ABSTRACT
The countryside, and the countryside alone, can provide the revolutionary bases from which the revolution can go forward to final victory. While the heretical statement must have puzzled some, the fact is that it merely dramatizes a familiar trend in red revolutionism, one at least as old as the asserted peasant character of the Communist Chinese insurgency. With few notable exceptions, as in the Palestine terror, incumbent regimes appear remarkably capable of controlling urban insurgencies. The most sustained, most successful insurgency against even these ruthless rulers was waged in one of the most backward rural areas in Europe, in Yugoslavia. Even if the Yugoslavs did not stand alone—for the Allies aided them—the fact of backwardness may have had much to do with their exceptional triumph. The successes of rural-based insurgencies in our age are not only impressive in comparison with the fortunes of non-rural insurgencies, but downright upsetting in their implications for conventional thinking about revolution.
