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Revolution and Terror

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View the page of Graeme Gill

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Graeme Gill argues that in order to understand the relationship between revolution and terror, it is necessary to distinguish between different types of terror and see how they are connected to the revolutionary seizure of power.

Image courtesy of interviewee. August 15, 2024

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In a discussion about a book focused on the themes of revolution and terror, the author, Graham, shares his motivations for writing. He expresses a longstanding intrigue with revolutions as moments of significant political, economic, and social transformation, often driven by high ideals that paradoxically lead to widespread suffering and internal terror.

Graham outlines three distinct types of terror associated with revolutions:

1. **Revolutionary Terror:** This video occurs when a new regime uses terror against its political opponents, often during its early years post-seizure of power.

2. **Transformational Terror:** This video is employed to achieve socioeconomic changes, as there is usually substantial opposition from those negatively affected by these transformations.

3. **Inverted Terror:** This video involves factions within the regime turning against each other, using terror to eliminate rivals, often fueled by paranoia about potential enemies within and outside the regime.

He references key examples, including the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, demonstrating how these types of terror manifested during and after their respective upheavals. While the former revolutions faced substantial opposition, leading to the necessity of terror to maintain control, the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe did not, as communist regimes largely dissipated without significant resistance, thereby rendering terror unnecessary.

Graham hopes readers will glean an understanding that revolution can bring about positive change and does not inherently lead to terror or regime self-destruction. He advocates for the view that revolutions can create avenues for more reasonable and democratic societies, although he acknowledges the complex, often violent histories associated with them.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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Since I was an, an undergraduate, I became intrigued

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by the fact that, revolutions are times of political

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and economic and social change,

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which bring about major transformation.

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And they're usually fueled by, very high ideals.

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But very often those revolutions actually lead to,

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to a lot of, a lot

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of people really suffering a great deal as a result of them

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that the, the ideals are not really,

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realized very often.

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Um, and so I wondered why this, why this was,

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and of course, what got me onto the,

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to the terror aspect was this, this statement

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that's attributed to a, a, a French revolutionary,

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the revolution like Saturn devours its children.

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Now, you know, you may, you may be aware of the Greek,

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the Greek myth about Cronon, eating his sons.

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And there's the Goya painting and the,

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and the, the Reuben's painting

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of the same, of the same thing.

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Terror was not only used

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by the regime against its opponents,

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which is the normal way in which it, it is seen,

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but that the terror is often turned on

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the revolutionaries themselves.

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And so this, this really intrigued me, particularly given

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that many, many writers

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of a more conservative disposition used this argument.

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The terror always eats its children, if you like,

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used this argument to say the terror by defin,

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the def the revolution by definition is a bad thing.

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So I just wondered whether revolution inevitably meant

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that sort of, that sort of terror and terror as a whole.

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And that's what led me into,

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into reading, into writing the book.

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I've distinguished between three different types of terror

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and, I don't think anyone has,

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has made this sort of distinction before.

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The first one I call, revolutionary terror.

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And this is the sort of terror

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that the new regime turns upon.

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Its political opponents,

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and it normally occurs round about the time

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of the actual seizure of power.

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Sometimes it can precede it, in which case, I mean,

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there's a problem because we're talking about regime terror.

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But, as in the Chinese case, this sort of terror

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happened before they got the power in 1949,

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but it also happened afterwards.

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So it fits into that category.

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So revolutionary terror has directed against essentially the

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political opponents of the regime,

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usually in its early years of, of existence.

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The second form of terror is transformational terror.

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Now a revolution involves significant

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socioeconomic transformation of the society.

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If you don't get that level of transformation,

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then it's not really revolution, it's something else.

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So, in carrying out that sort of transformation,

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regimes usually have to use a form of terror in order

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to get the changes through simply

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because once again, there's significant opposition.

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Once you try to change the socioeconomic structure,

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there are gonna be losers,

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and those losers will often seek to oppose, the regime

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and the changes it's seeking to make.

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So there's transformational, terror

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or if you like, it's the, it's the terror that's used

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to seek to attain the ideals

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that motivated the regime in the first place.

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And the third form of terror that I talked about is,

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is in inverted terror.

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It's a, it's a pretty ugly name.

