Revolution export

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As export of revolution is both accidental and the calculated or manipulated spread of revolution referred to a different country. In addition, a distinction is made between the export of revolution through direct intervention and through indirect support of subversive forces (as in the so-called proxy war ).

This can be about various forms of revolutionary social change. For example, the spread of the Reformation in the sixteenth century represented a religious revolution rather than a social revolution, but undoubtedly accompanied by significant political changes and a revolution of the peasants ( peasant war ). Messianic movements can also be viewed as a religious export of revolution. The industrial revolution, on the other hand, was exported mainly by rail in the 19th century .

Bourgeois-democratic revolution

In the real sense, however, the spread of the ideas of the French Revolution ("freedom, equality, fraternity") led to a large-scale export of revolution for the first time since 1789 and at the same time to one of the few successful revolutionary exports in history.

First of all, the republic of the United Belgian States , established in parallel by revolutionaries in the Austrian Netherlands in 1790, was suppressed again.

France

The revolutionary people's armies of the Republic of France , advancing into neighboring countries from 1792 onwards led to the establishment of the Raurak Republic , the Republic of Mainz , in 1794 to an uprising in Poland and from 1795 to the establishment or attempted establishment of numerous other satellite and subsidiary republics (républiques sœurs) , e.g. B .:

Poland and others

Even after the July Revolution of 1830 , revolutionary impulses again emanated from France . By 1832, the Belgian Revolution , the November Uprising in Poland and uprisings in Italy followed, but only indirectly and not in the true sense of an export of revolution. Triggered again by the French February Revolution in 1848 , Polish messianism also contributed significantly to the spread of the constitutional struggles and national liberation revolutions of 1848/49 throughout Europe.

The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, in turn, took part in numerous revolutions and freedom struggles in South America.

The (national) revolutions were lost, but the idea of communism and communist revolution was born ( Communist Manifesto 1848). The communist-influenced Russian Revolution in 1905, in turn, triggered the bourgeois-democratic constitutional revolution in Iran in 1905/11, and this then had a major impact on the revolution of the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire in 1908/09 .

United States

From the US point of view, the outbreak of the French Revolution was itself the result of an export of revolution after French troops returning from the United States from the War of Independence brought with them ideas of freedom.

Socialist revolution

During the First World War in 1917, not only the victory of an October Revolution in Soviet Russia , but also the victory of the world revolution in the other warring states seemed possible, since the war and internal nationality conflicts had created a revolutionary situation in all states. Despite mutinies in France, the revolutionary spark in 1918 initially only spread to Germany. German November Revolution were fraternization preceded by German and Russian troops and a clumsy saw policy of the Empire against the Soviets, but not a revolution export the then weak Soviets. The struggle to establish a soviet republic in Germany was therefore lost in 1919.

Soviet Union

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In Soviet Russia's struggle for survival, however, the Russian communists provoked further uprisings, initially with the aim of weakening the anti-Soviet front. As part of her counter-offensive from 1920 on all fronts, she also tried to surround Russia with a protective belt of communist satellite republics that would later serve as a buffer zone (e.g. the Iranian Soviet Republic ). The latter were created by the direct invasion of Soviet troops, but the communist revolution in Hungary in 1919 is also the result of a revolution export and there, in turn, led to a vain revolution export to Slovakia . All these attempts to import the revolution directly or indirectly failed by 1921 at the latest. The Russian defeat in Warsaw in the Polish-Soviet War and the failure of the establishment of a Polish Soviet Republic marked this failure clearly. In Outer Mongolia alone , the Soviet invasion of 1921/24 actually led to the establishment of a permanent communist satellite state ( Mongolian People's Republic until 1990), but Russian influence had already dominated there before the October Revolution.

Still, attempts to export the Russian Revolution continued. The Comintern and the GRU played a major role in this . In November 1923 a coup attempt was made in Germany , but the first attempts failed. On December 1, 1924, a coup organized by the GRU in Estonia collapsed within a day. In China , the Soviet model led to the establishment of the Chinese Soviet Republic since the 1920s, but from 1927 it was almost completely destroyed by the strengthened Kuomintang . The last remaining Soviet export attempt had thus failed.

The de facto independent Chinese communists under Mao were only able to consolidate their power after the Second World War and soon withdrew from Soviet influence.

The export of revolution feared in Europe and the United States did not materialize, but it was still an argument in anti-Soviet threat scenarios. After the Chinese debacle, the KPR (b) finally began to turn away from the idea of ​​world revolution under the leadership of Stalin. Josef Stalin pursued a policy of ruthless construction of socialism in the Soviet Union itself. Only after its victory in World War II was the Soviet Union able to found numerous new satellite republics on its borders, which were primarily intended to protect the Soviet Union against the west.

Like the daughter republics once on the French bayonets, " People's Republics " now arose on Soviet bayonets. In 1946 the Soviet Union withdrew from Sinkiang and Manchuria as well as Iranian Āserbāidschān and Mahabad (Iranian Kurdistan), but in 1948 communist regimes were successfully installed in Czechoslovakia , Poland , Hungary , Bulgaria , Romania and North Korea . In 1949, a “People's Republic” was established on the territory of the Soviet occupation zone in Germany and China . The Soviet revolutionary export found a new connection, since 1927 it mainly served geostrategic goals.

The last chapter of successful Soviet revolutionary exports is Vietnam's struggle for independence. It was only after two long wars ( Indochina War , Vietnam War ) in 1976 that a united people's republic was created, which was under strong Soviet influence.

