Dr. Jack Goldstone

I've told you that in order for a revolution to succeed, it's pretty much necessary for a large portion of the old regime administrative and military elite to defect or stand aside.

Now, if there's a charismatic revolutionary leader who has been mobilizing the people and can turn them against the remnants of the old regime and just kind of scare everybody to leave, just like the French Revolution went from initially nobles and commoners meeting and voting to throw out feudalism,

Then it kind of went further.

There were peasant uprisings and riots in the cities, and they ended up guillotining the king and the queen and going after the nobles.

Then all the nobles fled, and then it was essentially wide open for a popular, rising, charismatic military leader, Napoleon, to come in and say, this is a mess.

And I'm going to create order.

I'm going to put in a new set of laws.

I'm going to recruit a new military.

I'm going to recruit a new government.

And we're going to create a grand new France.

And he did a pretty good job until he got a little cocky and decided to invade Russia.

But he really kind of made a clean slate.

The French Revolution changed the calendar, creating new names for the months.

They changed the administration.

They kind of moved the courts and local government from old cities that had been associated with the monarchy to new commercial cities that were better aligned with the revolution.

But that's an extreme case.

And that's kind of why the French Revolution is a model.

If we look at what happened in Ukraine in 2014, the revolution of dignity or the Maidan revolution, you had hundreds of thousands of people meeting in the central square in the capital of Kyiv.

And there were shots fired on both sides, the protesters stayed strong, and the military started to literally defect and disperse.

And the ruler of Ukraine ran to Moscow, where his friends were, and left everything behind.