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I know inverted terror,

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but I couldn't think of, I couldn't think of one

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that sort of suited it, suited it better.

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And what this means is that,

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that the terror apparatus is turned upon the regime itself.

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And what this suggests is that, that there's some sort of a

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factional fight or division within the regime,

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and one section of it mobilizes that terror to do away

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with the other, with the other section.

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And in looking at the, the three main cases, the,

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so-called great revolutions of the French, the, Russian,

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and the Chinese, all of these three forms

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of terror were evident.

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Um, in, in all three cases of revolution, the seizure

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of power brings into, into power a new regime which seeks

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to implement, a a program of change, which is going

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to fundamentally transform the society.

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That's the, that's the, the, the, the way of, that's, that's

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what terror, that's what revolution is about, trying

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to bring about a brown brave new world, if you like.

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Uh, that's very different from the one that went before it.

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But the crucial thing here is that,

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that in these three great revolutions,

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there was significant opposition to that.

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If we think about, about the, the, the,

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the Russian revolution

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and the Chinese Revolution in particular, the old regime

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and supporters of the old regime were violently opposed

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to the sorts of changes that the,

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the communists were seeking to make in those two,

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in those two countries, which the same in France.

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But the, the chronology is a bit different,

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which makes it sort of a bit more awkward to, to,

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to fit into the, to the patent easily.

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But the seizure of power is crucial

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because it's the seizing of power, which is the key

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to being able to then mobilize the arms of the state

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to implement the terror.

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Because the terror that I'm looking at is, is state terror.

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We're not talking about the terror of,

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of the red brigades or of, of, ISIS

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or Islamic State or anything like that.

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It's state terror. So the crucial thing is

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that the regime seizes control of the state

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and is then able to use the command

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of the coercive apparatus of the state

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to implement that terror.

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So the, the the three, the three sorts of terror

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flow directly from,

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From the, the seizure of power,

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because they wouldn't occur without that seizure of power.

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When the communist seized power in both of those countries

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seized political power in both of those countries,

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the economy was still dominated by people

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who had run the economy under the old regime.

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And what the communists wanted was to transform

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that economy into something else.

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In the Russian case, they weren't able to do that

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until they'd seized national power in the capital in 1917.

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Then they immediately were confronted by opposition,

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mainly from within, so from within Russian society,

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but supported from outside in the Civil War.

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So that the civil War immediately followed the seizure

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of power in, in 1917.

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And during that civil war, what the,

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what the communist did was to break the economic power

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of the big landlords

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and the big industrialists in China,

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because the revolution was much more decentralized

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and it was actually sort of a gorilla civil war

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for a long period of time.

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A lot of that sort of process took place

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before the actual seizure of power in 1949,

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because as the communists took over particular areas,

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they then did away with the old power structures

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and the old economic structures of, of rural,

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and of economics when they got into,

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into national power in 1949, they were then able to do

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that on a nationwide, on a nationwide scale.

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In France, it was a bit different

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because while the revolutionaries wanted to do away

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with the, the feudal system that existed,

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and the monarchical system, they were able to do

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that relatively easily

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and without a great deal of, of, of conflict.

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But what that meant was that fundamental structures

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of economic power in the countryside weren't really changed

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as they were in Russia and, and China.

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But in France, what there was was considerable opposition

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within the, within Paris itself to the revolution.

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And of course then the revolutionaries themselves split when

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the jacobins came to power, late in the piece 39,

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70 93, 70 94.

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And they then turned on the other revolutionaries, the more,

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I dunno whether you could call the moderate revolutionaries,

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but the, the non jacobin, revolutionaries so

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that in France, the revolutionary terror

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and the transformational terror

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and the inverted terror were all really overlapped and inter

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and intersecting, which is why it's much

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more difficult than the other two.

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But in the other two cases, I mean, transformation followed

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sex, social economic transformation followed the seizure

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of power in, in, Russia.

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It was through collectivization

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and industrialization, 1929 to 33, say in China,

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it was with collectivization the great leap forward in the

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19, in the 1950s, so that, the

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transformational power was implemented once they were in

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power, and it hadn't sort of established themselves.

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Inverted power came about in, in Russia

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and China, some years later.

