What if the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had not happened?

Great Debates
1

There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917: The February Revolution, which supplanted the tsar and established the Provisional Government led by Dr. Alexander Kerensky; and the October Revolution, which brought to power the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party and paved the way for Communism and the Soviet Union. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution_of_1917

What if the second revolution had never happened?

Putting this in perspective – except for the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and Oktobrists (constitutional monarchists), all the major political parties and factions on the scene were socialists – although they had very different ideas about what “socialism” meant. Kerensky’s Social Revolutionaries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist-Revolutionary_Party), for instance, were mainly based in the peasantry and their main issue was land reform – meaning, they wanted to take land from the landlords and distribute it to the peasants in family smallholdings*; whereas the Bolsheviks wanted the land nationalize or collectivized. So, even without a Bolshevik revolution, what emerged might have been, or called itself, a “socalist republic” of some kind or other.

Even after the Bolshevik Revolution, there were free elections (they had been scheduled before the Revolution) to a Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting a new constitution. The Bolsheviks received only between 22% and 25% of the vote, while the SR’s got a majority – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly:

Lenin allowed the Constituent Assembly to meet for one day and then had it dissolved at gunpoint. But if Lenin had not been in power at that moment, what kind of republic might the Assembly have produced for Russia?

There were also the “soviets” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_(council) – mostly impromptu, self-organized committees of workers, soldiers, etc., which, at this point, were independent of any political party. A lot of people believed the soviets should be given real political authority, or argued that they already had it, and legitimately (the situation was confused and chaotic, of course). In practice the Bolshevik slogan “All power to the soviets!” turned out to be a euphemism for “All power to the Bolsheviks!” But suppose it had not turned out that way? Could the soviets have survived, as a bottom-up locus of authority independent of the state’s institutions? What would they have done with that power?
*On that note, see this recent thread on “distributism”: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=344179

2

No, and largely for the reason it fell in the fist place. No matter what they claimed, the non-Bolsheviks didn’t have a clue what they where doing. Incompetence would have claimed it. What followed did not have to be a Bolshevik regime, but I don’t believe it could have survived.

3

Probably some Tsarist claimant would have come in and taken over. There were quite a few of them.

4

Pretty much what Guinastasia said. Without the iron fist and large body count I don’t think the various Social Revolutionaries would have held onto power for very long. My guess is the White Russians (Royalists) would have won out in the end and probably put someone on the throne eventually. Perhaps they would have managed to put more constraints on the throne though a la the UK (constitutional monarchy or something like that).

In the long term I think Russia would have been better off (or at least a lot less folks would have died posing for gunfire)…until Germany invaded them at the beginning of WWII. At that point they may not have survived.

-XT

5

Czarist Russia was an Empire, composed of many diverse peoples & cultures.

I suspect ethnic cleansing & civil war would have been non-stop, right up to 2005.

And the Nazis rose to power as much on anti-Communism as racism. Without Lenin & Co., Hitler would have been a forgotten barfly.

(I like that last mental image. Hitler face down in a puddle of gin.) :slight_smile:

6

First, there was no Bolshevik revolution; it was simply a power grab, coup d’etat, at the end of October 1917.

The one and only real successfull Russian Revolution happened in February 1917. Power passed into the hands of Provisional Gov’t, until elections for Constituent Assembly, scheduled in one year for February 1918.

It is extremely important to keep in mind that the Provisional Gov’t was not only thoroughly Socialist, it was International Socialist, which means it ultimately put the interests of World Socialist movement ahead of Russian interests. It was committed to continue Russian involvement in WWI, in solidarity with French and British Socialists, which were absolutely committed to the war effort (just like German Socialists were on the other side). It was committed to advance the Socialist movement beyond Russia after the war.

Premier Kerensky’s party was called Socialists - Revolutionaries, which means they were both Socialists and Revolutionaries, equally and at the same time. They exiled the Czar to Siberia. They introduced Comissars into the Army, to moderate between officers and soldiers. They abolished death penalty, even for treason at the front line. They refused to put industry on the war footing and announce mobilization of workers at the factories, as much as they were committed to the war effort. If there was a bright prospect for the future World Socialist movement, that was it.

That’s what Lenin Bolsheviks destroyed.

Through 1917 Bolsheviks were making repeated attempts to take power: in April, June, July, finally in October. And through all this time, the Socialists in Prov. Gov’t were convinced that the real power grab will come from the Right, not from their narrow-minded radical cousins on the Left, the Bolsheviks.

So, the world would be very different without Bolshevik coup. Russia would probably remain a backward country, but firmly integrated in the League of Nations and other future European Unions, in unison with progressive European political movements.

7

Hell, I just remembered that at that time, the heir to the throne was still alive, so they probably could have gotten the Tsar’s son, Tsarevich Alexei, on the throne in a few years if he survived.

(That was the plan when they first forced the Tsar to abdicate. But since his son was a hemophiliac, he didn’t think it would be a good idea for his son to be on the throne and himself in exile, so he abdicated in his son’s name and the throne passed to his brother. His brother, realizing that things were pretty shitty, said he’d only take the throne if he was asked to by the Constitutional Assembly.)

8

A departure here to come back to reality.

Hitler’s main rallying point, for those who may have forgotten, was not the Communists, but the limitations placed upon Germany by France and the rest of Europe as a result of Germany’s defeat in WWI. Hitler, and the National Socialists, gained support throughout the 20’s and 30’s by promoting German nationalism against the Treaty of Versaille and the reemrgence of Germany as a power to be dealt with. That the rest of the “PC” world stood by and acclimated to Hitler was just further incentive for Hitler to keep moving forward.

The fact that wheelbarrows of money were required to purchase a loaf of bread also may have had something to do with it.

Thanks, now back to the main topic.

