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The Burkinabé Revolution (also known as the August Fourth Revolution) was a miltary coup d'état that occurred in the West Africa nation of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) on August 4, 1983. The coup was led by radical leftist elements of the army and brought Marxist–Leninist and Pan-Africanist revolutionary and former-Upper Voltan Prime Minister Thomas Sankara to power as President, deposingJean-Baptiste Ouédraogo. Soon after, Sankara announced a "democratic and popular revolution" to rapidly transform society according to communist principles, and established the National Council of the Revolution (CSR) as the revolutionary vanguard, to set the premises for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
In 1987, Sankara would be assassinated in a counterrevolution led by Blaise Compaoré, who would overturn all of Sankara's socialist policies and rule as a dictator for 27 years until he himself was ousted in a coup in 2014.