Category Revolutions

Russian Revolutions

russian-revolution-3-jpg

There seems to be a sense out there that somehow or the other, that the Russians are very stolid, patient, long-suffering and willing to tolerate considerable duress under their government without complaint. Not sure exactly how that idea got established. The last hundred years of Russian history has shown considerable instability.

In the last hundred years Russia has had three revolutions that overthrew the leadership and changed the entire form of government. The first revolution happened with the “February Revolution” which occurred in March 1917, when the Tsar abdicated and a provisional government was established, headed first by Prince Georgii Lvov and then by Alexander Kerensky. This actually briefly created a struggling democratic government that ruled (or misruled) Russia for eight months. The next revolution was when the Bolsheviks bloodily throw that government out of power and took over in their “October Revolution” (which occurred in November under the new calendar). The third revolution occurred in December 1991 when the heads of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine decided that they would rule themselves and dismissed the communist government headed by Mikhail Gorbachev, dissolving the Soviet Union.

This is three successful revolutions in a hundred years, or one every 33 if you want to use an average. Of course, two occurred in an eight month period, and then it was 74 years before the next one occurred.

On the other hand, there have been some significant changes to the Russian governance that did not necessarily include large street protests. For example, the shift from Stalin to Khrushchev generated significant changes in how the country was run and managed. Communism under Khrushchev and its later leaders was very different from the leadership of Lenin or Stalin, when a communist society was being built, often with considerable brutality. It was a change from a state that was revolutionary to a more mature and stable dictatorship. It also introduced the idea of reform of the Soviet system, something that did not last long under Khruschchev, but would later influence Gorbachev.

The next significant change was the reform movement that started under Gorbachev in 1986 or was it Andropov in 1982? Gorbachev arrived in power in 1985, instituted “Perestroika” (restructuring) in 1986 “Glasnost” (openness) in 1988. These reforms were quickly followed by the ending of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it was a significant change in the governance of the Soviet Union for as long as it lasted.

Then there was another significant change in governance with the change from Yelstin to Putin in 2000. This moved the country from a troubled democracy to one that for all practical purposes over time has turned into a dictatorship.

The interesting aspect of all four of these last changes is their fundamentally peaceful nature. Three were done with little open protests and the collapse of the Soviet Union happened four months after the violence of the “August Coup.” Even though their impact was far reaching, they were hardly classic revolutions (unlike the two in 1917). They might be better described as reform movements or even palace coups, but they did significantly change the way the country was ruled. So, this is six major changes in how the country was ruled over a hundred year, or one every 17 years, with the longest being 37 years, being from the October Revolution in late 1917 to the demotion of Malenkov in early 1955 (who was eventually allowed to retire instead of being killed, which was a significant change in the Soviet system).

In contrast the United States has not had any revolutions in the last 100 years, and no significant changes in the way we are governed. The two biggest changes in our recent history was the “New Deal” package of reforms that came during the Great Depression of the 1930s and what I call our “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. They certainly were significant, hard to say if they were as significant as the three non-revolutionary changes in Russia. So, I would argue that Russia is more prone to revolution and revolutionary change than places like the United States, United Kingdom or many other modern democratic counties. This should not really be surprising.

But one more point about the “long-suffering” image of the Russian people. In World War I, Russia lost 1.1% of its population in the war and its government was overthrown (twice). In World War I, France lost 3.4% of its population while Britain & Ireland lost 1.6% (and Scotland lost 3.1%). Other countries that lost a higher percent of population killed than Russia are: Australia at 1.2%, New Zealand 1.5%, Italy 1.6%, Bulgaria 1.9%, Austria-Hungary 1.9%, Germany 3.0%, Rumania 3.3%, Turkey 3.7%, and poor Serbia at 5.7% of their population lost in World War I! (Just for comparison, the U.S. lost 0.1% of its population in World War I, see Niall Ferguson, Pity of War, page 299). The “long-suffering” Russia people seemed to have bailed out a little earlier and at less cost than most of the other major powers in World War I. As I also like to point out to people convinced of the softness of America and the firmness of the old Soviet Union, the U.S. lost 58,000 people after a 15 year commitment to Vietnam (1957 – 1973) and then withdrew. The Soviet Union lost 15,000 people after a 9 year commitment to Afghanistan (1979-1989) and then withdrew.

So, it would appear from a most casual look that there is not much of an argument that the Russian government is somehow or the other more immune to revolution or palace coups or other significant changes in ruling systems because of the “long-suffering” nature of the population. It appears that they are as willing as most to change things up and more willing than some.

Just to give one more number, Putin has been effectively in power for 16 years (since 2000).

Why Men Rebel?

In the 1960s, there were two big-budget quantitative historical studies conducted of the causes of revolution. One was by Ted Gurr of Princeton University and resulted in the 1970 book Why Men Rebel? The other similar effort was done by a husband and wife team of Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend out at San Diego State University. They published their data and results in a series of articles and in 1972 in a compilation book (Anger, Violence and Politics: Theories and Research). Ted Gurr’s work is much more widely known, although in the 1980s when I reviewed both of their works in depth, I found them to be similar and of equal quality.

Both Ted Gurr’s and the Feierabend’s work was based upon measuring political violence, which was a very relevant subject back in the 1960s. I believe that both projects were U.S. government funded. They both collected extensive data on violence in every county in the world in the post-WWII era (their data cut off was in the late 1960s) and created an index of political violence by country. They then built a multi-variant regression model to try to measure what causes those levels of violence.

Although they were completely separate and isolated efforts, using different data collections, they ended up pretty much reaching similar conclusions (much like what happened with my work and Andrew Hossack’s work). They were both cross-national studies that tried to determine the level of political violence in a country based on a range of factors. Like with any extensive quantitative analysis, there were a lot of elements and interesting findings in this work. But, they both put front and center a “relative deprivation” hypothesis of the causes of political violence (and/or rebellion). Basically, what this said was that if things are going well, and then they start going badly, this creates the highest chance for ‘regime change.”

So, for example, in their data sample the rich (or developed) countries tended to be very stable. Very poor countries (undeveloped) were less stable. But the least stable countries are those somewhere between rich and poor that are getting wealthier (what they called at the time developing countries). They tend to be stable when they are economically growing, but once the growth stops, they become unstable. If there is any validity to this hypothesis (and there certainly was using the twenty years of data from around 1948 to 1968), then this leads to me to wonder about the long-term stability of Russia and China.

A summary of Why Men Rebel is here: http://wikisum.com/w/Gurr:_Why_men_rebel. As the summery notes: “(3) “Progressive deprivation” [the J-curve]–expectations grow [we expect continued growth] and capabilities do to, but capabilities either don’t keep up or start to fall (pg 53)–modernization, depression in a growing country, or other change could cause this. [What he wrote in 1970 about this describes nicely what happened with the fall of the USSR.]”

It would be interesting, in light of almost 50 more years of data since they did their work, if someone took their regression models and ran the last 50 years of data through them to see how they did. I always like to see a little model validation (although this is rarely done).