9

Actually, I disagree with Waterman. Hitler didn’t come to power specifically as an Anti-Communist, but that aspect was crucial to getting support from the old-line conservatives in Germany. Because fo the radicalizing and popular nature of German plitics in that day, those conservatives felt they had only two choices: allow the Communists to take over (unacceptable) or allow Hitler to take over. In other words, damned if you do and damned if your don’t. In retrospect, Hitler might (and this isn’t really clear given how nasty most of the Communists were) have been the worse choice, but no one knew it at the time.

But back to the OP. It still seems to me that the Socialists simply didn’t have a unified plan, nor a populace all that interested in their programs. The people wanted the Tsarists out, but had no real goals beyond that. Because of that, I don’t feel it would have survived as an effective state: it was trying to control too much with too little. And the fact is that Bolsheviks succeeded because no one was really willing to support the Socialists, a product of the Socialist’s continuation of WWI.

10

That is the truth but not the whole truth. Neither the February nor the October Revolution was simply imposed on a bewildered people by a clique of radical intellectuals. There was – and had been for decades – a considerable amount of socialist feeling on the ground in Russia (at least, in the cities and among industrial workers and soldiers; and, to a great extent, among the peasants). And much of that feeling supported the Bolshevik version of socialism – note that the Bolsheviks were able to get roughly a quarter of the Constituent Assembly vote (and the showing of the Constitutional Democrats was negligible by comparison). Furthermore, socialistic institutions such as the soviets and trade unions had been organized by the workers on the ground; they were not the creation of any political party.

You’ve got that just backwards. The Bolsheviks were the only committed internationalist party in the field – that is, committed to the idea of international proletarian solidarity, to the idea that “the worker has no country.” In fact, Lenin, who believed socialism in only one country was impossible, regarded the Russian Revolution itself as unimportant, except as the spark (Iskra – the name of the journal Lenin published) which would ignite a Europe-wide socialist revolution. From the Bolsheviks’ point of view (and even a non-socialist, viewing the situation dispassionately, might draw the same conclusion), it was the socialist parties in the French and German parliaments who had betrayed the internationalist principle by voting for war credits to finance a conflict that would put workers in the field to die and would serve only the interests of their respective countries’ ruling classes. And the Provisional Government, in refusing to make a separate peace with Germany, was repeating that mistake.

11

First of all, Socialists-Revolutionaries received almost twice the number of votes the Bolshevics did at free elections for Consituent Assembly, so the statement that 'no one was really willing to support the Socialists’ is factually incorrect. Bolsheviks aborted the Assembly at the point of a gun.

A whole lot of people were willing to die to get Bolsheviks out, too. The bloody Civil War lasted 4 years.

Bolsheviks co-opted a lot from right wing agenda. Right wingers wanted ‘honorable withdrawal’ from war. Bolsheviks just capitulated. Right wingers wanted discipline, total mobilization and death penalty. Bolsheviks introduced ‘war communism’, followed by 70 years of terror.

12

They all were committed to International Socialist movement. They all were members of the Second International. The only disagreement was about means of taking power and ways of using it.

‘Iskra’ was not Lenin’s paper but Russian Socialist paper, that often censored, refused and criticized Lenin’s contributions.

As far as Lenin’s anti-war stand, he once said that the War was the best thing he had to hope for, although he believed that Franz Joseph and Nicolas II 'will never give us the pleasure’.

Of course, he wanted the war to break for his own purposes.

Lenin was an opportunist determined to grab power by any means necessary.

13

It went a bit deeper than that. Not all members of the Second International were equally internationalist – and the organization dissolved when the war broke out. From your own link:

:confused: Lenin was on the staff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra

Haven’t read that before but it’s entirely plausible. However, what Lenin hoped would be achieved by the outbreak of the war (international class war/revolution) was entirely different from what Kerensky and the SRs hoped to achieve by staying in the war (some kind of victory for Russia, with at least no loss of territory or indemnities to Germany). Internationalist goals vs. nationalist goals.

It hardly bears mentioning, of course, that Lenin was entirely wrong in his assumption that all Europe was ripe for revolution.

14

Irrelevant. I did not say that the Bolsheviks were more popular.

That actually helps my argument. Simple put, no one really went out to stop the Bolsheviks except the Whites; despite their relative unpopularity, Bolsheviks were simply able to dominate everyone by sheer bullying. Can you imagine, for example, the Greens or Libertarians walking into Congress, pointing guns all around, and taking over? No one would listen to them.

In Russia at that time, one could plausibly do that, and the Bolsheviks did.

15

Edit: Should have noted that sociliast militias did oppose the Bolsheviks in the ensuing civil war, but not immediately, consistently, or with sufficient force.

16

Again, that is substantially true but an oversimplification. Even Lenin’s most hostile biographers (e.g., Paul Johnson, in Modern Times) acknowledge that Lenin was a True Believer in his cause, and did not identify it with himself. He was interested in power, not glory (the people were to see even less of him, during his rule, than they had of the tsar), and even power he was willing to yield if that would help the revolution. From A.J.P. Taylor’s introduction to teh 1977 Penguin edition of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World:

17

True, the country was most likely heading into some kind of dictatorship. Kerensky had basically dictatorial powers, de facto. Army generals were offering themselves for the position (Kornilov, in particular).

18

Kerensky and the SR stayed in war as an obligation to Allies. There were even rumors that February revolution was sponsored by the British.

It was their weakest point. They would say the war is imperialistic, wrong, immoral and should be ended but… not just now.

19

There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Gerrmany would survive longer with Russia in the fight. Germany would sue for peace even sooner. Thus Russia would be a part to a Versaille treaty and Russia would have popularly supported and elected Socialist gov’t. If only they managed to stay in power for just one more year…

20

Boris Savinkov, among others.