Riot, rebellion, revolution: organized violence of citizens in the context of modernization processes

The article is aimed at studying revolutionary tides - series of successive revolutions as ra­tional actions organized against the current government, involving the masses and including strongarm methods, to change the existing institutional setting. We consider revolutionary events in the context of key modernization processes: bureaucratization, secularization, capi­talist industrialization and separation of powers based on collegially. The attitude to such pro­cesses is the reason to elites split and the spate of conflicts in cities, places with a high density of heterogeneous population. The research focuses on a comparison of the events that took place in Prussia and Russia in 1848, Syria and Jordan in 2011. We have used the macrohis- torical approach as the main method, and the complex of historical and cross-cultural studies, memoirs and publicism as the empirical base. Comparison of economic, demographic, cul­tural, historical, ideological and military factors makes it possible to single out general and specific trends in the emergence and development of revolutionary situations, and to explain the development of authoritarian or democratic regimes at societies which "survived" the rev­olution.