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REVOLUTIONS // The 20th Century

01 / 13 ← → / SPACE / CLICK A 13-PART AGITPROP DECK · 1900 — 2000 REVOLUTIONS The 20th Century RUSSIA · CHINA · CUBA &middot...

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01 / 13 ← → / SPACE / CLICK A 13-PART AGITPROP DECK · 1900 — 2000 REVOLUTIONS The 20th Century RUSSIA · CHINA · CUBA · IRAN · THE COLONIES 02 PETROGRAD · 1917 1917 Russia — Two Revolutions in One Year From Autocracy to October The setting: Romanov dynasty, three centuries of tsarist autocracy, devastated by World War I — mass casualties, food... Key sections include: Russia — Two Revolutions in One Year; MEXICO — The First Social Revolution of the Century; Civil War & Stalin's Consolidation; China — The People's Republic; DECOLONIZATION — Empire Folds Up; Cuba — Castro & Che; Vietnam — Thirty Years' War; Cultural Rupture , Not Regime Change; Iran — The Islamic Republic; The Wall Falls — And With It, an Empire.

Key sections

01Russia — Two Revolutions in One Year
02MEXICO — The First Social Revolution of the Century
03Civil War & Stalin's Consolidation
04China — The People's Republic
05DECOLONIZATION — Empire Folds Up
06Cuba — Castro & Che
07Vietnam — Thirty Years' War
08Cultural Rupture , Not Regime Change
09Iran — The Islamic Republic
10The Wall Falls — And With It, an Empire
11The Anatomy of a Revolution
12Further Reading & Watching

Topics covered

catalog history 20th century revolutions

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Slide outline

01Russia — Two Revolutions in One Year
02MEXICO — The First Social Revolution of the Century
03Civil War & Stalin's Consolidation
04China — The People's Republic
05DECOLONIZATION — Empire Folds Up
06Cuba — Castro & Che
07Vietnam — Thirty Years' War
08Cultural Rupture , Not Regime Change
09Iran — The Islamic Republic
10The Wall Falls — And With It, an Empire
11The Anatomy of a Revolution
12Further Reading & Watching

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Slide 01

Slide 1

A 13-PART AGITPROP DECK · 1900 — 2000
REVOLUTIONSThe 20th Century
RUSSIA · CHINA · CUBA · IRAN · THE COLONIES

Slide 02

Russia — Two Revolutions in One Year

PETROGRAD · 1917
1917
From Autocracy to October
The setting: Romanov dynasty, three centuries of tsarist autocracy, devastated by World War I — mass casualties, food shortages, mutiny.
February: bread riots in Petrograd, soldiers refuse to fire. Tsar Nicholas II abdicates. A liberal Provisional Government takes power, alongside workers' soviets.
October (Nov. by new calendar): Lenin's Bolsheviks seize the Winter Palace in a near-bloodless coup, demanding "Peace, Land, Bread."
Why it stuck: a disciplined vanguard party, a war-exhausted army, and a state that had already collapsed once.
All Power to the Soviets
LENIN — exiled theorist returns by sealed train. Fuses Marxism with a vanguard model: revolution from above, in the name of below.
SLIDE 02 / 13RUSSIA · 1917

Slide 03

MEXICO — The First Social Revolution of the Century

NORTE · SUR
1910–1920. Three decades of dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz ended in a multi-sided agrarian war that rewrote the relationship between land, labor and the state.
MADERO
The opener. Wealthy reformer who issued the Plan de San Luis Potosí, called for elections, and toppled Díaz — only to be assassinated in 1913 by a counter-revolutionary general.
PANCHO VILLA
Northern bandit-turned-general. His División del Norte rode out of Chihuahua. Charismatic, ruthless, eventually crushed at Celaya.
EMILIANO ZAPATA
Southern peasant leader. "Tierra y Libertad." Plan de Ayala demanded the return of communal lands. Killed in ambush, 1919. The slogan outlived him.
Outcome: the 1917 Constitution — one of the world's most progressive of its era — enshrined land reform (Article 27), labor rights (Article 123), and anti-clerical secularism. The PRI would dominate Mexican politics for the next seven decades.

