A world without Lenin?

Great Debates
1

That is, without Lenin triumphant.

Inspired by this thread (though I ran a thread on the same question back in 2005). What if, in Russia in 1917, the February Revolution had happened but the October Revolution had not? Suppose the Germans never send the “plague bacillus” Lenin across the lines to the Finland Station; or he does get there, but his revolution simply never comes together.

The most numerous political power in Russia at that time was Kerensky’s Socialist-Revolutionary Party or SRs, which predominated in Kerensky’s government, and its main goal was land reform, i.e., breaking up landlords’ estates and distributing the land to the peasants in family smallholdings (not state-run collective farms).

In our timeline, Kerensky’s government scheduled elections to a Constituent Assembly for the end of the year. The Bolsheviks, after they took power, allowed the elections to go forward, but then dissolved the Assembly after it had met for one day. The election results were:

We may suppose this reflects, roughly, the level of popular support each party would have enjoyed if the October Revolution had never happened. The SRs enjoyed 41% – a solid plurality, but not a majority. The Bolsheviks had nearly a quarter of the vote. The Cadets or Constitutional Democracts (Western-style liberals) less than 3%.

Suppose the Constituent Assembly had been allowed to do what it was supposed to do, i.e., draft a new constitution for Russia? What would it have been like? Would the Bolsheviks have been brought into the new government, or remained a party-in-opposition?

What about Russia’s ongoing war with Germany? Kerensky’s policy was to continue it; Lenin’s was to make a separate peace. What would the post-Assembly government have done?

What about the soviets? These self-organized workers’ councils in factories, etc. – independent of management, of the state, and of any political party – had emerged in Russia beginning in 1905 and were a big deal by 1917. Lenin came to power on the slogan, “All power to the Soviets!” But when the Bolsheviks won, the soviets were reduced to instruments of rule of their Party and the state. What role – if any – would the soviets have enjoyed in Russian society, government and economy in a Russia with the SRs predominating?

2

Sorry, Cadets just under 5%.

3

The provisional government was as threatened by the right as it was by the left. If Lenin hadn’t been present to push things in favor of the left, the right probably would have won instead. Maybe in a coalition with a few left wing parties that switched sides. You would have seen somebody like Denikin or Kolchak or Kornilov or Wrangel becoming the Russian equivalent of Chiang Kai-shek.

The fact that I was able to name four possible leaders for a White government shows why Lenin was so important for the Reds. He was able to establish himself as the dominant leader for his side, something that nobody on the opposing side was able to do. If Lenin hadn’t been around, the Reds probably would have been a loose alliance like the Whites were, rather than a mostly united force.

4

But, the right had practically no mass base, even compared to the Cadets. It had only the people who had been important before the February Revolution – the royals, the nobles, the gentry, highborn career military officers and bureaucrats, and a very small class of industrial capitalists (the last being more inclined to support the Cadets) – who, together with all their sympathizers, probably made up less than 5% of the general population. And when Kornilov tried to move against Kerensky’s government, he was defeated and the situation never escalated to all-out civil war, not until after the Bolsheviks took power. If they had not, how could a civil war or RW coup have had any hopes of success?

5

According to this, in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, rightist groups (not counting religious Muslims) got only 507,000 votes out of a total of 35,333,666 cast, or less than 1.5% of the total. Presumably that roughly reflects their level of popular support.

6

I figure Kerensky was no idiot. He knew his government was threatened by the left and the right. And he formed an alliance with the left. So he apparently saw the right as the bigger threat. So I’d conclude that Kerensky, who was there at the time, felt that the Whites had a realistic chance of winning.

It’s true that the Whites didn’t have broad support. But the Reds didn’t really have a huge base either - their support was the urban workers, the intellectuals, and the revolutionaries. Neither side had a base among the actual masses. So it was a question of whether the right wing elite or the left wing elite could present a more plausible claim to represent the people.

7

But that was a huge base among the actual masses. Not a majority, but huge.

8

But Russia’s population in 1917 was about 185,000,000. Which means there were a lot of people who were outside of the political struggle.

