Long ’68: a radical protest and its enemies. Vainen R.

1968 was marked by an extraordinary scale of protests throughout the Western world. In terms of coverage, intensity and consequences, everything that happened then can be likened to the world revolution. Millions of strikes of French workers, radicalization of university youth, protests against the war in Vietnam, the struggle for minority rights and social justice of the Echo of the “long 68th” continues to resonate with modernity even fifty years later.

Richard Vainen, a historian and professor of the Royal College in London, sees in these events a not isolated milestone, but a whole historical period, which lasted from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s. This is the first attempt to consider in the transnational perspective the entire set of protest movements and uprisings that unfolded in the successful industrial countries of the United States of America, France, Great Britain and West Germany.

The author is trying to find out why the developed democracies of the West suddenly were on the verge of a nervous breakdown and how protests influenced various social groups of youth, women, workers, and sexual minorities. A separate place is given to the combination of revolutionary violence and political agreement, which demonstrated 1968 a year of radical requirements and unfulfilled hopes.