David Potter writes:

On 3 April 1917, a crowd gathered to meet a train arriving from Helsinki at Petrograd’s Finland Station. The train carried Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He greeted his audience with a speech calling for the overthrow of Russia’s government – and, six months later, he made this happen. The world changed.

Lenin, who had been living outside of Russia for more than a decade, was known as a theorist on the fringe of Russian political society, shaping Marxist thought to support his own theory of change. Karl Marx had envisioned a number of ways for a society to move to a system in which workers controlled the means of production. But Lenin saw only one way: through the violent overthrow of the existing government, organised by a dedicated group of professional revolutionaries. Lenin brought this scheme with him to Petrograd (now St Petersburg). There, his party took charge of the worker’s organisation that had been sharing power with a provisional government since the abdication of the tsar. But it would be more than five years before Lenin’s party secured absolute power in Russia. Millions died along the way.

Lenin’s theory of change was a theory of social disruption, of imposing a shift so radical that a society could not go back to the way it had been. Such disruptions don’t just happen randomly. There is a set of conditions required to launch them, and there are particular circumstances in which the initiators of the disruption tend to succeed in their aims.

The core characteristics of the kind of disruption I’m describing, as we’ll see in the historical episodes that follow, are that it: 1) stems from a loss of faith in a society’s central institutions; 2) establishes a set of ideas from what was once the fringe of the intellectual world, placing them at the centre of a revamped political order; and 3) involves a coherent leadership group committed to the change. These disruptions are apparent in, but not synonymous with, some of the events commonly called revolutions. Disruptions don’t always change who is in charge – they are, in fact, sometimes necessary to preserve a government that is on the verge of failure. But they will at the very least change the way that a governing group thinks and acts. [Continue reading…]