The Dynamics of Revolution

By LANCE MORROW

Edmund Burke cast an indignant eye across the English Channel at the French Revolution and wrote sarcastically: "Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation, they are forming plans for the good order of future society." Burke was the prototype of skepticism about certain revolutions. Since the French Terror, history has paraded past too many Utopian dramas of transformation that ended by being as totalitarian, as murderous, as the regimes that they swept away--triumphs of hopeful zealotry over experience. Stalin turned the Russian Revolution into a self-devouring machine that crushed its own in the basement of the Lubyanka. Especially because of the Soviet redemptive passion that ended in the Gulag, revolution in this century has lost much of its violent romance. Outsiders have learned not to judge revolutions quickly. They wait for the other boot to drop.

The Iranian uprising has prompted among the industrial powers a complicated wariness, along with the anxiety and attentive respect due to the world's second largest exporter of crude oil. Without the wealth buried in Iran, much of the fascination would vanish. Since most of the world was unprepared for the uprising and ignorant of Iran's internal stresses, it is difficult for outsiders to know what to make of the revolution. Iranians themselves are no longer certain. Nearly everyone who has carefully watched the event agrees on two propositions:

> It has been a widely popular uprising, virtually spontaneous, with support in almost every area of Iranian life.

> The revolution is far from over. Its ultimate meaning has not yet developed.

All revolutions are unique, for roughly the same reasons that, as Tolstoy said, all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. In The Anatomy of Revolution, the late Crane Brinton, the Harvard historian, attempted to formulate the stages of revolution. First, in Brinton's model, comes the euphoric phase of good feeling, when expectations and perfectionist rhetoric run high. Soon the practical tasks of governing split moderates and radicals. In the second stage, extremists rise and consolidate their power. Next comes the Terror, when the regime desperately tries to accomplish revolutionary goals no matter what the cost in blood. This horror often engenders a Thermidorean reaction (named for Thermidor, the month of the French revolutionary calendar in which the reaction occurred), when moderates regain control and the nation begins a period of convalescence. But ahead lies the danger of the fifth stage: the coming of a dictator still fired by some revolutionary zeal, and beyond that, the possibility, of a Bourbonism restored.

Brinton was following the classic pattern of European revolutions, which can translate only partially into other times and other cultures. But some events of the Iranian revolution already correspond disconcertingly to the Brinton pattern: the first euphoria of victory dissolving into factionalism, and now some possibility that leftists among the revolutionaries, better organized than the masses who drove out the Shah, may seize power. As in France, the tenure of forbearance may be short; already Qasr prison, emptied of its prisoners of the Pahlavi regime, is filling again, this time populated by the enemies of the revolution.

But Historian Walter Laqueur warns against rigid analogies. If anything, says Laqueur, "you should compare Iran not with France, not with Russia, but with the revolutionary movements in Spain beginning in 1808 against Napoleon, where the revolt was carried out by the crowd, by the mass of people." Princeton University Political Scientist Robert C. Tucker suggests some similarity to the Russian uprising of 1905. Thousands of unarmed striking workers marched on the Czar's Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. Government soldiers fired on the crowd, killing and wounding hundreds. More strikes broke out. Peasant and military groups revolted. Says Tucker: "That may have been the purest case before Iran in the 20th century of a great, spontaneous, popular, antimonarchical movement spreading across the country. In that case, it failed; the monarch caught itself, staggered and survived--temporarily."

For every point of historical comparison, Iran offers at least one anomalous or unprecedented detail. The role of mass electronics was rather weird, causing the McLuhanesque web to thrum with a new note. Ubiquitous transistor radios and cassette tape recorders with messages relayed over telephone lines to some 9,000 mosques all over Iran allowed a 78-year-old holy man camped in a Paris suburb to direct a revolution 2,600 miles away like a company commander assaulting a hill.

The most interesting and socially entangled factor in the Iranian revolution has been the role of the Muslim religion. The Ayatullah Khomeini's revolution was aimed to a large extent at restoration, a re-establishment of the Islamic spirituality and law that had been, so the faithful believed, desecrated by the Shah's modernizations and the widespread, profound corruption of everyday life. Iranians were caught in an intolerable bind: their daily routines were elaborately oppressed by a stupid, corrupt bureaucracy, and yet everything in Iran (costs, salaries, the pace of change) was moving at ungodly speeds. Eastern European official stolidity was impossibly combined with Western velocity.

Islam proved to be a liberating vehicle, although an ironic one, to Western eyes. There are several layers of paradox in the relationship between religion and revolution. The word revolution first entered the English language as a political term around 1600, and implied restoration of the old order. Later revolutions, like the French and the Russian, were explicitly antireligious, anticlerical. And yet revolution is almost always cryptoreligious in its vocabularies, disciplines and even operating psychologies. Revolution needs martyrs, saints, zealots, and almost always involves a rigorously ascetic ideal. Revolution, like religion, means faith and commitment, righteousness, intolerance, overriding goals, doctrine and ideology. In the revolutionary paradigm, the old order is corrupt, out of grace, godless, and therefore to be swept aside. Revolutionaries, of course, tend to seek their heaven on earth, here and now. But the contradiction between revolutionary dreams and religious yearning achieved at least a temporary resolution in Khomeini's Iran. Islam, after all, makes no distinction between the church and state, the secular and the sacred.

In a sense, the Iranian revolution was an exercise in internal anticolonialism: a convulsive rejection of foreign influence that had, so a wide variety of Iranians thought, robbed their culture of its Islamic values and its natural wealth. In a psychological way, the revolutionaries were obeying the logic of many anticolonial fighters who, in the formulation of the revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon, held that the "native" must be transformed into a free man through struggle against his foreign oppressors. In countries like Algeria and Kenya, the struggle was protracted and violent. In Iran, after a point, the army foreshortened the process by choosing not to resist the revolution.

Some outsiders fear the Moslem revivalism in the revolution. But Robert Wesson, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, sees it "not so much as medievalism as a rejection of foreign intrusion. They are not reversing modernization, but giving it a sounder basis in Iranian institutions." Wesson detects a parallel between Islam in Iran and Roman Catholicism in Poland. "There, in a country in a subrevolutionary situation, the Catholic Church is enormously popular because it is the counter to the government -- it is the refuge for freedom. It has become the umbrella for all man ner of movements."

In the months of the demonstrations that brought down the Shah and then Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, Is lam performed that unifying function. Several different revolutions coalesced then; now they are subdividing again. The century's earlier revolutionary his tory may explain the components. The revolutions of the '20s and '30s were ei ther rebellions of redemptionists (some times fascists, as in Germany and Italy) intent on rescuing old native virtues from alien influences, or of Communists, or of nationalists (in Ireland, for example). Elements of all three have been at work in Iran. But now the contradictions of the types must be sorted out. Says Laqueur: "The Iranian revolution does not exist. There exist various groups, each of which says, 'We caused the revolution, we are the legitimate heirs.' " The resolution may take months or years. After a period of chaos, it becomes easy to imagine, a variation of the Brinton model might start working: a strongman with an armed force imposing law where there is none. When Bakhtiar was named Prime Minister, the mind immediately said, "Ah, Kerensky." Now there seems a possibility of multiple Kerenskys: Bazargan, an Khomeini himself. In the Iranian turbulence, an ominous recollection about Russia arises: its two revolutions of 1917 were basically bloodless. Then, from 1918 to 1921, the country was torn apart by civil war.

-- Lance Morrow

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