You Say You Want a Revolution

Should historians look at violent revolutions with rose-colored glasses while vindicating the terror that carried them forth?

By Jack JacobsFebruary 19, 2026

• History

• Politics

You may believe that what is being celebrated will turn out a delusion, but history is full of gloomy afterthoughts.
—William Empson, “Red On Red,” London Review of Books (1999)

IN BEIJING, ON October 1, 1949, the English literary critic William Empson watched the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China with a mixture of admiration and worry. Could the new regime, with its military might and revived imperial grandeur, sustain the surge of revolutionary hope that had carried Mao Zedong and his Long Marchers through China’s swampy and moonlike landscapes to Yan’an—from where their peasant force had resisted both Japanese and Nationalist foes? This was, as Empson wrote in 1949—in an account discovered among his wife Hetta Empson’s papers and published by the London Review of Books 50 years later—“a victory of revolt against tyrants.” As part of a mass parade around Tiananmen Square, Empson found himself, against his own expectations, “extremely moved almost at once.” It was the same feeling that sent the young William Wordsworth over to revolutionary France in 1791, when “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

The hope of a new dawn—this one Eastern—had broken into Empson too.

I’ve been dwelling on the distance between such romantic beginnings and their “gloomy afterthoughts” since reading two recent books on revolution. Simon Hall’s Three Revolutions (2025) reprises the founding journeys of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions. The author, a history professor at the University of Leeds, gives us a cinematic sense of what it might have felt like to be alive during these revolutions in their ascendancy. He recovers the role that three American journalists—John Reed, Edgar Snow, and Herbert Matthews—played in converting these upheavals into world-historical events. Hall asks us to sympathize with the hopes his protagonists had, hopes that we know, with hindsight, did not pan out, instead producing their opposites in political violence.

In Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History (2025), these hopes are blunted by a sober realism about how revolutions end: a realism that doubles as a regret over the failure of the last century’s socialist experiments. Sassoon is a comparative historian who taught for decades at London’s Queen Mary University, and a former student of Eric Hobsbawm, one of the preeminent Marxist historians of the 20th century. Here he offers a tightly organized compendium of revolutions, ranging from the English Civil Wars of the 17th century to the Chinese revolution that he sees as still unfolding. Revolutions, he argues, are not simply events but “processes,” so he widens his frame beyond the dates of infamous uprisings to include the wars and counterrevolutions that muddy our memories of those early dawns.

Taken together, these books remember how revolutions felt and how they unfurled. But they also leave me with a sense of unease: for after everything we know about revolutionary terror, why do these books still stir with the romance of revolution?

Three Revolutions begins with Vladimir Lenin bounding back from self-imposed exile in Switzerland through Germany aboard a “sealed train” to Petrograd’s Finland Station in Russia. Lenin arrived late to the revolution on April 3, 1917, after the women and workers of the February strikes had already risen on International Women’s Day to depose the tsar. Hall lingers on the journey’s evocative details: German soldiers offering beer to Russian émigrés in hiding, arguments about smoking in the train toilets, Lenin’s refusal to part with his “ill-fitting woollen coat.” History, clearly, can be carried out on cramped trains by men in bad boots.

These details clash with the desperate circumstances of China’s Long Marchers in 1934–35: the romantic Mao, tempered by the intellectually austere Zhou Enlai, leading an ever-dwindling crowd of peasant communists through 6,000 miles of harsh terrain from Southeast China to the northwest, pursued all along by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army. (This is the journey that so moved William Empson and remains central to the Communist Party’s mythology.) We also follow Fidel Castro and Che Guevara from exile in Mexico to Cuba aboard the Granma, a “creaking, leaking leisure yacht,” before battling men and infections alike up through the island’s Sierra Maestra.

The book’s originality lies in Hall’s decision to tell these stories through the lives of Reed, Snow, and Matthews. Reed, a committed radical, worked for a time in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in the new revolutionary Russia, throwing himself into writing Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), the book that brought the Bolsheviks to the West. In 1936, Snow, “a former advertising executive from Kansas City,” became the first Western journalist to enter China’s “Red territory” after the Long March. Snow turned his encounters with Mao—whom he described as a “gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure”—into Red Star over China (1937), the book that gave the embattled Communist Party an early head start, with a positive reception within and outside China. Matthews, an older New York Times correspondent, was smuggled into the Sierra Maestra and, from there, helped convince the world—plus, to his horror, the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista himself—that Castro was alive and leading a force larger than the one he really commanded.

Whether these journalists served as objective witnesses is a question that inevitably hangs over Hall’s book. He represents them as reporters ostracized within their own country—early victims of the anticommunist counterrevolution in the United States—and works hard to vindicate them as men who, while sympathetic to the socialist revolutions they witnessed, saw themselves as independent journalists with a job to do.

