Simon Hall, Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys That Changed the World. London: Faber & Faber, 2024, 579 pages, INR 767.
Simon Hall offers a compelling narrative capturing some of the most pivotal moments, from Russia in 1917, China in 1934-49, and Cuba in 1956-59. In Three Revolutions, Hall adopts a dual lens of revolutionary leaders and Western journalists to recount some of the cornerstone events of the twentieth century. He pairs Lenin with John Reed, Mao with Edgar Snow, Castro with Herbert Matthews, offering an intertwined story of mediation and agency. The book offers an account of imaginative and communicative life rather than the material mechanics of revolution—dealing more with how revolutions are made, remembered, and transmitted across the world.
Use of Journey as a Metaphor
Hall uses three pivotal journeys that act as both narrative structure and metaphors, adding to historiographic innovation. The three arcs in the book—Vladimir Lenin’s journey to Petrograd, Mao Zedong’s Long March, and Fidel Castro’s voyage on the Granma—are historical events that are presented as symbols for ideological communication. For Hall, movement itself creates momentum: when the revolutionary returns from a place of displacement it signifies the re-entry of radical possibility and not simply personal redemption. Exile and return are presented as rites of revolutionary legitimacy.
Hall has chosen to begin telling the story of these revolutionary moments to perform a sort of narrative inversion where defeat or desperation transforms into heroism. Whether it be the sealed train from Zurich, the harsh forests of the Chinese hinterland, and the disastrous landing of the Granma, Hall presents these moments of utter defeat into episodes of revolutionary rejuvenation.
Communication in the Cog of Revolution
In contrast to these internal moments that allow revolutions to be sustained, journalism or communication are seen as a global phenomenon that promotes revolutions. Hall’s pairing of each revolutionary with a corresponding journalist who has a similar story of ‘journey’ to script history, promotes it to wider audiences. These journalists were mediators for the world. Edgar Snow’s account in Red Star Over China was essential for Mao and his ideas being circulated globally. Similarly, John Reed’s account, Ten Days That Shook the World, about Lenin and his struggle was pivotal for socialism to germinate in the United States. These texts were not simple chronicles but also helped consolidate these accounts of fleeting political action into the enduring myths of revolution and liberation. Hall argues that if these journalists were not part of these revolutionary moments, they would have been local or transitory in nature. He positions the pairings as co-producers of revolution and narrative, where outsiders helped confer legitimacy on such moments of societal change.
The Interplay of Power and Idealism
A central stage that is recurrent in Hall’s analysis is the interplay between power and idealism. He humanizes figures that have always been larger than life such as the leaders of authoritarian States. By using the moments of return from political exile to create change, he positions these men being in flux and still grappling with uncertainties. They do not know everything but have a deep-rooted conviction in their ideas. The transformation of these figures into State icons, from their moment of revolution through their journey, is not merely political but also symbolically portrayed through Hall’s writing. He suggests that no matter who the leader—Lenin, Mao or Castro—the institutionalization of revolutionary myth requires the ossification of the leaders into statesmen.
Revolutionary Typology
The book follows a triadic structure that constructs a typology of revolution of sorts—the Russian revolution was positioned to possess party discipline and ideology; the Chinese Revolution married moral education and rural mobilization under Mao; Cuba was a spectacle of the media and the charismatic leader, Fidel Castro. Each of these leaders and their revolutions were also supported by technological and geopolitical interventions. Lenin’s Revolution was aided with the telegraph and pamphlets; Mao’s Revolution was assisted by print-photo journalism, and Castro was helped by television. This allows readers to understand how communication technology shaped revolutions and international orders, and acted as mediators of struggle.
Revolution as a Cultural or Narrative Product
Three Revolutions offers an alternate understanding of revolution from the structural or Marxian perspective. The analysis stresses an understanding of revolution from a cultural and narrative approach that studies microhistory. A detailed recollection of the lives of individuals and their experiences is essential to revolutions and can be connected to macro historical transformations as well. Hall does a remarkable job of allowing narrative to form opinions rather than the dictates of theory. It allows for readers to think for themselves about contingency, mediation, and even the myth of such historical events and people. The narrative humanism that he offers is like the works of Eric Hobsbawm. This group of Marxist historians believes history to be a lived experience rather than a series of consequences to causality, offering an undogmatic interpretation of history.
Lack of Analytical Categories
While Hall’s ambitious work does manage to capture the finer details of his subject matter, the book glaringly lacks analytical depth. The writing style is largely narrative and often reads more like a story than a formal exploration. Secondly, and maybe the most obvious limitation of the book, is the absence of gender or class as categories of analysis. Three male leaders and their male chroniclers are used to tell stories of the revolution, and this in turn reproduces heroic masculine tropes. It also erases the experiences of the common people—women, peasants, and workers who were the main substance of the revolutions being studied. They remain peripheral and are often only seen as instruments through the lens of the ‘leaders.’ Additionally, the lack of structural conditions that made these revolutions possible are given very minor consideration, which makes revolution more dramatized and oriented towards a single individual alone.
Finally, an Anglo-centric lens of analysis cannot be missed in Hall’s work. By his reliance on Western media and their correspondents like Reed, Snow and Mathews, Hall allocates privilege and sees the Western gaze to be a medium through which revolutions gained legitimacy. His choice of journalists marginalizes non-Western local voices which could have added another vantage point to the narrative he was trying to foster, as expressed in the idea of transnational communication that the book explores. Three Revolutions, while aware of history as a form of narrative art, remains bound to the very mediation it explores.
Simon Hall’s acumen as a historian cannot be questioned, and the ease with which he manages to incorporate minor details in this work is impeccable. He writes elegantly without fanfare, and his analysis is interpretative rather than speculative. In making the book accessible to a wider public, analytical rigor however remains lost. Hall forces historians to see the innate connection between events and their representation—of the act of doing and telling. This remains a contemporary problem as well, making Three Revolutions as much about the modern history of media and political change.
Hall believes that political power may erode and calcify, however the myth associated with it endures—the emotions, the feelings, and the essence of revolutions still linger. The book is a great representation of how revolutions can be remembered into being, and how cultural history and political imagination can be combined to tell fascinating stories.
Priyanka Garodia is an MPhil graduate in International Relations and Political Science from Jadavpur University, specializing in international affairs, gender politics, and feminist international relations. With a BA and MA from Presidency University, and having studied at Sciences Po, Paris, she currently works as a research analyst at the Advanced Study Institute of Asia (ASIA) of the SGT University, Gurugram, India. Priyanka specializes in providing in-depth analysis and insights into South Asian political trends. Her book reviews have appeared in Rising Asia Journal.
