Revolutionary Context Research Articles

The Awakening and Challenges of Women's Rights: A Comparative Study under the Influence of the American Revolution and the French Revolution

Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution saw the emergence of women's rights in the modern West to a certain extent. Although both the French Revolution and the American Revolution were characterised by the struggle for women's rights, there were notable differences in the specific ways, times, and challenges they faced. This paper compares the emancipatory effects of the two revolutions on women and the independent links between women's emancipation in the local social and political contexts. It reveals that women's emancipation in the modern West was influenced by the unique internal structure of each country's society at the time. It is revealed that during the French Revolution, women's struggle for rights was more centred on the domestic and social level than on direct participation in the political decision-making process due to the development of capitalism in France. Conversely, women in the American Revolution were more concerned with political, legal, and social issues. This essay will examine the chronology of the pre-revolutionary, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary periods, with a focus on the differing national and revolutionary contexts of the two countries, the varying status of women, and the divergent approaches to the fight for women's rights.

The Role of Women in Revolutionary Movements: A Comparative Analysis of the French, American, and Mexican Revolutions

In the past, historical accounts have often excluded the contributions of women to revolutionary movements, focusing primarily on male figures and perspectives. However, recent scholarship has begun to uncover the significant and multifaceted roles that women played in shaping revolutionary events. This research has prompted a reevaluation of traditional narratives and highlighted the need for a more inclusive approach to understanding revolutions. This study seeks to address this gap by conducting a comparative analysis of women's participation across three pivotal revolutions: the French, American, and Mexican Revolutions. By examining primary sources, historical documents, and academic literature, the research aims to explain the diverse ways in which women engaged with and influenced revolutionary processes. Through qualitative methodologies, such as narrative analysis and thematic coding, the study will explore the motivations, challenges, and strategies employed by women in their revolutionary endeavors. Furthermore, the comparative approach will discuss the differences in women's experiences across different revolutionary contexts. By uncovering patterns of participation and leadership, the research aims to provide insights into the broader dynamics of gender and power within revolutionary movements. Ultimately, this research is sought to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of revolutions by focus the agency and contributions of women. By showcasing their voices and stories, the study seeks to explore historical narratives and promote greater recognition of women's roles in shaping revolutionary trajectories.

The Brazilian Eisenstein (1961–1981)

ABSTRACT Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American filmmakers and filmgoers began to interpret and adapt early Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s in an unprecedented fashion, extending its half-life in innovative ways. In this context, Brazil is a generative but seldom explored site. This article traces the Brazilian reception of Soviet cinematic poetics through the shifting approaches to Sergei Eisenstein in the filmography of Leon Hirszman (1937–1987). Eisenstein’s approaches to montage would shape Hirszman from his first student film to the workerist cinema that characterized his late filmography. Like his contemporary Glauber Rocha (1939–1981)—after Hirszman, the Brazilian filmmaker most marked by Eisenstein—Hirszman tranculturated the avant-garde postrevolutionary Soviet film for the truncated revolutionary context of Brazil. Changing and emphasizing different elements in Eisenstein’s understanding of montage, Hirszman consistently depicted it as a capacious opportunity for both capturing and transforming the world: registering justices and multiplying a cinematic off-screen where anti-capitalist solidarities might flourish. His experimental filmmaking praxis also suggests how Eisenstein’s montage method (activating disparate or contradictory contexts through juxtaposition) produces a paradoxical ground for comparison, a poetics of the urgent untimely, rather than either belated or diffusionist accounts of world cinema.

