Cultural Revolution
by Prof. H. Marcuse, May 13, 2003

Question: What causes BIG change to happen in history?
Short answer: Lack of balance in multiple areas.

Announcements: EAP, midterm evaluations,
paper Thursday (CLAS), sections

Dislocations in the early 20^th century
Portrayals of the Russian Revolution

China

Fall of the Qing

Empress Cixi & Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901)
secret organizations
European-educated generation

sons of scholar-gentry, merchants
deeply hostile to involvement of imperialist powers

1911-12: boy-emperor deposed

World War I: Int'l Factor & World History

Consequences

US & Japan emerge as world powers
created openings for intellectual resistance in Asia and Africa
Women mobilized for war
(hemlines, smoking, dating, activism)
Failed peace (Treaty of Versailles)

The Versailles Treaty and the World

Germany: "Diktat" (dictated peace) as insult
ambivalence of sides in and outcome of war

Global ramifications

Arab World: Brit and France reneged on wartime promises
Asia: no protection for China against Japan
Ho Chi Minh: no audience with Wilson
Mexico: Porfiro Diaz (1876-1910=80 years)
India: 100,000s of soldiers and laborers in WW1

Source interpretation: Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali poet, one of first non-Europeans to win Nobel Prize for literature)

"Has not this truth already come home to you now when this cruel war has driven its claws into the vitals of Europe? When her hoard of wealth is bursting into smoke and her humanity is shattered on her battlefields? You ask in amazement what she has done to deserve this? The answer is, that the West has been systematically petrifying her moral nature in order to lay a solid foundation for her gigantic abstractions of efficiency. She has been all along starving the life of the personal man into that of the professional."

Types of Change

Political: institutions of government
Social: groups within a society
Cultural: way of life, traditions

Video Clips 1 & 2

CNN:

"Russia and the Romanovs"
Execution of the Czar & family in 1918
"Soviet Past and Future"
Museum of the Nobility and Lenin Museum

What is left of the Russian Revolution?What influence does history have on today?

Russian Revolution

1905: Russo-Japanese War [film clip 3]
1914: Great War
1917: February (March): "moderate" revolution (Kerensky, Duma, Prov. Gov't)
April: Lenin (through Germany)
1917: October (Nov.), Bolsheviks
"10 Days that shook the world"
1918: March, Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
1921: New Economic Policy

Film Clip 3

Sergei Eisenstein:

"Battleship Potemkin" (1925=20th anniv. of 1905 Russo-Japanese War & failed uprising)
Mutiny in Black Sea port of Odessa
Massacre on the Odessa Steps

What causes people NOT to do what they are "supposed" (told) to?

Film Clip 4