A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-violent Conflict
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A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-violent Conflict
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Overview
This nationally-acclaimed book shows how popular movements used nonviolent action to overthrow dictators, obstruct military invaders and secure human rights in country after country, over the past century. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall depict how nonviolent sanctions--such as protests, strikes and boycotts--separate brutal regimes from their means of control. They tell inside stories--how Danes outmaneuvered the Nazis, Solidarity defeated Polish communism, and mass action removed a Chilean dictator--and also how nonviolent power is changing the world today, from Burma to Serbia.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250105202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 560 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Peter Ackerman holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Jack Duvall is President of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
Ackerman and Duvall are coauthors of A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict.
Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight is Peter's debut play, and ran off-Broadway in New York for six months and regionally throughout the US. It was recorded for radio by LA Theatre Works and broadcast on member NPR stations in the US and Canada. Peter has since written The Urn, which ran off off-Broadway and a radio play, I'd Rather Eat Pants. He is co-author of the animated movie, Ice Age, and is currently writting Jumanji 2 for Sony. As an actor he appeared off-Broadway in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and in Visiting Mr Green.
Jack DuVall is President of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
Read an Excerpt
A Force More Powerful
A Century of Nonviolent Conflict
By Peter Ackerman, Jack DuVall
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-10520-2
CHAPTER 1
Russia, 1905: The People Strike
The Silent Tanks
In the darkness of a Sunday night, in the second summer after the Cold War was over and when Russia was at peace, Major Sergei Evdokimov was awakened by the clanging of an emergency alarm. By three in the morning he was with his armored unit, based outside Moscow, waiting for instructions. They were not long in coming. As the eastern sky began to pale, Evdokimov's battalion commander ordered them to motor down the Minsk highway into Moscow and take up positions blocking two bridges across the Moscow River, which meanders through the center of the city. There were no explanations, but the major and his men followed orders without question — even when they pointed force at the civilian heart of Russia. So at eight o'clock sharp that Monday morning on August 19, 1991, Evdokimov signaled his column of tanks to move out.
In the same dawn, Valerii Zavorotnyi, a computer scientist from Leningrad, was awakened by his ringing phone. "Gorbachev has been arrested," said the voice on the other end. "Emergency rule has been introduced." Zavorotnyi turned on his television and found classical music playing on all three channels, a familiar sign from years past that a major state event had occurred. Later an announcer came on and read "an Appeal to the Soviet People," issued by a group of high officials calling themselves the State Committee for the State of Emergency. "Compatriots, Citizens of the Soviet Union," it began, "a mortal danger looms large over our great Motherland." The Committee promised to end the "crisis" facing the country, and its "Resolution No. 1" banned strikes and demonstrations, asserted control over the mass media, and suspended the activities of parties and organizations that interfered with "normalization."
All across the vast country, people awoke to the same news, delivered by telephone, by jittery neighbors, by radio and television. But no one was terribly surprised. For months there had been rumors that hard-line communists were preparing a coup to reverse the political and economic reforms introduced by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, it appeared, the nightmare had come true. The breathing room given to Soviet citizens over the last five years was about to be revoked, at gunpoint.
No sooner had the coup leaders begun issuing commands, however, than people disobeyed them. The first to do so was Gorbachev himself, who, after refusing to give his approval to the State of Emergency, was held prisoner at his summer home. Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian Federation, was not so easily contained. Eluding the KGB officer sent to arrest him, Yeltsin raced to the White House, the headquarters of his government. At noon he climbed on top of a tank outside and read his own appeal, addressed to the "Russian People," declaring all acts of the junta illegal and calling for a nationwide general strike. Then he went on the radio: "At this difficult hour of decision," he reminded the country's soldiers, "remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against the people ... The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people."
By what he did as well as what he said, Yeltsin urged defiance of the coup. By early afternoon Muscovites were holding small demonstrations outside the Kremlin walls and posting photocopies of Yeltsin's appeal in the Metro. Soon men and women converged on the White House and built barricades out of construction materials, phone booths, and anything else they could lay their hands on. Cab drivers even donated their cars to fortify the ramparts.
When a line of tanks rumbled down Kalinin Prospekt on its way to the White House, people formed a human chain across the road. "Be with the People!" they yelled. "Don't shoot at your own people!" An old man shouted, "I've worked my whole life, you see, all my life I've paid for this army, and now you've turned against me, you're shooting at me." The argument carried the moment; the commander cut off his engine, and the other tanks in the convoy followed suit. People climbed all over them, offering candy, bread, and milk to the soldiers inside.
When Major Evdokimov and his company pulled up near the Kalininskii Bridge, right by the White House, they learned about the coup from people putting up barricades. A few demonstrators swore at them, calling them fascists, and others, including an acquaintance of the major, tried to convince him to defect to Yeltsin's side. The thirty-six-year-old career military officer was not sure what to do. It was no easy thing to contemplate disobeying orders; but he had made up his mind on the way downtown that he would not attack unarmed civilians. "I'm going to stay here, I've received an order," he declared. "But we will not shoot or crush anyone. I give my word."