Greaney, John. The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation

Influenced by new modernist studies, John Greaney diligently interrogates the simultaneous proximity and distance that Irish modernism has to a national narrative of social and political history, particularly as enabled through form, aesthetics and questions of language and translation. The Distance of Irish Modernism adopts what Greaney calls a ‘flexible formalism’ (p. 26) in order to emphasize the importance of aesthetic features when approaching Irish modernism’s relationship to Irish history. In Chapter 1, Greaney complicates historicist readings of Beckett’s work, specifically Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnameable (1953). He convincingly illustrates the ways in which Beckett deflects ‘the capacities of even basic representation’ (p. 58), as apparent in his engagement with the Holocaust and Irish colonial history, and thereby enables his works to ‘operate at a remove from history to negotiate its trauma and ineffability’ (p. 58). Chapter 2 interrogates the questions of authorship and voice raised by the various pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan, as well as the subsequent destabilizing forces of fragmentation and trivia located within texts such as At-Swim-Three-Birds (1939). Greaney argues that O’Nolan/O’Brien/na gCopaleen’s texts actively refute being conflated with their cultural and historical contexts. Chapter 3 perhaps best captures the spirit of Greaney’s endeavours. His metacommentary on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) highlights that the variability in academic definitions and readings of Bowen’s novels acts to destabilize the text’s relationship with Irish history. In his textual analysis, Greaney argues that Bowen’s representation of Ireland during the War of Independence through the perspective of female Anglo-Irish characters, whose worlds are limited by their class and gender, serves to put distance between the novel and the wider revolutionary context. In Chapter 4, Greaney argues that Kate O’Brien’s application of omniscience is a formal modernist device which functions to distance the narratives of Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938) and The Land of Spices (1941) from her contemporary social history. Greaney clearly demonstrates how in O’Brien’s work, the setting of postcolonial Ireland is rendered ‘spectral’ (p. 139) by her omniscient narrator, who thus serves to detach O’Brien’s texts from their historical contexts. In his final chapter, Greaney considers the work of John McGahern, a writer usually associated with naturalism and social realism (p. 141), and tests the presumed distinctions between these attributes and modernism. Focusing on a wide range of McGahern’s texts, Greaney argues that McGahern’s critique of mid-century Ireland is informed by a modernist fragmentation of various narrative operations that render reality a ‘hermeneutic enigma’ (p. 165).

Couples and families’ resilience in facing sociocultural changes: “Co-maternity” and “Oedipus in law” in the Tunisian transitional context

When a nation has experienced state violence and political exploitation, relationships in families and between couples are severely strained. Conditions permitting, a resilience process can occur. In fact, family psychoanalysis allows the discovery of different forms and modalities of resilience, which only a group is capable of. This paper explores the richness of an intersubjective psychoanalytic approach. It demonstrates its clinical application for Tunisian couples and families in a changing sociocultural revolutionary context. It identifies two transitional link configurations, designated “co-maternity” and “Oedipus-in-law”, illustrating a process of “negotiation” favorable for resilience and fluent intergenerational transmission, even if change comes with its conflicts.

Reputational recovery under political instability: Public debt in Portugal, 1641–83

AbstractThis article examines the reputation recovery of Portugal's public debt during the war of liberation against the former Habsburg ruler. Using novel datasets on long‐ and short‐term debt and nominal interest rates, this study provides evidence that the sovereign borrower used debt credibility to build a pact of regime in a revolutionary context with implications for financing the war. The Portuguese kings followed an implicit budget balance rule as a reputational scheme, which made Portugal an exceptional case of military success with a low debt‐to‐GDP ratio and low interest rates. These conclusions contribute to the literature in various attributes of war finance, debt management, and state‐making by showing that default avoidance could be as important to military success as fiscal capacity.

Supporting a revolution from afar: the construction of unity between generations of Sudanese exiles in France

ABSTRACT Since December 2018, Sudan has been experiencing a revolution that has engaged the large numbers of Sudanese who live abroad in a political struggle from afar. Based on a case study of the Sudanese community in France and an analysis of their long-distance support of the political upheavals from three different cities, this article assesses how times of revolution affect the sense of commonness of diasporic groups and reshape socio-political boundaries in exile. From our initial identification of two Sudanese generations in France, which we will call the elders and the youth, we assess how the collective identification process for exiles, which is initially determined by social and regional affiliations, has been affected in recent times by the outbreak of the Sudanese revolution. After presenting the two generations of Sudanese currently living in France, we show how the revolutionary context has affected their feelings of belonging and produced a temporary sense of diasporic unity. Finally, the article analyses how the stalemate in the revolutionary process during the summer of 2019 led to an erosion of this unified Sudanese consensus and resurrected political, regional, social, and generational divides, pushing the young generation to the forefront of protest from afar.

