5

            Revolutions and Revolutionary Leadership

Transformational leaders are not the only ones who produce systemic change. So do revolutionary leaders, provided they are successful in carrying through the revolution. Compared with those who succeed, however, there are many more revolutionary leaders who fail to dislodge the powers that be. In an authoritarian regime, the reward for failure is execution or, at best, imprisonment. In established democracies, revolutionaries have experienced only failure. Fortunately for them, however, the consequences of leading or belonging to a revolutionary party or movement, unless they have reached the point of employing violence, are generally nothing worse than marginalization. The explanation for the failure of revolutionary leaders and revolutionary parties in democracies is straightforward. The very fact that governments are held responsible for their decisions by an enfranchised citizenry places constraints upon what they may do. It gives them a strong incentive to pay some heed to people’s views and interests, rather than bring them to a boiling point of indignation. Most crucially, free and honest elections mean that governments can be removed, and hopes for significant policy change maintained, without the need for either violent upheaval or sudden systemic change. As the Czech writer, Ludvík Vaculík, observed in a speech in Prague in June 1967 (which incurred the wrath of the Communist authorities), the rules and norms of democracy are ‘a human invention which makes the job of ruling considerably harder’. They have obvious advantages for the ruled – the citizens of the country – by enabling them to hold governments accountable for their actions. As Vaculík noted, however, they bestow benefits also on those in power, since when a government falls, democratic rules ‘save its ministers from being shot’.1

To examine revolutionary leadership presupposes clarity on what we mean by a revolution. In its derivation, the term points to a circular movement, as the verb ‘to revolve’ suggests. And, in practice, more often than not, a revolution replaces one form of authoritarian rule by another. However, in the years since the French Revolution, the notion has acquired a connotation different from that of government rotating in a full circle. For Samuel Huntington, revolution ‘involves the rapid and violent destruction of existing political institutions, the mobilization of new groups into politics, and the creation of new political institutions’.² For John Dunn, ‘Revolutions are a form of massive, violent and rapid social change.’³ Moreover, even when, as is generally the case, authoritarian rule follows the overthrow of a despotic regime by revolution, it is no less usual for it to be a type of authoritarianism quite distinct from the pre-revolutionary order. There will be different political institutions, different winners and losers within the society, and, in the case of Communist revolutions, a different economic system.

Some authors do not include violence as one of the defining characteristics of revolution.⁴ When it is excluded, however, the notion of revolution is made to cover too many disparate political phenomena. It is better to make a clear distinction between revolution, in the sense in which thinkers as very different in other respects as Huntington and Dunn use the term, and such occurrences as civil disobedience, passive resistance, state breakdown and coups d’état. Excluding civil resistance and non-violent demonstrations (even when they lead to the replacement of one regime by another) from the definition of revolution is not to downplay their significance, still less their merits. On the contrary, non-violent resistance to authoritarian regimes on the part of large numbers of citizens more often succeeds in overturning dictatorships than does violent resistance, and it has a much better record in establishing democracy thereafter.⁵ It is useful also to distinguish revolution from splits within the ruling elite, with one faction overthrowing and outlawing another. When a group within an elite replaces another in a palace coup, they themselves may call it a revolution (since ‘revolution’ retains a romantic aura, whereas ‘coup d’état’ is almost invariably a pejorative term), but that is stretching the concept unhelpfully.

            CHARACTERISTICS AND CONSEQUENCES OF REVOLUTION

What are the main characteristics of a revolution as distinct from peaceful transition from authoritarianism to democracy? The nature of regime change is most distinctively revolutionary when it is characterized by: (1) large-scale popular involvement; (2) the overthrow of existing institutions; (3) the establishment of a new legitimizing ideology for the post-revolutionary regime, and (4) the use of violence before, during or immediately after the change of regime. It is possible, naturally (as is true of other political concepts), to define revolution in different ways. Our starting point, however, remains the desirability of maintaining a distinction between peaceful systemic change and a negotiated transfer of power, on the one hand, and violent overthrow of a regime by a social and political movement, on the other.

There have been some attempts to study all known cases of revolution (often more broadly defined than here) and to delineate the social and political conditions in which they occur. Such efforts to find common features in, and parsimonious explanations of, the causes of revolution have failed, because the cases are too diverse.6 While it is possible to outline some of the social and political conditions that are conducive to revolution – they include war, rulers’ loss of faith in their own legitimating beliefs, the development of high educational levels within a closed political system, a heightened sense of relative deprivation, extreme inequality, the liberalization of a hitherto highly authoritarian regime, and rising expectations which state authorities lack the capacity to meet – we can find plenty of instances of these phenomena at times and in places where revolution did not occur. There is, moreover, sufficient variety in the causes and courses of different revolutions to limit the value of attempts to find factors that would explain them all.

The most ambitious general explanation remains that of Karl Marx. He saw the source of revolutionary transformation in the ‘contradictions’ – meaning growing incompatibilities – between institutional relationships and the changing material forces of production.7 State power was the power of a ruling class, and class conflict he regarded as the engine of historical change. It would culminate in proletarian revolution to overthrow capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Between capitalism and communism there would be a ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’, but that would lead on to communism, which, in its higher phase, would take the form of a classless, stateless society.⁸ This doctrine has inspired many a revolutionary movement, some of which were successful in overthrowing capitalism, although none came close to realizing Marx’s dream of a communist society. Although Marx played down the importance both of leaders and of ideas – classes rather than individual leaders were what mattered and ideologies were epiphenomena of socio-economic development, not of autonomous significance – the international Communist movement in the twentieth century, paradoxically but spectacularly, provided a refutation of his doctrine. Ideas mattered a great deal to such people as Lenin and Mao Zedong, and these leaders in turn played decisive roles in effecting revolutionary change and establishing Communist systems both within the largest country on earth and in the world’s most populous state.⁹

Not all revolutions are led by strong leaders. Some, indeed, are relatively leaderless, although that does not last for long once a revolution has succeeded in overthrowing the regime to which it is opposed. What the leaders get up to after the revolution figures in some cases in this chapter and in other cases in the next, for it is striking how often those revolutionary leaders who do manage to overturn an authoritarian regime go on to preside over one that is no less authoritarian, even if differently structured. Since political cultures are harder to change overnight than political institutions, much may depend on the new leaderships’ political-cultural inheritance. A great deal depends also, however, on the values, political beliefs and style of rule of the top revolutionary leader once he (and it has been a male-dominated vocation) is ensconced in governmental office. Although no such leader starts off with an entirely blank sheet, he has a wider range of choices open to him than has a leader within a consolidated democracy. He may, of course, be constrained by circumstances, both domestic and foreign, but is, by definition, far less constrained by institutions and custom.

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

The revolutions in the twentieth century which had the greatest global impact were those which brought Communists to power. We shall come to them, and their leaders, later in the chapter. The Russian revolutions aside, there were three other revolutions in the first quarter of the twentieth century of long-lasting significance – in Mexico, China and Turkey. The Mexican revolution is the odd one out, not only because it was much less the product of a national and cultural movement than the other two but also because there was no one leader who was as distinctively significant in the revolutionary process as was Sun Yat-sen in China or, still more, Atatürk in Turkey.

Eric Hobsbawm observed that ‘it is when the relatively modest expectations of everyday life look as if they cannot be achieved without revolutions, that individuals become revolutionaries’.10 Even where this radicalization occurs, it does not follow that a revolution will succeed. The Mexican case, though, is one where a deterioration in the already modest quality of life in the countryside turned many peasants into revolutionaries and where the revolution eventually prevailed. It began in 1910 and involved violent struggle over the next decade. The authoritarian regime that provoked the popular uprisings was such that reformist goals, it seemed, could be achieved only by revolutionary methods. The aims included land and labour reform, access to education, and opposition to foreign economic domination and exploitation. The bulk of the fighting forces of the revolution were peasants who had seen their standard of living fall in the immediately preceding years. The revolution had a number of leaders, but rather than forming a cohesive revolutionary movement, they were geographically dispersed, politically heterogeneous, and during a decade of revolutionary war and turmoil often engaged in fighting each other.

The authoritarian ruler of Mexico at the time the revolution broke out in 1910, Porfirio Diaz, had come to power in a coup (as had many of his nineteenth-century predecessors). It was middle-class discontent with Diaz’s dictatorship that triggered the movement. A wealthy and idealistic landowner, Francisco Madero, fired the first shot. He demanded that Mexico’s 1857 constitution be observed, and he opposed Diaz in the 1910 presidential election. After Diaz had won a typically corrupt contest, Madero was rewarded for his audacity by a spell of imprisonment. On his release, instead of returning quietly to his estates, he called in November 1910 for the forcible overthrow of the Diaz regime. There was a ready response to this appeal, especially from the rural poor, some of them indigenous peoples who had been deprived of their ancestral lands, while most were mestizo (of mixed ethnic ancestry). The immediate goal of the revolution, the removal of Diaz, was achieved when his advisers persuaded him to resign in 1911.

In a far freer election than that of the previous year, Madero was elected president. This did not put a stop to the violence, for Madero was too reformist for the old regime and too modest in the changes he introduced to satisfy the forces that had been unleashed in rural areas. The Madero presidency was ended by a military coup in 1913 and Madero himself was killed. The harsh military regime that followed did not, however, halt the rebellion. Local leaders who had been active in the revolutionary struggle since 1911 came to the fore in different parts of the country, the most notable being Emiliano Zapata in the south of Mexico and Francisco (‘Pancho’) Villa in the north. Zapata had been among those dissatisfied with Madero, especially on account of his failure instantly to hand back confiscated land to the peasantry. Both Zapata and Villa were skilled in guerrilla warfare and attracted armies of loyal followers. Their appeal was populist and egalitarian, although lacking national political ambitions and sophisticated ideological underpinning. While still fighting a guerrilla war, Zapata was lured into a trap in 1919 and shot. Villa survived until 1923, three years after the revolutionary war had ended, before he, too, was assassinated.11

The revolution was not animated by a great idea in the way in which three other major revolutions of the first quarter of the century were. The Chinese revolution of the same period was inspired by the idea of a modernized nation-state, the Turkish revolution spurred by concepts of Westernization and secularization, and that of Russia in 1917 driven by the goal of overthrowing capitalism as well as the autocracy and by the aspiration to build communism. In Mexico it was not so much a vision of the future as a demand to restore past rights that had been lost which turned agricultural workers into revolutionaries. The removal of local freedoms, the conversion of independent peasants into landless labourers, and a growth of destitution in the countryside were stimuli enough for people to fight. The Mexican revolution had, then, relatively modest goals. It had no one authoritative leader, ‘no great intellectual fathers’, did not claim a universal validity, and was not utopian.12

It was much less an ideological revolution than those which occurred around the same time in China and Turkey, not to speak of Russia. If it is compared with one of the outstanding examples of radical change discussed in the previous chapter – the transformation of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s – the contrast is especially sharp. In the Soviet case, there was (as Gorbachev put it) ‘revolutionary’ change by evolutionary and reformist means.¹³ What happened in Mexico was the obverse – reformist change by revolutionary means.¹⁴ Significant and concrete political and social innovation did, indeed, follow the decade of revolutionary turmoil and civil war when a post-revolutionary regime was established in 1920. Some of the change was not what the various revolutionary leaders intended. Their support had been local, regional and personal. The regime which was established was more centralized, statist and bureaucratic. Nevertheless, the post-revolutionary government facilitated agrarian reform and promoted secular education. New institutions were created in the 1920s, among them an education ministry in 1921, the central Bank of Mexico in 1925, the National Irrigation Commission in 1926 and the new official political party, the PNR in 1929.¹⁵

Many of the old pre-revolutionary elite were ousted. The president who made the most significant mark on Mexican politics of the early 1920s, Álvaro Obregón, had been a supporter of the moderate reformer Madero and an opponent of Zapata and Villa. Obregón was, however, no slouch when it came to populist and radical gestures. When he occupied Mexico City in the middle of the revolutionary wars, at a time when the people were going hungry, he distributed some of the Church wealth to the poor and forced rich merchants to sweep the streets.¹⁶ Becoming president in December 1920, he put in place not only educational and labour reform but anticlerical policies, which were, ultimately, and in the most literal sense, to be fatal for him. His response to the desire for greater national economic autonomy put him on a collision course with the United States, which recognized his government only after he promised in 1923 not to nationalize American oil companies. Obregón was debarred by the new rules established by the revolution from seeking a second consecutive term of office in the election of December 1924, but returned to the fray four years later. He was re-elected to the presidency, but during a victory celebration in Mexico City he was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic who objected to his policies towards the Church.