China and Cuba

Around 1960, at the instigation of Fidel Castro , Cuba became a socialist state after the United States had refused economic cooperation with the Cuban revolutionaries for hegemonic reasons and prepared for the overthrow of Castro. The People's Republic of China broke away from Soviet domination. In the next few years and decades, these two states, in contrast to the Soviet Union, again carried out a massive revolutionary export that was uncontrolled by Moscow, but which failed almost everywhere. Ernesto Che Guevara , who had already worked unsuccessfully in an overthrow in the Congo , was killed in 1967 while trying to export Cuban socialism to Bolivia . Cuban revolutionaries also worked in vain in Guevara's homeland Argentina, until 1989 Cuban troops were in Angola, Ethiopia and many other Latin American, African and Asian countries. The supposed export of revolution to Grenada was stopped in 1983 by a US invasion of this island.

China, which had not given up the world revolution at first, also supported massive Maoist and communist rebels in Asia and Africa in the 1960s . B. in Peru ( Shining Path and Ayacucho People's Republic ), the Philippines, Nepal (until today), India, Malaysia, Iraq (1959), Burma, Laos and Cambodia. In the case of the latter two states, Vietnam's 1975 export of revolution was successful. In contrast to Vietnam, these two states were under strong Chinese influence. An extreme example of the effects of Chinese revolutionary exports is the establishment of the Stone Age regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which was supported by China from 1975 to 1978.

Islamic Revolution

Also in the 1960s, regimes in Arab states supported by the Soviet Union, China and Cuba began to export their pan-Arab and Islamic-socialist ideas, above all Egypt's president and revolutionary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser . As early as 1954, the national revolution in Egypt had contributed to the anti-colonial uprising in Algeria , which led France (together with Great Britain and Israel) to attack Egypt in 1956 without success .

Arab socialism

In 1962, Egyptian troops intervened in northern Yemen to defend the republic established by the Nasserists against Yemeni and Saudi monarchists; In 1990 Iraq established the short-lived " Republic of Kuwait " on Iraqi bayonets . Above all, however, Libya's revolutionary leader Muammar al-Gaddafi saw himself as his successor since Nasser's death (1970) and staged countless attempts at republican overthrow and revolutionary uprisings in Morocco (" Republic of Morocco "), Sudan , Aceh (Indonesia), Mindanao (Philippines) and in Trinidad and Tobago. In neighboring Chad , the Libyans intervened several times in vain (→ Libyan-Chadian border war ), but ultimately contributed to the overthrow of several regimes.

Iran

The most international attention was given to the attempts to export the revolution that began in 1979 as a result of the Islamic Revolution in the Islamic Republic of Iran . On November 15, 1979 Ambassador Schlagintweit reported from Jeddah:

“During the peak of the pilgrimage in late October / early November, there were clashes between Iranian pilgrims and Saudi security forces at the holy sites. As I hear from reliable sources, Iranian groups of pilgrims have made propaganda with banners and popular speeches in various places in Mecca and Medina for an 'Islamic Republic' that, following the Iranian model and starting from Mecca, is to cover the peninsula and ultimately the entire Islamic world. "

Shiite aligned, which had Mullah regime the expansion of the Islamic Revolution initially intended almost simultaneously with the takeover in Tehran in 1979 in the majority also Shiite Iraq, North Yemen and from 1982 to Lebanon. Attempts to overthrow failed, however, and from 1980 Iraq attacked Iran in return ( First Gulf War ). The de facto defeat of Iran in 1988 revealed the failure of exports of the Islamic Revolution, so Saddam Hussein has the “merit” of keeping it away from Iraq and the rest of the Islamic world. Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini also called on the Soviet state and party leader Gorbachev to accept Islam and transform the USSR into a “Union of Soviet Islamic Republics”, but the export of revolution to the Islamic republics of Central Asia , feared by the Soviet Union , failed to materialize.

With Khomeini's death in 1989, the export of the revolution seemed to have been put aside, but as early as 1991 (after the defeat of Iraq in the Second Gulf War ), Iran tried again, with massive support from Iraqi insurgents from its own troops, to lead the Islamic revolution to victory in Iraq. In 1992, the Algerian regime accused Iran of a similar policy directed against Algiers. Since the Third Gulf War , the United States has also been accusing Iran of trying again to export revolution to Iraq. Despite Tehran's turning away from the export of revolution, the number of supporters and advocates of the Islamic Revolution has increased significantly, especially in Egypt, but a sufficient revolutionary situation has not yet arisen there.

Special case in Afghanistan

As a neighboring country to both Iran and the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan met the fate in 1979 of being the victim of two (failed) revolutionary exports. The communists in Moscow wanted to divert attention from domestic political problems (stagnation under Brezhnev ) with a foreign policy success and in April 1978 with the Saur Revolution installed a communist puppet government by the Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan in Kabul , which soon fell apart. In contrast, the Muslim population rose up in an armed uprising following the example of Iran and with direct Iranian support (armed volunteers, aid payments). For its part, a year and a half after the coup, the Soviet Union was forced to intervene directly in favor of the government in Kabul .

After years of civil war between communists and mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Soviet army withdrew in 1988, the mujahideen defeated the communists in 1992 and were themselves defeated by the Sunni Taliban in 1996 . Both the resumed export of communist revolution by the Soviet Union and the Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran had failed.

literature

  • Lev Besymensky: Stalin and Hitler - the poker game of the dictators. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-7466-8109-X .
  • Luis Baez: Secrets of Generals . Havana 1997.
  • Curzio Malaparte : Technique of the Coup . Berlin 1988 (1920, Polish interlude).
  • Witold S. Sworakowski: World Communism - A Handbook 1918-1965 . Hoover Institution Press, 1974, ISBN 0-81791-081-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Besymenski: Chapter 2: Why on November 9, 1923 no Soviet Germany came into being
  2. ↑ Sworakowski: p. 124
  3. ↑ Michael Ploetz, Tim Szatkowski: Files on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany 1979 Vol. II: July 1 to December 31, 1979. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 1706.