9

Hardly. Russia was still a mostly rural country. Controlling the urban workers did not give you any mass support (although it did give the Reds a strong base in Moscow and St Petersburg). And the intellectuals and revolutionaries were a drop in the bucket.

10

Well, for practical purposes, “mass support” = “support among those who vote or otherwise do anything at all relevant to politics,” and the Bolsheviks had that. Their October Revolution was not simply a coup d’etat imposed by a clique of radical intellectuals on a bewildered people. Neither was the February Revolution. Almost everybody wanted “socialism” in some form.

More importantly, however, the vast majority of Russia’s population were peasants. Their support was mass support, and the SRs had it, because they offered the peasants what they wanted most: land of their own. Don’t knock it; Thomas Jefferson had very similar ideas, and there have been many instances in American history of the government offering the (white) people their own homesteads for nothing or nearly nothing. It’s called distributism, an idea which many thinkers (mostly Catholic) have supported as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. How would Russia have developed, as a nation mostly of yeoman family farmers?

11

The October Revolution and the Civil War were two seperate events. The October Revolution was a coup d’etat - and having several thousand supporters in Moscow and St Petersburg was a major reason the Bolsheviks were successful. But the Civil War was a nation wide war - there weren’t enough factory workers to decide the outcome of that. Both sides needed armies

And sure the Social Revolutionaries said they represented the peasants. The Communists said the same thing. And so, for that matter, did the nobility. The question was who were the peasants actually willing to follow.

And historically, it’s still not clear who the peasants should have followed. Sure, the nobility had been oppressing them for centuries. But looking ahead, the Soviets weren’t going to have all that great a record either. The Soviet Union would kill more peasants in the first ten ten years of its existence than the Empire had killed in the last fifty years of its existence.

Besides, anyone looking at history can’t claim that right wing dictatorships are impossible. Plenty of them have succeeded in taking power. Obviously, they must have figured out some way to get enough popular support to do so.

12

Well, then, why not the SRs?

13

We might have seen Russia form something of a democracy led by the Social Democrats or a mild right-wing dictatorship like Pilsudski’s in Poland. Either case means no rise of Hitler through fear of communism and thus a much better world-the biggest problem in TTL would be the Japs (maybe) and decolonization but both problems probably will be solved.

14

The Bolsheviks were the Social Democrats. One faction of them, at any rate – the Mensheviks were the other. There seems to be a widespread belief, for some reason, that Kerensky was a Menshevik; he wasn’t, he was a Socialist-Revolutionary. Trotsky was a Menshevik until Lenin converted/recruited him.

15

But they ended up advocating and accomplishing violent revolution.

16

The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party always did advocate revolution (although factions differed on what form it should take). It does not make them hypocrites or dishonest, just because the name “Social Democrats” was used later by more moderate, reformist left-wing parties (including one in the U.S., never important and now all but defunct).

17

The JAPS?!?! WTF is WRONG with you, Curtis!
(And you know jack about Russian history)

18

Curtis LeMay, racial slurs are not allowed here. Don’t do this again.

19

They were certainly strong contenders. I’m not arguing the Whites had a guaranteed victory if Lenin wasn’t around; I;m just saying they weren’t facing certain defeat. Lenin was a key factor in the Red victory; he was able to unite the Red side. I don’t know if anyone else could have done the same.

I don’t know. Anti-communism was only one of Hitler’s tricks. He still would have been able to fan resentment over Versailles and advocate colonizing Eastern Europe and Russia (plus his number one standby, anti-semitism). He didn’t like the Russians for being Communist, true, but he also didn’t like them for being Slavs. So he still would have had a reason for invading.

I also agree that Japan would have still been expansionist - the roots of that predate the Great War. But whether they were able to act on it would depend on Germany. If Europe was quiet, the European colonial powers would have been free to threaten Japan into submission.

20

Even if Hitler did get into power (unlikely due to the Butterfly Effect if nothing else) he’d been surrounded by all sides: Britain, France, Poland, and Russia which would maintain a good relationship with Western European nations and not gut the officer corps like Stalin did.