Can someone sympathize with a political movement and still be its clear-eyed critic? George Orwell asked that question in his 1948 essay “Writers and Leviathan,” where he argued that “when a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not as a writer”—his writing remaining ever “a thing apart.” Orwell went as far as to say that writers should allow their political activities and writings to contradict: a sign of integrity rather than deceit. None of Hall’s three journalists met that standard. Each was torn between truth-seeking and being enlisted as a “secret weapon” for propaganda purposes. Reed paid the highest price, dying of typhus at 32, estranged from both his American friends and Russian comrades, marginalized within the Comintern for upholding the role that American trade unions (mere reformism to Bolsheviks) might play in bringing about world revolution. Snow spent his life dodging the brand “communist” at home, despite maintaining a charitable vision of the Chinese Communist Party leadership. (He admitted in a 1937 letter to the American ambassador in Nanjing that he had been “subjected to certain doses of propaganda,” an admission that seems to be honest, for Mao’s instructions to his deputies on receiving Snow were hardly subtle: “Security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet.”) Matthews was the most disturbed by the charge that his judgment had been compromised: “My reputation for never writing anything that is not true—or to the best of my knowledge true—is sacred to me.”

I am left with the sense that these journalists, despite their best intentions, were out of their depth with these revolutionary geniuses. Hall, however, asks us to resist the temptation to “sneer,” reminding us that the three journalists were operating at a rosy point in a revolutionary time “characterised by genuine optimism and a palpable sense of possibility that had not yet been tainted, or tested, by the messy realities of wielding—and holding on to—state power.”

Hall’s attempt at vindication risks categorizing the violence that followed as a mere upset—an unfortunate deviation from the plan—rather than, as Mao put it in his own brute lucidity, an “act of violence” built into the structure of revolution itself. In craving after a better world, these journalists made themselves vulnerable to justifying violence as part of humanity’s bargain with history. Hall’s book succeeds as a memorial to those who survived hellish times and understandably wished the world to be remade. But he reveals, perhaps more than intended, just how easily that wish can slide into an accommodation of political violence.

War and terror are given fuller treatment in Revolutions: A New History. Sassoon has spent decades writing sprawling surveys of large-scale transformations, such as One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the 20th Century (1996) and The Anxious Triumph: A Global History of Capitalism, 1860–1914 (2019). Here his argument is that revolutions are “processes,” only intelligible with time, when causes and consequences can be better linked across an extended chronology. In his telling, revolutions are necessary and sometimes even noble but inevitably riddled with contradictions.

The Russian Revolution, for example, was not merely confined to what happened in Petrograd in February or October 1917, Sassoon argues. Rather, it comprises a longer sequence: the 1905 revolution that left the tsar in power and the betrayal of its constitutional possibilities; the Great War; the Bolshevik-Menshevik split; Leon Trotsky’s Civil War against the Whites; Joseph Stalin’s purges and liquidation of the kulaks; mass industrialization and collectivization; and, finally, the collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev.

In widening out what counts as “the revolution” in each of these case studies, Sassoon punctures the purity of Hall’s origin myths by showing how revolutionary achievements were usually bound up with nationalism, imperialism, and slavery. Suddenly, the English revolutions of the 17th century no longer look like the simple execution of a king and the elevation of Parliament; they are entangled with empire and the slave trade that helped deform the civil liberties celebrated by the “Glorious Revolution.” Sassoon addresses the French Revolution as a bourgeois one that advanced the interests of capitalists at the expense of the feudal aristocracy (and, sadly, the proletariat). He sets American independence against American slavery and maintains that the American Revolution did not close until the end of the Civil War with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment. He holds that Stalin’s Soviet Union was driven less by Marxist ideology than by a muscular socialist nationalism—by a war-making power that took the Red Army to Berlin and helped win the Second World War for the Allies, despite the efforts of Anglo-American historians to center Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Stalin’s stead.

Sassoon handles China carefully, paying attention to the key twists and turns that led up to 1949. He argues that, after that point, challenges to Communist Party rule were absorbed through the statecraft of leaders like long-serving premier Zhou Enlai, whose caution helped the revolution weather Mao’s storms, including the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In turn, Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, bore the revolution’s contradictions in his own purpose: adapting its Marxist ideals to open market forms, while authorizing the violent suppression of the student protesters of Tiananmen Square in 1989—a betrayal that would have chilled Empson, who had stood there smiling only 40 years earlier. Sassoon praises the Chinese leadership’s reluctance to make war, at least since China’s seizure of Tibet across the 1950s, border clash with India in 1962, and invasion of Vietnam in 1979 to punish Hanoi and assist Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. This, he argues, has allowed the Chinese revolutionaries to avoid the fate that befell their French and Russian counterparts who expanded their revolutions beyond national borders. Xi Jinping’s imperial ambitions, according to Sassoon, do not extend beyond China’s current borders. Of course, the very placement of regions like the Uyghur and Tibetan homelands under PRC control was itself an act of extending the revolution to peoples who neither were initially party to nor asked for it. And the suggestion that China, unlike France and Russia, only wanted revolution within its borders overlooks its support for Maoist insurgencies across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Sassoon addresses the harsh crackdowns on Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, but reminds us that Taiwan—despite fanfare and warning—has not been invaded. Here his calm is not entirely convincing. We cannot forget that the control of one’s own people and neighbors through coercion and gradual seizure can work just as well as—if not better than—outright invasion in consolidating and extending state power.

