This chapter addresses the limitations potentially placed on the success of revolutions by “human nature” - which in psychological terms are the hard-wired characteristics that limit change in behavior. It is argued that in the long term, even behaviors that we conceptualize as hardwired at present tend to change (particularly through changes in the environment). The avowed goals of the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions are examined, and it is concluded that none of these revolutions achieved their goals. Despite failure, the regimes that survive in China, Cuba, and Iran continue to use the rhetoric of revolution. Four ways in which human nature seems to doom revolutions are considered: extremists come to power; an “ends justify the means” approach is adopted and corruption results; the style of leader–follower relations persist after revolutions, with the result that one dictatorship replaces another; and revolutionaries typically fail to set up the necessary conditions to achieve the behavioral changes necessary to reach their revolutionary goals (such as collectivization).

With the conclusion of the First World War the ages of global empires comes to an end and hitherto familiar and trusted ways of governing come to an end. Empires shatter, Kingdoms tumble. The interbellum is the age of mass mobilization of peoples in a host of new states. New political systems come to the fore (socialist, communist and fascist regimes), new concepts (universal suffrage, equal representation, corporatism, etcetera) claim their place in new liberal democracies that pop up throughout the world. New constitutions of a sixth generation - the Leviathan constitutions - enshrine the arrangements needed for these forms of mass mobilization.

Introduces the book as an empirical case study of the 1917 Entente spring offensive which analyses five key command tasks to illustrate the story of the German army in the First World War. Situates the book in the debate about how Germany was able to hold out for four years. Explains the significance of the offensive and its defeat for Germany, Britain and France at each level of war – grand strategic, strategic, operational and tactical.

Reviews scholarship on the offensive and German command, then explores German thinking on command from Moltke the Elder to 1917 and the linked question of the army’s ability to adapt. Emphasises its unresolved dichotomy between modernity and conservatism. Outlines modern thinking on command. Draws all this together to deduce the army’s five command tasks, explores the sources for analysing them and demonstrates the new insights into the German army and First World War produced by this approach.

This 1956 essay, marking the 39th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, was one of several articles that Du Bois contributed to New World Review, a publication associated with the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and the Communist Party of the United States. Du Bois highlights the exemplarity of the Russian Revolution for anticolonial struggles and the Soviet Union’s support of national liberation. Significant in this essay is also Du Bois’s obfuscation of the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union, a key feature of his late writings.

After Nicholas II, the Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated following mass demonstrations in Petrograd in March 1917, a committee of political leaders appointed by the Duma formed a Provisional Government.1 At the same time, workers and soldiers created a Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (Petrograd Soviet) that both shared power with the Provisional Government and rapidly evolved into the leading component of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.2 After the destruction of the Tsarist autocracy, the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet thus became the only sources of legitimacy for the Russian state. Since none of the competing social forces mobilized within the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet was strong enough to provide an effective social base, each was stalemated in what turned out to be a paralyzing competition for political dominance. This competition played itself out while the Bolshevik Party infiltrated the factory, the army, and the navy. Once the party was confident of the support of the workers and troops in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks revolted against the Provisional Government, founded the new communist state under the auspices of the Soviet, and thus realized the ideological promise of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In founding the communist state, the Bolsheviks yoked their claim on sovereignty to the party’s dedication to carrying out a Marxist working-class revolution. They thus inhabited and gave a social purpose to a state apparatus that had been eroding while other social forces contended for control of the government.

Russia is the world’s largest country by landmass, covering an area of 17 million square kilometres. Canada, the world’s second-largest country, is less than 10 million square kilometres in size. At the beginning of 2022, before the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow, Russia’s capital, was home to more billionaires than any other city on earth. Yet Russians are relatively poor compared with their western and eastern neighbours. The GDP per capita of Russians is only half that of Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, and less than a quarter of that of Japan, its easternmost neighbour. Why is it that the average Russian has lagged behind, despite the nation’s apparent opulence?

The answer lies in the country’s economic institutions. By the beginning of the twentieth century Russia was already a poor country relative to its neighbours. It had only abolished serfdom in 1861.

