Revolt, Rebellion and Revolution: some precedents.
Non-violence is not enough.
Gaither Stewart
(Rome): As a contribution to the ongoing discussion in America about the what-to-do of the post-OWS period, I have listed here some of the major tactics employed in Russia dating from 1860 which eventually developed into a successful strategy in the Russian Revolution of 1917 that shook the world.
In the biography, Dostoïevsky, by Henri Troyat of the Academie Française, I ran into the following description of the pre-revolutionary events in the era of the liberal and modernizing Tsar, Alexander II. In the years 1861-62, the Tsar and his civil servants, who had just eliminated serfdom, quickly came to understand that that long-awaited act had come too late to satisfy the truly liberal forces in Russia.
The events depicted by Troyat in which Dostoevsky himself was an unwilling actor led inexorably to the first Russian Revolution of 1904-1905 and subsequently to the Great Russian Revolution of 1917 ultimately led by Lenin. Continue reading »