

A looser working definition: a revolution is when an existing political order is broken by a sudden, popular, and at least partly spontaneous mass mobilisation, and when the result is a regime that defines itself in opposition to the one it replaced. By that test the twentieth century had perhaps a dozen first-rank revolutions and many lesser ones. They cluster, interestingly, in particular years, as if revolutions are contagious. They are.

Russia's First Try

Russia's 1905 revolution was the rehearsal. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the Bloody Sunday massacre of 22 January 1905 (when troops fired on a workers' procession to the Winter Palace), and a wave of strikes and rural uprisings forced Tsar Nicholas II to issue the October Manifesto granting a parliament (the Duma), civil liberties, and an elected legislature. Within two years he had clawed most of it back. Lenin, in Geneva, took notes. The 1905 mutiny on the battleship Potemkin was filmed by Eisenstein twenty years later as the founding image of the revolutionary genre.

Mexico

The Mexican Revolution (1910–20) is the longest and bloodiest revolution of the twentieth century's first half. It began as a constitutional protest against the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, articulated by Francisco Madero. It became, after Madero's assassination in 1913, a multi-sided civil war involving Pancho Villa's Division del Norte, Emiliano Zapata's Ejército Libertador del Sur ("Tierra y Libertad"), Venustiano Carranza, and Álvaro Obregón. It killed perhaps a million people in a population of 15 million.

The 1917 constitution that emerged was, in its time, the most advanced labour and land charter in the world: the eight-hour day, land reform, public education, the separation of church and state, and the nationalisation of subsoil resources. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that grew out of the revolutionary settlement governed Mexico, with no interruption, from 1929 to 2000. Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros — the muralists — gave the revolution its visual canon.

October in Petrograd

The two revolutions of 1917 were closer to a year apart than the names suggest. The February Revolution (8–16 March 1917 by the Western calendar, but late February by the Russian Julian calendar still in use) deposed Tsar Nicholas II after food riots in Petrograd led to mutinies in the garrison. A liberal Provisional Government took power; Lenin, returning by sealed train from Zurich on 16 April, denounced it.

The October Revolution (6–8 November by the Western calendar) was a Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government, executed in a single night by Red Guards under Trotsky's military leadership at the Smolny Institute. The Winter Palace was taken with minimal violence; the cinematic version with thousands storming the gates is largely Eisenstein's. What followed — five years of civil war, foreign intervention, the Cheka, war communism, the famine of 1921, the New Economic Policy, and Lenin's death in 1924 — produced the first Marxist-Leninist state. Its consequences for the next seventy-five years are the subject of Deck 04.

"All power to the Soviets."— Bolshevik slogan, April Theses, 1917

Mao at Tiananmen

The Chinese Communist Revolution was a much longer and bloodier affair than the Russian one. The Communist Party, founded in 1921, was nearly destroyed in 1927 by Chiang Kai-shek's purge in Shanghai. The Long March of 1934–35 — 9,000 km of retreat from Jiangxi to Yan'an — left fewer than 8,000 of an original 80,000 marchers but established Mao Zedong as undisputed leader. The Japanese invasion of 1937 made the Communists, with their guerilla doctrine and rural base, a more credible national force than Chiang's increasingly corrupt Nationalists.

After Japan's surrender in 1945 the civil war resumed. The Communists won decisively in 1948–49. On 1 October 1949 Mao stood at the Tiananmen rostrum in Beijing and proclaimed the People's Republic, telling the assembled crowd that "the Chinese people have stood up." For better and worse — the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959–61 killed perhaps 30 million; the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 destroyed institutions and lives at scale — China's revolution is the most consequential of the century after Russia's.

Castro & the 26 July

Fidel Castro's 26 July Movement, named for his failed 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, took Havana on 1 January 1959 after a two-year guerilla campaign in the Sierra Maestra. The dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled with US backing, fled to the Dominican Republic with $300 million. Castro was 32; Che Guevara, his Argentine doctor-comrade, was 30. Within two years Cuba had nationalised foreign businesses, expropriated US property, allied with the Soviet Union, repelled the CIA-organised Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961), and survived the Missile Crisis (October 1962).

The Cuban Revolution's image — bearded young men with rifles, Che on Korda's photograph — became the global iconography of revolutionary romance. Its reality was harder: a six-decade US embargo, a one-party state, the Mariel boatlift of 1980, the Special Period after the Soviet collapse, and the unresolved question of how a revolution outlives its revolutionaries. Fidel died in 2016; the embargo continues.

The Year of Fire

1968 was a global year. The Tet Offensive in late January shifted American opinion against the Vietnam War. The Prague Spring (Alexander Dubček's "socialism with a human face") was crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks in August. Martin Luther King was assassinated on 4 April; Robert Kennedy on 5 June. Paris in May saw a general strike of ten million workers and a near-collapse of the de Gaulle government. The Tlatelolco massacre on 2 October killed an unknown number of student protesters in Mexico City days before the Olympics. Black athletes raised gloved fists on the Olympic podium. Berkeley, Columbia, the LSE, Tokyo, Belgrade, and Karachi all had student uprisings.

1968 was not a successful revolution by Skocpol's strict criteria — almost no government fell. It was a cultural revolution that reshaped what could be said in a generation: about race, about sex, about authority, about the legitimacy of the postwar order. The Eastern Bloc's hardliners learned that they would never trust their own intellectuals again. Western elites learned that they had to manage rather than command. The 1968 generation went on to produce the Greens, second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and many of the people who, two decades later, brought the Wall down.

