Student Question
Were the European revolutions from 1789 to 1989 more similar or different?
Quick answer:
When deciding whether the revolutions in Europe between 1789 and 1989 had more similarities or differences, you should consider that there are bound to be a great number of differences, since these revolutions took place in different locations and across a two-hundred-year timespan.
I'd probably be more inclined to point to differences in these revolutions than similarities. While you can certainly draw parallels and shared continuities between various revolutions, be aware that you are still looking across a two-hundred-year timespan. Even in the case of just one of these revolutions (for example, the Revolutions of 1848), even then, you shouldn't expect the revolutionary movement in France to be identical to the revolutions in Italy or Germany. Local context matters a great deal where the study of history is concerned.
Now, applying that criticism to a two-hundred-year timespan—stretching from the French Revolution of 1789 into the twentieth century, looking forward not just to the Russian and Bolshevik Revolutions, but also to the revolutions against Soviet authority—with that kind of time span, there is going to be an extraordinarily wide range in variance, just based on how dramatically politics, culture, and society evolved across that...
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span of time.
That being said, continuities do exist and are well worth tracing and being aware of in and of themselves. The French Revolution, for example, restructured an antiquated political system according to enlightenment values (and only became more radical from there). In the process, it also continued to inspire liberals across the nineteenth century, who still fought for many of those ideals even after they had been suppressed with Napoleon's defeat. In this respect, historians can justifiably draw a direct line between the Revolution of 1789 into the Revolutions of 1848.
Beyond that, we can trace even more generalized thematic continuities and comparisons. The Russian Revolution and the French Revolution have been the subject to much comparison over the years, concerning, among other things, the history of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence (even to the point of civil war), as well as the dramatic political and societal restructuring that ensued and even the specter of the revolutionary dictatorship.
Similarly, you can even draw points of comparison between the Russian Revolution that ultimately resulted in the creation of the Soviet Union and the Revolutions of 1989 that sought to escape the Iron Curtain. In all these cases, you will usually find an ideal of political and societal progress—of overcoming antiquated, autocratic, or even tyrannical social structures to build something better in its place.