The point has been made already that the leader of a country, immediately following a successful revolution, generally has a wider available range of policy options than has a president or prime minister within an established democracy. Nevertheless, a post-revolutionary leader in Mexico was far from unconstrained by factions, business interests and social institutions, among which the Church loomed especially large. But the social and economic policies pursued were, on the whole, in line with the main strands of the revolutionary movement. No one individual leader made all the difference. Had another of the revolutionary leaders emerged on top (Pancho Villa came close to doing so), the result, Alan Knight has argued, ‘would have been – in broad ideological terms – much the same’.17

            THE CHINESE REVOLUTION OF 1911–12

The Chinese revolution of late 1911 and early 1912 brought to an end not only the Qing dynasty, which had lasted for well over two and a half centuries, but also two thousand years of imperial rule. China became a republic in February 1912 when the Chinese court bowed to the strength of the revolutionary forces and announced the abdication of the boy emperor, the five-year-old Puyi. This outcome was a good illustration of de Tocqueville’s dictum that the most dangerous time for an authoritarian regime is when it begins to reform itself. During the first decade of the twentieth century some significant reforms were introduced. In 1905 the empress dowager Cixi sent a Chinese delegation to Japan and the United States and to five European countries to study how their countries were governed. Constitutional changes and also educational reform were brought in, but the former did not noticeably reduce the power of the existing elite or the latter significantly counteract the advantages that still accrued to wealthy families. Moreover, the court and the government continued to be dominated by the Manchu minority who formed the Qing dynasty, largely to the exclusion of the Han majority of Chinese. The most important reform was the creation of provincial assemblies in 1909 and a new tolerance of public gatherings.18 From some of the most highly educated members of these assemblies came calls for more far-reaching reform.

A series of uprisings took place in late 1911, led by local army commanders. The revolts reflected their anger at the extent to which China had fallen behind Japan militarily and economically. They also made clear the anti-Qing nationalist sentiments of these provincial military leaders. The belief that China badly needed to be modernized was held even more strongly by many within the educated middle class, especially those who had studied abroad. Revolts took place in one region after another, and by the end of the year a republic had been declared with its seat of government in the old summer capital, Nanjing, while the imperial government remained precariously in place in Beijing. The closest approximation China had to a ‘leader of the opposition’ was Sun Yat-sen who for many years, most of them spent abroad, had campaigned for an end to Manchu rule and for the establishment of a modern republican government in China. Sun was travelling in the United States when the Chinese revolution broke out and learned of the uprisings in his homeland from a newspaper in Denver. Rather than take the first boat back to China, Sun went to Paris and London. His mission was to persuade European governments to preserve neutrality as the conflict in China intensified and to withhold financial assistance to the imperial government. Arriving back in China on Christmas Day 1911, Sun’s status as the political and intellectual leader of the revolutionary movement was underlined when he was chosen by delegates from sixteen provincial assemblies, meeting in Nanjing, to be the country’s ‘provisional president’.¹⁹

In November 1911 the Qing court had recalled to Beijing Yuan Shikai, a capable and ambitious military leader. Earlier he had antagonized the acting regent, Prince Chun, Puyi’s father, and had been dismissed from the service of the court. The dynasty now believed that Yuan was the strongman best equipped to win the support of the rebellious military throughout the country – and, where unable to do so, to crush them. Appointed premier in November 1911, he formed a cabinet composed mainly of his own followers. The court was divided between those who thought the game was up for the Manchu dynasty and those who were counting on Yuan Shikai to preserve it. Yuan himself became increasingly unwilling to share power with the imperial dynasty – or, subsequently, with anyone else. A number of assassinations of royalists, which Yuan was suspected of encouraging, as well as the presence now of more Han troops than Manchu forces in Beijing, tilted the balance against those who wished to preserve the imperial throne. The abdication of the child emperor, and thus the end of the dynasty, was announced on 12 February 1912.20

Sun Yat-sen had already been chosen as provisional president, but he did not have forces at his disposal at all comparable with the number under the command of Yuan Shikai. Rather than prolong a period of ‘dual power’, Sun held on to his ‘presidential’ status for only six weeks before persuading the delegates to a National Council, which had been convened in Nanjing, to choose Yuan as the country’s provisional president. For Sun, however, the ‘provisional’ qualification was important. He was in favour of both post-revolutionary constitutional government and the partial democratization of China. The drawing up of a draft constitution was completed by March 1912 and preparations made for parliamentary elections – both for a Senate to be chosen by the provincial assemblies and for a directly elected House of Representatives to be formed on the basis of one member for every 800,000 people. The influence of the political system of the United States was evident, since the Senate was to be numerically the smaller body with each Senator serving for a six-year term, whereas the House of Representatives would be much larger, with its members serving for only half as long before facing re-election. The electoral rules fell a long way short of embracing democracy. Women were disenfranchised and there was also a significant property qualification. It was calculated that about forty million men, at that time some 10 per cent of the population, would be able to vote.²¹

The election could, nevertheless, have been an important first step on a road to democracy. It was, at least, less undemocratic than any election that has subsequently been held on mainland China (as distinct from Taiwan in recent decades). Sun Yat-sen had converted his Revolutionary Alliance into a political party, the Kuomintang. The KMT, as this Nationalist party was known, was led in the electoral contest by a talented young politician, Song Jiaoren. He had served under Sun Yat-sen within the Revolutionary Alliance while they were both in exile. Although allied with Sun, Song was not an uncritical follower. The younger man and the older leader differed on constitutional issues. Song favoured an essentially parliamentary system in which parliament and a prime minister would be far more powerful than the president who would be a purely formal head of state. Sun, however, aspired to return to the presidency he had briefly and provisionally held, this time with full constitutional legitimacy. He had no desire to be a mere figurehead after the party he had founded had become electorally successful.22

The last expectation turned out to be well founded when the election results were announced in January 1913. Four political parties had taken part, and the KMT emerged in both houses as by far the largest, albeit just short of an overall majority. It seemed evident that the Kuomintang would have the major say in the composition of a new government and in the choice of premier. The expectation was that the choice of the latter would fall upon Song Jiaoren, given that he had led the most successful party. However, when he was standing on the platform of Shanghai railway station in March 1913, about to board a train for Beijing and talks with Yuan on the formation of a government, he was approached by a gunman and shot. Two days later he died in hospital. It was generally believed that Yuan, who had no desire to share his recently acquired authority, was behind the assassination.²³

At any rate, Yuan lost little time in acquiring authoritarian power. Throughout 1913 the police, on his orders, harassed KMT members of parliament and their supporters, and in January 1914 he formally dissolved the parliament, following this up in February with the dissolution of the provincial assemblies. In 1915 he even made an attempt to have himself chosen as emperor and thereby become the founder of a new dynasty. A hand-picked ‘Representative Assembly’ unanimously begged him to accept that office. This, however, alienated some of his support in the capital, and there were large-scale protests in the provinces, many of which proceeded to declare their independence from Beijing. Yuan died of natural causes the following year and his death was followed by several years of chaos in which regional ‘warlords’ (some of whom had formerly been loyal to Yuan) held sway. With China divided, its central government was weak both administratively and militarily. This did nothing to help its cause at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, following the First World War. The victorious Allies paid lip service to Chinese interests but in the end treated China shabbily. Economic concessions that the Germans had enjoyed before the war were transferred to the Japanese, and Japan was also granted the right to station troops in two Chinese provinces.²⁴

Protests in China against the weakness of its own government in face of the Versailles victors’ high-handed disregard for Chinese sovereignty began with a demonstration by some 3,000 students in Beijing on 4 May 1919. That particular protest ended with some of the students ransacking and setting fire to the home of a government minister who had, in their view, made humiliating concessions to Japan. Another prominent politician was badly beaten, as were some of the students (one of whom died of his injuries) by the police. The students’ actions gave a name of lasting resonance to the much broader current of critical thought which was already discernible in Chinese society. It became known as the May Fourth movement.25 Many of its leading thinkers were associated with Peking University.*

Just as the revolutionary events of 1911 unfolded without any one person acquiring the role of leader (with the very important exception of Sun Yat-sen on his American and European political missions), the same applied to the May Fourth movement. Following Yuan’s death and the lapse into regional warlordism, the main national leader was a military man, Duan Qirui, who became premier in 1916. Although he had earlier been promoted by Yuan Shikhai and had served him loyally, he did not support Yuan’s bid to turn himself into an emperor.²⁶ In the face of Yuan Shikai’s severe crackdown in 1913 (Duan Qirui was acting premier at the time), Sun Yat-sen had been forced into exile again, returning to China only after Yuan’s death in 1916. During his latest sojourn abroad, he turned the Kuomintang into a hierarchical, disciplined party with a premium placed on personal loyalty to him. The next revolution, he argued, would be military in the first instance, and that would be followed by ‘tutelage’ of the Chinese people. Only after this process had run its course would the population as a whole be ready for self-government under a republican constitution.²⁷ Although Sun was no Communist, the Bolshevik Revolution made an impact on him, as it did on other revolutionary activists in China. In light of the shameful treatment China had received at Versailles, and European powers’ preoccupation with protecting their economic interests in China, Sun was willing to seek cooperation with the new Soviet leadership. They, in turn, while not believing that China was ripe for Soviet-style ‘socialism’, were happy to promote cooperation between the Chinese Nationalists led by Sun and the newly formed Chinese Communist Party. The Bolsheviks’ desire to support anti-imperial, revolutionary forces in China was in harmony with considerations of realpolitik, since a friendly China would be a useful Soviet ally vis-à-vis Japan. In the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, the Japanese had emerged victorious, and though this could be blamed on the weakness of the pre-revolutionary Russian regime, it had left its mark on the consciousness also of the Bolsheviks.

From 1920 Sun Yat-sen was setting forth his central ideas, which, as he tried to broaden the appeal of his political party, he called the Three People’s Principles. These were nationalism, democracy and ‘people’s livelihood’. All three were somewhat problematical or ambiguous. The first was the clearest, for Sun did, indeed, head a Nationalist party. From his return to China in 1916, he was attempting to promote the unification of China and to bring an end to warlordism. The problem lay in the fact that, though there was a large Han majority in China, there were, as Sun acknowledged, other nationalities with rights as well. It was also not entirely clear what Sun meant by democracy (it was certainly not much practised within the Kuomintang). It is, moreover, arguable that China was not ready for fully fledged democracy at the time, and Sun’s support for a restricted franchise and a period of ‘tutelage’ of the Chinese people reflected that view. The third principle is sometimes translated as ‘socialism’ but more literally as ‘people’s livelihood’. It reflected Sun’s desire not only to raise the standard of living but also to promote some equalization, including in the size of land holdings.28 During 1921 Sun was granted the title of ‘president’ by remnants of the short-lived Beijing parliament, but this was far from receiving country-wide recognition. Based for the most part in Canton, the capital city of his native province, Sun remained, in his last years, the undisputed leader of the Nationalist party, but he had very little support from the warlords among whom the country was divided. Soon after he took part in a ‘national reconstruction conference’ in Beijing in November 1924, Sun discovered that he had terminal cancer, from which he died, at the age of fifty-nine, in March 1925.²⁹

Sun Yat-sen, who came from an unprivileged peasant family, had a strong sense of his ability to lead and a personality that attracted adherents. Although he played no part in the breakout of revolution in 1911 and never presided over a unified Chinese state, he is, nevertheless, justly regarded as one of the main founding fathers both of the revolution and of the republic of China. It was he who insisted that revolution was the appropriate way to bring about change at a time when there were many with a preference for a reformist constitutionalist course. With his higher education and his knowledge of English, he was an effective international representative of the forces in China seeking an end to the Qing dynasty and the creation of a modern republic. He was the principal founder of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist political party which, under Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, was to dominate China until the Communists came to power in 1949.* Although not as authoritarian as his successor – and, indeed, an advocate of democracy in principle – Sun was a reforming and modernizing, but hardly democratic, leader. He remained somewhat aloof from the May Fourth political and intellectual current. In the words of a recent historian of modern China, ‘he generally disapproved of any movement he could not control’.³⁰ That Sun is still regarded in his homeland as the principal leader of the first of the two great Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century underlines the fact that revolutionary leadership does not necessarily mean leading a charge over the barricades at the moment a regime falls, but takes many different forms.

            ATATÜRK AND THE TURKISH REVOLUTION

Born in 1881, Mustafa Kemal – better known as Atatürk (meaning father of the Turks), a title he officially adopted from 1934 – took part in the ‘Young Turk’ revolution of 1908 against the unconstitutional rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Although not yet the leader of the opposition to the sultanate, he already harboured the ambition to play that role and to lead his country. As a far from teetotal young army officer, he told a friend in the course of one drinking session that he would make him prime minister. ‘And what will you be?’ was his friend’s response. ‘The man who appoints prime ministers,’ replied Kemal.³¹ In a letter to a woman friend in 1918, he wrote: ‘If I ever acquire great authority and power, I think that I would introduce at a single stroke the transformation needed in our social life . . . After spending so many years acquiring higher education, enquiring into civilized social life and getting a taste for freedom, why should I descend to the level of common people? Rather, I should raise them to my level. They should become like me, not I like them.’32 In the light of such sentiments, it is unsurprising that Turkey under Atatürk did not become a democracy but, rather, a relatively enlightened authoritarian regime.

