Abstract
The end of the revolution has been proposed many times before, and such announcements have invariably proved premature. As Fred Halliday notes, the year 1989 gave the idea of revolution a ‘special contradictory confirmation’: it marked the 200th anniversary ‘of the emergence of the modern, and modernist, concept of revolution during the French revolution’; but it was a year that began ‘with sage warnings on how revolution was no longer a relevant concept, [but] it ended with the collapse of the communist regimes in a process that should, by all but the most dogmatically teleological of criteria, be termed “revolutionary”’.2 These were indeed revolutions, but revolutions of a special type.
Belinsky was as much an idealist as a negationist. He negated in the name of his ideal. That ideal had quite a definite and homogeneous quality, though it was called and still is called by different names: science, progress, humanity, civilisation — the West, in short. Well-meaning but ill-disposed people even use the word revolution.1
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Notes and References
Ivan Turgenev, ‘On Belinsky’, in G. Gibian (ed.), The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader (London, 1993), p. 390.
F. Halliday, ‘Revolutions and the International’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 24, 2 (1995), p. 279.
R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford, 1988).
The major works of these authors include: C. Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, revised edn (New York, 1965);
T. R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ, 1970);
S. P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn., 1968);
B. Moore, Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (London, 1969);
C. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York, 1978);
T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979);
M. S. Kimmel, Revolution: a Sociological Interpretation (Cambridge, 1990);
J. A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 1991).
C. Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford, 1993).
Cf. A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Oxford, 1990).
The characterization is by E. Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham, NC, 1975), p. 167.
A. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: the Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif., 1995).
N. Harding, The Marxist-Leninist Detour’, in J. Dunn (ed.), Democracy: the Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 155–88.
R. H. Dix, ‘Eastern Europe’s Implications for Revolutionary Theory’, Polity, 24, 2 (Winter 1991), pp. 227–42.
Andrew Arato, ‘Interpreting 1989’, Social Research, 60, 3 (Fall 1993), p. 611.
E. Bernstein, The Preconditions for Socialism, edited by H. Tudor (Cambridge, 1993), p. 6.
M. Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World (London, 1987), pp. 55–9.
T. Garton Ash, ‘Reform or Revolution?’, New York Review of Books, 27 October 1988, pp. 47–56;
R. Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (London, 1990), p. 22.
See M. Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: the Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (Leicester, 1987), pp. 98–102.
The Meiji restoration has often been compared with the ‘great’ revolutions, giving rise, despite the traditionalist rhetoric, to profound processes of social, political and economic transformation, but failing to generate new patterns of autonomous political organisation, see S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Frameworks of the Great Revolutions: Culture, Social Structure, History and Human Agency’, International Social Science Journal, 133 (August 1992), p. 389.
see also H. Webb, The Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa Period (New York, 1968).
J. Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left’, New Left Review, 183 (September/October 1993), pp. 3–21;
On peasant revolutions, see the classic work by E. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London, 1971).
For example, J. M. Colomer and M. Pascual, ‘The Polish Games of Transition’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 27, 3 (September 1994), pp. 275–94.
A. Michnik, ‘A New Evolutionism’, in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 135–48.
G. Konrad, Antipolitics: an Essay (San Diego, 1984).
D. Selbourne, Death of the Dark Hero: Eastern Europe, 1987–90 (London, 1990), p. 236.
G. Konrad, Antipolitics (San Diego, 1984), p. 129.
T. Garton Ash, ‘Does Central Europe Exist?’, in G. Schopflin and N. Wood (eds), In Search of Central Europe (Oxford, 1989), pp. 200–1.
T. Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge, 1994), p. 203.
J. de Maistre, ‘Supposed Dangers of Counter-Revolution’, in Considerations on France (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 83–105 at p. 105.
A. Horvâth and A. Szakolczai, The Dissolution of Communist Power: the Case of Hungary (London, 1992);
R. Khasbulatov, The Struggle for Russia (London, 1993), p. 181.
M. Weber, The Russian Revolutions, translated and edited by G. C. Wells and P. Baehr (Oxford, 1995), pp. 23–4.
M. Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984.
See in particular S. M. Frank, ‘Etika nigilizma’, in Vekhi: sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii (Moscow, 1909; reprinted Frankfurt, 1967), pp. 175–210.
A. Solzhenitsyn et al., From Under the Rubble (London, 1974).
For an updated version of her arguments covering perestroika, see G. E. Schroeder, ‘The Soviet Economy on a Treadmill of Perestroika: Gorbachev’s First Five Years’, in A. Dallin and G. W. Lapidus (eds), The Soviet System in Crisis: a Reader of Western and Soviet Views (Boulder/Oxford, 1991), pp. 376–82.
O. Rumyantsev, Osnovy konstitutsionnogo stroya Rossii (Moscow, 1994), pp. 159–60.
F. D. Colburn, The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries (Princeton, NJ, 1994).
Capitalism, of course, is still prone to crises, but the immediate prospects of an ideology based on the abolition of private property and the market would appear to be slim. For an excellent debate on the subject, see A. Shtromas (ed.), The End of ‘isms’? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism’s Collapse (Oxford, 1994).
L. Holmes, The End of Communist Power (Oxford, 1993), p. xi and passim.
M. Glenny, The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy (London, 1990).
See R. Sakwa, ‘The Revolution of 1991 in Russia: Interpretations of the Moscow Coup’, Coexistence, 29, 4 (December 1992), pp. 27–67.
F. Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18.
L. A. Gordon and A. K. Nazimova, ‘Perestroika in Historical Perspective: Possible Scenarios’, Government and Opposition, 25, 1 (Winter 1990) pp. 16–29.
For example B. Kagarlitsky, Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed, translated by R. Clarke (London, 1995).
D. Erebon, Michel Foucault (London, 1991), p. 284.
P. Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London, 1993).
H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 7th edn (Oxford, 1983), p. 847, outline a number of meanings: we here use the term more in the sense suggested by Hippocrates and Demosthenes.
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© 2001 Richard Sakwa
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Sakwa, R. (2001). The Age of Paradox: the Anti-revolutionary Revolutions of 1989–91. In: Donald, M., Rees, T. (eds) Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4026-1_9
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