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Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?
The hammer and sickle is one of the modern world’s most recognisable symbols. It instantly evokes the former Soviet Union and communism. For some people around the globe, it remains a beacon of hope for a better tomorrow. But for others it is a painful reminder of totalitarian oppression and terror. What’s the history behind this revolutionary symbol?
What is the hammer and sickle? The symbol of the hammer and sickle is typically presented in a two-dimensional format, with the hammer crossed over the curved blade of the sickle (a tool traditionally used for harvesting crops, which has a curved metal blade often set on top of a wooden handle). A red star often – though not always – appears just above the tip of the sickle. The hammer represents the working class engaged in industrial production, who, according to Marxist theory, are destined to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the dominant social class under capitalism. The sickle denotes the peasantry, the toilers of the land. Though the symbol denotes solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers, the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx, whose works were foundational to the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, had dismissed the peasantry as a vestige, leftover by the epoch that had preceded capitalism: feudalism. Marx regarded peasants as an instinctively conservative class that would likely prove hostile to a workers’ revolution. The adoption of a visual expression of unity between worker and peasant shows the Bolsheviks’ adaption of Marxism to their homeland’s specific circumstances, referencing the socio-economic reality of Russia, which was still a predominantly agrarian society with little industrial development, at the time of the October Revolution in 1917. When did the hammer and sickle first appear? In early 1918, Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky – head of the regime’s Commissariat for Education (known as ‘Narkompros’) – launched a competition for artists and designers to create an official seal for the nascent Soviet state. The entries were a diverse assortment that spanned everything from striking avant-garde forms, classical imagery such as overflowing cornucopias, and even a double-headed eagle shorn of its feathers and regalia (the double-headed eagle had been adopted centuries before by the Russian tsars to symbolise their link to ancient Rome via the Byzantine empire; the regal title ‘tsar’ meaning ‘Caesar’). Read more | The last days of the Romanovs: could George V have saved the family? The winning entry (by an unknown artist, though it has sometimes been attributed to one Alexander Nikolaevich Leo) featured a crossed hammer and sickle, sheaves of wheat, a rising sun and a vertical sword. However, this was just weeks after Soviet Russia had negotiated its withdrawal from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin, determined to maintain the regime’s peace-making credentials, vetoed the inclusion of a sword in April 1918. While the government debated the state seal, artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin created the template of a crossed hammer and sickle that would later become famous throughout the world. Read more | Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower Kamzolkin’s stark design was originally produced for a poster celebrating 1918’s May Day festivities in Moscow’s Zamoskvorechye district. On 10 July 1918, the Soviet republic formally adopted its constitution, which officially proclaimed that: “the coat of arms of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic consists of a red background on which a golden sickle and a hammer are placed (crosswise, handles downward) in sun-rays and surrounded by a wreath.” Beneath this design was a slogan in Russian Cyrillic that paraphrased the last sentence of The Communist Manifesto and affirmed the Bolsheviks’ commitment to a global socialist revolution: “Workers of the world, unite!” What other symbols did the Bolsheviks use? Among the rejected entries for the state seal was an illustration by graphic artist Sergey Chekhonin, of a peasant woman holding a sickle and spade, facing a male worker holding a sledgehammer and a caduceus. These gender roles – the countryside as feminine and nurturing and the city as masculine and assertive, endured in Soviet inconography. Some of these symbols also showed links to the classical pantheon. The caduceus is a staff wielded by the Greek god Hermes (also the Roman god Mercury). As well as a divine messenger, Hermes was the patron of commerce. His caduceus and other paraphernalia, such as his winged helmet, often appeared on the banners of trade unions across Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Also, the sickle is associated with Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture. Lenin and his comrades understood the power of symbols and revolutionary heraldry. Further classical imagery appeared on the frontispiece to the first Soviet constitution, which featured fasces (a bundle of wooden rods with an axe) behind the hammer and sickle. Fasces exemplified authority in ancient Rome and were revived during the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century. How is the hammer and sickle used today? Just over a year after the October Revolution, leading Bolsheviks formed the Communist International, better known as the ‘Comintern’. This global body aimed to promote the cause of worldwide proletarian revolution through kindred communist parties in every nation on the planet. The hammer and sickle quickly became the symbol for world communism. It adorned the Soviet flag until the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, undergoing slight modifications to its design over the decades. To this day it remains the symbol of many communist parties, including governing ones in the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam. On the podcast | Professor Lea Ypi reflects on living through the fall of communism in Albania Across present-day Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, the symbol remains ubiquitous on buildings and monuments. Aeroflot, Russia’s de facto national airline, has retained the winged hammer and sickle logo designed by artist Alexander Rodchenko. Is the hammer and sickle used in former Soviet states? In 2010, several states in eastern Europe that had once been within Moscow’s orbit called upon the European Union to ban the hammer and sickle as a symbol of totalitarianism and crimes against humanity. This was ultimately unsuccessful and was left up to the respective member states to determine their own approach. Following the escalation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has moved to obliterate traces of the country’s Soviet past. In August 2023, the Soviet coat of arms on the shield of the Mother Ukraine statue was replaced with the country’s tryzub (‘trident’) emblem. How else has the hammer and sickle been used? Given its striking imagery, the hammer and sickle has also found an audience beyond its explicitly political context. During a holiday to Italy, pop artist Andy Warhol was inspired to create a series featuring the tools in 1976 after being confronted with ubiquitous graffiti of the symbol while touring Italian towns. George Orwell’s 1945 fable of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, in which animals revolt against their human farmer, features the so-called ‘Hoof and Horn’ flag in an apparent parody of the Soviet banner. By coincidence, and in a non-communist rendering, the Republic of Austria’s coat of arms consists of an eagle grasping a hammer and sickle in its claws. What symbols did the Bolsheviks use prior to the hammer and sickle? Before the hammer and sickle there was another Bolshevik emblem – the plough and hammer, set within a red star. As the American journalist John Reed conveyed in the title of his eyewitness account of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in autumn 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World, the October Revolution was a seismic event. As the ancient double-headed eagle of Russia’s tsarist past came crashing down amid the aftershocks, the country’s radical new leaders turned to face the future. Unlike its European neighbours, Russia had retained an autocratic monarchy into the 20th century. Having only abolished serfdom in 1861, the vast empire was still largely defined by a feudal social order where illiterate peasants made up most of the population. Generations of them had been raised to revere religious icons and the tsar as a ‘little father’ to his people, a living intercessor between their everyday lives and the divine. The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware of the authority that visual motifs and symbols commanded in the land. They set about cultivating a new revolutionary culture soon after the October Revolution. Tsarist flags and iconography were outlawed, while statues of emperors were toppled on a wave of iconoclasm that swept through the major cities. Yet before the hammer and sickle emerged, the new regime’s earliest symbol arose amid the Russian Civil War that immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster On 19 April 1918, soldiers of Soviet Russia’s Red Army were bestowed with a breast badge that depicted a plough crossed over a hammer, contained within a red star. Although its designer remains a mystery, the plough’s association with agriculture functioned as a precursor to the sickle, symbolising the peasantry in union with the industrial working class, embodied in the hammer. As for the red star, its origins as a socialist symbol are also unclear. Five-pointed red stars had first appeared on the uniforms of tsarist officers during the early 19th century. Its martial use was a nod to the Roman god of war, Mars. Similarly, its adoption by the Red Army evoked this meaning. However, it may also have been a salute to the 1908 novel, Red Star by Russian writer, Alexander Bogdanov, a work of science fiction that imagined a communist utopia on the red planet, Mars. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now Why is red associated with communism? The Bolsheviks considered themselves the heirs to the European revolutionary tradition. To that end, in 1918, they adopted the red flag and renamed themselves the Communist Party as a homage to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Prior to that brief insurrection – which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had highlighted as a glimpse of the workers’ revolution they envisioned – the red flag had been adopted by radical republicans on the left during the 1848 revolution in France. The use of red by the Soviet state also tapped into centuries of Russian tradition. In the Russian language, krasnyi (‘red’) is related to the word krasivyi, meaning ‘beautiful’. Red corners were (and remain to this day) features of Orthodox Christian homes where residents displayed their holy icons. Similarly, Moscow’s Red Square became the focal point for all national celebrations in the decades that followed the October Revolution.
Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower
Stalin is widely regarded as one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in history. From his childhood in the Caucasus to his career as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Robert Service explores his life and explains why he was constantly underestimated by his contemporaries
Josef Stalin was the longest-serving leader of the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union, one of the principal architects of the postwar order and among the most ruthless tyrants to have ever lived. Undoubtedly, he was one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Robert Service explains how the young Stalin had been seduced by revolutionary ideals of the age and ultimately joined the network of Marxists operating both inside and outside the territories ruled over by the tsar. As a Bolshevik, he played a key role during the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin ultimately emerged as the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, confounding those around him who had misjudged his political acumen. During the 1930s, his Five-Year plans drastically altered the socioeconomic makeup of the USSR at a terrible human cost. His innate paranoia then instigated a bloody purge of his one-time comrades in the Communist Party as he sought to consolidate his grip on power. Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the most vulnerable point in his dictatorship. Nevertheless, allied with Britain and America, the Soviet dictator would play a major role in reshaping the world following the defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945. By the time of his death in 1953, Stalinism – the ideology synonymous with his approach to statecraft and culture – had transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. But not without cost: estimated tens of millions had perished due to his decisions. This would ensure his criticism by successors. Where and when was Stalin born? Josef Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. Located in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas, Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time. However, some sources specify that he was born in 1879. Stalin preferred to “stay fairly quiet about most of his background”, says Service, choosing to indulge an aura of mystery. When did Josef Stalin pick the name ‘Stalin’ – and what does it mean? During his initial foray into radical politics, Stalin, like other revolutionaries, adopted a series of nicknames. One of his earliest ones was ‘Koba’, inspired by the bandit protagonist in Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 novel, The Patricide. ‘Stalin’, meaning ‘man of steel’, was a revolutionary nom de guerre he adopted in 1912. It spoke to his desire to be considered formidable, as well as being, says Service, “a Russian name, not a Georgian one”. That was important because “he was increasingly identifying with the wider Russian revolutionary movement”. Read more | Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century What was Stalin’s childhood like? Stalin’s upbringing was rough, “involving fist fights in the streets and little gangs of boys,” says Service. Nevertheless, he was a precocious child and an adept student. This convinced his mother that he should enrol at the Tiflis (now called Tbilisi) Theological Seminary and train to become an Orthodox priest in 1894. How did Josef Stalin become a revolutionary? It was via Georgian nationalism that Stalin first embraced radical politics. His teachers at the Tiflis found him to be increasingly rebellious and he quit the seminary before he could qualify as a priest. “He was a rebel and he turned from faith in God to faith in revolution,” says Service. At the turn of the 20th century, while employed at the Meteorological Observatory, Stalin began to immerse himself in key Marxist texts and the Caucasus’s revolutionary scene. His activities soon attracted the attention of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. “Georgian Marxists were notorious for blackmailing and intimidating industrialists in the Georgian capital,” says Service. “He got involved in all of this and [therefore] wasn’t quite as clean-handed a Marxist as other young revolutionaries were in Russia itself. He had a reputation for combining being a Marxist with being something of a Georgian patriot, and he was definitely someone who was involved with gangsters”. When did Stalin meet Lenin? Stalin met Vladimir Lenin in 1905 during the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist organisation, in Tampere, Finland (then part of the Russian empire). This occurred four years after Stalin had joined the party. In 1903, the party had split along ideological differences, into Mensheviks (the ‘minority’) led by Julius Martov, and Bolsheviks (the ‘majority’) headed by Lenin. Both factions would later form breakaway parties during 1912. Over the following years, Stalin’s revolutionary activities would lead to him being arrested and exiled to the far-flung reaches of the tsarist realm several times. What role did Josef Stalin play during the Russian Revolution of 1917? Stalin, like many Bolsheviks, was living in exile (in his case Siberia rather than abroad) when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. The collapse of the Russian monarchy followed. Though nobody knew it at the time, this February Revolution was just one of two major convulsions that would take place that year. Émigrés and internally exiled radicals (meaning those detained in Russia’s bleak hinterlands) flocked to major cities like Moscow and the then-capital, Petrograd (now called St Petersburg). Stalin was among them. Read more | Books interview with Robert Service: "Nicholas II brought the Russian Revolution upon his own head" Upon his arrival, Stalin “barged into the leadership that already existed in a small kernel of men and women in the capital,” says Service. “He basically took over the central Bolshevik party apparatus until Lenin [who had been living in Switzerland alongside other revolutionaries] returned in April 1917. “When difficult jobs had to be done throughout that year, whether it was running the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, or helping to set strategy in the central committee of the party, Stalin was there. He wasn’t a man who ‘missed the revolution’, as his enemies always later claimed”. Later that year, after the Bolsheviks took power during the October Revolution, Lenin made Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. This post gave him responsibility over the new regime’s governance of the non-Russian peoples living within the wreckage of the former tsarist empire. What was Stalin’s relationship with Lenin like? Their working relationship following the October Revolution was relatively fruitful, though not without some disagreements. “Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing,” says Service. “Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership”. By the 1920s, Lenin’s health – and his ability to engage in statecraft – was increasingly debilitated after a series of strokes. This would leave him largely bedridden until the end of his life in January 1924. Before Lenin's death, he recognised that both Leon Trotsky – architect of the Red Army and a convert to Bolshevism from the Menshevik faction – and Stalin, were emerging as likely successors to his leadership. “Lenin found that the man [Stalin] that he had promoted to high party office had ideas of his own. Now, he had always had ideas of his own, but Lenin had been able to control him, moderate him when he thought necessary,” says Service. By late 1922, the two men fell out over the position of Georgia within the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This vast new multinational polity, spanning northern Eurasia, fused the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with Soviet republics in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) on 30 December. According to Service, Lenin “decided that if Stalin ever got into a position where he might be his successor, that would be a disaster for the party as a whole, and for the revolution itself”. Therefore, Lenin dictated a so-called ‘testament’ that urged party comrades to remove Stalin from the post of party General Secretary. Its contents shocked Stalin and it was subsequently suppressed from wider circulation. How did Stalin come to preside over the Soviet Union? Following Lenin’s death, the factions within the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party hardened. Trotsky rallied party officials against what was perceived to be the creeping bureaucratisation of Soviet politics, which became synonymous with Stalin himself. As well as Trotsky, a contingent of leading Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin also looked down on Stalin, says Service, because they thought he was an “ignorant provincial”. One contemporary, Nikolai Sukhanov, famously dismissed Stalin as “a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace”. Stalin, for his part, played up to this image. While the others pushed for worldwide revolution, Stalin struck a much more cautious tone. Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster Service says that “this appealed to numbers of Bolsheviks after the Russian Civil War who were war weary and shared Stalin’s zeal to make the revolution a success at home first before turning their eyes towards Europe”. By the late 1920s, Stalin had outflanked his rivals within the Communist Party by forging and betraying alliances with key party figures and playing each group off against the other. Eventually, his greatest adversary, Trotsky, was ousted from the Soviet government and first subjected to internal exile, before banishment overseas. Stalin’s rise to power also hinged on his canny self-appointment as ‘high priest’ of the emerging cult of Leninism after the Bolshevik founder’s death. Although Stalin’s eventual mastery of the Soviet Union was contingent on this policy of ‘socialism in one country’, Service maintains that Stalin really did believe in spreading the revolution once the USSR was in a strong enough domestic position to coordinate such an offensive. What is Stalinism? Stalin’s dictatorship would lead to the emergence of his own cult of personality, as well as a new ideology: Stalinism. This new phenomenon, says Service, was “a brutal extension of Leninism” and he acknowledges that “for some people this is controversial… they think that Leninism and Stalinism are totally different things. I don’t.” Service affirms that Stalinism consolidated Leninism’s commitment to a one-party state premised on state terror and the ultimate objective of communism’s victory throughout the world. It is synonymous with the dictator’s ubiquitous presence in official propaganda, the system of state surveillance, detention and mass murder, as well as the demonisation of ‘Trotskyite’ subversion. As a totalitarian ideology, it permeated every facet of life within the Soviet Union, from literature and painting to architecture and the naming of cities, prompting Tsaritsyn to be renamed Stalingrad (today it is Volgograd). What was the Five-Year Plan – and how did it lead to the Holodomor? In 1928, Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan – a colossal effort to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union and bring agriculture under state control and central planning. This latter aspect, known as Collectivisation, marked a definitive break with the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by Lenin in 1921. The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy. Adopted in March 1921, the NEP marked a tactical retreat from the Bolsheviks’ socialist measures. It held sway for much of the ensuing decade and reintroduced limited private ownership and commerce under the supervision of the Soviet state to bolster the economy. Always envisaged as a temporary measure, Service points out that by the late 1920s, the regime believed that the NEP had enabled “too many nationalists, street traders and priests” to gain influence within Soviet society. Part of the Five-Year Plan entailed individual private farms being consolidated into larger units under the supposed collective ownership of peasants known as a ‘kolkhoz’. Similarly, ‘sovkhoz’ were farms under the direct control of the state. This also enabled Stalin to bring the class struggle (fundamental to Bolshevik ideology) to the countryside, as the previous better-off peasants – known as ‘kulaks’ – were pilloried for exploiting the poorer peasants and thus became the subject of intense persecution, including deportation from the village and, in many cases, execution. In Ukraine, collectivisation led to mass starvation and the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants – a famine known as the ‘Holodomor’ (meaning ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian). Although the policy also led to famine conditions in other parts of the Soviet Union, “the Ukrainians felt, with some reason, that they were being punished for being Ukrainians, as well as for being peasants,” says Service. Why did Stalin launch the Great Terror? The Great Terror (or Great Purge) began in 1936 and ran until 1938. It was a period marked by high profile show trials of the leading cadre of Bolsheviks that had been active during and since the October Revolution. The suspects were accused of conniving with Trotsky to sabotage the Soviet state and murder Stalin. As Service explains, the Great Terror’s “main purpose was to annihilate any kind of opposition, real or potential”. Confessions were typically extracted under torture and the guilty were subsequently executed as ‘enemies of the people’ or sentenced to long periods of servitude in labour camps. The wave of terror later spread to the Red Army and members of the intelligentsia – the educated group of Soviet society. Stalin was a deeply suspicious individual by nature. He was also aware that the violent methods inflicted on the Soviet Union during the first and second Five-Year Plans, had made some of his comrades within the Communist Party deeply uneasy. In December 1934, one of Stalin’s most loyal comrades in the regime, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad. His murder was blamed on a Trotskyite plot whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Stalin himself. Some historians have suggested, however, that Kirov’s murder was ordered by Stalin who had come to regard him as a potential rival. Kirov’s demise also provided Stalin with the pretext to point the finger at alleged traitors within the state apparatus. Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode. “He thought that he could replace them with a new young elite that he would train to fulfil the industrial, agricultural, commercial and political tasks of the new Soviet state”, says Service. Furthermore, Service explains that the Great Terror was a reflection of “the most terrible human pessimism by Stalin, combined with an extreme optimism that you could do this to a country… and come out at the other end of the tunnel with a new state that would be more pliable, more obedient, and would be able to present itself to the rest of the world as offering a vision of the communist future”. The latter half of the 1930s became “a very gruelling period, a tormenting period in which nearly all the close associates of Lenin were exterminated… Trotsky was the last” – he was assassinated in exile in 1940. But the Great Terror was not solely reserved for the party’s upper echelons. Wherever you were in the party, you stood a high chance of being arrested and thrown into a labour camp, or shot after being beaten up, tortured and forced to sign a confession. At its height, an estimated 2.5 million people languished in the Soviet Union’s extensive penal system – the notorious ‘Gulag archipelago’. Gulag is the Russian abbreviation for the Main Administration of Correctional-Labour Camps. This supplied a constant stream of slave labour to the state’s industrial and economic drive. How many people perished under Stalin’s rule? The precise number of people who were killed during Stalin’s rule is difficult to ascertain with any precision, but Stalin is acknowledged as one of the most brutal leaders in history. “It’s in the tens of millions,” says Service. “It’s a staggering number of people, and it’s not just those who were executed or thrown into the Gulag. There are also people who died as a result of the catastrophic effects of the economic and social policies that he unleashed from the end of the 