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And there is no direct

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and necessary causative link between the revolution,

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transformational power, and the inverted revolution,

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because the inverted revolution comes about essentially

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because to put it very simply of the, the, the sort

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of paranoia of Mao, on the one hand, about the existence

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of enemies all over the place

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and of Stalin on the other, who also believed

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that there were enemies,

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both within the regime and outside.

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And the only way to do away with both of these was, for both

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of these was through terror.

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The key factor in the, in the unrolling of revolution

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of revolutionary, of revolutionary terror,

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and of transformational terror was

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the existence of opposition.

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It's the fact that that the, the new regime in Russia

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and China and to a lesser extent in, in France,

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was confronted with overwhelming, powerful opposition.

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And so terror was seen as being needed in 1989 in the,

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in the, the velvet revolutions of Eastern Europe,

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or we now call it Central Europe.

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Um, the communist regimes effectively evaporated.

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There was in some cases they had to be, they, they, they had

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to be sort of pushed from power, but by

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and large, they eventually, they,

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they essentially evaporated.

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And that meant that when they had gone,

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there was virtually nobody there to support the old regime

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and therefore nobody there

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or insufficient numbers there to oppose the new system

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that was being, that was being set up.

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And therefore the new revolutionaries, if you like,

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because it was a revolution,

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because what we got was the overthrow

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of the communist political system

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and the overthrow of the communist economic system

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and the imposition of, of,

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democracy in one degree or another in these countries,

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and the imposition of a,

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of a capitalist economic system.

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But there was virtually nobody domestically opposing it.

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Furthermore, unlike the other, the three great revolutions,

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the international community by

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and large was supportive of the revolution as opposed to

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opposing it, as was the case

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with the three great revolutions.

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And the key here, of course, was,

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was RB Charles said in, said in 1989 that,

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that the East European countries could go their own way.

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So that meant that the Soviet Union wasn't gonna step in

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as they had in 1968 in Czechoslovakia in 19,

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56 in Hungary.

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They weren't gonna step in so that there was no sort

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of dark prints outside that was going

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to stand up for the old regime.

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So effectively there was nobody there

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to conduct terror against.

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So terror was unnecessary.

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Yeah, I mean, the issue is of course whether

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that's gonna be the model

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of revolution in the future or not.

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Um, but I wouldn't like to,

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I wouldn't like to put my money on it.

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Revolution is not necessarily a bad thing that,

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that relu that

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that positive things can come out of revolutions.

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I mean, usually when there is widespread change,

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someone does pay the cost.

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That's, that's true. And the costs have been pretty

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horrendous for, in terms

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of lives lost in particular in, in both the Chinese

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and the Russian revolutions.

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Less so, less so the French one.

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But there was still significant loss of life.

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But I would hope that what it shows is that, that,

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that revolution does not necessarily have to lead to

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the regime itself cannibalizing itself, the terms

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that you used earlier,

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and that it can lead to the establishment ultimately of a,

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a, a sort of reasonable democratic society.

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I mean, the French one did,

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but admittedly it went through a period of,

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of military dictatorship in between the revolution

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and getting on towards this.

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And it led to a, a, all of the 19th century though,

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was moving in that sort of direction in one form or another.

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And so I would hope that what it shows is

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that revolution is not the bogeyman that it's often been,

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been pointed out to be

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and is not necessarily the, the precursor

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of the unleashing of terror on society as a whole.

00:00 - Since I was an, an undergraduate, I became intrigued by the fact that, revolutions are times of political and economic and social change, which bring about major transformation. And they're usually fueled by, very high ideals. But very often those revolutions actually lead to,

00:20 - to a lot of, a lot of people really suffering a great deal as a result of them that the, the ideals are not really, realized very often. and so I wondered why this, why this was, and of course, what got me onto the, to the terror aspect was this, this statement that's attributed to a, a, a French revolutionary, the revolution like Saturn devours its children. Now, you know, you may, you may be aware of the Greek,

00:50 - the Greek myth about Cronon, eating his sons. And there's the Goya painting and the, and the, the Reuben's painting of the same, of the same thing. Terror was not only used by the regime against its opponents, which is the normal way in which it, it is seen, but that the terror is often turned on the revolutionaries themselves. And so this, this really intrigued me, particularly given

