Several major revolutions of historical importance occurred alongside the twentieth century’s global conflicts. Ancient regimes and civilizations, which were resistant to the West’s expansive imperialism and industrialism, set their own terms for modernization and Westernization in violent and original ways.
Two of the most important Communist revolutions were in Russia and China, in response to exploitation of the laboring classes. This was in contrast to the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s revolutions and reform movements in other Western European and American societies. Russia’s and China’s goals were to establish liberal principles of social and economic freedom for the middle classes and peasants against aristocratic and landed privilege, with little concern for the growing class of urban and industrial workers.
The Bolshevik government seized all private land, banks, and industries; the former owners were persecuted and their estates looted and burned. Soviets, or popular committees, ruled locally under command of the central Party. The Cheka, the secret police, spied on and arrested any who deviated from revolutionary enthusiasm. Marx had said Communism was designed for developed states like Germany and Britain, where the industrial working class would seize and freely share the capital that fueled their production. There was nothing in Marx about how to communize a society like Russia that was largely agricultural and pre-industrial. The Bolsheviks’ solution, called Marxism-Leninism, called for dictatorial central direction by a single Party until industry, national wealth, and Communist thought had developed enough for the state to “wither away.”
In 1924, Lenin died and Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin instituted his Five-Year Plans with the goals of increasing industrial and agricultural productivity. Individual farms were collectivized, and over five million who resisted were killed. An intensive program of heavy industrialization was begun. Education and basic health care were universal and free, women were given equal rights under the law, and organized religion was suppressed in favor of official atheism. At the same time, civil rights were non-existent. Until the 1950s, the Communist Party used state terror and purges to enforce submission; hundreds of thousands were tried and executed, and millions were imprisoned in a vast network of deadly labor camps. For several decades this aspect of Communism was denied or minimized, and Soviet propaganda seemed to offer a glimpse of a “future that works” to Marxist true believers around the world.
Even more than Russia, at the beginning of the twentieth century, China struggled to reconcile its 2000-year history and imperial traditions with the challenges of the modernizing West. The declining Qing Dynasty finally succumbed to the Chinese Revolution of 1911. The last emperor abdicated and China was declared a Republic, with a program of Western-oriented idealistic reforms focused on national independence from foreign control, constitutional democracy, and popular welfare. In reality, the country was fragmented into a series of warlord-dominated zones, reflecting China’s long history of chaotic regional struggles whenever the strong central government weakened.
The Kuomintang (KMT) was the ruling nationalist party founded by Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen), and led after his death in 1925 by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). They struggled to unify and modernize China in the face of continued Western extraterritorial privileges and increasing Japanese imperialist pressure. Although the new Soviet Union helped build the KMT’s military power in the 1920s, by the 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had emerged as a major political and military rival, with a program more oriented towards China’s huge rural population than its urban middle and working classes. The growing conflict with Japan after 1931 increased national feeling and cooperation among factions, but also weakened or destroyed China’s most modern and Westernized sectors. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, open civil war broke out, which ended in 1949, with the KMT’s defeat and withdrawal offshore to Taiwan.
The second Chinese Revolution was launched in 1949 by the Communists’ leader Mao Zedong, who proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Similar to the Russian experience, the Chinese had to adapt the German industrial theories of Marx to a huge and almost entirely rural nation. Stalin sent advisors and aid to the newest and largest Communist state (while the United States refused to recognize the new regime and treated it as a hostile power). Following totalitarian models of the period, the Party eliminated all opposition by killing and imprisoning millions, completely controlled cultural and political expression, and elevated Mao as the supreme and perfect dictator. Mao expanded the Party’s existing land reform program, whereby landlords were dispossessed and often killed, and landless peasants were given their own parcels to farm in cooperative groups. This required social adjustment as well as economic: Communist ideology was promoted as a replacement for Confucian ideals, which had worked for thousands of years to enforce Chinese class hierarchies. Businesses were nationalized and a Five-Year Plan was begun to develop heavy industry along Soviet lines.
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Mao’s ideological but often impractical focus on China’s huge rural population led to erratic methods of national development. Not satisfied with the technocratic Soviet model, in the late 1950s Mao decreed the Great Leap Forward. All life was collectivized, private property was abolished, and ancient social customs replaced by Party activities. To achieve a modern industrial capacity, backyard steel furnaces were set up, in which farmers made iron and steel from scrap metal. The Great Leap Forward was a failure. The backyard furnaces produced poor quality iron, and bad weather combined with a drop in agricultural productivity to cause a major famine and the deaths of at least 30 million Chinese.
| COMPARATIVE CLOSE-UP: THE ROLE OF WOMEN DURING THE RUSSIAN AND CHINESE REVOLUTIONS |
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China’s radical Communist revolution took place just as Russia’s was moderating. Maoism’s apparent success inspired a new generation of Communist parties in the developing world during the Cold War. Cuba’s successful revolution, led by Fidel Castro in 1959, introduced Communism to the Western Hemisphere. This led to direct nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and to repeated struggles between U.S.-supported governments and rural rebels supported by Cuba and the U.S.S.R., across Latin America and the Caribbean basin. Limited successes in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Chile were countered or crushed by the United States and the local governing classes. In Cuba and much of Latin America, the economies were primarily based on commodity exports. Communism had even less chance to overcome its contradictions than in the self-sufficient Marxist states in Eurasia.