‘Fitna’ in the Context of the Syrian Revolution: The Example of al-Būṭī

‘Fitna’ in the Context of the Syrian Revolution: The Example of al-Būṭī Bachar Bakour (bio) Introduction The popular uprisings in Syria in 2011 have emphasized the centrality of religion in social and political spheres. As Friday sermons would be a fitting opportunity for gathering, numerous mosques served as a platform for anti-regime demonstrations.1 Measures, mostly repressive, were taken by the security forces to foil or break up any demonstration launching from mosques.2 Senior Syrian Sheikhs,3 key figures in understanding the conflict/war dynamics, took different attitudes towards protests. Influential scholars, like Kurayyim Rājiḥ, Sāriyah and Usāmah al-Rifā‘ī, Mu‘ādh al-Khaṭīb, and Abū al-Hudā al-Ya‘qūbī, vocally criticised the government’s bloody policy and sided with the protests. Other ulama condemned demonstrations and propagated the official narrative.4 A third party, confused or apprehensive, preferred the culture of quiescence and silence. The escalating protests have taken ulama vs. the regime into uncharted territory. [End Page 25] Muhammad ‘Abd al-Sattār al-Sayyed and Aḥmad Ḥassūn, the Minister of Syrian Endowments and the Grand Mufti of Syria respectively, described the popular unrest erupting into revolution as ‘foreign conspiracy’ inspired by scholars of the fitna (referring mainly to al-Qaraḍāwī) in addition to satellite channels of the fitna, i.e., Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya.5 At an unofficial level, Sheikh Muhammad Sa‘īd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī, a leading Muslim thinker, refused to endorse the protests based on a broader interpretation that they might lead to chaos, and unrest causing substantial collateral damage and bloodshed among innocent Muslims and non-Muslims of Syria.6 Up to his assassination in 2013,7 al-Būṭī already developed an argument about the fitna against the backdrop of traumatic events in Syria, (causes, consequences, and remedies). With his influential position as a religious authority, al-Būṭīs view on the fitna has been echoed by a multitude of Syrian ulama and Sharī‘ah students.8 This article aims to examine al-Būṭī’s treatment of the fitna in the context of the Syrian revolution by attempting to address the following questions: given its multiple meanings, what does fitna signify in the revolutionary context? What is al-Būṭī’s attitude towards the fitna in Syria, and is it grounded in a balanced approach that does not reflect favouritism? How should the fitna be treated from a holistic point of view? Sources include (i) al-Būṭī’s books, Friday sermons, videos, and fatwas9 as well as other traditional and modern writings that provide a broader perspective of the fitna and (ii) research books, dissertations, and journal articles focusing the Syrian revolution. Textual and content data analysis is employed to position al-Būṭī’s argument on fitna within a wider Islamic [End Page 26] framework of the Qur’an, Sunnah, and the opinions of leading classical and contemporary scholars. This is to re-situate the issue of the fitna in its proper context within the rights and duties of both the ruler and the ruled. Further, the article showcases the fitna’s overlapping meanings via a linguistic review of a chapter named ‘the Book of al-Fitan’,10 of the five well-known collections of ḥadīth. The reason is that the vast majority of the quoted ḥadīths that speak about and warn of the eruption of the fitna are stated in that chapter. This review is warranted by the fact that post-revolution pronouncements such as ‘armed rebellion leads to the fitna’, ‘if you say so and so, you will create the fitna’, ‘if you stay at home and mind your own business, you avoid involvement in the fitna’ etc. are left without clear and accurate definition. For this research, key concepts and terms are defined and clarified. The word fitna means ‘to burn’, i.e., to melt gold or silver with fire to purify it.11 Then this signification is extended to mean “To put to the test, to afflict (in particular as a means of testing someone’s endurance); to disrupt the peace of a community; to tempt, to seduce, to allure, to infatuate.”12 Thus...

Narrating National History in the Global «Springtime of the Peoples». The People as Historical Character in mid-19th Century Mexican and Brazilian Conservative Historiography

Mexican and Brazilian mid-19th century historiographies have been conventionally interpreted considering the national circumstances in which they were written. This article aims to transcend this point of view, placing those texts –specifically Historia de México by Lucas Alamán and História Geral do Brasil by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen– in the framework of the global revolutionary context triggered by the events of February-June Paris 1848. I argue that the negative role that both national histories assigned to “the people” in their respective narratives of the Mexican and Brazilian independence revolutions is closely linked to the mid-19th century global ascent of popular classes to political life and to their global incorporation as key characters of historiographical discourses.