01:13 - that many, many writers of a more conservative disposition used this argument. The terror always eats its children, if you like, used this argument to say the terror by defin, the def the revolution by definition is a bad thing. So I just wondered whether revolution inevitably meant that sort of, that sort of terror and terror as a whole. And that's what led me into, into reading, into writing the book. I've distinguished between three different types of terror

01:43 - and, I don't think anyone has, has made this sort of distinction before. The first one I call, revolutionary terror. And this is the sort of terror that the new regime turns upon. Its political opponents, and it normally occurs round about the time of the actual seizure of power. Sometimes it can precede it, in which case, I mean, there's a problem because we're talking about regime terror.

02:10 - But, as in the Chinese case, this sort of terror happened before they got the power in 1949, but it also happened afterwards. So it fits into that category. So revolutionary terror has directed against essentially the political opponents of the regime, usually in its early years of, of existence. The second form of terror is transformational terror. Now a revolution involves significant socioeconomic transformation of the society.

02:41 - If you don't get that level of transformation, then it's not really revolution, it's something else. So, in carrying out that sort of transformation, regimes usually have to use a form of terror in order to get the changes through simply because once again, there's significant opposition. Once you try to change the socioeconomic structure, there are gonna be losers, and those losers will often seek to oppose, the regime and the changes it's seeking to make.

03:11 - So there's transformational, terror or if you like, it's the, it's the terror that's used to seek to attain the ideals that motivated the regime in the first place. And the third form of terror that I talked about is, is in inverted terror. It's a, it's a pretty ugly name. I know inverted terror, but I couldn't think of, I couldn't think of one that sort of suited it, suited it better.

03:36 - And what this means is that, that the terror apparatus is turned upon the regime itself. And what this suggests is that, that there's some sort of a factional fight or division within the regime, and one section of it mobilizes that terror to do away with the other, with the other section. And in looking at the, the three main cases, the, so-called great revolutions of the French, the, Russian, and the Chinese, all of these three forms of terror were evident.

04:10 - in, in all three cases of revolution, the seizure of power brings into, into power a new regime which seeks to implement, a a program of change, which is going to fundamentally transform the society. That's the, that's the, the, the, the way of, that's, that's what terror, that's what revolution is about, trying to bring about a brown brave new world, if you like. that's very different from the one that went before it. But the crucial thing here is that, that in these three great revolutions,

04:42 - there was significant opposition to that. If we think about, about the, the, the, the Russian revolution and the Chinese Revolution in particular, the old regime and supporters of the old regime were violently opposed to the sorts of changes that the, the communists were seeking to make in those two, in those two countries, which the same in France. But the, the chronology is a bit different, which makes it sort of a bit more awkward to, to,

05:10 - to fit into the, to the patent easily. But the seizure of power is crucial because it's the seizing of power, which is the key to being able to then mobilize the arms of the state to implement the terror. Because the terror that I'm looking at is, is state terror. We're not talking about the terror of, of the red brigades or of, of, ISIS or Islamic State or anything like that. It's state terror. So the crucial thing is

05:40 - that the regime seizes control of the state and is then able to use the command of the coercive apparatus of the state to implement that terror. So the, the the three, the three sorts of terror flow directly from, From the, the seizure of power, because they wouldn't occur without that seizure of power. When the communist seized power in both of those countries seized political power in both of those countries,

06:08 - the economy was still dominated by people who had run the economy under the old regime. And what the communists wanted was to transform that economy into something else. In the Russian case, they weren't able to do that until they'd seized national power in the capital in 1917. Then they immediately were confronted by opposition, mainly from within, so from within Russian society, but supported from outside in the Civil War. So that the civil War immediately followed the seizure

06:42 - of power in, in 1917. And during that civil war, what the, what the communist did was to break the economic power of the big landlords and the big industrialists in China, because the revolution was much more decentralized and it was actually sort of a gorilla civil war for a long period of time. A lot of that sort of process took place before the actual seizure of power in 1949,

07:10 - because as the communists took over particular areas, they then did away with the old power structures and the old economic structures of, of rural, and of economics when they got into, into national power in 1949, they were then able to do that on a nationwide, on a nationwide scale. In France, it was a bit different because while the revolutionaries wanted to do away with the, the feudal system that existed, and the monarchical system, they were able to do

07:42 - that relatively easily and without a great deal of, of, of conflict. But what that meant was that fundamental structures of economic power in the countryside weren't really changed as they were in Russia and, and China. But in France, what there was was considerable opposition within the, within Paris itself to the revolution. And of course then the revolutionaries themselves split when the jacobins came to power, late in the piece 39, 70 93, 70 94.

