So you Say you Want a Revolution?

In Brief

Yugoslavia had a bloodless revolution last week that ended a thirteen-year dictatorship. Milosevic, the now ex-president, managed to hold onto power through years of sanctions from the US and the EU, plus incessant NATO bombing that demolished his country. After all those troubles, the man finally fell. What changed? What was different? If past rebellions are any indication, it was probably a low-level Joe or Jane that everyone liked who tipped that first domino. History House asks the question: Who starts revolutions, anyway?

Party On

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The News

10/16/2000 Slobodan Milosevic, longtime Serbian thug cum dictator, stepped down in October of 2000 after losing elections and getting the crap bombed out of his country by a crumbly NATO alliance.

Yugoslavia has a new President, Vojislav Kostunica, who almost didn't get there. The former President, Slobodan Milosevic, orchestrated a fraudulent win by inventing fictitious voters, and got busted. However, the he didn't actually concede defeat until an irked populace torched the parliament building and paralyzed the country.

It started with protests denouncing the election as flawed. Coal miners kicked things off by stopping the flow of coal from a mine in Kolubara to the cities, disrupting urban electrical plants and throwing the country's utilities into disarray. Demonstrations soon sprung up all over, calling not for lost electrical amenities but instead for Milosevic's ouster. Throngs blocked roads; entire towns shut down. The rabble conquered state-run television stations and protest leaders were quite comfortable slinging the word "bloodbath" unless demands were met. It took over a week for president and sort-of-dictator Slobodan Milosevic to step down.

Nice Tie, Slobodan

. Milosevic had been in power thirteen years, and was unpopular for many of them. It's worth noting NATO bombed Yugoslavia in general, and parts of the Kolubara mine in particular, in 1999. Similar outpourings of disgust on the part of his constituency were present in 1996 and 1999. He managed rather easily to hold onto power then. What made this time different? Who starts revolutions, anyway?

A Little Horsy Named Paul Revere

A seminal event in the American Revolution was the defense of the rebel arms stash at Lexington, Massachusetts, initiated by the famous Paul Revere. Interestingly, before Paul Revere ever left Boston for Lexington in order to warn everybody that the British were coming, a loser named William Dawes did the very same thing the very same night. Dawes heard that British officers were scurrying about Boston harbor that afternoon and guessed something was up. However, when he went on his night ride nobody listened. One town Dawes hit, Waltham, Massachusetts, barely responded at all. Things were so muted there that later historians suggested that Waltham was actually a pro-British town. It turns out that Dawes was so thoroughly uncharismatic that nobody listened to him. It is nearly impossible to find records of anyone who remembered him that night.

It was a dark time for the rebellion. Fortunately, Paul Revere was also around. He was liked and respected. Of the seven major groups of revolutionaries in the Boston area, Revere was affiliated with five of them (Most of all the revolutionary types were in a group, and only rarely were individuals in more than one such outfit). When he died, according to a contemporary newspaper, "troops of people" attended his funeral. He was health officer of Boston following an epidemic; he was Suffolk County's coroner. He was appointed the position of regulating the Boston market; he was integral in the formation of the Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance Company, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, and headed the jury of the most sensational murder trial of his time. He was not a statesman or esteemed political theorist. He did not pen reams of pamphlets, like Thomas Paine, nor was he the holder of some high office. However, he was, needless to say, well-connected.

Like E.F. Hutton, when Revere rode north and west from Boston to alert the revolutionaries that British troops intended to arrest revolutionary leaders and steal their arms supply, people listened. Starting around midnight, Revere took two hours to ride the thirteen miles from Boston to Lexington. By 5 AM, the message had made it all the way to Andover, some forty miles away. By being the right guy in the right place at the right time, Revere started an informational wildfire that roused an entire region over a short few hours in a time when the fastest communication was equine-dependent. And, of course, the British were shocked to find themselves confronting a well-organized resistance force when they figured they had a slam-dunk sneak attack lined up.

A Man Of The Cloth ... From Transylvania?

This sort of transmission isn't an exclusively American phenomenon. Yugoslavia's next-door neighbor, Romania, got a recent dose. In 1989, thoroughly mad Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu felt no pangs of remorse whatever when he evicted an upstart Calvinist minister named Laszlo Tokes from the man's house. Tokes had caused Ceausescu considerable embarrassment, and, given the friendly relations between religious leaders and the state in Romania, it was no big deal to get the guy tossed out on his ear: the local bishop told him it was time to move off the church-owned property. Laszlo was a popular guy with a lot of friends, but he wasn't exactly Romania's Thomas Jefferson.

The police in the bucolic Transylvanian burg of Timisoara half-assedly tried to remove Tokes on November 17, 1989, but were met by a rabble of protesters. Like we said, the minister was a popular guy. The cops shrugged, and went home. They occasionally made similar lackluster efforts, only to be rebuffed. In mid-December, some student protesters outside Tokes' house took to chanting, "Down with Ceausescu" and "Down with Communism". This got them dousings from police-directed water cannons. Disgusted, the crowd ran to the town hall and started breaking windows and defacing portraits of Ceausescu. Police promptly shot them and made off with the corpses; crowds chanted, "Give us our dead," and all hell broke loose. By the end of December, Ceausescu and his wife had been overthrown and messily killed by their own people. They showed it on TV.

Ceausescu in happier times

There had been a variety of near-coups leading all the way back into the 1970s, but none of them took off. What made this one different? Was it the mere likeability of Tokes? Certainly, conditions of civil unrest had been present in Romania before (notably in 1985), but nothing happened. Sure, the Soviet Bloc was collapsing all around them in 1989, but just look at Yugoslavia: it hung on for another decade. Even if all the conditions were set for that revolution, perhaps it simply wasn't going to happen until a humble, but central, figure like Tokes showed up. No statesman he, but, like Revere, a catalyst instead.

Sparking That Tinder

So after a week of remarkable events and a freshly-installed President, the Yugoslavian revolution begs the question: who is Yugoslavia's Paul Revere? Perhaps it is Kostunica, who found himself in an unlikely candidacy after the promising (and former Serbian president) candidate Ivan Stambolic mysteriously disappeared on a morning run last August. Cobbling together support from Yugoslavia's notoriously fickle opposition must certainly have been a big job, so maybe we'll see the man on a postage stamp in a decade (or, like Gorbachev, perhaps he'll settle for Pizza Hut ads). Perhaps, as some have suggested, Milosevic's time was up regardless of who arrived. The European Union offered to rescind its embargoes if Milosevic lost before Yugoslavia even held the election. Given all this international pressure, maybe nobody really needed to start this revolution. Perhaps it started itself.

There is, of course, another possibility. As the American Revolution was spurred by a low-level silversmith, and the Romanian revolution by a tinhorn minister, perhaps this one had humbler beginnings. There was a seminal moment when protesting coal miners watched police-protected scabs try to cross the picket line. One miner, disgusted, got in his backhoe and plowed through the police barricade to stop the scabs. Who was he? What was he made of? Probably not the stuff of a presidential candidate. Maybe he did it on a bet. Perhaps it was a few too many beers. That lone miner might very well have been this year's Revere or Tokes.

Or, just as intriguingly, perhaps this year's most prominent revolutionary was the police officer who decided not to shoot him.

 
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