Atatürk had distinguished himself as a soldier during the First World War, when Turkey fought on the German side, and he led the campaign in the years immediately following against Allied control of Turkey and against Greek occupation of part of the country. Throughout 1919 he gathered together both nationalist army officers and various independent groups that had risen spontaneously to protest against the Allied occupation, and succeeded in consolidating them into a movement of national resistance.³³ By 1920 he was elected head of government by the Turkish Grand National Assembly which he had convened, and a new Turkish state was proclaimed in January 1921 after Atatürk had arranged for the ministers of the previous Ottoman government to be, in effect, kidnapped. Although he was to establish friendly relations with the leaders of the new Soviet state, Atatürk was no more sympathetic to Turkish Communists than he was to the traditional authorities. A number of Communists were shot in 1922 with Atatürk’s acquiescence.³⁴

This was a revolution not only because it involved the violent overthrow of the pre-existing state authorities but inasmuch as it also altered the ideological foundation of the state. It put an end to the institutions that had prevailed when Turkey was at the heart of the Ottoman empire. Both the traditional political and the religious authorities – the sultanate and the caliphate – were replaced. (There was an element of continuity, even so. The Turkish nationalists, while believing that the attempt to sustain an empire had been misguided and that the sultans had stood in the way of progress, drew on the Ottoman bureaucracy and especially the army as linchpins of their new state.³⁵) The sultanate was not instantly abolished, but by the autumn of 1922 Atatürk, strengthened by the military victory over the Greeks, was moving to get rid of the remaining domestic curbs on his authority. He had the support of the government of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, which wielded real power, while the sultan still headed the remnants of the Ottoman government in Istanbul. Atatürk announced: ‘Sovereignty and kingship are never decided by academic debate. They are seized by force. The Ottoman dynasty appropriated by force the government of the Turks, and reigned over them for six centuries. Now the Turkish nation has effectively gained possession of its sovereignty.’ He hoped that this would be agreed. If it was not, the facts would still prevail ‘but some heads may roll’.36 The sultanate was duly abolished and the sultan himself went into exile before the end of 1922. The following year the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed and Atatürk became its first president.

The religious authority – the caliphate – was allowed to survive for longer than the sultanate. However, by 1924 Atatürk argued that the religious leader, the caliph, was doing what the sultan had done – listening to critics of the government and being in touch with the representatives of foreign powers. In early March the palace of Caliph Abdülmecid was surrounded by police and the building’s telephones were cut off. The caliph deemed it prudent to announce his resignation, although he rescinded that statement as soon as he had crossed from Turkey into Bulgaria. It did him no good. He never set foot in Turkey again and, following his death in 1944, his descendants’ requests to have his remains returned to Turkey were rejected.³⁷ The abolition of the caliphate, however, contributed to a deterioration in relations between Turks and the Kurdish citizens of the new state. Kurds constituted 20 per cent of the population, and putting an end to the caliphate removed an important religious symbol that had been common to both Turks and Kurds.³⁸

Atatürk was both the intellectual and the military leader of the Turkish revolution. It was one in which ideas were important and the ideas of Atatürk above all. He was very much a Westernizer, although there was sometimes a gap between ideals and behaviour. The rise of Kurdish nationalism – a new phenomenon – in the first quarter of the twentieth century posed a serious challenge to the idea of a Turkish nation-state. Promises of autonomy for the Kurds, made by Atatürk and other Turkish nationalists during the independence struggle, were not kept, and Kurdish rebellions in the mid-1920s were brutally suppressed.³⁹ Moreover, Atatürk’s respect for democracy in principle led to no more than half-hearted attempts to introduce it. They were aborted when it became clear that the creation of parties other than his own People’s Party (later the Republican People’s Party) would lead to frustration of his wishes and reforms. In other respects, however, the Westernization was real. Atatürk’s principal biographer, Andrew Mango, notes a series of decisions that ‘amounted to a cultural revolution’.40 Secular rule replaced religious hegemony and of particular importance was the secularization of the educational system. Religious courts, which had adjudicated on marriage and divorce, were closed down. The ban on alcohol, which Atatürk had conspicuously ignored even while it was operative, was ended.

The emancipation of women was greatly advanced, although Atatürk unilaterally divorced his own wife in a traditional manner. Women in inter-war Turkey acquired equal inheritance rights and new educational and career opportunities. Under Atatürk’s rule, women were also discouraged, although not banned, from wearing the veil.⁴¹ In foreign policy, Atatürk combined nationalism and anti-imperialism with a cautiously pragmatic neutrality. The revolution which he led, and the secular norms which it established, outlived him. Following his death in 1938, İsmet İnönü – who had been foreign minister and subsequently prime minister throughout most of the Atatürk era – became president and carried forward the modernization process. He went much further than Atatürk in one crucial respect, presiding over the country’s democratization. The first free elections in the history of the republic were held in 1950 and when the Republican People’s Party were defeated, İsmet accepted the result with good grace.⁴²

            COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS IN EUROPE

            The Russian Revolutions of 1917

Few could doubt that one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century was the ‘Russian revolution’ of 1917. By the end of that year Communists had taken power in the largest country on the planet, and the Soviet state that emerged over the following years was to have an immense impact on world politics over the next seven decades, especially from the Second World War onwards. There were, though, two quite distinct revolutions in Russia in 1917 which should not be conflated. They became known as the February and October revolutions – somewhat confusingly, since according to the Western calendar they took place in March and November.43 The strikes and demonstrations that marked the beginning of the first of Russia’s 1917 revolutions were launched on 8 March – International Women’s Day.⁴⁴ That timing was not coincidental, for the protests began with a walkout from the textile mills of Petrograd by women workers, who deliberately chose this particular date to make public their anger about the war and their own hardships. Events then moved quickly. It took only another week before the tsarist autocracy had collapsed.

The revolution came as a complete surprise to Vladimir Lenin who was, however, to be the most influential advocate of a second revolution in the same year and instrumental in ensuring that it would bring Communists – not a coalition of liberals and socialists or even a coalition of different types of socialist – to power. Rightly regarded as the principal founder of the Soviet state, Lenin was a sufficiently orthodox Marxist to believe in the inevitability of socialist revolution and enough of a revolutionary by temperament and conviction to devote his entire adult life to speeding up that process. Yet at the beginning of 1917 Lenin was far from sanguine about the prospects for early success. In exile in Switzerland, he addressed a meeting of workers in Zurich in January 1917 and said: ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.’⁴⁵ At that time Lenin was aged only forty-six.

Russia had suffered huge losses in the First World War, a conflict which had become increasingly unpopular, especially among those who bore the brunt of the fighting – the ‘peasants in uniform’, as Lenin called them. The Bolsheviks (renamed Communist Party in 1918) – the section of the Russian revolutionary movement which Lenin led – played little part in the February revolution, for their leading ranks had been depleted by imprisonment and exile.⁴⁶ There had been growing opposition to the tsarist government on the part both of liberals and of a range of socialist parties and factions. Although the Bolsheviks had significant worker support in the capital city, Petrograd (as St Petersburg was then called), they were far from being the most widely approved political party nationally. The party with the largest number of members as well as the most popular – as was shown in November 1917 in Russia’s first fully free election, which turned out also to be the country’s last democratic election for more than seventy years – was the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) whose appeal was primarily to the peasantry.47

The decisive action of the revolutions, however – those of both March and November – took place in Petrograd. Peasants, on learning what had happened in the capital, also asserted themselves and began redistributing land to those who worked on it. Bread shortages combined with war weariness to increase the general discontent with the tsarist regime. It had been gathering momentum over several decades, but in the first quarter of 1917 reached the point of no return. Mass walkouts from factories culminated in a general strike, which brought Petrograd to a standstill. The Duma, a legislature with limited powers and restricted suffrage that had been set up following an earlier revolution in 1905, attempted to mediate between the demonstrators and the government, but the tsar, Nicholas II, did not respond to their call for the formation of a government that could command the Duma’s confidence.⁴⁸

The February revolution was a brief moment of cooperation between liberal and radical opponents of the tsarist autocracy. A Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (‘soviet’ is simply the Russian word for council) had existed briefly during the revolutionary turmoil of 1905 and it was to be resurrected in Petrograd in 1917. Conscious of the support this body could attract from within the army, its members renamed it the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. On the fourth day of the strikes and demonstrations against the old regime, the police made many arrests and hundreds of people were killed or wounded when soldiers fired on the crowds. But by the following day many regiments had mutinied and in Petrograd alone sixty-five thousand troops had joined the rebellion.⁴⁹ Losing the support of the army left the old regime powerless. A majority of ministers in the tsarist government were arrested, and Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March 1917. He and his wife, together with their four daughters and haemophiliac son, were put under house arrest; they would be shot by the Bolsheviks in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg in July 1918.

A provisional government was formed, composed mainly of liberals who were critics of the incompetence as well as the authoritarianism of the old regime. They sought to introduce constitutional government and to move towards democratic elections for a Constituent Assembly. A socialist but anti-Communist member of that government, Aleksandr Kerensky had been, unusually, a member of both the Duma and the Petrograd soviet. He was to be joined by other socialists – Mensheviks and SRs – in May, as the coalition government was broadened.50 An impressive orator, Kerensky was successively in the short period between March and November minister of justice (in which capacity he freed all political prisoners), minister of war, and (from July) prime minister. At this time of turmoil, his biggest handicap was his commitment to continue fighting the war alongside Russia’s allies. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had opposed the war from the outset and were prepared to sign a separate peace with Germany to get out of it. Indeed, Lenin’s desire to end Russia’s participation in that war led the German High Command to facilitate his return from Switzerland to Russia. A sealed railway carriage was provided, in which Lenin travelled through Germany, along with some of his comrades, to the Finland Station in Petrograd. He immediately set about undermining the provisional government, calling on those who welcomed him not to cooperate with it. The period between the two Russian revolutions of 1917 became known as one of ‘dual power’, as the soviets (especially the Petrograd soviet) and the provisional government each claimed a superior authority.

Among the slogans Lenin had coined on the journey back to Russia, as part of what he called his April Theses, was that of ‘peace, land, and bread’. This broadened the Bolsheviks’ appeal, and the call for unilateral withdrawal from the war and forcible redistribution of land distinguished the Bolshevik position clearly from that of the provisional government. With the aim of wresting power from this new and precarious government, Lenin also included in his April Theses the slogan, ‘All power to the soviets!’ He was, at the same time, cautious about that outcome. In particular, he did not wish such a power transfer to occur until the Bolsheviks had a majority in the Petrograd soviet. In the early months following the February revolution, the executive committee of the Petrograd soviet was dominated by Mensheviks and SRs.⁵¹ It was not until the autumn that the Bolsheviks had a majority in both the Petrograd and the Moscow soviets, and from that moment Lenin was ready for immediate insurrection. There was, however, far freer discussion in 1917 within his party than was to be the case throughout almost the whole of the Soviet period, and the Central Committee initially rejected Lenin’s argument that the time was ripe for the Bolshevik seizure of power because the working class was now firmly on the party’s side.⁵²

If the February revolution was a combination of spontaneous unrest and the withdrawal of support for the autocracy on the part of a substantial part of the elite, with no one person or group overwhelmingly responsible for the outcome, the same could not be said of the October revolution. Lenin, as the most authoritative of the Bolsheviks, played a more decisive role than any other revolutionary, but Leon Trotsky’s participation was also of major significance. Trotsky had earlier kept his distance from both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, but in 1917 joined forces with Lenin. He believed that Lenin had come round to his view of ‘permanent revolution’ by abandoning the more academic Marxist precept that a lengthy period of ‘bourgeois democratic’ rule would be required, following a bourgeois revolution (which, in their terms, the February revolution was).53 Trotsky matched both Lenin’s intellectual power and his ingenuity as a revolutionary. Like Lenin, he also possessed enormous self-belief. (Trotsky was, however, to be outmanoeuvred in the intra-party politics of the 1920s by a less intellectually sophisticated, but craftier and still more ruthless member of the Bolsheviks’ ruling group, Josif Stalin.) Just like Lenin, Trotsky had been taken by surprise by the suddenness of the collapse of the tsarist regime. Whereas Lenin had been in Switzerland in March 1917, Trotsky was in New York, as were two other leading Bolsheviks, Nikolay Bukharin, and the only woman who was to become a prominent member of the first Bolshevik government, Alexandra Kollontai. Members of their party who did not go into exile had been rounded up in 1914 because the Bolsheviks not only opposed the war with Germany, but also hoped for a German victory. They argued that it would speed up the revolution if Russia were to be defeated.⁵⁴

The Bolsheviks suffered a setback in July 1917 when newspapers reported that Lenin was a German agent. Since Lenin had, indeed, used German help to get back into Russia from Switzerland, the accusation was damaging, although in essence absurd. It coincided, however, with a move by some Bolsheviks, which Lenin had considered premature, to seize power, with twenty thousand sailors from the Kronstadt naval base joining workers in this demand. The provisional government, albeit temporarily, came out on top. Armed clashes left some four hundred people dead. Lenin, endangered both by these events and by the supposed German connection, went once again into exile, this time in Finland. Trotsky was temporarily imprisoned, while Stalin gained in significance by remaining the most senior of the Bolsheviks still to be in Russia and at large.55

By the autumn of 1917 the Bolsheviks had a majority within the Petrograd soviet and Trotsky had been chosen as its leader. He regarded the soviet as the most appropriate instrument of the revolution which would bring the Bolsheviks (a party he had formally joined only in August 1917) to power. Lenin’s slogan of ‘All power to the soviets’ had been coined primarily to undermine the provisional government rather than because he shared Trotsky’s firm belief that the soviet rather than the Bolshevik party should organize the seizure of the reins of government. Lenin’s overwhelming concern was to ensure that the Bolsheviks would have nothing less than full power. At the First Congress of Soviets, held in June 1917, when the Bolsheviks did not yet have a majority within that national body and had not emerged victorious in any election of consequence, he made this clear in an unexpected answer to a rhetorical question. One of the speakers had asked, assuming that the answer in the negative was too obvious to need stating, whether in the prevailing conditions of Russia any political party was capable of taking power on its own. Lenin called out: ‘There is such a party.’⁵⁶ His political boldness was not entirely matched by his personal conduct in the run-up to the Bolshevik revolution, which erred on the side of caution – perhaps because he was convinced of his indispensability once the revolution had succeeded. Even after the provisional government had released the Bolsheviks arrested in July, Lenin remained in Finland for several more weeks, while urging his comrades in writing that the time had come for an armed uprising. The Bolshevik leadership were divided about the wisdom of this, but when some of them published their disagreement with the policy in newspapers, it alerted the government to the likelihood of another revolutionary insurrection. Since the authorities had been forewarned, more of the Bolsheviks came to believe that it would be dangerous to postpone the seizure of power.⁵⁷

The Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd soviet, which had been created to organize resistance to a threat in August of military dictatorship under the command of General Lavr Kornilov, became the chosen instrument of the Bolshevik insurrection. Lenin came out of hiding only on the night of 6–7 November (or 24–25 October, according to the Russian calendar in 1917). On the sixth, the forces deployed by the Military-Revolutionary Committee had taken over strategic points in the capital and on 7 November (the anniversary of which was celebrated with great fanfare throughout the Soviet period), they seized the Winter Palace where a meeting of the provisional government was in progress. Kerensky escaped and lived abroad for the rest of his life. (He died in New York in 1970 at the age of ninety-one. Stalin was later to ensure that many of the revolution’s victors – his fellow Bolsheviks who took part in the seizure of power – lived far shorter lives than the premier they forcibly ousted in November 1917.)

