On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military — led by Augusto Pinochet and supported by the United States — overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The seventeen years of dictatorship that followed were brutal. And they’ve managed to erase much of the historical memory about what came before them — that is, what took place during those three years of Allende’s Popular Unity government.

In her new book, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile, historian Marian Schlotterbeck brings to life the spirit of popular revolution that characterized the thousand days of Allende’s government. While the Popular Unity government often preached moderation, it unleashed radical changes from the bottom up — raising the hopes of the historically oppressed that society could be remade for their benefit rather than the “Yankee imperialists” or traditional landed elite. The September 11 coup crushed those popular democratic dreams.

In the following interview — which has been condensed and edited for clarity, and first appeared on the radio program Against the Grain —  Sasha Lilley speaks with Schlotterbeck about Chile’s three-year experiment with a socialism that was both top-down and bottom-up.