1920s onwards”. Why did Stalin sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler? In summer 1939, Stalin shocked communists around the world by signing a non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The years leading up to that point had seen Stalin increasingly perturbed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Nazism, and its overtly anti-Bolshevik agenda, was of acute concern to the Soviet Union’s security. Stalin had aided and abetted the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), who were fighting a military rebellion backed by Europe’s fascist powers. When it became apparent that the Spanish Republic was doomed, he estimated that his best chance of avoiding trouble with Hitler lay in diverting Hitler’s focus westwards to the capitalist states. Read more | Hitler and Stalin’s utopian dreams A key part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact entailed the two powers invading and dividing Poland between them. Just over two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, triggering the Second World War, the Soviet Union began annexing eastern Poland on 17 September 1939. As Red Army forces surged into the occupied territory, they began targeting leading Polish intellectuals, army officers and other luminaries. “Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the secret police, [had] concocted a plan to round them all up,” explains Service. This led to the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940, during which approximately 22,000 members of the Polish elite and intelligentsia were systematically murdered. The bodies were then dumped in mass graves inside the Katyn forest. How did the Second World War impact Stalin? When Hitler ultimately acted on his ideological conviction of attacking the Soviet Union, and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Stalin was stunned. “He would not take advice in 1941 that Hitler really did mean to launch an invasion,” says Service, “He thought that he was being misled either by Western powers who sought to involve him in their war against Hitler, or there were just saboteurs inside the Soviet Union against the communist leadership. He got it catastrophically wrong”. After initial paralysis and the loss of vast swathes of territory, the Soviet elite persuaded Stalin to lead the fightback. He was forced to forge an alliance with his sworn capitalist enemies – notably the dogged anti-Bolshevik British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans Appeals to Russian nationalism suffused wartime propaganda, while many of the Soviet Union’s great cities – from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to Kyiv and Stalingrad endured staggering hardship at the hands of Nazi aggression. The Nazis’ discovery of the mass graves within the Katyn forest in April 1943 was used by Hitler to try and drive a wedge between the Allies. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile, and the atrocity was later covered up and blamed on the Nazis themselves (a line that Moscow stuck to until 1990) once the Red Army had wrested back control of the area. Although the Soviet Union had lost over 27 million lives since 1941 and was among the most battered powers to have fought Nazi Germany, on 9 May 1945, it proclaimed victory over the Third Reich, with much of Eastern and Central Europe now under Stalin’s control. What role did Stalin play during the Cold War? The Soviet Union emerged from the war as one of the two new superpowers that would hold sway over the world for the next four decades. Initially, Stalin hoped that the wartime alliance would somehow endure. According to Service, Stalin anticipated that the Soviet Union “would be allowed to more or less do as it wanted in Eastern Europe without interference from the Western powers, and he hoped that he might get economic assistance from America in the short term, even though he expected there to be trouble with the United States in the longer term”. However, by the late 1940s, the Marshall Plan – the US aid package designed to revive Europe’s post-war economies – was quickly perceived by Stalin as a threat to the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe. “From that point on, there was a clash between the US and the USSR [but] both sides wanted to avoid a hot war,” says Service. “Stalin then put his foot down on the throat of all the existing half-freedoms in Eastern Europe and fully communised those countries in a brutal period of trials, arrests and the suppression of rival political parties across half of the European mainland”. How did Stalin die? In the early hours of 1 March 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke while staying in one of his dachas (a countryside retreat) in Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. His staff, who were too frightened to disturb him, eventually found Stalin unconscious, lying on the floor. High-ranking members of the Soviet government such as Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov, flocked to the dacha. “They decided that the best thing to do was not to touch him,” says Service. The rationale behind this was that, if by some miracle, he recovered, then none of them could have been accused of having held a gun to his head or of having plunged a knife into his back. Despite this, rumours that the dictator was poisoned persist today. Stalin dwindled over the next few days before succumbing on 5 March 1953, aged 74. His death triggered a surge of grief within the Soviet Union. “As much as many millions of people hated him, perhaps the same people also somehow thought that something had been pulled out of their lives, too,” explains Service. He was embalmed and displayed alongside Lenin’s preserved body in the mausoleum on Red Square. In 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the Soviet Communist Party, in which he denounced Stalin’s murderous excesses and cult of personality, led to de-Stalinisation. Finally, in 1961, Stalin’s remains were removed from the mausoleum and buried in a grave along the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Read more | A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends
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Christina Ezrahi speaks to Elinor Evans about the story of Nina Anisimova, one of the most famous ballerinas in Stalin’s Soviet Union. After being arrested for supposed counter-revolutionary activity, Anisimova was transported to a forced labour camp, only to make a remarkable return to the stage. Christina Ezrahi is the author of Dancing for Stalin: A Dancer’s Story of Courage and Survival in Soviet Russia (Elliott & Thompson Ltd, 2021) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Snuffed out democracies and poisoned toothpaste: how the Cold War wreaked havoc in post-colonial Africa
The years following the Second World War saw European empires lose their grasp on Africa. Lawrence James explores the efforts of the United States and Soviet Union to secure influence across the post-colonial continent
Soon after dawn on 5 November 1956, British paratroopers drifted down on the El Gamil airfield near Port Said in northern Egypt. Simultaneously, French troops landed at Raswa and Port Fuad just to the south and east. The invasion of Port Said, and the operation to capture the Suez Canal, was launched. The following day, a huge sea and air assault, supporting landings of British tanks and marines, succeeded in taking the port. By midnight, British and French troops had secured the canal zone – and sparked fury from the United States and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers had been wooing Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser – first the US, which offered then withdrew financial support for the construction of an Aswan dam, then the Soviet Union, which sold Egypt large quantities of arms. The action by Britain and France, following Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July, was ostensibly launched to halt fighting between Egypt and Israel, which had invaded the Sinai Peninsula a week earlier. In truth, though, it marked a turning point – the end of direct actions by western powers in Africa, replaced by conflicts that spread across the continent as the west and the Soviet Union tussled for influence in newly or soon-to-be independent African