Trotsky had more to do than had Lenin with the actual organization and implementation of the Bolshevik revolution, but it was Lenin who had more influence than anyone else on the power structure and ideology of the new regime. Although sometimes regarded as no more than a coup, this was a revolution as defined earlier in the chapter. It led to a change of both the political and the economic system, achieved through violent insurrection, and with substantial (albeit not majority) popular backing. And it led to a regime that rested on a new ideological basis for its legitimacy. Soviets had spread throughout Russia during 1917 and a national congress had elected a central executive committee to represent them. For ordinary members of soviets, that body appeared to be the obvious replacement for the provisional government until such time as a government emerged following the election for a Constituent Assembly, to be held in November 1917. (The date of that election had been decided before the Bolshevik seizure of power.) This, however, did not happen. The Bolshevik leadership had other ideas. When the new government was announced, it was called the Council of People’s Commissars (which had a more revolutionary ring to it than Council of Ministers, the more conventional name it was given in 1946), and it consisted entirely of Bolsheviks. Lenin became head of the government, Trotsky the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities.

In the election for the Constituent Assembly, non-Communist socialists did much better than the party led by Lenin. As a leading historian of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union put it: ‘Half the country voted for socialism but against bolshevism.’58 Such democratic niceties did not trouble Lenin or Trotsky. When the Constituent Assembly held its first session and defeated the Bolsheviks in a vote, the Bolshevik delegates and the left wing of the socialist revolutionaries withdrew from the Assembly. The following day Bolshevik Red Guards stopped the remaining delegates – the majority of the assembly’s members – from entering the building, and that was the end of the Constituent Assembly. Lenin had opted for one-party authoritarian rule. Some Bolsheviks did favour a broader coalition and a greater role for the soviets, but even though soviets were to remain part of the constitutional form, as well as the name, of what from 1922 was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union), these institutions never regained the power they briefly wielded in 1917.

Until 1921 the Bolsheviks were fighting a civil war, in which they ultimately prevailed, against opponents of their revolution. Both sides acted ruthlessly and as early as December 1917 the Bolsheviks created an All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Fighting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, which became better known as the Cheka. In later incarnations it was known under different sets of Russian initials, among them the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB. The Bolshevik victory in the civil war owed much to superior leadership, that of Trotsky (who in March 1918 became war commissar) and of Lenin as head of the government and principal ideologist.

Both the economic and the political systems were rapidly changed. Industry and the banks were nationalized and, in place of the somewhat anarchic democracy of 1917, there was political repression not only of those who would have liked a return to tsarist rule but also of non-Bolshevik socialists. Lenin was ready to make tactical retreats in economic policy when confronted by popular unrest, as he did with his New Economic Policy, launched in 1921, which legalized small-scale private manufacturing and private trade. He made clear, however, that this did not involve political tolerance of Mensheviks or other critics. Lenin suffered a stroke in 1922 and, following growing incapacity, died in January 1924. In the last two years of his life major levers of power were moving from the government (the Council of People’s Commisars) to the Central Committee of the Party and the Secretariat that headed it. Its General Secretary from April 1922 was Stalin who had been chosen with Lenin’s full approval. By the end of the 1920s Stalin had put an end to the partial economic liberalization – the mixed economy that prevailed throughout most of the decade – and proceeded with the compulsory collectivization of agriculture, which caused immense suffering, including famine. By the early 1930s not only was the dictatorship of the Communist Party fully established, but it was accompanied by Stalin’s dictatorship over the party as well as over every other institution within the society. Whereas Lenin had not hesitated to employ terror or to order executions when dealing with opponents of Bolshevism, Stalin had no compunction about using the same methods against real and imagined enemies within the Bolshevik ranks. He also sought, and increasingly gained, a supreme leadership role within the international Communist movement.

            Communist Revolutions in South-Eastern Europe

A majority of Communist states in Europe either were essentially Soviet creations – as was the case also of the first Asian country to adopt a Communist regime, Mongolia, in the 1920s – or were formed with important Soviet participation. The rise of Communism in Eastern Europe was very much a consequence of the Second World War and of the success of the Soviet army, which played a far greater part than the armed forces of any other country in defeating Hitler’s Germany in the land war. The two countries where the Communist seizure of power was most clearly an indigenous revolution rather than a Soviet imposition were in south-eastern Europe – Yugoslavia and Albania, although Yugoslav Communists gave important assistance to the Albanian Communist Party, and serious consideration was given to a merger of the two countries in a confederation or even federal union. In both countries the Communist Party used the major parts they played in the wartime resistance movement as a means of furthering their revolutionary aims. This was true, to a certain extent, of other East and Central European countries where Communists were active in the resistance – albeit only after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 – but nowhere else in the continent did Communist-led partisans play such a large wartime role as in Yugoslavia.

Josip Broz, who became better known as Tito, an alias he adopted in 1934, fought in the First World War in the Austro-Hungarian army, was severely wounded in 1915, captured, and spent the next five years in Russia – as a prisoner until after the Bolshevik revolution.59 Tito returned to what was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as a Bolshevik sympathizer. He became an early member of the Yugoslav Communist Party, which had been founded shortly after the end of the First World War. Tito was arrested several times in the 1920s and was in jail from 1928 until 1934. On his release he was co-opted into membership of the Politburo of the Yugoslav Communist Party. The following year he was summoned to Moscow to work in the Comintern, the organization of the International Communist Movement. The Comintern was ultimately an instrument of the Soviet Communist Party and of its dictatorial leader – the ‘Stalintern’ as an American former Communist dubbed it.60 Nevertheless, the person who headed the Comintern from 1935 until the dissolution of the organization in 1943, the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, enjoyed a degree of authority and influence.⁶¹ For a foreign Communist the call to serve in the Comintern could be a path to higher things – or to the grave. Many European Communists, based in Moscow, who were refugees from fascist or other right-wing authoritarian regimes, perished in Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s. Tito survived largely because he was looked upon with special favour by Dimitrov. The choice of leader of an underground Communist party was essentially made in Moscow, and in 1937 that position was granted to Tito and formalized with the title of general secretary in 1939.⁶²

Someone who was later to be a thorn in the side of the Soviet leadership thus owed his initial pre-eminence among Yugoslav Communists to the patronage of Moscow. He went on, however, to establish a personal authority in Yugoslavia that was not dependent upon Soviet support and which, indeed, later increased when he incurred Soviet wrath. His leadership qualities came to the fore during the war years and, again, following the break in Yugoslav–Soviet relations in 1948. The British army officer, Bill Deakin (later Sir William Deakin and the first Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford), who was parachuted into Montenegro in occupied Yugoslavia in 1943 to liaise with the Yugoslav Partisans, noted that Tito’s authority depended on ‘few words or gestures’ and that he gained ‘an instinctive and total respect from those around him’. Deakin regarded him as ‘sure in judgement and deeply self-controlled’. He had expected to meet a rigid doctrinaire who would be impervious to open debate, but found him instead to be ‘flexible in discussion, with a sharp and humorous wit, and a wide curiosity’.⁶³

Milovan Djilas, at one time a close comrade-in-arms of Tito, became in subsequent years more critical of Tito than was the conservative British soldier-scholar, Deakin.⁶⁴ Djilas belonged to the leadership group of the Yugoslav partisans and was an important member of the post-war Yugoslav government until he became a critic of the system. He was expelled from the Yugoslav party in January 1954 after calling for its democratization. Subsequently Djilas spent nine years in Yugoslav prisons after writing The New Class (the first of a number of important books on Communism of which he was the author), in which he observed that ‘so-called socialist ownership’ had become ‘a disguise for the real ownership by the political bureaucracy’.65 In a later book – a critical, but nuanced, biography of Tito – Djilas wrote of Tito’s intellectual limitations, of his vanity and his growing desire for luxury. Such aspersions notwithstanding, Djilas emphasized that both during and after the war, Tito displayed ‘a glittering political talent’. He had a mastery of timing, which enabled him to choose the right moment for ‘critical courses of action’. He also had ‘a strong sense of danger, as instinctive as it is rational; an unconquerable will to live, to survive, and to endure; a shrewd and insatiable drive for power’.⁶⁶ Tito’s years as the dominating figure in post-war Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 will be touched upon in the next chapter. In the present context what is important is how he and the Communists achieved power in the first place.

During the war Tito was not only the leader of the Communist-dominated Partisan resistance movement to German and Italian invaders, he and his comrades were also engaged in civil war. The Partisans triumphed over both Croat fascists and Serb nationalists, and Tito became the leader of a provisional government of Yugoslavia in 1944. Under pressure from Western allies, he reluctantly included three royalist members, but they were discarded – along with the monarchy itself – the following year. Yugoslavia, which had been dismembered during the war, was reconstituted as a Federal People’s Republic. By the end of 1945 the Communists in Yugoslavia had achieved a monopoly of power which their counterparts in other East European countries took several years to attain. They won it first on the battlefield, subsequently dealing ruthlessly with known collaborators with the occupying forces. They then legitimated their rule with an election in November 1945 in which the only choice was to be for or against the nominees of the Communist Party. Since power was already in their hands, and as they had gained real prestige among a substantial part of the population for their role in the liberation of Yugoslavia from the invaders, they might well have secured victory in a free election. In the event, however, anti-Communists had no confidence that they could safely register negative votes and Tito’s movement secured a massive 96 per cent of the votes cast.67 The coming to power of the Communists was a combination of war of liberation and of revolutionary struggle, with nothing left to chance thereafter.

Success on the battlefield and intimidation were not, however, the only reasons for the success of the Yugoslav Communists. Along with the attractive promise of social justice, they appeared to offer the best prospect of bringing harmony in place of inter-ethnic conflict. The Communists had the advantage that they were the most Yugoslav (a word that means southern Slavs) of all the political parties, the only one which united the various nationalities who during the war – as well as earlier and much later – were engaged in bitter strife. Tito himself transcended the national divide. His father was a Croat, his mother a Slovene, and he grew up in a Croatian village. Yet Serbs and Montenegrins were disproportionately well represented in the Partisan movement he led. (The Serbian population was itself deeply divided between support for the nationalist Chetniks and for the Communist-led Partisans.) Different nationalities were represented also in the inner core of the party leadership.⁶⁸

A combination of national resistance movement against invading forces and revolutionary civil war was characteristic also of the coming to power of Albanian Communists. Within the resistance to the Axis powers, the Communists in Albania acquired a position of clear dominance. Mussolini’s Italy invaded Albania in 1939 and from the outset Enver Hoxha, the son of a landowner who had become attracted to Communism while studying in France, was active in the resistance. When the Albanian Communist Party was founded in 1941, Hoxha became its leader. He retained that position until his death in 1985. By then he had become not only the longest-lasting East European party leader but had been head of government for longer than any other non-hereditary ruler in the twentieth century. That owed much to his cunning as well as to his ruthlessness and to the institutions which the Communists put in place.

The Albanian Communists received more direct advice from their Yugoslav than Soviet counterparts during the Second World War, but Hoxha even in the war years was warier of the Yugoslav embrace than were some of his colleagues. In 1944 the Communists overthrew the German-supporting government in Tirana. As in Yugoslavia, they had proved capable of redirecting a national liberation struggle to revolutionary ends. Hoxha, who played the most important role in the takeover, was both well read and intelligent (and the author in later years of interesting memoirs).69 He was also a vindictive and dogmatic Stalinist, remaining an admirer of Stalin to the end of his life, long after Khrushchev had drawn attention to at least some of Stalin’s mass murders. Before the war, Albania had been under the authoritarian rule of King Zog. Under Hoxha Albania moved not just from one type of authoritarian rule to another but to totalitarianism. Hoxha went further than most Communist leaders in the elimination of all elements of civil society, with religious institutions and the practice of religion totally outlawed.

            COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS IN ASIA

            The Chinese Communists’ Capture of Power

Apart from the Soviet puppet regime of Mongolia, the first Communist state in Asia was China. It was also the earliest example of successful indigenous Communist revolution on the Asian continent. When Communists came to power in China, this was far more important for global politics, especially in the long run, than what happened in south-eastern Europe, but there are some parallels with the events in the Balkans. In China, as in Albania and, still more, in Yugoslavia, a war of national liberation was combined with a revolutionary struggle for Communist power. During the Second World War, with Japanese forces occupying China, there were separate Nationalist and Communist resistance armies. The Nationalists, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, bore the brunt of the struggle and their losses were enormous. The Communists focused mainly on guerrilla attacks on the Japanese, and suffered less severe casualties. For Mao Zedong the highest priority was preparing for the coming struggle with the Nationalists for the control of all of China. When the war against Japanese aggression began, the Chinese Communists controlled territory occupied by only four million people. By the time it ended that had grown to territories with more than ninety-five million inhabitants. During the same period the Chinese Red Army had risen in size from one hundred thousand troops to some nine hundred thousand.70

Mao had been the acknowledged leader of the Chinese Communists since the 1930s. Neither he nor the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek were in the least receptive to American attempts to broker an agreement between them following Japan’s surrender. A superficial rapprochement in late 1945 and early 1946 soon broke down.⁷¹ Civil war continued until it ended in victory for the Communists in 1949. The Soviet leadership, like that of the United States, had been in favour of compromise. Stalin advised the Chinese Communist Party not to attempt to take over the whole country. In a rare admission (albeit not in public) that he had been wrong, Stalin said that ‘when the war with Japan ended, we invited the Chinese comrades to agree on a means of reaching a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek’. They consented at the time but ‘did it their own way when they got home: they mustered their forces and struck. It has been shown that they were right, and we were not.’⁷² The Communists had a number of advantages in the contest for the support of the peasantry who constituted at that time the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population. They appealed successfully, in particular, to the poorer peasants and to landless agricultural labourers.⁷³ They promised them land of their own, whereas the Nationalists were too dependent on large landowners and regional power-brokers to match them in any such offers. The Kuomintang were also severely damaged by widespread corruption and by rampant inflation which the government utterly failed to bring under control. Shopkeepers found themselves changing their prices several times a day. And this was in a country that had suffered dire poverty throughout the whole of the first half of the twentieth century.

Some of those who had fought for the Kuomintang in the war against Japan were willing to fight for, and be fed by, the Communists who also did not hesitate to recruit Chinese auxiliaries who had fought on the Japanese side. The Communists had artillery, mostly of Japanese origin, which had been handed to them by their Soviet allies. They also had as head of their People’s Liberation Army a capable military man, Zhu De, although Mao headed the Revolutionary Military Committee and retained the highest political authority. His skilful leadership at that stage of his career and ruthless determination to extend Communist control to the whole of China played a major part in the successful capture of power.

During the first two years of the civil war which broke out in 1946 Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had vast superiority in both numbers and equipment over the Communists, and in the first year, in particular, they had a lot of military success. Between then and the defeat of the Kuomintang in 1949, however, the Communist leadership succeeded in inspiring the forces under their command more than the Nationalist leaders were able to do, and they mobilized greater support in the society. The Communist victory was both military and political. Mao had significant success in showing that the Nationalists could be challenged on their own ground of fostering national pride. Although the Communists’ accession to power meant, in many respects, a break with Chinese tradition, they evoked patriotic aspiration and desire for a clean break with the humiliations of the previous century and a half. On declaring the foundation of the People’s Republic of China at the beginning of October 1949, Mao said that the Chinese people had ‘stood up’.74

            Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communists’ Ascent to Power

Communists in many countries had an influence in excess of their numbers because of the strength of their ideological belief and their hierarchical and disciplined organization. Revolutionary movements in Asia, however, had two assets that were absent in Europe where so few Communist parties came to power as a result entirely of their own efforts. Asian Communists were able to combine their revolutionary commitment to a new social and economic order with that of national liberation from colonial rule, thus broadening their appeal. Their other strength lay in their appeal to a largely uneducated peasantry who constituted overwhelmingly the largest social class. A focus on the grievances and aspirations of peasants meant playing down the classical Marxist belief that the industrial working class would be the social force making for revolutionary change. Both Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, who were of a similar age (Ho was born in 1890, Mao in 1893) and who became Communists in the early 1920s, emphasized the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. The name Ho Chi Minh, which means He Who Enlightens, was the last in a series of pseudonyms (at least fifty) which Ho adopted, in this case from the time of the Second World War.75*

As a young man, Ho spent a number of years away from Indochina, working in a variety of jobs. He was in the United States immediately before the First World War, and later claimed to have worked as a pastry chef in Boston. He also spent time as a seaman, a junior chef in London’s Carlton Hotel, and as a photo retoucher in Paris. He was in London from 1915 to 1917, but it was his six years in France from the end of 1917 to 1923 which turned him into a Communist. Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution and radicalized also by the Versailles Peace settlement, which he condemned for failing to apply President Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of national self-determination to the peoples of Indochina, he joined the French Communist Party in 1920 at the age of thirty. Ho spent time in both the Soviet Union and China in the 1920s and 1930s and became an agent of the Comintern in Asia. He took the view, at odds with conventional Marxism, that Communism could ‘acclimatize itself more easily in Asia than in Europe’, for in Asia there was a traditional sympathy for ‘the idea of community and social equality’.⁷⁶ The Indian Communist, M.N. Roy, who was the most prominent Asian to take part in the founding meeting of the Comintern in Moscow in 1919, was another who believed that the chances of Communism taking hold in Asia were better than in Europe and that Asian revolutions would lead the way in the worldwide overthrow of capitalism. The two men did not, however, get on. Ho was generally liked both within the international Communist movement and even by anti-Communists with whom he negotiated, but Roy, who knew him in Moscow in the 1920s, disparaged him as unimpressive both intellectually and physically.⁷⁷ Ho’s subsequent career, which included long treks from one guerrilla base to another, suggests that Roy was wrong on both counts. Ho became the principal founder and leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, established in 1930. In October of the same year, on Comintern instructions, it changed its name to Indochinese Communist Party, since it was to embrace, for some years, Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam.

During the Second World War, the Vietnamese Communists created a national liberation movement, the Vietminh, opposed to the Vichy regime which collaborated with the Japanese occupiers. It was their wartime resistance role which brought them to national prominence and gave them popular influence. Although dominated by Ho and his party comrades, the Vietminh put their emphasis on building a broad coalition and on the attainment of an independent Vietnam.78 They themselves were able to seize power in Hanoi in 1945, although the opportunity had been created by American action – the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which were rapidly followed by the Japanese surrender. The Vietminh took over government buildings in Hanoi in the same month and established what they called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh as its president. At that point Ho was intent on maintaining an international as well as a domestic coalition of supporters. Addressing a crowd of half a million people in Hanoi in early September 1945, he quoted from the American Declaration of Independence, clearly hoping that the aftermath of the Second World War would bring more support for Vietnamese self-determination from the United States than had occurred after the First World War, Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric notwithstanding.⁷⁹

President Truman, however, gave a higher priority to having France as an ally than to supporting the independence of the Vietnamese. Although General de Gaulle would later conclude that the French war in Indochina was unwinnable and that the United States would find their war in Vietnam to be equally forlorn, in 1945 he played the card which would have most effect in Washington when he warned that if the US opposed the French attempt to regain their colonies in Indochina, that would push France ‘into the Russian orbit’.⁸⁰ Although the American government remained unenthusiastic about the French attempt to re-establish their colonial rule in Vietnam, this changed when the Chinese Communists attained power in 1949. From then on, stopping the spread of Communism in Asia was still more of a prime concern in Washington.

Despite the fact that the Vietminh had succeeded in wearing down the French, the peace agreement of 1954 which formally ended the conflict, involved, to Ho Chi Minh’s great disappointment, the partition of the country. Both the Chinese and Soviet leaderships (who had taken until 1950 to recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Chinese doing so before the Soviet Union followed suit) favoured this compromise. Ho felt let down by them. He needed, however, their political support and relied on the Soviet supply of weapons. North Vietnam was never, though, simply a Soviet client state, for Ho managed at times to play off the Chinese and Russians against one another and yet to maintain good relations with the leaders of both countries during the most acrimonious years of the Sino-Soviet dispute. With North Vietnam, in its turn, supplying weaponry to their Viet Cong comrades in the South, the United States government had reason to believe that the whole of Vietnam was liable to become Communist. Already under President Kennedy, American military advisers were sent to South Vietnam to assist the forces under the command of the anti-Communist and authoritarian President Ngo Dinh Diem. It was only during the Johnson presidency that American combat troops, in ever-increasing numbers, were dispatched to Vietnam. Ho did not live to see the American withdrawal from Vietnam and the face-saving treaty that was signed in Paris in 1973 and provided a politically convenient pause before the unification of Vietnam under Communist rule in 1975. By the time the war ended fifty-eight thousand Americans had lost their lives in vain, but the Vietnamese losses were vastly greater. Around three million soldiers and civilians had been killed and the country was devastated, not least by the use of Agent Orange, the toxic compound the United States forces had used to defoliate the forests which were the hiding place of the Viet Cong. Long after the war ended, this was causing many birth defects and cancers in Vietnam.81 The victory of the Vietnamese revolutionaries had been attained at a very high price.⁸²

In Communist revolutions, as distinct from more spontaneous uprisings – such as the February/March revolution in Russia – leaders, ideas and organization were invariably important. In some cases more than others, one person played a more significant role than any of his colleagues. That was true of Ho Chi Minh if we focus on the long haul – the creation and development of the revolutionary movement in Vietnam, the foundation of the republic in 1945, and the guerrilla war against the French as they tried to re-establish control over their former colony and failed. By the time American troops entered Vietnam in the mid-1960s, Ho Chi Minh was hardly the most powerful decision-maker within the Vietnamese Communist leadership, although still much revered in North Vietnam. His standing in the outside world, which he understood better than his less-travelled comrades, remained an asset for the Vietnamese Communists. Ho had his ups and downs during the first quarter of a century of the party’s existence, but by the early 1940s undoubtedly wielded more power within it than anyone else. Yet, his style of rule within the highest party echelons was consensual. He did not try to dominate in the manner of Stalin, Mao Zedong or North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, but operated within a more collective leadership in which, rather than browbeat or dictate, he relied substantially on his powers of persuasion.83 Ho deliberately cultivated an image of saintliness and in the 1940s and 1950s wrote two self-congratulatory ‘biographies’ of himself under assumed names.⁸⁴ Nevertheless, he was by nature more of a conciliator than an autocratic strongman and was ultimately a more successful Communist leader than those in the latter category.

            Pol Pot and the Killing Fields of Cambodia

After the Cambodian ruler, Prince Sihanouk, had been removed in a palace coup in 1970, a vicious civil war between the Khmer Rouge Communists and anti-Communist forces got underway, with the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia the greatest sufferers. American bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, ordered by President Nixon, was directed at the Khmer Rouge, and at the trails through the jungles by which weapons reached Vietnam, but its consequences were more indiscriminate and counterproductive. The bombing ‘ensured that there would never be a shortage of recruits [for the Khmer Rouge] in a countryside now filled with hatred for the Americans’.⁸⁵ Prince Sihanouk played his part, too. Outraged at having been ousted by General Lon Nol, he encouraged Cambodians, in a broadcast from Beijing in March 1970, to ‘go to the jungle and join the guerrillas’, thus giving a boost to what was at that time a very small Communist Party.⁸⁶ Even before coming to power, the Khmer Rouge provided a foretaste of their extreme ruthlessness in the civil war. After capturing Oudong, at one time the royal capital, they massacred tens of thousands of people.⁸⁷ When they took the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975, they set about trying to establish a Communist regime like no other, in which cities were emptied, money was abolished, as were schools, courts and markets. Collectivization of agriculture was completed far faster than in any other state, with virtually the whole population forced to work on the land. Between 1975 and 1979, when a Vietnamese invasion ended Khmer Rouge dictatorship and replaced it by more ‘normal’ Communist rule, it is estimated that at least one in five of the Cambodians, possibly even a quarter of the population, had died an untimely death.

