You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

When I was growing up in the 20th century, revolution seemed significant.

At school, the Russian Revolution was everyone's favourite subject, but it was less theoretical

for me than for most. My parents had ended

up in England because of it. The 68th of parents of school friends would tell me about the

sexual and cultural revolutions of their youth, which, they said, changed the world. I was 12 in

1989 when we all watched the Berlin Wall fall on live TV, it seemed like the Russian Revolution

in the 1960s rolled into one, the people taking power from elites while celebrating the

subversive effect of U-2.

Later, when I went to film school and discovered Eisenstein, I realized that revolution had altered

the way things looked. All those CNN and BBC montages with their close-ups of

ordinary people on the revolutionary streets of Berlin, Moscow and Bucharest, and their stirring music

could have been borrowed from Battleship Potomkin or Strike. They were rolling news versions of

Eisenstein's notion of making the crowd the hero transformed through editing into a unified body.

But in the 21st century, something changed. Suddenly, any national political fight was calling itself

a revolution. The Rose Revolution, Georgia, the Green Revolution Iran, the Chulip Revolution,

Kyrgyzstan, the Jeans Revolution, Belarus, the Cedar Revolution, Lebanon, the Jasmine Revolution, Tunisia. Some of these were revolutionary, others, not at all.

Revolution stopped being the name you gave to a transformative historical moment

and became the name a political technology gave itself in order to gain importance.

Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004 had all the slogans, the set designs, the pop music,

the flag waving, and video mashups of revolution, but when it was over, the same leaders

returned to practice the same corrupt schemes as before.

...