nations: a proxy Cold War described as a “second scramble for Africa”. The years following the end of the Second World War saw both the start of the Cold War between the west and the eastern bloc, and the break-up of empires as colonies across Africa and Asia strove for independence. Africans were losers in the Cold War. The big players never fought each other head-on, but instead sponsored wars between their clients in Africa (and, indeed, in Asia) so that large swathes of the continent became war zones in which predominately locally recruited soldiers did the fighting. Liberation movements across southern Africa were sustained by the Soviet Union and Cuba, which sent large contingents of troops to support independence fighters. Nato also armed two colonial powers, France and Portugal, in their struggles against nationalist insurgents in Algeria, Angola and Mozambique. Millions died in these proxy wars throughout Africa; food production and distribution were disrupted, and regional famines followed. How significant was the Suez Crisis? The 1956 Suez Crisis is widely remembered as a critical event in post-war British history, which helped bring to an end the era of Britain as a global empire and superpower. Dr Andrew Jones explains how significant Suez really was, and why it continues to resonate in British popular memory... Cold War losers Cold War conflicts played havoc with African politics. They skewed the complex processes of decolonisation, and snuffed out many of the fledgling democracies that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. US and Soviet intelligence agencies played kingmakers, financing and overseeing coups to install biddable rulers. Both powers tended to suborn corruptible local strongmen with military backgrounds and authoritarian instincts. It did not matter to the superpowers whether or not these dictators had any ideological commitment to communism or capitalist democracy, though many paid lip service to one of these ideologies when convenient. Cynical pragmatism prevailed in Washington and Moscow when selecting African clients. Underlying this common policy was the cynical maxim – reputedly uttered by US president Franklin D Roosevelt about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García, but equally applicable to any of the rivals’ chosen African despots – “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” This was the line taken by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1955 when he extended patronage to Nasser. Moscow’s doctrinal purists had dismissed Nasser as a radical nationalist in the mould of those military strongmen who held sway across South America. But Nasser was an ideal ally in Khrushchev’s new policy of challenging the west in Africa. From 1955, the Soviet Union poured modern warplanes and weaponry into Egypt, which Nasser deployed in clashes with Israel. Moscow’s propagandists portrayed Nasser as a champion of oppressed peoples in their worldwide struggle against imperialism and capitalism. Washington followed suit. By 1959 the US state department was convinced that ‘democratic’ Africa was fragile and prepared to embrace authoritarian but reliable alternatives. The United States therefore welcomed the rule of General Ibrahim Abboud, who had in November 1958 seized power in recently independent Sudan, bordering Egypt to the south. Abboud declared himself an enemy of communism and of the Soviet-supported Nasser. The pattern was set for the next 30 years of proxy rivalry in Africa. Exploiting decolonisation Both the Soviet Union and the United States were quick to exploit the myriad difficulties that accompanied decolonisation in Africa. The Second World War had given enormous impetus to the embryonic nationalist movements in British and French colonies. Both powers had called on their African subjects to fight for them, and the response had been impressive: more than one million Africans fought in Europe, north Africa and the far east, and were repeatedly told that they were risking their lives for freedom and democracy. Many returned home full of new ideas, and began to question the old imperial order. In Kenya’s villages, for example, young demobbed soldiers expressed their new confidence by scoffing at their chiefs and tribal elders. Elsewhere, this spilled over into anger. Krim Belkacem, who served in the French army and was later a partisan leader and a minister in the provisional Algerian government before independence, spoke for many veterans when he declared: “My brother returned from Europe with medals and frostbitten feet! There, everyone was equal! Why not here?” Empires had always proclaimed intended reciprocity. Britain and France, in particular, had taken pride in the belief that their rule was benevolent and progressive, and that – at some unspecified date in the future – their colonies would achieve independence. After 1945, the pace of change quickened. In 1947 self-government was granted to India by Britain’s Labour government, which was also committed (as were the Conservatives) to self-determination for African colonies. That change was, they suggested, to be achieved over 40 or so years; impatient African nationalist politicians accused them of procrastination. The Soviets exploited such reactions, offering sympathy and friendship, and accusing the imperialists of slyly seeking to retain their power to exploit their subjects. France, too, prevaricated. In 1948 President Vincent Auriol reminded Algerians that their country “was never a state; you were rescued from slavery as well as tribes fighting each other. Without France, what would you be or do?” This was the view of many French people, and of many of the 700,000 European settlers (colons) in Algeria who enjoyed the advantages of French citizenship. In 1954 the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front) began an uprising that triggered an eight-year partisan war of attrition in which more than a million died, most of them Arabs. France persuaded a sceptical Washington that it was fighting communist-backed insurgents in Algeria; the result was that Sikorsky helicopters, manufactured in the United States and intended for Nato service, were used to hunt down Algerian guerrillas. The point was not lost on Soviet propagandists. Spirit of nationalism At this point, the United States was in a quandary. Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal were valuable Nato allies – but, if they persisted in resisting African nationalist movements or delaying independence, they were offering the Soviet Union a propaganda bonus. As US president Dwight D Eisenhower explained to Winston Churchill in 1954: “We are falsely pictured as the exploiters of people, the Soviets as their champions.” It would be foolhardy, he warned, to ignore the “fierce and growing spirit of nationalism” spreading across Africa and Asia. Moreover – and this was a growing source of anxiety for Washington – Britain and France no longer enjoyed their former prestige in Africa, and their efforts to cling on there imperilled American interests. Neither Britain nor France would acknowledge their weaknesses. Rather, in 1956, they attempted to recover their old influence by their joint invasion of Egypt. This coup de main misfired. Afterwards, US secretary of state John Foster Dulles concluded that it was now imperative for America “to fill the vacuum of power which the British filled for a century”. The following year, when Vice-President Richard Nixon returned from an African tour he reported that “French patronage and influence in north Africa are decreasing at an alarming rate”. The Soviet Union, too, hoped to fill that power vacuum, posing as the patron and armourer of colonial liberation movements. America did likewise. Both tended to favour ambitious local military men who possessed hard power on the ground. The officer and non-commissioned officer corps of former colonial armies became a praetorian guard of newly independent states, and palace revolutions propelled to power such figures as army commander Idi Amin in Uganda in a 1971 west-backed coup, and Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Soviets’ choice in Ethiopia, who effectively took power in 1974. Winning influence in Africa Britain was anxious that power in Africa was handed to dependable politicians. MI5 monitored nationalist