The principal leader of the Khmer Rouge was Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar. As a young man he studied in France and became a member of the French Communist Party. On his return to Cambodia he worked as a schoolteacher. He was later influenced by Mao and by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. However, his combination of utopianism and bloodthirsty pursuit of class war far exceeded even Mao’s on both counts. In his mercifully brief period as the number-one person within the Khmer Rouge government, he kept a low public profile and, unlike Mao, was far from promoting a cult of his personality. Pol Pot (a name he took in 1976) appeared actually to believe in the construction of some kind of communism, built on the bones of the people his henchmen and acolytes killed, whether by having their throats cut (the fate of tens of thousands), beating to death with spades, shooting, or the famine that the Khmer Rouge policies induced. Among those arrested were close comrades who had thought of themselves as friends of their leader. They were tortured before being killed. By 1979, 42 per cent of Cambodian children had lost at least one parent. Throughout all this, Pol Pot appears to have retained an unshakeable belief in his own genius.88 He believed that ‘he would be enthroned higher than his glorious ancestors – Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong’.⁸⁹ After the Vietnamese had installed a government of their choosing in Phnom Penh, Pol Pot and his forces retreated to jungle camps on the border of Cambodia and Thailand and carried on a guerrilla war for another eighteen years. Remarkably, they continued to be recognized as the government of Cambodia by the United Nations, thanks to the continued support of China and of Western countries’ willingness to view Cambodia through the distorting lenses of the Cold War in which the principal adversary was not China but the Soviet Union. Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998, just a month short of his sixty-third birthday.

            Kim Il Sung’s Accession to Power in North Korea

Kim Il Sung, in spite of the legends that were created for him by his propagandists and the fertility of his own myth-making, was put in place as the leader of North Korea by his Soviet sponsors. His earlier mentors, however, had been Chinese. In late 1929 and the first half of 1930 he was in prison under suspicion of belonging to a left-wing group. He had spent much of his boyhood in China – in Manchuria – and it was the Chinese Communist Party he joined in 1931. At that time a separate Korean party did not exist.90 In the course of the 1930s, when Korea was under Japanese rule, Kim took part in guerrilla activity against the occupiers. In common with most other Communist revolutionary leaders, Kim did not use the name he was given at birth. Kim Il Sung was a nom de guerre, his original name being Kim Song Ju. He spent the years 1940 to 1945 in the Soviet Union, a fact he suppressed when he set about embellishing his image as a great national liberator. It was when Soviet forces captured the northern part of the Korean peninsula, with the Americans in control of the south, that they put Kim, who had made a good impression as someone of sharp intelligence, in charge. Nevertheless, Kim was not the first choice of the Soviet authorities to be the top leader of the part of Korea which they occupied. They had in mind someone who would appear more independent, Cho Man Sik, who had led a non-violent reformist group. The problem, however, was that Cho proved in reality to be too independent for their taste. Before long he was at odds with the Soviet occupying forces and was subsequently arrested.⁹¹

The second-choice Kim, having already in December 1945 become chairman of the North Korean branch of the Korean Communist Party, was installed the following February, thanks to Soviet backing, as chairman of the Interim People’s Committee. This embryonic state authority took over 90 per cent of industry in the course of 1946 and launched a far-reaching land reform.⁹² In September 1948, less than a month after the Republic of Korea had been formally declared to exist in Seoul, a separate state in the north was announced in the shape of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with Kim Il Sung at its head. This was less a revolution than a Soviet imposition, although Kim, with his promise to free Korea from foreign tutelage (with the exception, at that time, of the Soviet Union) appears to have had more popular support than did several of the Soviet-imposed leaderships in Eastern Europe. He also went on to establish a regime which, following Stalin’s death, deviated substantially from the Soviet model. Instead of copying their partial relaxation and cultural thaw, Kim’s North Korea continued its development as a peculiar Communist hybrid, one that was both sultanistic and totalitarian. The personality cult of the ‘Great Leader’, as he was known, exceeded even those of Stalin, Mao Zedong and the Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, improbable feat though that was.

            THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

Although Cuba, several years after Fidel Castro came to power, became a Communist state, the revolution of 1959 was not a Communist revolution. The Cuban Communist Party had been dismissive of the middle-class revolutionaries, led by Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, who had for several years been fighting a guerrilla war from the thick forests and mountainous terrain of the Sierra Maestra against the country’s corrupt authoritarian regime. Its president was Fulgencio Batista who had seized power in March 1952 in a military coup which he called a revolution. In contrast with Batista’s coup, the eventually successful struggle of Castro and his comrades, which began in 1953 with a failed attempt to seize the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, was a genuine revolution. Castro and his comrades-in-arms called for social transformation as well as national independence, viewing their large neighbour, the United States, as an exploitative imperial power. The fact that Batista was hand in glove with crooked American businessmen, most notably the mafia boss Meyer Lansky who became his ‘official adviser for casino reform’, helped to stoke a quite widespread popular anti-Americanism.93 During the 1950s the predominant influence on Castro was not Marx but the hero of the island’s struggle for freedom from Spanish colonial rule, José Martí, who died in 1895 before that independence was achieved. Martí, although not a Marxist, was an advocate of a socially just democracy as well as of national self-determination. Castro continued to admire Martí. As he later put it: ‘I was first a Martían and then a Martían, Marxist and Leninist.’⁹⁴

Castro was the son of a relationship between his landowner father and the cook-housekeeper, whom Castro’s father later married. Fidel, who was born in August 1927, wrote a letter as a boy to Franklin Roosevelt, congratulating him on his election victory in 1940 and asking if he would send him ten dollars ‘because I have not seen a ten dollars bill American and I would like to have one of them’.95 He received an acknowledgement of his letter from the State Department, but no dollars were enclosed. Castro later remarked that ‘there are people who’ve told me that if Roosevelt had only sent me $10 I wouldn’t have given the United States so many headaches!’⁹⁶ Castro attended a prominent Jesuit school and then entered the Law Faculty of Havana University in 1945. Years later he said he didn’t know why he had decided to study law, adding: ‘I partly associate it with those who said: “He talks so much he should become a lawyer.”’⁹⁷ As a student, Castro was drawn into radical politics, but was unusual in that he managed to combine political activism with notable sporting achievements. Nine years after his request to Roosevelt for ten dollars, he turned down the offer of a $5,000 signing-on fee from the New York Giants, for American talent scouts had noticed his great promise at baseball.⁹⁸

After he embarked on serious revolutionary activity, Castro on numerous occasions came close to being killed. When the attempt to capture the Moncada barracks in 1953 failed, many of those who took part in the attack were shot, in most cases after gruesome torture and mutilation. Castro escaped but was captured five days later. He was about to be killed on the spot when the black officer in charge of the army patrol, Lieutenant Pedro Manuel Sarria, ordered his men to stop. According to Castro, he then added: ‘Don’t shoot. You can’t kill ideas; you can’t kill ideas . . .’⁹⁹ When he was brought to trial in October 1953, Castro made a stirring speech to the court which lasted for several hours. He concluded it with the words: ‘Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me!’¹⁰⁰ He was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment, but served only one year and seven months of the sentence. Following both public pressure and the intervention of Archbishop Pérez Serantes, who suggested that Castro and his associates no longer posed a danger, he was released as part of a wider amnesty.¹⁰¹ Less than two months after leaving prison, Castro left Cuba for Mexico where he joined his younger brother, Raúl who, unlike Fidel, was already attracted to Communism. He also met the young Argentinian doctor and Marxist revolutionary, Ernesto (better known as ‘Che’) Guevara who, at twenty-seven, was two years younger than Fidel. Ordered out of Mexico in November 1956, this group of revolutionaries acquired an ancient boat, the Granma (which later became the title of the main Cuban Communist party newspaper) and, after overloading it with weapons and ammunition as well as eighty-two people in a vessel meant to accommodate twenty-five, they set off for Cuba. They came close to sinking in a storm in the Gulf of Mexico and took two days longer than they intended to reach Cuba, eventually running aground about a mile short of where they planned to dock.

After taking to the hills of the Sierra Maestra, they made steady progress in winning support for their cause from the rural population. It was not primarily the peasantry who provided their most solid support, but workers who earned a living wage from the sugar industry during the harvest season and hardly anything outside it. They were described at the time as ‘semi-proletarianized labourers’. The revolution in due course brought in other social groups (including urban workers), for Cuba was, by Latin American standards, a relatively urbanized and literate society, with some significant trade unions. Thus, this was not simply a peasant uprising, but it began in the countryside under the leadership of middle-class revolutionaries.

Castro and his core group of rebels confiscated livestock from large landowners and distributed them to peasants with little or no property. In the earliest months of 1957 the group around Fidel, who was the acknowledged leader, numbered just eighteen. Castro already recognized the value of publicity and news management, and agreed to be interviewed by a New York Times correspondent, Herbert L. Matthews. After an arduous climb, and taking care to avoid Batista’s soldiers, Matthews reached Castro’s camp and interviewed him. Meantime, Raúl organized frenetic activity intended to convey the impression that the company of armed rebels was much larger than it actually was. This included a messenger arriving breathlessly with a report from a ‘Second Column’, which did not actually exist.102 The interview provided a great boost to Castro, and the size of his group soon grew to around three hundred. In the piece he published, Matthews wrote of Fidel: ‘The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership.’103 The Times published a photograph of Castro holding a telescopic rifle.

Fidel Castro had been the only person in the group who was known as commandante, but he conferred that title on Guevara who not only acted as the group’s field doctor, but took an active part in their armed struggle. He personally shot dead one of their scouts who had accepted 10,000 dollars from Batista’s army to lead the revolutionaries into an ambush.¹⁰⁴ After numerous skirmishes, Castro’s group controlled a substantial part of eastern Cuba by the middle of 1958 and set up a radio station in that territory. When in July that year eight Cuban opposition parties and anti-Batista groups met in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and issued a ‘Manifesto of the Civil-Revolutionary Opposition Front’, they recognized Fidel as their leader. Castro’s radio station was able to broadcast their statement. The Cuban Communist Party did not participate in the Caracas meeting, but shortly afterwards their leader, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, belatedly realizing that this movement had more potential than he had hitherto appreciated, made his way to the Sierra Maestra for a meeting with Castro. They went on to establish good relations, and Rodríguez subsequently served in government under Castro’s leadership.

By late 1958 Castro’s fighting force had risen to some three thousand people, and the support for them was much more widespread. They met less and less resistance from an increasingly demoralized army. As the rebels moved towards Havana, Batista decided that his days as president were numbered. On 1 January 1959 he left by plane with his relatives and some friends for the Dominican Republic. Two other planes followed, filled not only with some of the people closest to Batista but with almost all of Cuba’s gold and dollar reserves. By 3 January Castro had embarked on a victory parade across the island, and on 8 January he led his column into Havana to the sound of church bells and factory and ship sirens. Castro addressed a crowd of several hundred thousand people from the balcony of the presidential palace, characteristically speaking for several hours. To the British ambassador to Cuba, Fidel seemed to be ‘a mixture of José Martí, Robin Hood, Garibaldi and Jesus Christ’.¹⁰⁵ At that time Castro and his followers were widely perceived to be radical democrats rather than Marxist revolutionaries, and that was not entirely a misconception, although Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, while knowing very little about the Soviet Union, were already more sympathetic to Communism than was Fidel. Incorporation in the international Communist movement (and the alliance with the Soviet Union) was to come later.

The Cuban revolution is a clear case where leadership mattered a great deal. It was not the organizational discipline of a Communist party in this instance that brought revolutionaries to power, but something much closer to charismatic leadership in the person of Fidel Castro. He did not manufacture a cult of himself in the manner of some Communist leaders – there were no streets, buildings or parks named after him during his years as Cuban leader – but that was partly because his personality was so overwhelming that he did not need to. His style of rule was widely known as fidelismo, a very particular variant of the Latin American tradition of caudillo, a popular leader who comes to be trusted and obeyed as a father figure. Orthodox Communists, such as those reporting from the GDR embassy in Cuba, disapproved of the emotional component of his leadership, but it was one reason why Castro could evoke a warmth of response and at times touch hearts in a way that Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker never could. A confidential report from the GDR embassy to the political leadership in East Berlin in 1964 complained of Castro’s ‘nationalism and left radicalism’, his ‘subjective evaluation of trends and their causes’ and of his propensity to ‘guide the popular masses from a basically emotional point of view’ and of his ‘letting off steam’ in difficult situations.106

Castro also had an eye for the theatrical gesture and knew how to project his personality. When he appeared at the United Nations in 1960 and addressed the General Assembly wearing his characteristic olive-green battledress, this made his impact all the greater. He also cocked a snook at the US administration and hostile American mass media by moving, with his eighty-five-person delegation, from an expensive New York hotel to one in the middle of Harlem, where he was cheered by black and Latino supporters. In that unusual setting for head-of-government diplomacy, he received the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, the Indian premier Jawaharlal Nehru and the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser as well as the radical black leader Malcolm X.¹⁰⁷ Ever attentive to symbolism, Castro succeeded in preserving at the same time a greater frankness and spontaneity than is typical of leaders who have spent many years in power. He was also untouched by material motives. As his major biographer observes: ‘Not only those who claim to know him personally, but also his various opponents, think that he is one of the few absolute rulers who have not enriched themselves in office and salted away millions in Switzerland.’108

Some revolutions begin when huge numbers of people take to the streets or storm government buildings without waiting for a leader to spur them into action. Others depend much more on a particular leader or small leadership group. Cuba was clearly in the latter category. The audacity and ability to inspire of Castro and his comrades-in-arms, and their evident desire to redress the grievances of the rural population and to remove the scourge of corruption, won them increasing support. Castro himself later emphasized what a tiny group it was who set the revolutionary process in motion: ‘If you look, it was just three or four of us who created the embryo of the movement that attacked the Moncada barracks. From the beginning – it’s strange – we had a small corps of leaders and a small executive committee of just three people’. He went on to generalize the point: ‘Radical revolutionary parties are often born in the underground, clandestinely – they’re created and led by a very few people.’¹⁰⁹ At the time he led the Cuban revolution Castro was neither a Marxist nor a Leninist, but his view of the movement’s origins is consistent with Lenin’s idea that the mass of the people needed an avant-garde of professional revolutionaries who would lead them to understand that amelioration of the conditions of life was not enough (indeed, it could be dangerously distracting and seductive); what was required was the complete overthrow of the old regime and the creation of a fundamentally different system and new society.

