The Russian Revolution of 1917, like the French Revolution, had multiple distinct periods, and its end result didn't look much like the vision its founders had intended. While the initial uprising, the February Revolution, overthrew the czar and set up a provisional government made up of members of the czarist Duma, the October Revolution later that year -- led by Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks -- demolished this stopgap structure and began a wholesale dismantlement of Russian politics and society, creating a permanent revolution that would last in one form or another for more than 70 years.
In 1945, Ho Chi Minh led an armed uprising against French colonial rule in Vietnam that became known as the August Revolution. Reportedly a fan of George Washington, Ho Chi Minh managed to push the French south of the 16th parallel and declare the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north -- and began the First Indochina War in the process.
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The 1949 Communist Revolution in China came as the final phase of the Chinese Civil War, fought between Mao Zedong's troops and the ruling, U.S.-backed Kuomintang, or Nationalist party. The conflict phase of the revolution ended with Nationalist leader Chang Kai-shek fleeing to Taiwan; but Mao placed his country into a permanent state of "cultural revolution," similar to Stalin's collectivization projects and purges, that was immensely shocking and traumatic to the country's citizens, not to mention its economy.
Egypt has had revolutions before, notably in 1952, when the charismatic army officers Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the king, abolished the monarchy, and declared a republic under the banner of a secular, socialist pan-Arabism. This, of course, became known as Nasserism, after the figurehead Naguib was thrown out of power. Nasser's movement inspired several nationalist coups throughout the Muslim world, including Muammar al-Qaddafi's in Libya and Ahmed Ben Bella's in Algeria.
In 1959, Fidel Castro's communist guerrilla army defeated Cuba's corrupt U.S.-backed strongman ruler, Fulgencio Batista, after years of increasingly organized and targeted attacks. Castro's revolution is another example of a permanent one: His Committees for the Defense of the Revolution system began as a Soviet-style network of informers, designed to root out counterrevolutionary behavior.
The wave of nationalist, anti-U.S. revolutions continued in Iran with the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which overthrew Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was seen both as a secularist Western toady and a corrupt autocrat. With powerful opposition leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returning from exile, a theocracy swept into power -- launching a permanent religious revolution in which devout purity has become twinned with Iranian nationalism. Both are harshly enforced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Given the anti-Western flavor of the revolutions of the 1970s and early 1980s, it may be no surprise that the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe -- as Soviet bloc countries pulled away from Moscow's rule -- deliberately avoided the term. Bell writes, "Polish Solidarity leader Jacek Kuron went so far as to write in the summer of 1989, apropos of the French Revolution's bicentennial, that Poland did not want a revolution because revolutions spill too much blood. Germans refer to the events of 1989 as the 'Turning,' not the 'Revolution.' It was, above all, in Czechoslovakia that the word 'revolution' came to describe what happened in 1989, but paired with the word 'velvet' to underscore the differences from the great revolutions of the past."
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Recently, permanent revolutions have seemed to be a thing of the past. Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004, inspired by allegations of election fraud, concluded once a revote could be called and declared fair by international observers. And, in fact, almost as soon as the revolution began, it was reversed: Viktor Yanukovych, the incumbent in 2004 who was said to have benefited from vote-rigging, won an internationally certified election in 2010 and is now the president.
The recent uprising in Tunisia, which has been called the Jasmine Revolution, succeeded in unseating President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. But though it began for familiar reasons -- a frustrated middle class demanding basic economic liberties as well as democracy and other freedoms in the face of oppression by a Western-backed, corrupt dictator -- it's still too early to assess historically. Will the new government in Tunis continue to act as revolutionaries, or have the people's goals been met? It did, however, set off a ripple effect, as opposition groups across the Middle East began to ask: Why not us?
It's also too soon to know whether Egypt's young revolutionaries will be satisfied with a middle-ground solution -- a temporary provisional government with elections in a few months -- or whether, like the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks, they will demand a larger-scale permanent revolution. We may not know the answer for months, even years. What's clear is that the chaos of revolution can frustrate the best-laid plans -- and that even those initially responsible can't always control the wild tumbling of events.
