Revolutionary Pairs

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In the history of revolution, there are few figures more widely known than Karl Marx, who began the "working-class" revolution with his poignant criticism of capitalist economic systems. With the help of his close friend and colleague, writer Friedrich Engels, Marx's free-thinking spirit was inspired, and his writings were expanded. This friendship began one of the most significant social revolutions in modern history. Four of the most influential revolutions were led by pairs: V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky (Russia), Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (China), and Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Cuba). Marx and Engels, while the godfathers of three of those revolutions, participated in only one revolution, but did not, in their respective lifetimes, witness the success they had worked so hard to inspire. The members of each pair were completely dissimilar, save for their devotion to the cause. In Revolutionary Pairs, author Larry Ceplair tells the stories of five revolutionary struggles through the lens of these famous figures, examining their political relationships and personal histories to explain what led to the phenomenon of their radical companionships. While previous works on revolutionaries attempt to perform a psychoanalytic study of the pairs or individuals' behaviors, Ceplair takes a more practical approach, choosing instead to focus on the natural order of events and elements of personal history that the pairs shared. Some of these pairings were politically convenient, such as Lenin's contentious partnership with Trotsky during the Bolshevik revolution. Many were born of other factors, such as the mentorship between Ghandi and Nehru, or were simply a combination of respect and fear, which was the case for Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong during the communist revolution in China. Ceplair's comparative exploration of these relationships sheds light on the complex nature of modern revolutionary history."--