            THE DEMISE OF COMMUNISM IN EUROPE – NOT REVOLUTIONS

It may seem odd to discuss non-revolutions in a chapter on revolutions and revolutionary leadership. The reason for doing so is very simple. The myth of the East European ‘revolution’ of 1989 is very pervasive. Both within the countries that underwent dramatic change and in the rest of the world, the events of that year are frequently referred to as a revolution. It is a telling example of the romantic aura which has clung to the word ever since the French Revolution that people who have experienced something different from – and better than – revolutions still yearn for that old revolutionary élan and feel a need to bolster their belief that systemic change was all their own doing.

It makes sense, on the contrary, to differentiate revolutions, long understood to involve violence or the threat of violence, not only from peaceful transformative change but also from the collapse of a regime which has continued to exist only so long as it is backed by a foreign power. When the leadership of a regional hegemon decides that it will no longer impose a system of rule on other countries against the will of their own people, then the resultant collapse of the regimes in question does not amount to revolution. The transformation of Eastern Europe in 1989–91 was a case in point. Gorbachev and his allies in the Soviet leadership had made it clear that they would not use force to maintain Communist systems in Eastern Europe, the more so since they were in the process of dismantling the pillars of such a system at home.110 The Communist states of East Europe (with the exceptions of Yugoslavia, Albania and Romania) were penetrated political systems, by no means fully autonomous. When the Soviet Union abdicated from determining and enforcing the limits of change in the region, national independence was quickly asserted. Gorbachev, as we have seen in the previous chapter, publicly declared in Moscow in the summer of 1988, and in New York at the United Nations in December of the same year, that the peoples of every country had the right to decide for themselves what kind of system they wished to live in. And in 1989 the Kremlin leadership had not only removed the threat of Soviet armed intervention, they also strongly advised Communist leaders in Eastern Europe not to resort to force either.¹¹¹ Large-scale peaceful demonstrations took place, but they were as much a symptom as a cause of systemic change. They did not constitute a revolution; they were better than that.

In Poland and Hungary, in particular, there was a negotiated transition to democracy. They were the first countries to take advantage of the new opportunities opened up by change in Moscow, and Poland led the way in installing a non-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as early as August 1989. In Czechoslovakia there were massive demonstrations against the Communist regime in the last two months of the year, once it had become obvious that this would not produce another Soviet armed response. For two decades those who had written and distributed underground literature had numbered not more than a thousand people, a small circle persecuted by the authorities and ignored by the majority of the population.112 The ranks of their overt supporters swelled in the course of 1989 and on 19 November of that year the embattled minority, who had created Charter 77 as an oppositional pressure group in 1977, converted their movement into one called the Civic Forum, whose informal leader was Václav Havel. Coming together in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague from mid-November to early December, they held meetings that were highly democratic, with each participant allowed to have his or her say and important issues decided by vote.¹¹³ Yet Timothy Garton Ash, who was present throughout most of these discussions, noted also the individual standing Havel had acquired. While ‘a less authoritarian personality than Havel would be hard to imagine’, he often became the final arbiter, ‘the one person who could somehow balance the very different tendencies and interests in the movement’.¹¹⁴

Large but peaceful protests against Communist rule put pressure on the government, but the final straw for them was a declaration from a Warsaw Pact summit meeting in early December that the 1968 invasion had been wrong and illegal. Since every member of the top leadership team ultimately owed his position to that earlier Soviet intervention, their position was now completely untenable. Within days the prime minister Ladislav Adamec and president Gustáv Husák resigned in quick succession and a predominantly non-Communist government was formed which included leading Chartists. Before the year’s end – on 28 December 1989 – Alexander Dubček, who had been the reformist First Secretary of the Communist Party in 1968, was co-opted to be Chairman of the Federal Assembly (Speaker of the Parliament) and the following day that still otherwise unreconstructed body bent before the winds of change and elected Havel as President of Czechoslovakia.

In Bulgaria the long-serving Communist leader, Todor Zhivkov, was deposed in what was essentially a palace coup one day after the Berlin Wall was breached in November 1989. Between then and multi-party elections in October 1991, Bulgaria made a peaceful transition to democracy. So, too, did Albania, which over many years had been the most repressive country in Europe. Albania was outside the Soviet bloc, but not immune to contagion from what was happening within it. In December 1990 a meeting of the ruling Communist party agreed to the legalization of opposition parties, and the following day the Democratic Party of Albania (DPA) was formed. In elections held in 1991, the new party fared less well than the successor party to the Communists, the Socialist Party of Albania, but in 1992 the DPA won an overwhelming victory. Not one of these peaceful transformations of political systems in East-Central Europe amounted to a revolution in the normal sense of the term.115

Only in Romania, where the example of the changes in the Soviet Union influenced the popular mood but where the Soviet leadership had long ceased to have leverage, was there something that looked more like a revolution (but which, nevertheless, did not meet the criteria of Huntington or Dunn). The regime used brutal force in the attempt to suppress those who demonstrated against the dictatorial rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu. There was violence also from some of Ceauşescu’s opponents within the system as well as more widespread non-violent resistance on the part of the population. There was a strong element of manipulation of the process with one section of the political elite seizing the opportunity to replace another.¹¹⁶ East Germany and Yugoslavia were also, in their different ways, exceptions to what was happening elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, although in neither instance did it amount to revolution. In the case of the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially known, demonstrations in favour of democratization of the GDR in 1989 were soon superseded by demands for the unification of Germany, leading to a process of negotiation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, as the principal actors, which bore fruit in 1990.

In Yugoslavia, national sentiments had the opposite effect. Whereas in Germany, the emphasis on the nation led two states to become joined in one – the enlarged Federal Republic – in Yugoslavia fervid emphasis on nationhood, at the expense of the multinational state, became a source of discord and civil war. By the end of the 1980s Marxism-Leninism had lost whatever appeal it once had, and ever since the death of Tito there had not been a leader who could command respect in all the very unevenly developed republics of Yugoslavia. The Serbian Communist leader Slobodan Milošević led the way in playing the nationalist card. Realizing that Tito’s federation was unlikely to survive, he set about creating (or attempting to recreate) a Greater Serbia. The consequences were disastrous, but the proper name for that disaster is not revolution.117

The systemic change of 1989–91 in Eastern Europe had, then, some common elements, but also much diversity. Communist leaderships which had appeared firmly entrenched, so long as they could count on the backing of Moscow, stepped aside with varying degrees of resentment or resignation. Transnational influences, emanating in the first place from the Soviet Union but then from one Central and East European country to another, played a decisive role. Ideas were critically important – not only the idea of national independence but the aspiration for democracy. Where Moscow’s writ had ceased to run years earlier than 1989, but where national Communist leaders had maintained their own domestic authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, the transition from Communism was much less smooth, especially in two of the three cases. The Communist Party of Romania split, more than a thousand people were killed in the clashes that took place between demonstrators and the authorities in December, and Ceauşescu, with the full connivance of some of his former Politburo colleagues, was shot by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989.¹¹⁸ The Albanian Communists negotiated their own path to political pluralism in a country which was nationally more homogeneous than most. Multinational Yugoslavia disintegrated in bloody civil war, while its successor states over the next two decades felt their way, at very different speeds, to varying degrees of democracy.

            LEADERLESS REVOLUTIONS

Whereas indigenous Communist seizures of power have been led by a ruling group within those parties, often with one especially authoritative figure playing a decisive role, many revolutions break out so suddenly that even the most organized of opposition groups are taken by surprise. Thus, Sun Yat-sen was in Colorado when the Chinese revolution of 1911 broke out and Lenin was in Switzerland when the first of Russia’s two revolutions of 1917 occurred. Revolutions in the Middle East in more recent times have also been more leaderless than led. That is true even of the Iranian revolution of 1979 as well as of the revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

            The Iranian Revolution

The Iranian revolution of 1977–79 saw vast popular demonstrations against the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi, with as many as two million people on some occasions taking to the streets, in defiance of the secret police. Although most of the demonstrations were peaceful, there was violence as well, especially from the side of the regime. Iran had a long tradition of street protests, going back at least to the late nineteenth century and, more recently, in support of Muhammad Mossadegh, the liberal nationalist Iranian prime minister who in the early 1950s clashed with the Shah (as well as with British commercial interests) and was ousted in a coup. A first attempt, thought up by the British intelligence service, failed, but MI6 then persuaded the American government that there was an imminent threat of Iran going Communist, and though there was little substance in the claim, it had the effect the British authorities wanted. A second coup, orchestrated by the CIA, succeeded in removing Mossadegh in 1953. It was not only the people of Iran who were the losers, but the Western countries who, by their actions, earned long-lasting Iranian mistrust. Moreover, no subsequent leader of Iran has been as liberal or as relatively democratic as was Mossadegh. The Shah, when no longer shackled by a popular prime minister in the shape of Mossadegh, headed an authoritarian regime. Until he was removed (in a revolution, rather than a coup, in 1979), he was, in contrast with Mossadegh, subservient to Western interests, but only when those were defined as narrowly and short-sightedly as they were in Washington and London.119

Crowds returned to the streets of Iran in 1963 in support of Ayatolla Ruhollah Khomeini when he denounced the Shah for granting American military personnel immunity from Iranian laws.¹²⁰ Khomeini was, however, exiled from Iran the following year and was not able to return until February 1979 after the revolution had succeeded in ousting the Shah. While for some of those who took part in the series of demonstrations against the Shah’s regime, Khomeini and the idea of an Islamic Republic were an inspiration, there were many others who looked back with admiration to the liberal and secular government of Mossadegh. Human rights violations under the Shah came under increased Western scrutiny in the 1970s, and Jimmy Carter’s victory in the American presidential election of 1976 gave an undoubted boost to opponents of the regime. During the electoral campaign Carter had referred to Iran as a country which should do more to protect human rights. The Shah was sufficiently concerned to order SAVAK, his secret police, to stop torturing prisoners.121

The Shah’s partial liberalization allowed many old organizations to reappear – among them Mossadegh’s National Front, the Writers’ Association, the Association of Teachers, and the Tudeh Party (meaning ‘the masses’ but, in fact, the Communist Party) – and numerous new ones to appear, including a Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners and a Committee for the Defence of Human Rights.¹²² Demonstrations against the Shah’s rule, its associated corruption, and his dependence on foreign interests began in Tehran in 1977 and became more widespread in 1978. There were riots in the city of Tabriz in February. The crowds were dispersed by the military who arrested 650 demonstrators and killed nine of those who had attacked police stations, luxury hotels and the offices of the Iran-American Society and Pepsi Cola. Most of the rioters were young people – students, school pupils and young factory workers. The unrest spread to other cities, and in August 1978 a cinema was burned down, killing the 430 people inside. After martial law was declared in eleven cities in September, the military governor of Tehran ordered troops to disperse the crowds which had gathered, chanting anti-Shah slogans. They fired indiscriminately at them, and even the regime put the number of deaths at eighty-seven. The opposition claimed that at least four thousand people had been killed, an overestimate in response to the authorities’ understating the number of deaths. By November the demonstrators themselves were becoming more aggressive, and numerous buildings in Tehran were set alight or ransacked, among them the British Embassy. By the end of the year, many of the soldiers as well as the demonstrators were no longer prepared to put up with the repression. The Shah left Iran, never to return, in January 1979, having ‘realized that he had lost control not only of the streets but also of the military’, some of whom were refusing to obey orders, deserting, and even handing over weapons to the demonstrators or themselves ‘firing at gung-ho officers’.¹²³

The Iranian revolution was far from bloodless, although the figure of over sixty thousand ‘martyrs’ which became official after an Islamist regime was established seems to have been a great exaggeration and contrasts with the estimate of two sociologists that some three thousand people were killed. Ervand Abrahamian, a specialist on modern Iranian history, has emphasized that the revolution emerged spontaneously from below rather than being managed from above. He writes:

There were no statewide parties, no systematic networks, and no coordinated organizations mobilizing the mass protests, meetings, and strikes. On the contrary, the crowds were often assembled by ad hoc groups, grass-roots organizations, and, at most, informal networks: classmates in high schools, colleges, and seminaries; teenagers in the slums; guild members, shop assistants, and occasionally, mosque preachers in the city bazaars.124

What happened after the revolution was another matter. Ayatolla Khomeini and radical Islamists did not make the revolution, but they were quick to seize the opportunity to become the main beneficiaries of its success. Moreover, the radical pronouncements of Khomeini were in tune with widespread public sentiments at the time of the revolution’s triumph. He himself returned to Iran on 1 February 1979, seventeen days after the Shah had left the country. He was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of two million people. The final phase of the revolution occupied only a few days. Crowds prevented the Shah’s ministers from reaching their offices and broke into armouries, using the weapons obtained to fight with the only part of the military still remaining loyal to the Shah’s regime, the Imperial Guards.¹²⁵ Taken as a whole, the process showed that revolutions can be made without leaders but that, even when that happens, leaders will quickly emerge in the aftermath of the revolution. In Iran that leadership was, and remains, Islamist – a theocracy in which the religious authorities have wielded more power than the secular – with Khomeini its most authoritative figure from the time of his return until his death in 1989.