08:16 - And they then turned on the other revolutionaries, the more, I dunno whether you could call the moderate revolutionaries, but the, the non jacobin, revolutionaries so that in France, the revolutionary terror and the transformational terror and the inverted terror were all really overlapped and inter and intersecting, which is why it's much more difficult than the other two. But in the other two cases, I mean, transformation followed sex, social economic transformation followed the seizure

08:46 - of power in, in, Russia. It was through collectivization and industrialization, 1929 to 33, say in China, it was with collectivization the great leap forward in the 19, in the 1950s, so that, the transformational power was implemented once they were in power, and it hadn't sort of established themselves. Inverted power came about in, in Russia and China, some years later. And there is no direct

09:18 - and necessary causative link between the revolution, transformational power, and the inverted revolution, because the inverted revolution comes about essentially because to put it very simply of the, the, the sort of paranoia of Mao, on the one hand, about the existence of enemies all over the place and of Stalin on the other, who also believed that there were enemies, both within the regime and outside. And the only way to do away with both of these was, for both

09:50 - of these was through terror. The key factor in the, in the unrolling of revolution of revolutionary, of revolutionary terror, and of transformational terror was the existence of opposition. It's the fact that that the, the new regime in Russia and China and to a lesser extent in, in France, was confronted with overwhelming, powerful opposition. And so terror was seen as being needed in 1989 in the, in the, the velvet revolutions of Eastern Europe,

10:24 - or we now call it Central Europe. the communist regimes effectively evaporated. There was in some cases they had to be, they, they, they had to be sort of pushed from power, but by and large, they eventually, they, they essentially evaporated. And that meant that when they had gone, there was virtually nobody there to support the old regime and therefore nobody there or insufficient numbers there to oppose the new system

10:55 - that was being, that was being set up. And therefore the new revolutionaries, if you like, because it was a revolution, because what we got was the overthrow of the communist political system and the overthrow of the communist economic system and the imposition of, of, democracy in one degree or another in these countries, and the imposition of a, of a capitalist economic system.

11:22 - But there was virtually nobody domestically opposing it. Furthermore, unlike the other, the three great revolutions, the international community by and large was supportive of the revolution as opposed to opposing it, as was the case with the three great revolutions. And the key here, of course, was, was RB Charles said in, said in 1989 that, that the East European countries could go their own way. So that meant that the Soviet Union wasn't gonna step in

11:54 - as they had in 1968 in Czechoslovakia in 19, 56 in Hungary. They weren't gonna step in so that there was no sort of dark prints outside that was going to stand up for the old regime. So effectively there was nobody there to conduct terror against. So terror was unnecessary. Yeah, I mean, the issue is of course whether that's gonna be the model

12:20 - of revolution in the future or not. but I wouldn't like to, I wouldn't like to put my money on it. Revolution is not necessarily a bad thing that, that relu that that positive things can come out of revolutions. I mean, usually when there is widespread change, someone does pay the cost. That's, that's true. And the costs have been pretty horrendous for, in terms

12:43 - of lives lost in particular in, in both the Chinese and the Russian revolutions. Less so, less so the French one. But there was still significant loss of life. But I would hope that what it shows is that, that, that revolution does not necessarily have to lead to the regime itself cannibalizing itself, the terms that you used earlier, and that it can lead to the establishment ultimately of a, a, a sort of reasonable democratic society.

13:18 - I mean, the French one did, but admittedly it went through a period of, of military dictatorship in between the revolution and getting on towards this. And it led to a, a, all of the 19th century though, was moving in that sort of direction in one form or another. And so I would hope that what it shows is that revolution is not the bogeyman that it's often been, been pointed out to be and is not necessarily the, the precursor

13:45 - of the unleashing of terror on society as a whole.

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