Counterrevolutionary: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

A counterrevolutionary is anyone who opposes a revolution, particularly those who act after a revolution to try to overturn or reverse it in full or in part.

Monarchists and supporters of the ancien regime following the French Revolution were counterrevolutionaries as were the monarchies that put down the various Revolutions of 1848.

In France before World War I anyone who "opposed democratic ideas, parliamentary government, trade-unions, or socialism" was considered counterrevolutionary. The White Army and its supporters who tried to defeat the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and the Freikorps who crushed the attempted Spartacist uprising in Germany in 1919 were counterrevolutionaries as well.

More recently the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion into Cuba was conducted by counterrevolutionaries who hoped to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. In the 1980s the US government sponsored Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Contras were called such because they were counterrevolutinaries. Some counterrevolutionaries are former revolutionaries who supported the initial overthrow of the old regime but came to differ with those who ultimately came to power. Thus, some of the Contras had fought with the Sandinistas to overthrow Anastasio Somoza and some of those who oppose Castro also opposed Batista.

The word is often used interchangeably with reactionary however the Nazis and Italian fascists who claimed that their regimes were revolutionary used the term counterrevolutionary to describe their opponents even if those opponents were advocates of a Marxist revolution. Similarly, the clerics who took power following the Iranian Revolution would describe all those who opposed them as counterrevolutionary even those who were Communists. The term, therefore, should be understood in a relative sense rather than as an absolute concept.

References

(1) Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism, Social Forces in England and France (1815-1870), Prof. J. Salwyn Schapiro, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., NY, l949. pg 364.