            Arab Revolutions of the Twenty-first Century

It is, however, misleading to conflate the diverse groups who made the Iranian revolution of 1977–79 into radical Islamists, even though the latter were to find themselves best placed to reap the fruits of the successful rebellion. The same is even more true of the Arab revolutions that got underway a generation later. The popular uprisings across much of the Arab world began in December 2010 with an apparently random event. Inspectors in Tunisia confiscated the produce, cart and weights of a poor trader, Mohamed Bouazizi, who was unregistered with the authorities because he did not have the money needed to bribe officials to obtain a permit. In despair about losing everything and at the injustice of his plight, he set fire to himself and died of horrific burns a little over two weeks later.

There were good grounds for revolution in the Arab world – repressive rule of dictatorial leaders, massive unemployment, nepotism, corruption, poverty combined with huge inequality, subjugation of women, sectarianism and intolerance among them. Many could identify with the despair which Bouazizi’s self-immolation exemplified. What, for most of the time, had prevented revolution from occurring was justified fear of the terrible retribution that would be meted by the authorities on anyone who rebelled. The BBC’s Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, observed in his book, The Arab Uprisings:

When I did my first trip to the Middle East after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 I heard some reporters with a lot more experience saying that Arabs like a strong leader. Apparently that trait explained the survival of the likes of Saddam Hussein, even though they imprisoned and often killed their subjects. I realised almost straight away that despots ruled through violence and fear, and that the notion that Arabs liked it was absurd, but I am ashamed to admit that the line might have crept into a few scripts before my brain kicked in.126

The uprisings, for which Bouazizi lit a fuse, led to the overthrow of the dictatorial rulers of Tunisia (Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali) and Egypt (Hosni Mubarak) and the capture and killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The uprising in Yemen led to the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh who had been president for more than thirty years, although the outcome has remained ambiguous. He stayed in the country and many security officials, still loyal to him and his family, remained in post.¹²⁷ The revolutionary upsurge affected the whole of the Middle East and North Africa, with contagion hugely assisted by the significance of Arabic being a common language across the region; the comprehensibility, accordingly, of the broadcasts of Al Jazeera (including the transmission of amateur videos); the internet; and the widespread availability and use of mobile phones. The Qatari-financed Al Jazeera played an especially important role in circumventing the censorship of authoritarian regimes and in giving ‘voice to the voiceless’.128

In virtually every country of the region there was a new belief in the possibility of change, a greater confidence engendered by the sheer numbers of those prepared to resist the regimes, and the energizing example of the overthrow of such firmly established autocracies as those of Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi. The first two leaders and their entourages were removed entirely by their own citizens. In Gaddafi’s case, although Libyans themselves rose up against him and overthrew his regime, they benefited from the NATO air support which they requested and were granted, with the backing of the United Nations. As David Gardner, the former Middle East Editor of the Financial Times, has noted, both European and American governments had long been ‘wedded to a network of regional strongmen’. The Arab revolutions were a serious challenge to such ‘realists’ and led to an incoherent response whereby, for example, Libyan rebels were given military help but Bahrain was just mildly rebuked for brutal suppression of unarmed protesters.¹²⁹ In most cases, when people first took to the streets against the regimes, the protests were entirely non-violent and that worked to their advantage in getting international opinion on their side. When the regimes predictably turned to repression, varying degrees of violence were used also by the protesters. In Syria, in particular, the result has been prolonged and tragic civil war. Monarchies in the region, although also authoritarian, have survived with fewer problems than the republics. That is partly because their leaders appeared to be accorded a somewhat greater legitimacy than were self-appointed republican despots. Their (nevertheless precarious) survival was also aided by their making some mildly liberal compromises as well as by more substantial material concessions which helped to dampen down discontent. In Jordan and Morocco, in particular, reforms were introduced in 2011 precisely to forestall radical demands or revolutionary upheaval.

The hereditary principle has been more readily accepted in states ruled by monarchs, in which it is a traditional and basic norm of the system, than in republics where it is seen as usurpers adding insult to injury. Thus, the fact that Mubarak, Gaddafi and Saleh all had plans to be succeeded by one of their sons only added to the popular clamour in Egypt, Libya and Yemen to remove them. The hereditary transfer of power had already taken place in Syria at the turn of the century and subsequent experience has hardly been an advertisement for this mode of political succession. Although initially Bashar al-Assad seemed an improvement over his ruthless father, Hafez al-Assad, the ferocity and indiscriminate character of the violence used against those who – peacefully in the first instance (although not for long) – rose up against his regime was reminiscent of the elder Assad. As a leading analyst of the Middle Eastern revolutions has noted, ‘not only the dictators but their sons and heirs’ have come to be ‘regarded as evil and as symbols of the wickedness of the regime’.130

The Arab revolutions of 2011, both those which succeeded in toppling the old regime and those which did not, were essentially leaderless. Where there has been a prolonged struggle, as in Syria, organized groups, including Islamist ones, have come to play a more prominent role in the fight even while the old regime has remained precariously in place, but in the revolutions which succeeded most quickly – those of Tunisia and Egypt – massive resistance to the regime emanated from a wide variety of social groups and took the authorities by surprise. The very fact that leaders could not be identified – and accordingly eliminated – was confusing for the regimes under threat. If the young, educated and middle class played a disproportionately prominent part in the upheaval, the more successful revolutions benefited from the participation of the poor who provided the numbers and who had ‘no stake in the old world and nothing to lose by rising up’.¹³¹ There were, naturally, informal leaders even in street demonstrations, but they tended not to belong to formal structures such as political parties or trade unions, nor were they ‘charismatic’ leaders. Rather, they were internet activists who were committed to spreading word of the demonstrations and of the cruelties of the regime’s response, thus helping to mobilize their friends and engage still wider circles.¹³²

In the aftermath of those Arab uprisings which have succeeded in removing essentially secular autocrats (all of whom, however, paid varying degrees of lip-service to Islam), the advantages of a leaderless revolution turned into a disadvantage (as in Iran in 1979). The best-organized groups moved rapidly to fill the vacuum and the new leaders were more intent on imposing their will than on building consensus and democratic institutions. The 2012 election in Egypt (which was democratic at least to the extent that the votes were honestly counted and the result not known in advance) was reduced to a choice between two candidates who were not to the liking of a great many people who had risked much to demand the removal of Mubarak. They were asked to choose between Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, who was backed by the military, and a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Morsi, who won a narrow victory. Many secular Egyptians who were distrustful of the Brotherhood voted for Morsi on the grounds that to support a prominent member of the Mubarak regime would mean that the sacrifices of those who had died or been maimed in the revolution had been in vain.

In Egypt and elsewhere, the Muslim Brothers had gained prestige from the very fact that they had been imprisoned and persecuted by the secular autocracies, and had earned some popularity for the charitable services they provided to the poor. The fact that they had an existing organization meant that they were much better prepared than were secular liberals to flourish in the post-revolutionary political climate. Yet it appears, as Olivier Roy has argued, that the ‘Arab Spring took the Brothers by surprise’.133 Research on public opinion in the Arab world has shown deep divisions in most countries on the role religion should play in politics, with the exception of Lebanon where there is a consensus that its influence should be minimal, reflecting sectarian divisions and fears of a return to devastating civil war along religious lines.¹³⁴ In most of the Arab countries surveyed, there was an emerging consensus that the clergy ‘should not seek to affect the political behavior of ordinary citizens’ but significant disagreement on how much influence religious officials should have on governmental decisions. For a majority of Arab respondents, though – and this was quite notably so in Tunisia and Egypt – economic issues were at the top of people’s agenda. Unemployment and inflation were the problems that most worried them, followed in order of importance by corruption.¹³⁵

Although the Muslim Brotherhood were not the prime movers in carrying out the revolution of 2011, they were its main initial beneficiaries. Those who worried about their capacity to govern democratically but gave Morsi the benefit of the doubt at the time of the presidential election soon had their doubts rather than their hopes amply reinforced. Morsi’s popularity had dropped from 57 per cent at the time of his election in mid-2012 to 28 per cent by May 2013.¹³⁶ What was more fundamental was his use of a narrow majority to push through partisan changes rather than build consensus. A new constitution was ratified in a turnout of only 32 per cent of eligible voters. There could scarcely have been a sharper contrast between the manner in which Mohammed Morsi proceeded to govern and the way that Adolfo Suárez used the powers conferred upon him in the Spanish transition to democracy (discussed in Chapter 4). Morsi had, of course, a host of problems to contend with, quite apart from the teetering economy, which was the biggest issue for many Egyptians. The institutions of the ‘deep state’ that had developed in Mubarak’s time – the army, the security forces, a significant part of the judiciary and of big business – were distrustful of the Muslim Brotherhood. The military had managed to emerge from the revolution of 2011 with its authority enhanced, since it had acquiesced in the removal of Mubarak. Opponents of the Morsi government were to be found on several different flanks. It had even disappointed more extreme Islamists, the Salafis, who had briefly formed an alliance with it. So far as they were concerned, the government was too liberal and insufficiently committed to a rigid interpretation of their religion. Above all, the secular liberals had every reason to be disappointed with Morsi’s use of his small electoral majority to exclude them from the political process.

These failures meant that there was widespread support from many sections of society for the military coup that toppled the government in early July 2013 and placed Morsi under arrest. Not for the first time, those who had played a major part in overturning an unpopular autocratic regime felt that the revolution had been betrayed. Both the way Morsi governed and the manner in which he was, in turn, removed from power illustrated the advantages of a pact-making process whereby in some of the most successful transitions from authoritarianism to democracy – most notably Spain – very broad agreement was reached, as a result of bargaining and compromise, on the new rules of the game. The Morsi government showed little interest in or understanding of the need for ‘societal’ as distinct from ‘majoritarian’ legitimacy. Interestingly, a scholarly opinion survey conducted in Egypt in December 2011 found strong support for democracy, rejection of the idea that what the country needed was a strong leader even if that person overthrew democracy, and this was accompanied by more than 60 per cent of the population rejecting also the statement ‘the military should withdraw entirely from political life for good’. That last opinion might seem, on the face of it, to be at odds with the first two. It appears, though, that with their recent experience in mind, many Egyptians had come to see the military as the ultimate guardians of the democracy they desired.137 The majority who were ready to concede a political role for the military would include also people who were content with Egypt the way it was under Mubarak.

This helps to explain the breadth of the alliance in support of the forcible overthrow of the Morsi government in July 2013. It embraced those nostalgic for the Mubarak regime and determined to hold on to their former privileges and some of that old regime’s most dedicated liberal and democratic opponents. Yet it is hard to see how the overturning of the result of a reasonably democratic presidential election will promote legitimate rule. It is equally difficult to comprehend how the banning of Egypt’s largest social movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, is compatible with democracy. For the military elite who seized power, and who did not hesitate to kill hundreds of Brotherhood protesters, these may not be issues that particularly trouble them, but for the ‘liberals’ who cheered them on it seems all too likely that disillusionment with the results of violent overthrow of a regime will once again follow.

*

Some revolutions, then, are led – as in Russia in November 1917 or Cuba in 1958–59 – and others are relatively leaderless, as in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. It is clear that regime change of itself does not necessarily require an established organization, an outstanding leader or even a handful of leaders but can, in a revolutionary situation, be a much wider, looser and unstructured movement. That is not to deny that in some revolutions particular leaders have been so important that the system would not have changed when it did, or would have changed in very different ways, in their absence. When the opportunity of holding leaders and regimes accountable for their misdeeds is absent, the case for systemic change is overwhelming. When that can be done by peaceful means, as it was in post-Franco Spain or in Eastern Europe in 1989, this is hugely preferable to revolution. In the last resort, however, there is justification for violent revolution – the forcible removal of tyrants from power – when all attempts to change an oppressive system by peaceful means have failed. What follows, however, seldom lives up to the rhetoric and hopes of the more idealistic of the revolutionaries, as most of the cases examined in this chapter and the next illustrate all too clearly.

* Although the city of Peking is now known in English as Beijing, an exception has been made for Peking University by the University itself. Because it already had an international reputation under that name, the University in its official communications in English continues to refer to itself as Peking.

* It can stake a claim to continuous existence up to the present day. Under the same name, it is one of the two major political parties in contemporary Taiwan.

* Many revolutionary leaders, as rebels against, or as fugitives from, the conservative authoritarian regimes they were intent on overthrowing, adopted a nom de guerre. Thus, for example, Ulyanov became Lenin, Djugashvili became Stalin, Bronstein became Trotsky and Broz became Tito.