Chapter 17 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores the Urban Planet from the bourgeois Belle Époque to World War I and the protest, strikes, and revolutions that followed on the left and the right. It begins in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo to show how forces of both revolution and counterrevolution gained strength in an age of apparent bourgeois triumph, and how rival nationalist imperialists and their industrial military industrial complexes, railroads, and new oilfields predisposed Europe toward global war. The chapter also delves into the micro- and macro-geography of the newly renamed city of Petrograd to understand how Bolshevik revolutionaries were able to seize power there and then in Moscow. A wide-ranging survey of general strikes, revolutions, and counterrevolutions follows, showing how anti-capitalist and anti-imperial movements then spread to cities worldwide, followed by ominous resurgences of racist and right-wing forces in the streets of Chicago, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Rome, and Munich.

Bakhtin's work is difficult to interpret because it amalgamates so many different intellectual strains and influences.His early interest in Neo-Kantian philosophy and phenomenology, the first largely mediated through his friend M. I. Kagan, structured his ideas permanently. His interest in and commitment to Christian thought, and Russian Orthodox thought specifically, was important but is often over-emphasised. Bakhtin's further intellectual development was spurred by encounters with Russian Formalism, linguistics (particularly early versions of sociolinguistics), and the Marxist literary debates of his time. Far from maintaining a saintly distance from the diputes around him, Bakhtin was fully engaged by and tried to participate in debates about the role of style in literary writing and the idea of realism and the positive hero.

This chapter examines the challenges that the second half of the war presented to the British monarchy’s sacralised status. It examines the impact of anti-monarchist revolution in 1916–22 in Ireland and in 1917–18 in Continental Europe upon the British monarchy and the way that courtiers reacted in response to such challenges and successfully re-sacralised the monarchy by associating it with ‘democracy’. It also examines the reasons why the monarchy’s German origins only became an issue relatively late in the war. Overall it finds very limited levels of wartime anti-monarchism in Britain, in contrast to the situation in Ireland.

This chapter concludes with a summary of the work, as well as a discussion of the implications thereof. In particular, the book identifies implications for research on civil wars and insurgencies, governance and statebuilding, as well as revolution. Critically, if some forms of rebel governance are not directly related to rebels’ military strategy in that they do not necessarily confer resources and recruits, then the consequences of rebel governance institutions are not yet fully known. This chapter suggests instead that the consequences of rebel groups imitating burdensome governance learned from the Chinese Communist Party can affect international politics, national institutions, subnational social cohesion, and individual behavior in ways that have implications for scholars and policy practitioners. The chapter then discusses how the findings of this work relate to research on governance and state formation and calls for a greater synthesis of scholarship on these topics. Finally, it reviews the importance of governance to revolutionaries generally, beyond rebel groups, and demonstrates that learning and imitation about how to govern for revolution has persisted for centuries.

Chapter 3 examines the immediate impact of the Russian Revolution, which triggered the proliferation of autocracy during the interwar years. With ample primary sources, the chapter documents how Lenin’s success quickly stimulated a wave of radical-left emulation efforts, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Driven by cognitive shortcuts, rather than fully rational decision-making, these imitation attempts were precipitous and ill-planned; therefore, they uniformly failed. The chapter investigates the experiences of many countries, especially the Baltic States, Finland, Germany, and Hungary.

Turning the national wars of the Allies into a coherent Allied grand strategy was the ambitious project of the new British Prime Minister, Lloyd George. He however needed to overcome Allied resistance while simultaneously facing unprecedented crises: the Russian Revolution and the U-Boat campaign.

This chapter examines the causes and processes of spontaneous revolutions, focusing on how state crises and weaknesses provide space and opportunity for localized expressions of political anger and other sparks for social movements. If, as encouraged by increased state vulnerability, missteps, and elite defections, these social movements grow into something bigger, a spontaneous revolution can ensue. These revolutions are initially without ideology and their leaders and outcome are not predetermined. The French revolution of 1978, the Russian Revolution of February 1917, and the Iranian revolution of 1978 can be classified as spontaneous revolutions.