Queering the Politics of Black Respectability in Plays of the Black Revolutionary Theatre

In this article, I analyze Ed Bullins's Clara’s Ole Man (1965) and Amiri Baraka's The Baptism (1964) to evince what black queer representation looked like in the hands of Black Revolutionary Theatre playwrights. I read Bullins and Baraka's one-act plays to engage in a discussion of black respectability politics from an historical perspective. I argue that movements for social change, theatrical or otherwise, if unchecked, erect a politics of respectability that limits the possibilities of collective progress toward revolutionary ends. I suggest that to trouble the potential rigidity of such politics (which can call for the inclusion of some at the expense of others), more representations of black experience should be considered and engaged with. In this article, I wanted to explore several question that arose for me early in my research on Black Queer Theatre: Are there dramatic narratives of the Black Arts Movement, and more specifically The Black Revolutionary Theatre, that include LGBTQ+ characters? If so, what are the limitations and possibilities of representations of black queerness in a 1960s black revolutionary context? To answer these questions, I critically analyze both plays using a black queer feminist theoretical lens. I identify how the plays use black queer characters to achieve the mission of the Black Revolutionary Theatre, and illustrate the ways in which this experiment merely reproduces black queer stereotypes

Revolutionary Music in Lebanon and Egypt: Alternative Imaginaries for Self-representation and Participation

Globally, mainstream media excludes or misrepresents many societal groups, resulting in significant community absences. In these contexts, alternative media plays a vital role in offering meaningful self-representation and political participation. This type of media becomes crucial in revolutionary contexts, where people rise against the injustices of their governments in hopes of change. This article offers a case study approach to revolutionary music in the Middle East, where we review the socio-economic and political contexts behind the emergence of alternative media in Lebanon and Egypt. We analyze our cases by using Bailey et al.’s (2007) comprehensive approaches to alternative media. We propose that revolutionary music evolves and adapts to larger changes in the public sphere. Still, as the article concludes, while music can enable a persistent community when demanding change, it does not guarantee an actual change in the political system.

