A fascinating and generally overlooked feature of the 1989 protests is the role of political commemorations in the mobilization of protest. In both Eastern Europe and China, students and dissident groups took to the streets in connection with historical anniversaries, funerals or memorial services and staged public expressions of discontent to which a broader, relatively unorganized and previously uninvolved populace responded. Judged by the standards of much social movement theory, this kind of protest activity seems irregular and unconventional.

In this paper we consider political commemorations as ritual practices and explain why under certain conditions such practices may be used to mobilize protest in authoritarian regimes. Political rituals are important political indicators in authoritarian societies because they are public events in societies that are generally privatized and because they provide a relatively accessible indicator of social and political conflicts in societies in which repression and dissimulation often obstruct sociological research. Our argument is developed through a theoretical discussion of 1) the double-edged character of social rituals; 2) the conditions of collective action in state-socialist regimes; 3) the uses of rituals for staging protest; and 4) political commemorations as symbolic resources in collective action.