Slide 04

Civil War & Stalin's Consolidation

U.S.S.R. · 1918–1953
Reds vs. Whites (1918–22)
Trotsky builds the Red Army from scratch. Foreign interventions (UK, US, France, Japan) fail. War communism, famine, the Cheka. By 1922 the Bolsheviks rule a ruined country renamed the USSR.
Stalin's Turn (from 1928)
Forced collectivization: peasant land seized, kulaks "liquidated as a class." Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor) kills millions.
Five-Year Plans: brutal industrialization. Magnitogorsk rises from steppe.
The Great Terror (1936–38): show trials, gulag, ~700,000 executions. Old Bolsheviks erased.
The Pattern
Revolutionary regimes face a second crisis after the seizure of power: institutionalization. Stalin's answer was total state ownership, a personality cult, and terror as routine governance.
SLIDE 04 / 13"SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY"

Slide 05

China — The People's Republic

YAN'AN · BEIJING
1949
From Long March to Tiananmen Gate
1921: Chinese Communist Party founded in Shanghai.
1934–35: The Long March — 9,000 km retreat from Nationalist (KMT) encirclement. Mao Zedong emerges as supreme leader.
1937–45: Anti-Japanese war. Communists build rural base; KMT bleeds.
1946–49: Civil war resumes. KMT collapses. Chiang Kai-shek flees to Taiwan.
October 1, 1949: Mao proclaims the PRC from Tiananmen.
Cultural Revolution 1966–76
To purge "capitalist roaders" and re-radicalize a stalled regime, Mao mobilizes the Red Guards — teenagers with little red books. Teachers, intellectuals, party rivals are denounced, beaten, sent to the countryside. Estimates: 500K–2M dead, an entire generation's education erased. Ends with Mao's death; Deng Xiaoping reverses course in 1978.

Slide 06

DECOLONIZATION — Empire Folds Up

THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Within twenty years, hundreds of millions left European empires — through negotiation, mass mobilization, and armed struggle. The map of the world is redrawn.
India — 1947
Gandhi's mass non-violent campaign and Congress organization vs. an exhausted post-war Britain. Partition of India and Pakistan: ~15 million displaced, ~1 million killed in communal violence. Independence inaugurates the postcolonial era.
Africa — 1957–65
Ghana under Nkrumah goes first (1957). The "Year of Africa" (1960): seventeen new states. Algeria wrests independence from France in a brutal eight-year war (1954–62). Portugal hangs on until 1975.
INDIA '47
INDONESIA '49
GHANA '57
GUINEA '58
CONGO '60
NIGERIA '60
ALGERIA '62
KENYA '63
ZAMBIA '64
ANGOLA '75
MOZAMBIQUE '75
ZIMBABWE '80
SLIDE 06 / 13BANDUNG · NON-ALIGNED

Slide 07

Cuba — Castro & Che

SIERRA MAESTRA
1959
From the Hills of Oriente
1953: Castro's failed Moncada barracks attack — "history will absolve me."
1956–58: 82 guerrillas land from the Granma; survivors regroup in the Sierra Maestra. Che Guevara, an Argentine doctor, joins them.
Jan 1, 1959: dictator Batista flees Havana. Castro's column enters the city.
1960–61: nationalizations, US embargo, alignment with Moscow.
Bay of Pigs · Missile Crisis
April 1961: CIA-backed Cuban exiles invade at the Bay of Pigs. Total fiasco for the US.
October 1962: Soviet missiles in Cuba. Thirteen days at the edge of nuclear war. Kennedy & Khrushchev step back; secret deal removes US missiles from Turkey.

Slide 08

Vietnam — Thirty Years' War

INDOCHINA
A single anti-colonial revolution stretched across two superpowers. Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh and its successors fought, in sequence, the Japanese, the French, and the Americans.
1945
Ho Chi Minh declares independence in Hanoi, quoting the US Declaration. France attempts to reconquer.
1954
Decisive Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu ends French rule. Geneva Accords split Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
1965
US ground troops arrive en masse. By 1968 there are over 500,000. Operation Rolling Thunder drops more bombs on Vietnam than were used in all of WWII.
1968
The Tet Offensive: a tactical defeat for the North, a strategic catastrophe for US public opinion.
1973
Paris Accords. US withdraws.
1975
Saigon falls. Vietnam reunifies under Hanoi's rule. ~3 million Vietnamese dead across the war.
SLIDE 08 / 13HO CHI MINH · GIAP

Slide 09

Cultural Rupture, Not Regime Change

A YEAR OF FIRE
1968
PARIS · MAY
Student occupation of the Sorbonne. Ten million workers join a wildcat general strike. De Gaulle briefly flees the country — then wins re-election by a landslide.
PRAGUE · AUGUST
Dub&ccaron;ek's "socialism with a human face" is crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks. The reform-from-within path is closed off for two decades.
MEXICO · OCTOBER
Ten days before the Olympics, troops fire on student protesters at Tlatelolco. Hundreds dead. The state covers up the massacre for thirty years.
Why it matters: 1968 produced almost no new governments. But the terms of political life shifted — second-wave feminism, ecology, civil rights, the New Left, gay liberation. Revolutions can succeed culturally while failing politically.

