If one set out in the spring of 1980 to analyze recent revolutions – inspired, perhaps, by the dramatic events of the previous year in Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan – one's attention would have been drawn inexorably and indeed exclusively to the Third World. At that time, certainly, there did not seem to be anything particularly revolutionary occurring in the “Second World” of the Soviet bloc (and certainly not in the “First World” of advanced capitalist societies). Indeed, opposition movements in Eastern Europe seemed extraordinarily weak or simply nonexistent. The fact that powerful movements within and without the ruling Communist parties had been bloodily suppressed by the Soviet Union in Hungary in 1956 and rather more easily, but no less thoroughly, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 only underscored the apparently insurmountable difficulties in opposing the extant Communist regimes.