Counter-revolution

Meaning and origin

The Russian encyclopedia defines counter-revolution as a political process opposite to revolution, aimed at preserving or restoring the political system, its elements and its elite as they existed before revolutionary change. The English encyclopedia applies the word both to attempts to defeat a revolutionary movement before it takes power and to attempts to restore the old regime after a successful revolution. According to the French encyclopedia, the expression arose in opposition to the French Revolution of 1789, was then applied to the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and to the Paris Commune, and from the Russian Revolution of 1917 onward to revolutions of the communist type. Vladimir Dahl's Russian dictionary glossed it as a counter-rising in favour of the order that existed before the overturn. The same French article notes that after a revolutionary regime is installed, and especially since 1917, the adjective has also served to discredit people whom those in power wished to remove.

The French Revolution and counter-revolutionary thought

Counter-revolutionary thought appeared early. Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790; the Savoyard Joseph de Maistre regarded the Revolution as a crime against the natural order and argued for a return to absolute monarchy. Louis de Bonald, Augustin Barruel and Spain's Juan Donoso Cortés are counted in the same current. The French encyclopedia divides these thinkers into those who, like Burke, stood largely within the liberal tradition and those who defended an anti-liberal traditionalism or a radical authoritarianism. In practice the counter-revolution took the form of emigration and revolt: at least 150,000 people emigrated, many of them officers. After the king's execution and the anti-clerical measures, royalists and Catholics in the Vendée took up arms in 1793 when the government demanded a levy of 300,000 men; some historians regard the suppression of the revolt as the first modern genocide.

From the nineteenth century to the Second World War

Monarchies, those of the German Confederation among them, put down the revolutions of 1848. In France the legitimists, who denied the Revolution any legitimacy, formed a party until 1902, when most of their deputies rallied to the Republic at the Pope's request. In the twentieth century Charles Maurras's Action Française placed itself in the counter-revolutionary tradition of Maistre and Bonald while promoting "integral nationalism". The historian René Rémond regarded the Vichy regime of 1940 as counter-revolutionary rather than fascist; its motto "Work, Family, Fatherland" replaced "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".

In Russia and the Soviet Union the term referred above all to the White movement of the Civil War. Its core was officers of the tsarist army with conservative views, though leaders such as Lavr Kornilov and Anton Denikin opposed monarchist slogans; the historian Peter Kenez saw the Whites as part of an international counter-revolutionary phenomenon marked by nationalism, clericalism and hostility to democracy and social revolution. Allied troops landed at Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok in 1918, and after the armistice of November 1918 the Allies turned to helping the Whites; the Japanese intervention in Siberia lasted until 1922. In Germany the Freikorps that crushed the revolution of 1918–1919 and the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, and in Spain the alliance of Carlists, monarchists and the Falange against the Second Republic in 1936, are given as further examples.

The Cold War and after

During the Cold War the term was applied to armed groups and regimes opposing communist revolutions or left-wing governments: the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 against Fidel Castro's government and the Contras who fought Nicaragua's Sandinista government in the 1980s, whose name itself came from "counter-revolution". The English encyclopedia notes that many anti-communist mass killings of the Cold War were backed by the United States and its allies, and that the Indonesian killings of 1965–1966 and the killings by the Guatemalan military are considered genocide. The right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone abducted and killed left-wing opponents in Operation Condor (1975–1983). The overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013, after the Egyptian revolution of 2011, is also described as a counter-revolution. The German encyclopedia mentions interpretations that use the word for the rollback of post-war social gains and of the achievements of 1968 by fiscal and monetary means.

Usage in socialist states and in Marxism

Soviet historiography defined counter-revolution as the reaction of an overthrown class to a social revolution, a regressive process aimed at restoring or preserving an outdated social and state order. The revolutionary state turned the concept into institutions. On 7 December 1917 the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka) was created; a ruling of the cassation department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of 6 November 1918 called counter-revolutionary any action against the soviets or their organs, whatever its motive. The RSFSR Criminal Code of 1926 defined counter-revolutionary crimes in Article 58, and a Politburo resolution of 30 January 1930 classed kulak resistance to collectivisation as counter-revolutionary. The Russian encyclopedia notes that the label was attached to almost any opponent of the Bolsheviks according to the political moment. In China the Kuomintang wrote the term into law first: the Wuhan Nationalist government passed regulations on counter-revolutionary crimes in February 1927, and Chiang Kai-shek branded warlords, communists and Shanghai merchants counter-revolutionaries. The People's Republic promulgated its regulations on punishing counter-revolutionaries in 1951; during the Cultural Revolution many intellectuals and officials were denounced as counter-revolutionaries. The criminal code of 1979 kept the crime, but the revision of 1997 replaced it with subversion of state power, and the constitutional amendment of 1999 did the same. The German encyclopedia notes that socialist states often called their internal opposition counter-revolutionary regardless of its actual positions.

Distinctions

The White movement is one particular counter-revolutionary movement and army of the Russian Civil War; the White Terror is the violence of counter-revolutionary forces, a term coined in France in 1795 after the royalists' white flag. The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950–1953) was, conversely, a campaign of a revolutionary state against alleged counter-revolutionaries. Counter-revolution overlaps with conservatism and monarchism without being identical to them. The German Nazis did not call themselves counter-revolutionaries and described their seizure of power in 1933 as a "national revolution", yet made common cause with the counter-revolutionaries against the communists.