movements, and trembled whenever it believed these movements might be penetrated by Soviet agents. During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, for example, MI5 investigated possible Soviet involvement but, when questioned, bewildered tribesmen asked: “What does a Russian look like?” and “Can Russians speak Swahili?” Clearly, the KGB was making little headway in east Africa. One way by which the Soviets could win friends in the continent, as well as spread the Marxist-Leninist gospel among its future leaders, was to offer scholarships for Africans to study at universities in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Some students were shocked by conditions in Moscow, which was summed up by one African visitor as having “no cars, no cafes, no good clothes or good food”. Others were appalled by everyday racism: one was asked by Russians whether Africans lived in houses. Seducing the elected rulers of newly independent states proved the most effective policy for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Such leaders had come to power at the head of disciplined parties, practised the arts of messianic leadership, and fostered popular optimism. But could they deliver a golden age for their followers? Their backers assured them that they could. In the early 1960s the KGB cultivated Kwame Nkrumah, charismatic first prime minister then president of independent Ghana, only to discover (by breaking Ghanaian wireless codes) that he and his cronies were squirrelling away Soviet subsidies. The CIA wrote off Nkrumah as “a vain opportunist and playboy”, and in 1966 were believed to have been involved in a coup that toppled him from power. He went into exile, followed by 1,000 of his Soviet advisors. His corruption, like that of so many others of his kind, weakened economies and stifled growth. The United States offered Africa’s new rulers what they needed to keep power: modern security systems. It has been reported that between 1963 and 1969 the United States Agency for International Development spent US$3.3m delivering radios and small arms to African police forces and instructing them in strike-breaking, riot control and investigating sedition. The one-party states that replaced colonial administrations were handed the apparatus of domestic coercion. By 1969 President Julius Nyerere, a self-declared ‘African socialist’, had accepted equipment worth over US$640,000 from the US for his police force, all of whom were members of the ruling Tanganyika African National Union Party. But he also accepted Soviet weaponry for his army. This was prudent: at this stage there was no knowing who would win the Cold War. What brought a thaw in the Cold War? As the Second World War's uneasy alliances unravelled, a new world emerged: of east vs west and of global conflicts as the superpowers vied for influence. From dark days to moments of hope, David Reynolds traces the Cold War from 1961 to 1991 “A second scramble for Africa” As Soviet and American patronage (and arms) spread across the continent, Nyerere warned that “a second scramble for Africa by Russia and its satellites” was under way. He was responding to events in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC) in 1960 following the withdrawal of the Belgians, who had enriched themselves on their colony’s mineral resources and neglected the welfare of their subjects: on independence day, 30 June 1960, the Congo had perhaps just 200 African graduates. Within a week, the country dissolved into anarchy after the army mutinied. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba threatened the nationalisation of foreign businesses, and looked to the Soviet Union for assistance. Soviet and Warsaw Pact aircraft, arms and ‘advisors’ were flown in to prop up his government. United Nations (UN) secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld feared the imminent ‘communisation’ of the Congo, despite the despatch of UN peacekeepers. There was alarm in Washington, where CIA director Allen Dulles suspected that Lumumba was “a Castro or worse”, and the CIA moved in, supplied with dollars and a hitman instructed to assassinate Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste. The money secured the loyalty of Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (who later renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko), a ruthless, ambitious and venal chancer whom the CIA believed to be “childish” and easily led. He moved in America’s direction, used its cash to pay his soldiers, deployed them to expel the Soviets and detained Lumumba, who was murdered soon afterwards. The upshot was that the country’s resources remained an asset of the west, and the DRC endured five years of civil war. Welcomed by President John F Kennedy in 1963, Mobutu was America’s man. Following a coup in 1965, he stayed in power until 1997 and amassed a personal fortune estimated at several billion US dollars by siphoning off the nation’s wealth. Cold War priorities dictated events in southern Africa, too. The United States treated Angola and Mozambique as strategic assets, arming the 200,000 Portuguese conscripts who fought a long-running war against local nationalist insurgents with an imported arsenal including napalm and defoliants. The conflicts in both countries ended in 1974 with Portugal throwing in the towel. In Angola a war of succession followed, with three rival nationalist parties fighting for power. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (its Portuguese name abbreviated to MPLA), led by Agostinho Neto who became the newly independent nation’s first president, was backed by the Soviet Union – which, in return, was allowed to establish a naval base at the country’s capital, Luanda. The United States threw its weight behind the rival party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), in co-operation with South Africa. Substantial and decisive support came from Fidel Castro as part of what he saw as Cuba’s mission to engage in the global “conflict between privileged and underprivileged, humanity against imperialism”. By 1975, some 36,000 Cuban reservists with artillery, tanks and missile systems were serving in Angola, while Cuban doctors, teachers and technicians replaced their Portuguese counterparts who had returned home. Castro’s commitment to Angola was integral to a strategy that would extend the struggle for independence to neighbouring South West Africa (later Namibia) and Rhodesia (today, Zimbabwe). Inevitably, South Africa was drawn into the conflict, because Cubans were using Angolan bases to train guerrilla units. Some were destined for Rhodesia, where the white minority were defending themselves against nationalist partisans, some of whom enjoyed Soviet patronage. Under American and British pressure, Rhodesia consented to black majority rule in 1979. End of Africa’s Cold War By 1980, then, South Africa – ruled by what Castro called a “Fascist-Racist” regime – stood alone against the forces of African nationalism. For 40 years, the apartheid regime had presented itself as a bastion against communism – a stance that had secured it a steady flow of western arms. The Soviet Union and Cuba provided weapons and training camps for African National Congress guerrillas fighting black oppression by the apartheid government. South Africa was also, as US President Ronald Reagan remarked in 1981, “essential to the free world in its production of minerals we all must have”. In the event, Reagan did not need to commit his country to support South Africa’s last stand; events inside the Soviet Union were now dictating the outcome of the Cold War in Africa. By the mid-1980s, the communist powerhouse was facing an economic crisis, losing a war in Afghanistan and overstretched in Africa. One Kremlin official, Anatoly Adamishin, spoke for many others when he asked: “Why, with all our problems, did we have to get involved [in Africa]?… We could not afford it.” Angola alone owed the Soviet Union US$5bn, which it could not repay. In 1977 the Soviets attempted to unseat Neto, whom they now distrusted. Afterwards he made oblique approaches towards the US. It was left to the last leader of a communist Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to disengage from Africa. In 1988 he salvaged what he could in an agreement with the United States, by which all Soviet and Cuban forces would withdraw from the continent, and South Africa pulled out of Namibia, which was granted independence in 1990. Castro growled about “betrayal”, but acquiesced. The Cold War in Africa had ended. The United States had won on points. But Africa was left, traumatised, to pick up the pieces and face the problems created by the corrupt dictatorships that were the Cold War’s lasting legacy. Want to read more about the history of African history? Here are some of our most popular articles... The big question: Is Africa a prisoner of its past? Nelson Mandela: “a symbol of the struggle against racism” Africa’s medieval golden age Lawrence James is a historian and author of Empires in the Sun: The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) This content first appeared in issue 3 of BBC World Histories magazine
