The taste of better things excites revolt

It is not as much constant, totalitarian oppression that foments revolt among the oppressed as when the oppressed first taste the possibility of a better future.

In both France and Russia the land-hungry peasants owned almost exactly one-third of the agricultural land at the outbreak of revolution, and most of that land was acquired during the generation or two preceding the revolution. It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.… The most dangerous moment for the regime of the Politburo will be when a considerable improvement in the economic conditions of the Russian masses has been achieved and the iron totalitarian rule somewhat relaxed.
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It would seem then that the most fertile ground for the propagation of a mass movement is a society with considerable freedom but lacking the palliatives of frustration. It was precisely because the peasants of eighteenth century France, unlike the peasants of Germany and Austria, were no longer serfs and already owned land that they were receptive to the appeal of the French Revolution. Nor perhaps would there have been a Bolshevik revolution if the Russian peasant had not been free for a generation or more and had had a taste of the private ownership of land.^[1]

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