An expertly selected collection of articles on class, party, and revolution from one of the world's most important socialist journals

Why the world’s most resilient dictatorships are products of violent revolution Revolution and Dictatorship explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism. Although most revolutionary governments begin weak, they challenge powerful domestic and foreign actors, often bringing about civil or external wars. These counterrevolutionary wars pose a threat that can destroy new regimes, as in the cases of Afghanistan and Cambodia. Among regimes that survive, however, prolonged conflicts give rise to a cohesive ruling elite and a powerful and loyal coercive apparatus. This leads to the downfall of rival organizations and alternative centers of power, such as armies, churches, monarchies, and landowners, and helps to inoculate revolutionary regimes against elite defection, military coups, and mass protest—three principal sources of authoritarian breakdown. Looking at a range of revolutionary and nonrevolutionary regimes from across the globe, Revolution and Dictatorship shows why governments that emerge from violent conflict endure.

This pioneering study explores the role of working-class militias as vanguard and guardian of the Chinese Revolution. The book begins with the origins of urban militias in the late nineteenth century and follows their development to the present day. Elizabeth J. Perry focuses on the institution of worker militias as a vehicle for analyzing the changing (yet enduring) impact of China's revolutionary heritage on subsequent state-society relations. She also incorporates a strong comparative perspective, examining the influence of revolutionary militias on the political trajectories of the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and Iran. Based on exhaustive archival research, the work raises fascinating questions about the construction of revolutionary citizenship; the distinctions among class, community, and creed; the open-ended character of revolutionary movements; and the path dependency of institutional change. All readers interested in deepening their understanding of the Chinese Revolution and in the nature of revolutionary change more generally will find this an invaluable contribution.

"Relying on a wealth of detailed institutional, policy, and elite information, Hahn presents a magisterial study that fills a significant void in our understanding of USSR's destruction. While readers may at times feel overwhelmed.... readers are presented with a conceptual approach that can be useful for appreciating ongoing institutional changes and oftern subtle elite maneuverings in the post-Soviet era. --John P. Willerton, University of Arizona "This is a big book in all respects, weighty both in size and scholarship. The core is a meticulous analysis of the perestroika period of the Soviet Union (1985-91). Followed by a concluding general chapter that applies the earlier analysis to post-Communist Russia (1992-2000). The work is based on years of painstaking analysis, considerable archival research, and numerous interviews." -- The Russian Review "This is an important book with a number of substantive strengths." -- Slavic Review The fall of the Soviet communist regime in 1991 offers a challenging contrast to other instances of democratic transition and change in the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1991 revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below as occurred in Czechoslovakia nor a negotiated transition to democracy like those in Poland, Hungary, or Latin America. It was not primarily the result of social modernization, the rise of a new middle class, or of national liberation movements in the non-Russian union republics. Instead, as Gordon Hahn argues, the Russian transformation was a bureaucrat-led, state-based revolution managed by a group of Communist Party functionaries who won control over the Russian Republic (RSFSR) in the mid-1990s. Hahn describes how opportunistic Party and state officials, led by Boris Yeltsin, defected from the Gorbachev camp and proceeded in 1990-91 to dismantle the institutions that bound state and party. These revolutionaries from above seized control of political, economic, natural and human resources, and then separated the party apparatus from state institutions on Russian Republic territory. With the failed August 1991 hard-line coup, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party and decreed that all Union state organs, including the KGB and military were under RSFSR control. In Hahn's account, this mode of revolutionary change from above explains the troubled development of democracy in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Hahn shows how limited mobilization of the masses stunted the development of civil societies and the formation of political parties and trade unions with real grass roots. The result is a weak society unable to nudge the state to concentrate on institutional reforms society needs for the development of a free polity and economy. Russia's Revolution from Above goes far in correcting the historical record and reconceptualizing the Soviet transformation. It should be read by historians, economists, political scientists, and Russia area scholars. Gordon M. Hahn is visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His articles on Soviet and Russian politics have appeared in Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Russian Review, and Russian History/Histoire Russe.

Revolution and Its Past is a comprehensive study of China from the last quarter of the eighteenth century through to 2018. A fascinating and dramatic narrative, the book compels interest both as a history of an ancient civilization developing into a modern nation-state and as an account of how the Chinese as a people have struggled and continue to work to find their identity in the modern world. Beginning in the last two decades of the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736–1795), the book provides a baseline that allows readers to understand China’s rapid decline in the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, and extends into the present day, a time when China has the second largest economy in the world and aims to become a leading global power by 2050. The vast changes that have swept over China between these times are probed through the lens of the broad and important theme of "identities." This fourth edition has been updated throughout, providing a more thorough examination of recent history since 1960, and increasing coverage of such topics as "new Qing history," frontier and ethnicity, women and their roles, environmental concerns and issues, and globalization. Supported by maps, images, tables, online eResources and suggestions for further reading, and written in an engaging, concise, and authoritative style, Revolution and Its Past is the ideal textbook for all students of the history of modern China.

At a time when China is once again facing a major turning point in its direction, I firmly believe that my academic dispute with Wang Hui is in no way a personal or left-right dispute. Wang Hui's grand narrative about the Chinese revolution and the Chinese century is meant to provide a new legitimate basis for one party to rule forever, to place world history in the value system of the Chinese revolution, and to shape the Chinese revolution and its regime into the ultimate source and ultimate judge of universal justice in the world. There is no doubt that Wang Hui's new theoretical proposition is not only far from the basic idea of liberalism, but also far from the political democratic position that the Western left-wing tradition has always insisted on. Since liberal scholars have automatically given up head-on confrontation with Wang Hui, it is time to end Wang Hui's theories, which have never been subjected to comprehensive and systematic academic criticism in China's intellectual and intellectual spheres for nearly thirty years. Therefore, at such a time, it would be an unforgivable dereliction of duty for liberals to fail to take the initiative, as Raymond Aron did, to undertake the historical mission of criticizing barbaric ideologies–totalitarianism and statism– and to hold fast to the basic virtues given to intellectuals by providence. As Arendt said, "the storm of ideas is not characterized by knowledge, but by the ability to distinguish good from evil, beauty from ugliness. And this may indeed prevent disaster in that rare moment of crisis."