After the end of communist rule in eastern Europe and the break-up of the Soviet Union, many observers suggested that revolutions never really achieve their objectives. But how do we judge the long-term outcome of such endeavours - and have any been truly successful? Six historians debate the legacies of major revolts and uprisings
Charles Townshend Revolution has meant many things – except perhaps its literal meaning: a full-circle return to a previous state. In the modern world it has meant change, usually dramatic and rapid, often accelerated by violence. It has been applied to sudden seizures of power, but also to vast processes such as industrialisation and technological development. (The United States even called its development of so-called ‘smart weapons’ the Revolution in Military Affairs.) Variations in meaning bear directly on the issue of success or failure. In ‘palace revolutions’ (sometimes mistakenly labelled coups d’état), in which one general might seize power from another, the issue has been resolved after a short military clash. But such revolutions cause little change, beyond that of the Swiss bank account into which the proceeds of political power are transferred. Revolutions that have attempted to transform whole societies – the great French, Russian and Chinese uprisings – have far-reaching, complex and maybe contradictory effects that work themselves out over very long periods of time. Because of this, success and failure can be hard to calibrate. Did the French Revolution fail? That’s certainly what Beethoven thought when he struck out the dedication of his Eroica symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte – but Bonaparte was a child of the revolution, and his dictatorship was a world away from the Bourbon monarchy. After the revolution, power derived from the nation, not God; democracy was built into it. Though many French people today see the revolution as a bloodstained disaster, they still hold to the ‘republican values’ it established. A century ago, the Irish revolution promised not just to free Ireland from British rule, but to remake it as a new Gaelic society. This carried a price: partition, confining independence to 26 out of 32 Irish counties. Yet its centrepiece, the revival of the language, was never achieved, even if it still complicates the politics of Northern Ireland. Failure is relative; revolutions may not fail entirely, but most end in disillusionment. Charles Townshend is professor emeritus of international history at Keele University, and author of The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence (Allen Lane, 2013) Evan Mawdsley The Russian Revolution might seem to be a classic case of failure. The autocracy of Emperor Nicholas II was overthrown in February 1917, only to be replaced by Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in October 1917 and by Stalin’s even worse rule of terror in the 1920s and 1930s. The events and outcome were caricatured in George Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm, which ends with the revolutionary pigs turning into humans, and the restoration of ‘Manor Farm’ – the old order. In truth, things were more complicated than that precis suggests. Revolutions can fail or succeed in different ways. The earlier revolution of 1905 failed because the Tsar made concessions to the liberals, and because the forces of order remained intact. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 failed within eight months because the centrist (Duma) politicians who overthrew the Tsar did not satisfy popular economic demands, especially land reform, and did not bring an end to an unpopular war. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 surely did not fail, at least politically, in the sense that the radical group that brought it about remained in power until 1991. The Bolsheviks (later Communists) avoided failure, in the short term at least, by addressing the issues of land hunger and war-weariness. At the same time, they ruthlessly dealt with the forces of counter-revolution and disorder in the subsequent civil war. Revolutions sometimes fail because they are attacked by counter-revolutionaries from beyond national borders. Revolutionary ‘Soviet’ Russia benefited from the impact of the First World War and its aftermath, which made effective foreign intervention impractical. Having said that, Lenin’s revolution was a failure, at least in its own ‘internationalist’ terms, because it could not immediately trigger similar uprisings in other countries (although it did do so in the late 1940s). Whether the October Revolution failed in an Animal Farm sense – by merely replacing the old ruling class with another oppressive and corrupt one – is more open to dispute. The Communists did not create a truly egalitarian polity, but they did bring about remarkable upward social mobility and mass education. The fact that this was implemented alongside Stalin’s cruel repression does not necessarily make it less revolutionary. Evan Mawdsley was professor of international history at the University of Glasgow. His books include World War II: A New History (CUP, 2009) Marisa Linton History is littered with instances of revolts that never became revolutions. Most uprisings of the oppressed are ruthlessly crushed by the ruling group. So what does it take for a revolt to become a revolution – if we define ‘revolution’ as a political regime change accompanied by social transformation that empowers the poor? If the ruling group remains united, decisive and, above all, retains control of the army, then internal revolt is unlikely to succeed, at least without foreign intervention. The French Revolution of 1789 shows what can happen when the state fails on a catastrophic scale. Financial crisis and the collapse of the old regime paved the way for the most shattering revolution the world had yet seen. It became, for many observers, the archetypal revolution. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote Wordsworth. Liberty and equality became the watchwords, along with ‘fraternity’ – love of one’s fellow man. So how did this idealism collapse within four years into war, civil war and terror? This scenario was not inevitable, though made more likely by the reluctance of the king to co-operate with the new regime. His attempt to flee France, along with the revolutionaries’ reckless decision to export the revolution abroad in a foreign war, fatally undermined the constitutional monarchy, leading to renewed revolution – and the terror that made a mockery of the revolutionaries’ humanitarian aims. Revolutions are overwhelming experiences for the people who live through them, including their leaders. By 1795, many of the leaders in France were either dead, in exile or exhausted – cynical and disillusioned with idealism. As one leader wrote: “We have lived six centuries in six years”. Revolutions are, by their nature, politically destabilising. When the revolutionaries chose war, they risked the revolution coming under the control of the army’s leaders. Ultimately, the revolution was destroyed by an opportunistic and unscrupulous general who seized his chance to become a military dictator. Many more people would die in Napoleon’s wars than died under the revolutionary terror. Marisa Linton is associate professor in history at Kingston University, and author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013) Michael A McDonnell The American Revolution is often rightly seen as an example of a ‘successful’ revolution. A colonial resistance movement against imperial taxes snowballed into a successful war for independence that resulted in the creation of a union of states, in the federal constitution – and in the founding of a nation. But we need to think carefully about how we define ‘success’, and from whose perspective we do so. Few patriots who protested against the Stamp Act in 1765 envisioned independence. Most were proud Britons at the time. And the myriad forces that led to that break also drove many to stay loyal to the British empire. Few remember the revolution as a civil war, but fighting among colonists across the new states was endemic, and some 70,000 colonists and enslaved people fled during the conflict. African-Americans and Native Americans would also contest the success of the revolution. Many enslaved Americans already embraced patriot rhetoric that stressed liberty over tyranny, but were deeply disappointed that the revolutionary settlement did not include wholesale abolition, despite the fact that many enslaved people fought for their masters against the British during the war. Thousands of others instead fought for and tried to escape to British lines where at least some found freedom in far-flung places including Australia. Native Americans fought for their own independence against founding fathers who coveted their land and waged a war of conquest in the west. It was only the constitution of 1789 that gave the newly united states sufficient force to overcome the still powerful native nations on their borders. Finally, even many patriots were disappointed with the outcome. Radicals who embraced abolition, a broader suffrage and more representative assemblies were often defeated by conservative forces in the individual states when new governments were formed. And though the federal constitution is often seen as a revolution in politics and political thinking, its creators deliberately set out to curb the more democratic tendencies of the state governments in the name of stability. Americans still wrestle with the revolution’s ambiguous legacy: the vagaries of the electoral college, state versus federal rights, and the inequalities perpetuated by the creation of a nation rhetorically dedicated to freedom, but built by enslaved African-American labourers on Native American lands. Michael A McDonnell is associate professor in history at the University of Sydney Robert Bickers The 1911 revolution in China began with a farce and ended in tragedy. Launched when a cigarette-smoking bomb-maker blew himself and his comrades to smithereens, it finished when the first man democratically elected to be prime minister was assassinated by the president’s secret service at a railway station in Shanghai. The bombing unleashed the fury of 20 years of ethno-nationalist propaganda that saw thousands slaughtered in pogroms, as the uprising advanced across the sprawling Qing empire ruled by the Manchu dynasty. As chaos spread, a great fear grew that foreign powers – which, barely 11 years earlier, had sent troops into northern China to suppress the anti-colonial Boxer uprising (1899–1901)– would seize the moment to carve up the country. Like so many other revolutions, this one ended in uneasy compromise. The Manchu rulers abdicated and a new strongman, Yuan Shikai – once head of an important Qing army – became president of a new republic. China was saved from extinction, and the republic incorporated all of the lands ruled by the Manchus (except Tibet and Mongolia, which broke free). The former emperor was even allowed to keep the ‘Forbidden City’, his palace at the heart of the capital. But Yuan Shikai was no republican. Between December 1912 and January 1913, millions of voters selected an electoral college that chose a new national assembly – the first and only time that mainland China has held anything approaching a free, democratic election. The revolutionaries won the vote, but in March 1913 their prime minister designate was assassinated. The murder sparked a ‘Second Revolution’, pitching the nationalist revolutionaries against Yuan Shikai. They were defeated, the revolution failed, and 40 years of political disintegration and vicious strife followed. The preservation of China’s territorial integrity triumphed over the aspirations of its people. But the incomplete revolution prompted a far darker turn. It seemed to many that it was China’s culture itself – not Yuan, nor foreign influences – that obstructed all hope of progress. To remove that obstruction, the revolutions that unfolded during the years in which Mao Zedong controlled the country aimed to destroy every last vestige of the old order. Decades of agony would ensue. Robert Bickers is professor of history at the University of Bristol, and author of Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination (Allen Lane, 2017) Charles Forsdick Although the Haitian Revolution has been described as the “only successful slave revolt in history”, it is equally associated with the inevitability of revolutionary failure. Western media often perpetuate an account of Haitian history that implies a teleology of decline. An extreme version of this was evoked following the January 2010 earthquake, which the US fundamentalist preacher Pat Robertson blamed on a “pact with the devil” (an allusion to the August 1791 vodou ceremony seen as the trigger for the revolution). According to such a narrative, the revolution represents a tipping point in the passage from colonial abundance to postcolonial impoverishment. Such an account downplays the extent to which – by most criteria – the Haitian Revolution was, in fact, a major success. The wealth of the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ depended on a brutal system of plantation slavery that denied the freedom and humanity of the enslaved. The revolution represented an extension of the French revolutionary spirit of 1789 but was, more importantly, the culmination of resistance evident throughout Atlantic slavery. Under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, a revolt of the enslaved turned into a disciplined revolutionary movement that defeated French, British and Spanish forces, delivering universal emancipation from slavery (decades before French abolition in 1848) and liberation from colonial France. In the revolution itself were, nevertheless, seeds of the failures that followed in its wake. Central to these were decisions regarding the systems required to replace plantation slavery. Afro-Trinidadian historian CLR James saw Louverture’s tragic flaw as his inability to communicate this to the people. Independence was followed by civil war associated with government based on skin tone, by diplomatic ostracisation as world powers sought to quarantine the impact of Haiti’s revolution, by the crippling debt imposed by France in return for recognition of independence in 1825. Despite attempts to ‘silence’ its importance, the impact of the revolution is, nevertheless, evident in abolitionism, anti-slavery revolts and other political radicalism throughout the 19th century. The limitations of the Haitian Revolution are primarily associated with its failure to defend the gains achieved. It has, though, continued to shape and inspire political movements today, suggesting that, far from having failed, the Haitian Revolution remains still unfinished. Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, and co-author of Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto, 2017) This article was first published in issue 6 of BBC World Histories magazine
Giles Milton reveals how the German capital became the frontline in a bitter diplomatic conflict between the western Allies and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War
Any illusions that the wartime entente between the western Allies and the Soviet Union would flourish in the new postwar world were shattered when the two sides came face to face on the streets of Berlin in the summer of 1945. Author Giles Milton reveals how spiralling tensions between Josef Stalin and his counterparts in the west over the fate of the German capital fired the starting gun on the Cold War. Giles Milton is the author of Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown that Shaped the Modern World (John Murray, 2021) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Amazon