The state and the individual: the revolutionary context

The state and the individual: the revolutionary context

Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-peace Guatemala

The Guatemalan Revolution (1944–54) looms disproportionately large within twentieth-century scholarship. This pivotal democratic period stands alone, bookended by military dictatorships and the 36-year civil war (1960–96), with its genocidal violence against Indigenous peoples. Precisely why and how this brief era of democracy, referred to as the Ten Years of Spring, continues to resonate within Guatemalan national memory is the fundamental question asked by the edited collection Out of the Shadow. The contributors ask how and why this brief era of democracy has reverberated in the 1996 peace accords' aftermath, out of the shadow of the 1954 coup and Cold War counterrevolution. These scholars excavate internal, political, cultural, social, racial, and geographic dynamics to present a more nuanced panorama indicative of the often contradictory aims of many revolutions in many places.This collection situates itself within a monumental historiography, scholarly trends that the editors identify as overlapping strands of interpretation and justification. The first strand identifies US foreign intervention as critical to the military coup that deposed the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. The second strand emphasizes the revolution's untimely end and the internal barriers to change that emerged, intertwining with the first strand to either defend or condemn the 1954 overthrow. The third strand, highlighting Guatemala's historical racism, emerged within the truth and reconciliation commission's indictment of the genocide against Maya Indigenous communities. Out of the Shadow proposes a fourth strand that builds on previous insights from twenty-first-century postpeace Guatemala by accentuating “the shifting memory and meaning of Guatemala's ‘Ten Years of Spring’ in the present and the past” and thereby identifying sociopolitical continuity and change over the past 60 years (p. 9). The collection's contributors bring decades of archival expertise, historical analysis, personal lived experience, and solidarity with a variety of Guatemalan communities.The book's four parts highlight regions, frameworks, and actors that challenge the dominant historical revolutionary narrative. Part 1 examines the revolution's sociopolitical policies by focusing on “new regions.” Chapter 1 explores the activism of Black and mixed-race labor leaders in Izabal as they embraced key social and political transformations within the banana workers' union. Chapter 2 reveals how the 1952 agrarian reform was transformed by Indigenous communities, who forced the state to adopt a more holistic model of agricultural development that tried to balance productivity, environmental health, and social well-being. This chapter demonstrates how empowered campesinos could quickly reduce inequality, improve productivity, and address environmental problems (p. 59). Chapter 3 focuses on Poptún, a little-known frontier agricultural settlement initiated by President Juan José Arévalo (1945–50) that sought to prove that the jungle landscape could be controlled scientifically and that also played a strategic role in Guatemala's political posturing against both Belize and Mexico.Part 2, “New Frames,” examines the revolution via new themes. Chapter 4 traces the historical trajectory of Guatemala's “indigenous problem” and the historic use of racism in state making. Here the unstable categories of ethnic and national identity are linked to Cold War geopolitics and binaries, which the author suggests obscure the ethnic fluidity and transculturality present throughout Guatemalan history. Chapter 5 explores the youth organizations that secretly coalesced as the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajadores in 1949. Chapter 6 addresses the traditional representation and periodization of the revolutionary democratic decade to question how radical it was. Disrupting monolithic conclusions, this chapter uncovers a variety of experiences dependent on social or ethnic identity and concludes that a multiplicity of historical narratives contributes to a more just, democratic nation (p. 166).Part 3, “New Actors,” uncovers critical pieces of the revolutionary story. Chapter 7 asks how medical experimentation by US doctors, with the full knowledge of President Arévalo, could have occurred within a revolutionary context. The authors expose key continuities with prerevolutionary history, including racism, oppression, and compromise. Chapter 8 examines the Instituto Indigenista Nacional de Guatemala (IING) as a neocolonial institution. While well-intentioned, IING employees ultimately were part of a larger process that continued to replicate hierarchy and racist relationships.Part 4 focuses on “new memories.” Chapter 9 reveals links across the 1980s and 1990s between communities of resistance, self-determination efforts, and state repression, including questions of gender roles, religious identity, and social justice. Chapter 10 explores the current resurgence of revolutionary ideals in the devastating civil war's aftermath, which includes continued social violence, political and legal impunity, corruption, and ever-deepening poverty.As Guatemalans face neoliberalism, corruption, and dashed hopes following the peace accords, Out of the Shadow demonstrates that revolutionary ideals continue to resonate across the decades. These essays illuminate sociopolitical continuity and disruption, shifting memories, and new stories. The complexity offered here suggests that the revolution reformed existing institutional structures rather than replacing them. This critical volume excavates the forgotten revolutions while also attending to their enduring legacies and potency within the present, which suggest that revolutionary ideals remain even more urgent.

المسار الدستوري والسياق الثوري في تونس : قراءة سوسيولوجية = The Constitutional Process and the Revolutionary Context in Tunisia : A Sociological Reading

المسار الدستوري | السياق الثوري | الوعي الدستوري | النقاشات العمومية | الصراع السياسي | Constitutional Process | Revolutionary Context | Constitutional Consciousness | Public Debates | Political Conflicts

Por uma leitura político-militar da Revolução Russa: o Estado Soviético e o comunismo de guerra permanente

O presente artigo centra energia na leitura da política soviética construída no calor revolucionário, isto é, o ato hermenêutico que parte do desdobramento da lama das batalhas reais e imaginadas travadas no afã da construção de um estado proletário. Trata-se de descarga político-militar com o propósito de salvaguardar o projeto de superação do capitalismo, diante do iminente perigo da contrarrevolução. Nesse sentido, o autoritarismo soviético foi, com efeito, de matriz militar, carregado de disciplina e hierarquia belicosa, genealogia antes encontrada nos manuais militares do que nos livros de política marxista emancipatória. É o que explica a emergência de uma sociedade militarizada da cabeça aos pés. O objetivo principal deste artigo é o de interpretação político-militar acerca do processo revolucionário russo de 1917, a fim de constituir uma paisagem do real vivido com base nas práticas belicosas que acompanharam a formação do Estado Soviético. Assim, é possível, ao longo do texto, inferir que há uma importante singularidade no contexto revolucionário em tela, momento de emergência das guerras totais, que impactou no devir do primeiro Estado Socialista do século XX.

