Perhaps this was the most powerful wave of interest in revolutions and the time of creating a systematic scientific approach to this social phenomenon, which continued to nourish the enthusiasm of researchers, slowly fading in the 80s. A new explosion of interest arose along with the “revolutions” of the late 80s – early 90s in Eastern Europe, causing new thoughts and discussions about the phenomenon of revolution in the history of mankind. After 2004, this interest was fueled by new events and data for the analysis of the so-called. “Color revolutions” in several states of the post-Soviet space, and so on. “Arab spring”, which, of course, will bring to life new generalizing work.

The most common approach to systematizing historiography to date has been proposed by Jack Goldstone, an American political scientist. This classification, of course, is not the only one and did not appear from scratch, combining and reworking existing among researchers, however, it is the most influential. This systematization is based on the so-called generations of researchers of the theory of revolution and has gained popularity and developed independently by many authors. The division of these generations occurs not only on a temporal basis, but also based on certain methodological principles that are attributed to the authors. In connection with this division, some representatives of the generation of the 60s fell into the group of the 20—30s, and P. Sorokin was attributed to the second generation. Thus, the first generation is associated with a historical approach and philosophical-historical interpretation. The second is with modernization theory and structural-functional analysis. The third generation, according to the developers of this approach, distinguishes state-centric models.

The first generation, from the point of view of adherents of this concept, refers to the 1920—30s. – “The generation of the natural history of the revolution” (after the title of Edwards’s work “The Natural History of Revolution”), to which belonged Edwards, Brinton, and Petty. To the second generation, Jack Goldstone ranked Ted Garr, Chalmers Johnson, Samuel Huntington, Charles Tilly (“From Mobilization to Revolution” (1978). To the third generation – Harry Eckstein “The Etiology of Internal Wars” (1965), Anthony Oberschall “Growing Expectations and Political Disorder” (1969), Edward Muller “Applicability of the Theory of Opportunity to the Analysis of Political Violence” (1972), Barbara Salert “Revolutions and revolutionaries” (1976), Theda Skocpol. J. Goldstone called last work “the crown of the third generation” [Goldstone, 59].

In the 90s Jack Goldstone said that “the third generation of theories of revolution is leaving the scene”: “not a single generally accepted theory of the fourth generation has yet been created, but the contours of such a theory are clear” [Goldstone, 99]. As targets for this fourth generation, Goldstone proposed revising all Skocpol’s key assumptions. “The stability of the regime in it will be considered as an unobvious state and substantial attention will be paid to the conditions for the existence of regimes for a long time; issues of identity and ideology, connections and leadership will occupy an important place; revolutionary processes and consequences will be seen as the result of the interaction of numerous forces. More importantly, it is possible that the fourth generation theories will combine the results of case studies, rational choice models and quantitative data analysis, and a generalization of these theories will cover situations and events that were not even mentioned in theories of the revolution of past generations” [Goldstone, 103].