There are potential revolutions Sassoon leaves out. While he treats Italian and German unifications in the 19th century as revolutionary, he deliberately excludes Spanish and Italian fascism, as well as Nazi Germany, from his analysis—insinuating that revolution is a concept of progressive change that belongs only to the Left, and never to the Right. In Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism (2008), Sassoon suggested that fascism has its own tradition, separate from revolution. Despite Mussolini’s original ambitions to break with the Italian past altogether, he proceeded through the existing apparatus of the monarchical state in what was a “quite legal” takeover. (The dictator himself put it aphoristically in his 1944 autobiography: “There was a monarchy before and there was a monarchy afterwards.”) For Sassoon, institutional continuity, even when bastardized, precludes that transformation from qualifying as a revolution. In Revolutions, Sassoon implies something similar about Hitler, who, once elected chancellor, grew his Nazi cancer out of the body of the German state.

Sassoon’s implication is that a violent revolution does not count as a revolution if it claims to conserve past institutions, even if only in name. Yet if revolution is the violent upturning of an existing order through total state and social transformation—as it is in Mao’s maximalist definition—why should right-wing convulsions, even when they begin by co-opting existing institutions, not count as revolutions too? The difficulty, I think, reflects a broader problem with Sassoon’s argument. He spends much of his introduction, somewhat frustratingly, showing just how vague and amorphous “revolution” is as a term but never arrives at a clear definition of it beyond his periodizing scheme, which distinguishes only one dimension of what does or does not count as revolution. The problem is not that he opts for a narrow definition of revolution but that he leaves his implicit criteria unstated, drawing distinctions that ultimately preserve revolution as a what-could-have-been category for the political Left.

In a New Left Review obituary of his teacher Eric Hobsbawm, Sassoon eulogized that “notable strand” of European Marxism—represented by Hobsbawm—in which, to borrow Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, a “pessimism of the intelligence [is] barely tempered by an optimism of the will.”

Sassoon’s own pessimistic intelligence accepts that violence soon dims the naive hopes of a revolution’s dawn. Yet he does not show enough wariness toward violence itself. He habitually relies on comparative body counts to acquit revolution and condemn war. He shows, for example, how the numbers killed in the Jacobin and Red terrors dwindle when set beside the death tolls from the civil and imperial wars that framed them—in France, these are the Napoleonic campaigns; in Russia, the Civil War and Second World War. We are told, based upon Napoleon’s own figures, that the repression of a revolt in Cairo over two days in 1798 led to a “far greater” loss of Egyptian life than died in Paris “throughout the Terror.” Sassoon also presents Stalin’s purges as the work of a plodding dictator responding sporadically to perceived threats to his position while lacking a coherent plan of elimination—his terror marked by “constant indecision, false starts and short-term improvisation.” These are unsettling historical contrasts, of which I am glad to have been made aware, yet Sassoon’s effect is to relativize terror so extensively that its moral ugliness blurs into the background noise of humanity’s most violent century.

In this respect, Hobsbawm’s ghost haunts Sassoon’s argument. When pressed by Michael Ignatieff in a 1994 television interview on The Late Show, Hobsbawm refused to concede that terror might not have been necessary, even after Stalin’s purges. This went along with his unwillingness, even in the wake of the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to make the kind of clean break with the Soviet approach to rule made by other British socialists of the time, such as E. P. Thompson, another towering figure in radical history circles who left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956. “In a period in which […] mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal,” Hobsbawm reflected, “the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing.” Yes, the sacrifices were “excessive by almost any standard and excessively great,” but he would not rule out their being justified by success.

Sassoon presents a more wary version of that wager. We should ‘vindicate terror,’ he seems to say, only to the extent that we are prepared to vindicate war, for we spend far more time criticizing revolutions than condemning wars, even though wars kill more people. Why, Sassoon asks, do we relegate revolution to history’s backyard of shame while treating war as a tragic, and yet somehow permissible, evil?

It’s a serious challenge. But the answer surely cannot be to rehabilitate revolutionary violence by way of comparison. We ought to distrust our own longing for world-remaking dawns, just as we ought to oppose the violence that so quickly lurches to speak in that longing’s name—or else risk adding to history’s growing list of “gloomy afterthoughts.”