Transactions with Disorder: American Pastoral and To the Lighthouse

Readings of American Pastoral commonly center on the failures or limitations of the American dream, on the multi-generational immigrant experience of upward mobility and ethnic assimilation, and/or on the political and cultural convulsions of the 1960s. To set the book beside To the Lighthouse is to place it within a broader transnational context and subsume Roth the historian of twentieth-century America to Roth the metahistorian and metaphysician reflecting on forces of destruction inimical to civilized order and operative across time. The aim of this essay is twofold: to situate American Pastoral more firmly within the revolutionary context of the 1960s and at the same time, through Woolf, to consider its historicism as it extends beyond the story of the Levovs and America to a disorder latent in things and capable of erupting at any time.

Nuevas experiencias de lectura para la Unidad Popular: la “novela tabloide” … Y corría el billete (1972) de Guillermo Atías

This article examines Guillermo Atias’ self-proclaimed “tabloid novel”… Y corria el billete (1972), which was published during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government through the new state publishing house Quimantu. I argue that Atias presents his work as an example of how print media may move beyond traditional journalistic and literary frameworks within a revolutionary context. …Y corria el billete may in this sense be considered to enter into dialogue with Quimantu regarding the importance of creating multilayered educational materials that are able to cater to –and politically influence– a diverse readership with different levels of commitment to Chile’s “road to socialism”.

Interplay between labour dynamics, accounting and accountability practices during the rise of a political logic: an Egyptian case study

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to provide a political explanation of management, accounting and control (MAC) practices in a traditional and unstable African setting. This was done by exploring the influence of latest revolutionary politics in Egypt along with labour dynamics in the context.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically, the study uses the institutional logics perspective to understand the effects of higher order institutions on corporate management and workers at the micro level. Methodologically, the study adopts an interpretative case study approach. Data were collected using a triangulation of interviews, documents and observations.FindingsThe study finds that volatile political settings can have different contradictory implications for MAC practices. It also concludes that revolutionary events play a central role not only in the configuration of MAC practices but also in the mobilisation of labour resistance to these practices.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature by investigating the different appearances of MAC practices in a volatile, political or revolutionary context, in contrast to highly investigated stabilised Western contexts. This broadens the definition of the social in the area of accounting and control.

Women’s Work: Photographers of the Sandinista Revolution

This article focuses on the early careers of Margarita Montealegre and Claudia Gordillo, both of whom produced substantial photographic documentation of Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution (1978–1990). Working around the ideological strictures of that moment, I propose reading their work against inherited notions on how political imagery should operate in a revolutionary context. Rejecting the demand for sensationalist images, Montealegre and Gordillo turned their gaze toward fellow citizens, using the camera as a means to observe Nicaraguan society up-close. Aesthetically and politically, each pursued different, yet intersecting directions in their work, exploring how revolutionary ideals, and social change intertwined. The Revolution marked a moment of profound historic change, whereby identities were shaped and political imaginaries formed in ways that remain consequential to date. Revisiting these photographers’ archives now, across the span of four decades, reveals previously overlooked contingent details and an ample range of interpretative possibilities.

Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Ecclesiastical Authority at the End of the Imperial Regime

In 1917/1918, a final effort was made to reform edinoverie, the branch of the Russian Orthodox Church which allowed the usage of the anathematised Old Believer ritual. Founded in 1800, edinoverie’s long 19th century had given rise to a series of problems intimately connected with issues of ritual, confessional identity, and ecclesiastical authority: increasingly, edinovertsy and churchmen sought reform in order to resolve these problems. In the first half of 1917, lay and clerical edinovertsy pushed forward with a radical plan “from below” to discipline edinoverie religious life, to renegotiate the place of edinoverie in the Church, and to restructure the nature of episcopal authority. This was most clearly manifested in the second national edinoverie congress of July 1917, whose main purpose was to propose a plan of reform to the Local Church Council. In this, edinoverie reflects the “church revolution” in mainstream Russian Orthodoxy, whereby parishioner and priestly groups took the initiative from the Holy Synod and episcopate to assert control over the Church. However, these plans were ultimately rejected by the Council in favour of a moderate settlement: the way in which the radical scheme challenged the authority of the Orthodox episcopate was looked at askance in the revolutionary context, where ecclesiastical authority was disintegrating across the Russian state and its previous dominions. In the case of edinoverie, therefore, the Council refused to legislate the consequences of the church revolution: however, its chosen solution ultimately collapsed under the pressure of Soviet persecutions.