Chile · Counter-revolution

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean military, under General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. Allende, given a chance by the rebels to surrender, instead made a final radio broadcast and shot himself in the Moneda presidential palace as the air force bombed it. The Pinochet dictatorship that followed lasted seventeen years, killed at least 3,200 people, tortured tens of thousands, and pioneered Latin American free-market authoritarianism with advice from Chicago-school economists.

The 1973 coup belongs in this deck because it is also a hinge of twentieth-century history. The CIA's role, declassified in the 2000s, is documented; Henry Kissinger had remarked that "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." The Chilean experiment with "neoliberalism" became the template for Thatcher and Reagan a few years later. Counter-revolutions are also revolutions; sometimes they last longer than the things they overthrow.

Iran & the Rest

1979 produced the second-most consequential revolution of the twentieth century after Russia's: the Iranian. The Pahlavi dynasty, in power since 1925 and increasingly authoritarian under Mohammad Reza Shah, was overthrown by an unlikely coalition of Islamist clerics, leftists, liberals, and bazaari merchants. The Shah fled on 16 January; Ayatollah Khomeini returned from Paris exile on 1 February to a million-person welcome at Tehran's airport. A referendum in April established the Islamic Republic of Iran. The hostage crisis (444 Americans held at the US embassy from November 1979) ended Carter's presidency.

1979 also produced the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega's FSLN took Managua on 19 July), the New Jewel Movement's brief revolution in Grenada, and — the great forgotten event — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 24 December, which produced the mujahideen, then the Taliban, and eventually the world's longest war. The Iranian revolution is the one whose long shadow still falls heaviest on the early twenty-first century.

People Power, Manila

The People Power Revolution in the Philippines, 22–25 February 1986, deposed Ferdinand Marcos after twenty years of authoritarian rule. The trigger was the assassination of opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino in 1983 and the rigged election of February 1986 in which Marcos claimed victory over Aquino's widow Corazon. Two million unarmed civilians, including nuns with rosaries, blockaded military and police units at EDSA Boulevard in Manila. The army defected. Marcos was helicoptered to Hawaii by the US. Cory Aquino became president.

Manila's revolution was the template for the largely peaceful "people power" revolutions of the late twentieth century: South Korea (June 1987), Solidarity (1989), the Velvet Revolution (1989), Serbia (2000), Georgia's Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine's Orange Revolution (2004). Whether such revolutions can succeed against twenty-first-century authoritarianism — with its surveillance technology, financial leverage, and disinformation — is the open political question of our own time.

Annus Mirabilis

1989 was the most concentrated burst of regime change in modern history. Poland's Solidarity-led government took power in August. Hungary opened its border in September. East Germans flooded west; the Berlin Wall opened on 9 November. The Velvet Revolution overthrew Czechoslovakia's regime in twelve days that November. Bulgaria's regime collapsed. Romania's Ceauşescu was executed on Christmas Day. By the end of the year every Warsaw Pact regime except Albania's had fallen, and most without significant violence.

The same year, however, was not a uniform victory for the protest. The Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing (April–June 1989) were crushed by the People's Liberation Army on the night of 3–4 June, with somewhere between several hundred and several thousand civilian deaths. The Chinese Communist Party drew, from its own near-miss, the lesson that 1989 had to be foreclosed. Three decades later it is still drawing it.

Aftershocks

The dissolution of the Soviet Union (December 1991), the dissolution of Yugoslavia into a decade of war (1991–99), the various coloured revolutions in post-Soviet states, and the Arab Spring of 2010–12 are all aftershocks of the 1989 detonation, propagating outward at varying rates. The Tunisian Jasmine Revolution (December 2010 – January 2011), the Egyptian revolution that brought 18 days of Tahrir Square protests in January–February 2011, the Libyan and Yemeni and Bahraini risings, and the catastrophic Syrian civil war that consumed the decade after 2011 — these were a wave that, in places, succeeded, and in places, was crushed or hijacked.

What revolutions teach

The historian Crane Brinton, in The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), proposed that revolutions follow a recurring pattern: a moderate phase, a radical phase, a terror, and a Thermidorean reaction in which a strongman (Cromwell, Napoleon, Stalin) consolidates a more disciplined order than the one the moderates wanted. The pattern is not universal, but it has reasonable predictive power.

The twentieth century also taught some less expected lessons. Most successful revolutions follow defeat in war (Russia 1917, China 1949, Iran 1979 was atypical). Most fail when the army stays loyal to the state. Mass nonviolent campaigns, by Erica Chenoweth's database covering 1900–2006, succeed about twice as often as armed uprisings. Revolutions are easier to start than to finish; the hard part is what to do on Tuesday morning. Revolutions that do not produce institutions usually produce dictators. The political imagination that the twentieth century inherited from 1789 — that a single transformative event can solve the human problem — is, on the evidence, partially mistaken. The ordinary work of building decent institutions afterward is, almost always, longer and harder than the storming of the gates.

Faces of the century

Where to go

Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions · Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes · Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine · Erica Chenoweth, Civil Resistance · Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern.

↑ Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989. Watch on YouTube for more.