Course description

This class examines some of the world’s social revolutions, from the period 1789 to 1989. It considers theories, causes, and implications of revolution and includes case studies of efforts that succeeded and efforts that failed.

Required books

By Sheila Fitzpatrick (2008)

In this historian’s account of the 20th century’s first significant social revolution, Stalin’s Great Purges of 1937–38 constitute a “monstrous post-script.” For Fitzpatrick, the revolution starts with the Romanov Dynasty’s fall and the Provisional Government’s short-lived rise to power in 1917 and it reaches completion together with the forced industrialization of the First Five-Year Plan, in 1932. Fitzgerald details a Russia that, at the start of the 20th century, was quasi-feudal, bereft of political organization, and minimally industrial—“a great power . . . universally regarded as backward,” she says. She describes the Romanovs’ undoing by the events of World War I and their own ineptitude; the bitterly divided post-dynastic period, when power was split between the liberal Provisional Government and the socialist Petrograd Soviet; the victory of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917; and finally the ascent of Stalin, with his revolution “from above.”

The Russian revolution is generally portrayed as a communist insurrection, but Fitzpatrick calls into question the importance of ideology in bringing the Bolsheviks to power and determining what happened afterward. “All revolutions have liberté, égalité, fraternité and other noble slogans inscribed on their banners,” she writes. The Russian revolutionaries won not because they promised communism but because they promised “Land, Peace, and Bread.” Once they were in power, superior organization, arbitrary terror, and divisions among their opponents kept them there. The result, says Fitzgerald, was “less than the revolutionaries expected, and different.”

The Russian Revolution, 2008 edition

By Charles Kurzman (2004)

The success of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 initially puzzled many observers. “A seemingly stable regime,” writes sociologist Kurzman, “led by an experienced monarch, buoyed by billions of dollars of oil exports . . . and supported by the world’s most powerful countries—how could such a regime fail?” But the central problem of petro-states is that they are independent of society. Such states do not need strong support from their people; they also do not strive for it.

Moreover, Iran’s oil wealth appeared to compromise the country’s international sovereignty. By the 1970s, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s close relationship with the United States made him seem to many Iranians a puppet of the West, as did his programs to foster secular schools and courts and liberalize conditions for women. This association, Kurzman points out, allowed for the allying of anti-colonial, nationalist, leftist, and religious groups that might otherwise have been fighting one another.

In the years prior to the revolution there was no “crisis of the state,” Kurzman says—no fracturing of the elites or military defections (as we would see later in Eastern Europe). But between 1977 and 1979 economic conditions in Iran collapsed, due in part to a steep fall in world oil prices, and much of the blame fell on the Shah, a common problem for dictators. Islamic groups took two steps that enabled them to challenge the regime, says Kurzman. They linked Islam to nationalism (and anti-Westernism), transforming even the month of Ramadan, which is traditionally identified with personal purification, into a metaphor for the cleansing of the state. And they cultivated a “mosque network” that, like African-American churches in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, served as a powerful mobilizer. There were more than 9,000 mosques in Iran in 1979, says Kurzman; they “reached into every town and village.”

By Padraic Kenney (2002)

By Stephen Kotkin (2009)

Read back to back, these two books encompass a debate over what happened in Eastern Europe to cause communism’s collapse there in 1989—another revolution that few observers saw coming. To be sure, the Eastern Bloc states had serious structural flaws: inefficient and outmoded economic programs; increasing indebtedness to and lack of competitiveness with the West; and sclerotic and corrupt political systems. Another contributing factor was the 1989 decision by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to cease underwriting the regimes. But according to Kenney, a historian, it was the citizens of Eastern Europe—the “proletariat”—who toppled the governments.

In Poland and East Germany in particular, there was a history of direct confrontation with governing authority by labor, most famously by Poland’s Solidarity trade union. Worker strikes and protests were especially troubling for communist leaders, who claimed to serve “dictatorships of the proletariat.” Another important form of opposition came to be known as the “WiP model,” after a Polish group called Wolno´s´c i Pokój (Peace and Freedom). It involved small groups undertaking apparently apolitical actions, such as cleaning up city parks, removing graffiti from national monuments, and helping pensioners obtain their benefits. These acts characterized the state less as an object of resistance and more as a figure of irrelevance. They “sharpened the distinctions between state and society, while lowering barriers to participation,” says Kenney—and, with social movements eroding authorities’ claims of control, the bankrupt regimes had nowhere to turn, so they imploded.

As inspiring as Kenney’s narrative is, it simply is not true, says historian Stephen Kotkin. He maintains that most analysts of the Eastern European revolutions focus “disproportionately . . . on the ‘opposition,’” which they “fantasize” as forming a nascent civil society. Kotkin focuses on what he calls the “uncivil society,” meaning the ruling elites in the Communist Party—some 5 to 7 percent of the population in most Eastern Bloc countries. He argues that these elites started out in the 1940s believing socialism would remove the causes of social conflict, namely private property and class division. It was, in Kotkin’s words, “a heady mix that held awesome power but then disintegrated with uncanny velocity.”

By the 1980s, communism’s leaders had lost belief in themselves, mainly due to the economic shortcomings of their regimes. The states tried becoming exporters of industrial, consumer, and technical products, only to be beaten out by Japan, the Asian Tigers, and China. They tried borrowing their way out of trouble, and in 1989 their debt to Western banks reached $90 billion. Faced with the end of Soviet support, the Eastern European regimes lost coherence and splintered internally. With the violent exception of the Ceaus¸escu government in Romania, communist elites negotiated themselves out of power—and often into advantageous positions in the new order. “No surprise there,” Kotkin says. “All revolutions are in some sense revolutions of the deputies.”

Two views of Eastern Europe

By John Foran (2005)

If people revolted whenever they were poor and repressed, revolution would be a global constant. In an analysis of attempted and failed revolutions that extends over four continents, Foran, a sociologist, identifies essential conditions for revolutionary success. Some can be long-simmering, including what he calls “dependent development,” whereby economic growth in a country is controlled by a narrow elite and often involves the exploitation of natural resources for export, a situation that tends to result in overburdened infrastructure and ever-increasing inequality. Regimes that meet this standard have ranged from the dynastic (the Somozas of Nicaragua, the Assads of Syria) to “guided democracy” (Batista’s Cuba).

A marked economic downturn is likely to be the immediate trigger of revolt, says Foran, with what he calls a “world-systemic opening” serving as a portent of revolutionary success. A “world-systemic” opportunity arises when foreign powers are distracted by other events or lose the capacity or will to help a client regime maintain power—as, for example, in 1980 when American hostages in Iran diverted the Carter Administration’s attention from revolutionary events unfolding in Nicaragua.

Still, writes Foran, it is difficult to predict when a plummeting economy will cause revolt as opposed to grumbling or despair. Revolt usually occurs when people’s subjective understanding of what is tolerable—sometimes termed their “moral economy”—has been violated, fueling a coalescence of opposition that, even as it draws on citizens’ shared experiences, is usually cross-class and often multi-ethnic. Such coalitions are nearly always internally fractious, says Foran, as they “struggle among themselves over the shape of the new order.”

Certainly, no one could have predicted that Mohamed Bouazizi, a vegetable peddler frustrated by callous treatment from local officials, would set himself on fire in a small town in Tunisia, nor that his act would spark the “Arab Spring,” however revolutionary those recent events prove to be.

Paul Christensen is an adjunct associate professor in the political science department and the author of Russia’s Workers in Transition: Labor, Management, and the State under Gorbachev and Yeltsin(1999).