Every revolution begins with a story, an invitation to shed old chains and step into a new age of justice. Ethiopia’s 1974 revolution arrived amid famine, unemployment, and the long shadow of Emperor Haile Selassie’s ancient monarchy. Soldiers grumbled in their barracks while students marched through the heart of Addis Ababa, chanting for bread, land, and the rights of the poor. Into this ferment stepped the Derg, a committee of young army officers who promised to end the world’s oldest feudal order and lift the nation’s forgotten millions into a new dawn of dignity.

The Derg’s message was direct and intoxicating “Land to the tiller!” No more would peasants break their backs for absentee landlords and corrupt officials. This was a revolution, they said, for those who had always bent low, an Ethiopia where class and privilege would be abolished, and every citizen would finally belong. For university students and the urban poor, it was as if history itself had knocked on the door, calling them to help remake the world.

At first, the air was thick with possibility. In the cities, Selassie’s portraits were ripped from schoolroom walls and tossed onto bonfires. The estates of the nobility were seized and distributed on paper, as villagers gathered in the shade to hear promises of land and justice. In open-air meetings and on radio broadcasts, the revolution’s orators spoke of equality, the dignity of honest labour, and an end to hunger.

Ordinary Ethiopians, many for the first time, were told they could be citizens, not subjects; architects of their own future, not passengers on history’s margins.

Two-faced

Yet the Derg’s vision was always two-faced. The promise of equality masked a hunger for control. The Derg’s leaders, soldiers unaccustomed to the habits of self-government, proclaimed themselves the vanguard of the people. Critics, dissenters, and rivals were swiftly branded enemies of the revolution. Even former allies who questioned the pace or means of the transformation were painted as counterrevolutionaries, a word that would come to mark thousands for death.

Beneath the slogans, a new bureaucracy of fear spread quickly. The Derg set up neighbourhood block committees, peasant associations, and people’s militias, tasking them with rooting out disloyalty. Anyone could be denounced, by a neighbour, a jealous rival, or an overzealous party official. Suspicion became a civic duty.

In the countryside, party agents arrived with new rules for land reform, but these often meant forced collectivisation, impossible quotas, and loyalty oaths at gunpoint. Peasants who questioned the orders were accused of sabotaging socialism and could be arrested, or worse.

The revolution’s leaders, meanwhile, moved to secure their own position. Power gathered around a single man, Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose rise was as swift as it was ruthless. Mengistu understood the language of fear.

In a chilling ceremony before a crowd, he smashed a vial of red liquid on the stage and declared it was the blood of their enemies. The message was not lost on the watching thousands.

Rhetoric

As months passed, the rhetoric of equality twisted into a tool for the new elite. The revolution’s architects said they acted in the name of the people, but in practice, the people meant those loyal to the regime. New privileges appeared, not for peasants or workers, but for the revolution’s enforcers, who received land, authority, and the right to judge their neighbours.

The Derg’s central committee made all important decisions, shielded from criticism or accountability. The machinery of state expanded: more spies, more checkpoints, more executions. In Addis Ababa, party officials lived in confiscated mansions while the poor queued for ration cards and news of missing relatives.

Ethiopia’s dream of collective uplift became a nightmare of collective suspicion. Schoolteachers, priests, even children could be denounced as class enemies. The Red Terror campaigns of the late 1970s saw tens of thousands killed, with some estimates ranging far higher, as the Derg unleashed violence to root out opposition both real and imagined.

The rhetoric never changed. Every bullet, every raid, every grave was justified as an act of revolutionary necessity, a step toward the radiant future. Meanwhile, famine returned, as forced collectivisation and war tore through the countryside. Millions starved as food rotted in storage or was redirected to feed the army and the party elite.

For the generation who had marched, sung, and dreamed, the revolution’s promises dissolved into suspicion and silence. One former student would recall years later that they believed they were building a new Ethiopia, but instead built their own prison. By the 1980s, the Derg had become everything it once claimed to oppose: a small, fearful elite ruling by decree, blind to suffering and insulated by the myth of their own righteousness.

Not forever

But revolutions do not last forever. By the late 1980s, Ethiopia was exhausted, battered by civil war, famine, and a collapsing economy. Rebel movements gathered in the north and east, drawing strength from years of brutality and neglect. Internationally, the tide had turned against Marxist regimes. The Soviet Union, once Mengistu’s patron, withdrew its support as its own empire crumbled. Mengistu responded with more repression, but the state machinery was running on fumes.

The final years of the Derg were marked by desperation. The army, once a symbol of revolutionary pride, was stretched thin, fighting guerrilla wars on multiple fronts. Urban dissent, once crushed, began to resurface. In 1991, as rebel forces closed in on Addis Ababa, Mengistu fled into exile, leaving behind a country hollowed out by ideology, violence, and broken promises.

What remained was a landscape of loss. An estimated half a million had died in purges, famines, and civil war; millions more were displaced or orphaned. The party elites who had promised a new world slipped away, leaving ordinary Ethiopians to rebuild from the ruins.

Today, Ethiopia still reckons with that legacy, of hope betrayed, power abused, and a nation’s future mortgaged to the dreams of men who believed themselves above the people they ruled.

History is full of such moments, when the language of hope is turned back against the people who trusted it most. In Ethiopia, the dream of equality became the instrument of a new hierarchy; the promise of dignity, a prelude to terror. The tragedy endures in silence, in the memories of those who survived, and in the warning it offers to any nation tempted to mistake the rhetoric of liberation for its reality.

This history invites readers to reflect on the gap between revolutionary promise and lived reality. Through the lens of Ethiopia, it offers a warning for any society captivated by the language of liberation yet blind to its dangers.