For several hours Evdokimov and his men stayed put. Around seven in the evening, a deputy from the Russian parliament appeared and asked the major to come talk to Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who was organizing the defense of the White House. Rutskoi told him about Gorbachev's arrest and Yeltsin's call to disobey the junta, and he asked him to help protect the White House. "Give me an order," Evdokimov replied. "We'll help." With that Evdokimov went back out to his company and led the tanks, now flying the Russian tricolor, rather than the Soviet hammer and sickle, through the cheering crowd to the White House.
Many journalists also refused to knuckle under. On Monday evening the junta held its first (and last) press conference. Tatiana Malkina, a young reporter, raised her hand and, with one question, destroyed the veil of legality that the junta was struggling to create. "Could you please say whether or not you understand that last night you carried out a coup d'état?" That night the whole country heard about the barricades in Moscow and Yeltsin's appeal on the tank from a five-minute report on an official news program, Vremia. Banned newspapers got the news out by faxing reports to activists, who distributed them on the streets.
The coup plotters expected that a show of force would unnerve any opposition. Indeed, most people, even the majority in Moscow and Leningrad, were passive; they went on with their daily lives, enjoyed their vacations, and paid scant attention to the news. Yeltsin's call for a national strike met with little response. But enough people came to the White House, as similar strongholds of resistance materialized in other cities, so that the junta was denied the acquiescence it needed. By posting leaflets, going to rallies, building barricades, and scrawling graffiti on tanks, these ordinary citizens showed that they would not be intimidated.
On Tuesday around 100,000 people were emboldened to go to a rally at the White House; by then more military units had joined the shield around the building. High military commanders, such as Pavel Grachev and Aleksandr Lebed, declared their support for Yeltsin, and even top KGB officers made it clear they would not take part in a bloodbath. In the end, the junta never ordered the attack prepared for Tuesday night. By early Wednesday the coup had collapsed.
The men and women who took to the streets in August 1991 had written a new chapter in the long Russian struggle to make government reflect the people's will. Although many of them may not have known it, they were not the first Russians to throw up civilian barricades in central Moscow and dispute arbitrary rule. Eighty years earlier, just a flew blocks from where the White House now stands, at the end of a year-long popular upheaval that shook the government of Tsar Nicholas II, Muscovites by the thousands had confronted armed soldiers in December 1905. But when they brandished guns, the troops mowed them down, killing scores — and stalling Russia's first democratic revolution. Until that moment, Russia had been the scene of the century's first sustained use of nonviolent action to achieve basic rights. But it started as it ended: on a day of violence.
BLOODY SUNDAY
The Priest and the Workers
On a cold, clear Sunday morning in January 1905, in the industrial outskirts of St. Petersburg, a young long-haired priest stood before several thousand factory workers. Father Georgii Gapon read a prayer, said a blessing over everyone, and then asked if anyone was armed. When the answer was no, he was pleased: "Good. We will go unarmed to our Tsar." A little after eleven, the crowd set off for the center of town, singing prayers as it went. In the front row, marchers carried a cross, icons, portraits of the country's rulers, and a banner reading "Soldiers! Do not shoot the people!" Their destination was the royal family's Winter Palace, where they would be joined by similar processions from other points in the city, over 100,000 in all. Then, on the spacious, classically proportioned square outside the palace, in the heart of the capital of the Russian empire, they would present a petition to Nicholas II.
The petition they carried, entitled "A Most Humble and Loyal Address," had been drafted by Gapon. "We, the workers and inhabitants of St. Petersburg," it began, "... come to Thee, O Sire, to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened ... Do not turn Thy help away from Thy people ... Allow them to determine their own future; deliver them from the intolerable oppression of the officialdom. Raze the wall that separates Thee from Thy people and rule the country with them ..."
Gapon's followers were approaching their ruler not in revolt but in supplication. The petition listed more than a dozen requests, such as a minimum wage and an eight-hour day, yet it looked beyond workers' grievances and also embraced a political agenda that would touch every person in the empire. It called for freedom of speech, press, worship, and association; the release of all political prisoners; and equality before the law for all people. Most important, it called for a constituent assembly, elected by universal and equal suffrage. "This is our principal request, upon which everything else depends," the petition insisted.
In effect, the marchers were asking the Tsar to dissolve an entire era of Russian history. Article 1 of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, still in effect in 1905, defined it succinctly: "To the Emperor of all the Russias belongs the supreme autocratic and unlimited power." A good Tsar would consult with his subjects and take their interests to heart, but he would not share his power with the people, or let it be constrained by civil liberties that would stand regardless of his will. His subjects felt the hand of the state everywhere: Censors decided what appeared in newspapers and journals, governors could order anyone detained without trial, and associations or clubs of the most innocent kind could be forbidden. Autocracy, in short, meant that there were no rights.