Slide 10

Iran — The Islamic Republic

TEHRAN
1979
From Peacock Throne to Theocracy
1953: CIA-MI6 coup against PM Mossadegh restores Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Western alignment, oil wealth, SAVAK secret police.
1970s: rapid modernization, deep inequality, political repression. Bazaar merchants, leftists, and Shia clergy converge against the regime.
1978–79: mass strikes paralyze the economy. The Shah flees in January '79. Ayatollah Khomeini returns from Paris exile to a million-person welcome.
Hostage crisis: students seize the US embassy, hold 52 Americans for 444 days. Defines US–Iran relations for the next half century.
A New Template
Iran was the first major revolution to reject both Western liberalism and Soviet communism. Its winning ideology — political Shia Islamism, organized through mosque networks — reshaped how scholars think about religion as a vehicle for mass mobilization.
An iron law reasserted itself: revolutions are made by coalitions, but consolidated by their most disciplined faction. Liberals, Marxists, and nationalists were sidelined within two years.
SLIDE 10 / 13WHITE REVOLUTION → ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

Slide 11

The Wall Falls — And With It, an Empire

EASTERN EUROPE
1989
JUN
Poland. Solidarity wins free elections, the first non-communist government in the Eastern Bloc since 1948. Lech Wałęsa, an electrician, becomes the face of dissent.
SEP
Hungary. Border with Austria opened. East Germans flee west by the tens of thousands. The seal on the bloc is broken.
NOV
Berlin. Misread press conference, mass crowds at checkpoints, guards stand down. The Wall is breached on Nov 9. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution follows weeks later — Havel from prisoner to president.
DEC
Romania. The only violent overthrow. Ceaușescu and his wife flee, are caught, summarily tried, and executed on Christmas Day.
1991
USSR. A failed August coup against Gorbachev accelerates the end. By December, the Soviet flag comes down over the Kremlin. Fifteen successor states.
The Gorbachev Variable: previous Eastern Bloc uprisings (Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia '68, Poland '81) had been crushed by Soviet force. In 1989, Moscow declared it would not intervene — the "Sinatra Doctrine." Without that, regimes folded one by one.

Slide 12

The Anatomy of a Revolution

SYNTHESIS
Drawing on Skocpol, Goldstone, Tilly — revolutions don't simply happen because people are angry. Four factors recur, and all four usually need to align:
1 · Economic Crisis
Famine, inflation, war debt, sudden fall in living standards. Russia '17, China '49, Iran '79, Eastern Europe '89.
2 · State Weakness
Lost wars, fiscal collapse, divided elites, foreign humiliation. Tsarist Russia after WWI; the Shah after the oil bust; Batista's army hollowed out by corruption.
3 · Organized Opposition
Anger alone produces riots, not revolutions. Bolsheviks, CCP, Viet Minh, M-26-7, Solidarity, mosque networks — all had years of organization-building before their hour came.
4 · Ideology
A frame that turns grievance into program: Marxism-Leninism, anti-colonial nationalism, political Islam, liberal democracy. The frame names the enemy and pictures the world after.
And after? Almost every revolution faces a "Thermidor" — a period in which the most disciplined and ruthless faction sidelines its coalition partners. Liberty narrows. New elites consolidate. The hardest revolutionary problem is not seizing power, but governing without becoming what you overthrew.
SLIDE 12 / 13SKOCPOL · GOLDSTONE · TILLY

Slide 13

REVOLUTIONS // The 20th Century

About this HTML presentation

Key sections

Topics covered

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Presentation Transcript

Slide 1

Russia &mdash; Two Revolutions in One Year

MEXICO &mdash; The First Social Revolution of the Century

Civil War & Stalin's Consolidation

China &mdash; The People's Republic

DECOLONIZATION &mdash; Empire Folds Up

Cuba &mdash; Castro & Che

Vietnam &mdash; Thirty Years' War