Typology

The Ethiopian Revolution of 1974 caught almost everybody by surprise. Although they had been calling and fighting for it for almost a decade, even the most radical of the students were unprepared. As for the ruling class, while it might have had a premonition that something might go wrong, it took quite some time for it to gauge the magnitude of the crisis. Indeed, the equivalent term for 'revolution’ (abyot) was a relatively recent one in the Amharic lexicon; many came to learn of it only after its eruption. Hence the highly expressive characterization of the very process of that eruption: abyotfanada ('revolution exploded/erupted’). It certainly did explode in the faces of both the regime and its opponents. How to handle, let alone direct, that explosion became one long process of adjustment and improvisation that ultimately delivered the country into the clutches of a totalitarian dictatorship.

In the suddenness of its occurrence, the Ethiopian revolution was not unique. As the American historian Crane Brinton has concluded after his survey of the classical revolutions, ‘The actual revolution is always a surprise’. But it is more than the element of surprise that the Ethiopian revolution shared with its predecessors. It fitted very well into the standard pattern of ‘a form of massive, violent and rapid social change’ (Dunn, 12), of'a world turned upside down'. It conformed also to Lenin's famous characterization of a revolutionary situation - the people refusing to be ruled in the old way and the ruling elite failing to exercise its customary political control. There 228 was also, in Ethiopia as in earlier revolutions, a revolutionary elite with a formula for a better future, just as there was to be a fatal gap between initiating a revolution (the ideal) and controlling it (the reality).

Like the Chinese revolution, the Ethiopian one ushered in a radical land reform that changed the rural landscape in a decisive manner. But it is with the French and Russian revolutions that the Ethiopian experience has the closest parallels. Like its French and Russian predecessors, it did away with a dynasty (even if the French one was restored for some decades in the nineteenth century).