The Tsar's love for this system was more than a desire for personal power; he believed he had a divine mandate, reflected in hallowed traditions. Russia had industrial workers and capitalist entrepreneurs, modern political thinkers and artistic movements, but Nicholas surrounded himself with the trappings of an earlier time. He insisted that official documents use archaic spelling, and he held costume balls where everyone wore replicas of two -hundred-year-old outfits. He preferred to spend time in Moscow, with its traditional wooden architecture and winding streets, rather than among the massive stone palaces in the newer, more European St. Petersburg. In his imagination if not in reality, Nicholas stood before his subjects like a father before his children, bound by mutual affection and obligation before God.
But some Russians wanted to sweep away that fantasy, and much of educated society had hungered for political change for the better part of a century. Beginning with a rebellion by military officers in 1825, small groups had from time to time hatched conspiracies to liberate the country from absolutism. The "People's Will" had managed to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1881 (Nicholas, then thirteen, had seen his grandfather die), and a new terrorist group, the "Battle Organization" of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, had become active after the turn of the century.
Other radicals rejected terrorism and tried instead to organize peasants or workers for popular uprisings. Marxist ideas tempted many young people, and socialists had agitated among workers in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and elsewhere since the 1890s. Still others were bent on persuading the government to reform itself. In the first years of the new century, a liberal movement emerged among many landowners, professionals, and intellectuals, who used public meetings and publications, both legal and illegal, to call for a constitution and some form of representative government.
Thus the demands in Father Gapon's petition — free unions, civil liberties, democracy — had all appeared before, in the appeals of revolutionary and liberal groups. What made the Gapon petition unprecedented was that tens of thousands of people took to the streets to show they supported it. For the first time demands for an end to autocracy came from an incipient mass movement rather than from educated circles. But the movement was also, ironically, aided by the state's own policies.
One of the policymakers was Sergei Zubatov, head of the political police in Moscow. Zubatov, who had once consorted with radicals and then been a police spy, feared that the state would lose ground to revolutionaries in the battle for workers' allegiance. He attacked the complacent view, popular among top officials, that since Russia's workers came mostly from peasant families, they would reflect the conservatism commonly found in the countryside. Strikes in St. Petersburg, and the involvement of Marxist activists in organizing them, collapsed this myth and provoked Zubatov to come up with a novel plan. He argued to his bosses that workers had real complaints, that their loyalty would last only as long as they believed that the state was not the enemy — and he won approval from the Ministry of Interior for state-sponsored mutual aid societies among workers in several cities, under the supervision of police agents. The state, not the revolutionaries, would lead workers to a brighter future.
Zubatov's strategy proved to be explosive. His associations became embroiled in disputes between workers and employers and actually organized strikes in a number of places. Outraged employers complained bitterly to V. K. Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, who transferred Zubatov to St. Petersburg late in 1902. But Zubatov was not to be deterred, and he established a new organization in the capital, the St. Petersburg Mutual Aid Society of Workers in the Machine Industry.
One of the young men attracted to that society was a twenty-eight-year old worker by the name of N. M. Varnashev. From the age of twelve he had been working in factories in a city that had been flooded during the past decade by thousands of rural migrants who had put down their plows and taken up the tools of industry. Most of these workers were barely literate and still quite rustic, and they were crammed into tenements and grim barracks. But there were no unions to look out for their interests, and strikes were illegal and therefore risky. Still, some felt the yearning for something better.
Often while daydreaming at his lathe, Varnashev would ask himself, "And what should become of you, if you lose this job and you can't immediately find a new one? And if you get hurt, or you grow sick and exhausted in your old age?" Unlike many of his fellow workers, Varnashev took the time to think about his situation; he was an avid reader and saw himself as an urban, even cosmopolitan man. As a skilled metal worker, he was among the best paid in the city, and he had managed to find rooms near the city's statelier neighborhoods. He had even spent some of his earnings on a newfangled device called a bicycle.
One autumn day in 1902, Varnashev (who was still learning to ride) pedaled over to visit his friend and co-worker Stepanov, who lived across the Neva River. After a few scrapes on his hands and knees and one collision with an apple-seller, Varnashev arrived at his friend's apartment. There he was introduced to a man named Kladovikov, who told him about a plan brewing among workers to organize a mutual aid fund, similar to one in Moscow. Kladovikov invited him to its second meeting, to be held the next week — and with that small step Varnashev started down a path that would bring him, together with thousands of other St. Petersburg workers, into open conflict with the government of Tsar Nicholas II.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Force More Powerful by Peter Ackerman, Jack DuVall. Copyright © 2000 Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Part I: Movement to Power * Russia, 1905: The People Strike * India: Movement for Self-Rule * Poland: Power from Solidarity * Part II: Resistance to Terror * The Ruhrkampf, 1923: Resisting Invaders * Denmark, the Netherlands, the Rosenstrasse: Resisting the Nazis * El Salvador, 1944: Removing the General * Argentina and Chile: Resisting Repression * Part III: Campaigns for Rights * The American South: Campaign for Civil Rights * South Africa: Campaign Against Apartheid * The Philippines: Restoring Democracy * The Intifada: Campaign for a Homeland * China, Eastern Europe, Mongolia: The Democratic Tide * Part IV: Violence and Power * The Mythology of Violence * The New World of Power * Victory without Violence