Likewise, in Asia and Africa, uprisings, civil wars, and occasionally successful revolutions were based on anti-imperialist or nationalist forms of Communism, supported by Soviet and/or Chinese diplomacy, aid, and military supplies. Successful examples include Vietnam and North Korea, which resisted Western military pressure. More isolated Communist movements or governments arose in underdeveloped former colonies like Indonesia, Malaya, Angola, Mozambique, and the Republic of the Congo, but these states struggled. The collapse and retreat of Soviet and Chinese Communism at the end of the 1980s signaled the failure of Marxist-Leninism and Maoism as world-changing revolutionary ideologies in the twentieth century.
Early in the twentieth century, before the Great War, a number of independent empires on the periphery of the European world order underwent revolutions led by middle-class elites: Russia in 1905, Ottoman Turkey in 1908, and China and Persia in 1911.
In contrast to Communism’s emphasis on radical change, Islamism in the twentieth century has focused on tradition, including earlier history when the Caliphate, established by the Prophet, united all Muslim peoples under one rule. As the European world order collapsed in this period, Western-style nationalism proved an effective force for anti-imperialist independence movements. At the same time, it conflicted with the world's emphases on reunification and consolidation in the name of the faith.
In 1914, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the last incarnation of the Caliphate, was already taking place due to European imperial pressure in Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. In fact, the Great War itself was started by competition of two Empires, Austria-Hungary and Russia, to control former Ottoman lands in the Balkans. During the Great War, the Allies mobilized Arab resentment of Turkish domination. The Young Turks, progressive modernizers who had already pressed the sultan for reforms before the war, fought to preserve Anatolian Turkey from being carved up by the victorious Allies in 1919. Under Kemal Ataturk, the Caliphate was abolished, with Islam taking a back seat to nationalism and modernization in the new Republic of Turkey. The Kemalist state has since balanced industrial development and its strategic position between West and East, against the continuing strength of Islamic faith and practice among its people. Turkish intellectuals and clerics continue to debate the possibilities and contradictions of the world’s most secular Muslim state.
The Arabian Peninsula was largely unified by the Saud dynasty by 1932, becoming Saudi Arabia. However, the Pan-Arab advocates in the Levant saw the Ottoman Empire cynically replaced by imperial Britain and France, which divided the region up into “mandates” of the League of Nations. Iraq, the former Mesopotamian provinces of the Ottomans, rebelled and was gradually given independence by Britain by 1932; on the other hand, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria did not achieve independence until after the Second World War. Tthe Arab national states of the Middle East are still torn by competing sects and ethnic groups, but united by opposition to Israel and by their Islamic heritage. They have exchanged kings for dictators, have used their oil wealth and strategic locations in international relations, and have tried to both appease and control Islamic activism.
Persia, descended from one of the world’s oldest civilizations, was still an independent empire in 1914, despite Russian and British incursions. Nationalist elites, allied with the Islamic clergy, had been engaged in a revolution against the dynastic Shahs since 1906. They created a parliament and a constitutional monarchy, and removed some of the foreign influence over their government. After the Great War, in response to Soviet and British interference to control the nation’s oil resources, army leader Reza Pahlavi was declared the new Shah and the country was renamed Iran. Anti-Communist and secular, he introduced numerous modern reforms along Western lines. He also followed Turkey’s example in demanding that Muslims liberalize their practices to accommodate social progress, wear modern clothing, and give more freedom to women. After he chose to back Nazi Germany in the Second World War, Pahlavi was replaced in 1941 by his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
The new Shah continued to modernize Iran in the postwar world, as U.S. influence replaced British influence and Soviet pressure remained a constant factor. In the 1960s, he began a massive land reform and industrial program to enlist peasant and working class support against the landlords, clergy, and educated middle classes who resented his authoritarian and anti-democratic rule. Fueled by oil revenue, his regime increased in world influence in the 1970s, but he lost touch with the changing social dynamics among his people. Faced with the uncertainties of an industrial revolution, more Iranians from every class saw the traditionalist Shi’ite Muslim clergy, led by exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, as their most faithful representatives. In 1979, increasing civil resistance forced the Shah to leave Iran. Khomeini returned, and within months the nation voted to become an Islamic Republic. The Islamic Revolution put the clergy in charge and imposed a fundamentalist theocracy that was hostile to the secular and Christian West, to Israel, and to atheistic Communism. Iran remains a regional industrial and military power and an example of the power of religious, rather than political or economic, ideas in modern revolutionary history.
From 1939 to 1959, Cuba was ruled by the dictatorship of Batista, under which a small percentage of people were very wealthy and the masses of peasants were impoverished. Fidel Castro organized a guerrilla movement which initially failed, but eventually captured power in 1959. Though he had promised to hold elections, Castro did not do so, and at first even denied that he was a communist. When he established close ties with the Soviet Union, the United States viewed him as a threat.
In 1961, Castro announced his communist plans for Cuba: collectivized farms, centralized control of the economy, and free education and medical services. Tensions with the United States continued when a group of Cuban exiles in 1961, supported by the United States, launched a failed invasion attempt, known as the Bay of Pigs.
In 1962, a standoff known as the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred when Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba. The United States and the Soviet Union compromised, and a third world war was avoided.