Russia without Marxist Comunism WWI til now - how different would history be?

Great Debates
1

During world war 1 the Russian monarchy fell apart and the communist rebels eventually took power.

My question is, if there had not been the Marxist-Communist ideology, and the Russian rebellion had instead led to a non-communist government, how might the major events in history been different? My main questions are:

  1. Without communism, would there have still been animosity between the Russians and the western Europeans and Americans between 1920 and 1940? Would Russia have been more likely to revert to Monarchy, become dictatorial, nationalist, or what?

  2. How would the alliance of the allies in WWII been affected? (Did Soviet domination of eastern Europe exist before WWII, and was that an issue for the UK/US at the time?)

  3. Post WWII, a lot of countries were influenced by the soviets, and that led to proxy wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, other SE Asian, African, and Central/South American countries. Would that have still been an issue? Most of those places were also ending colonialism, and sometimes the Communists were just the strongest opposition, so people made a choice to be communist since the only other option was colonialism. If Communism was not there, how would those independence movements have been different?

  4. Post WWII China without the influence of Leninist/Stalinist communism would have gone a different direction too - how so? Would China still have been so isolationist, or would it have started it’s industrialization earlier?

  5. Post WWII the Iron Curtain fell, would there have been the same kind of east/west Europe division w/o communism?

  6. Would European style socialism be different without the influence of large communist nations?

In general, it seems to me that communist countries were also very authoritarian. I think that some of those countries may have not gone authoritarian w/o communism, what do you think?

On the one hand, it seems that laze fair capitalists in the west reacted strongly to the communist “threat”, but on the other hand, long term regional issues can make two countries adversarial regardless of ideology - look at how China and the Soviet Union were not really all that friendly.

2

I think we did a thread like this before but can’t be bothered to search. Here is a YouTube video that I like that talks about this. Assuming no one will bother to watch it I’ll give my thoughts on the OP:

No…why would there be? There would be no basis for animosity between Russia and the western European powers or the Americans.

I doubt the monarchy would have survived. Most likely what you’d have had was the Provisional Government would never have fallen, and instead would have ended the war with Germany on whatever terms they could get (obviously Germany would have gone for this, since they actually did go for it in our timeline) and bowed out of the war. This would have prevented the Bolsheviks from ever gaining power in the first place and would have set up the Provisional Government to be the, um, not so provisional government. They would have formed a new government and the Tsar would have advocated as he planned too and probably fled with his family to some other country…perhaps England after the war was over. This new government would have been a more agrarian socialist government, since that’s what the Provisional Government was pretty much.

Russia would have been a much weaker power, but probably more stable and unified. They most likely would have had good relations with western Europe, America, etc. It’s possible that the Nazis would have never risen in Germany since without Soviet Communism one of the pillars of the Nazi party (anti-communism) wouldn’t have been there. Perhaps another anti-Jewish party would have risen instead, but most likely it wouldn’t have had the same goals and drives as the Nazis, so it’s possible WWII wouldn’t have happened, or would have been very different and Russia wouldn’t have been involved at all. Certainly if it were involved and everything else was the same the Russians would have been at a huge disadvantage, since I doubt whatever the Provisional Government became it would have industrialized the same way the USSR did. Of course you also wouldn’t (most likely) have had the purges and terror of the Stalin regime either, so maybe it would have been a wash. Depends on how popular the new government was and what reforms they put in…they were VERY popular with the common Russians until they decided to continue to very unpopular war with Germany. That’s really what allowed the Bolsheviks to rise and take control.

I don’t believe that communism would ever have been a thing without the USSR and the revolution, so I think these are all moot…or perhaps mute. There wouldn’t BE an Iron Curtain, there wouldn’t be a CCP and communism wouldn’t have risen in any of those places. Instead, what I think would happen is something more along the lines of western European socialism or social democracy, though obviously some of those places would have been more inclined to dictatorships (or the Nationalist Party in China would have stayed in power and perhaps morphed into something like modern Taiwan…eventually).

I think it would have been the dominant force, much more so than communism. I could see it gaining a major foothold in the US…after all, without communism and the threat, and with the presidency of FDR (though it would be different), you can kind of see how that could work. A US more like western European socialism, perhaps, though maybe jumping ahead to modern western European mixed economies and social democracy combined with capitalism.

3

Thanks for your response!

I watched, Thanks!

My vague memory from high school history is that Russia was lagging behind the British and others in colonial powers. Around 1905 there was a war with Japan. Alaska was sold to the US partly because Russia was afraid of loosing it to Britain, and did not want to give the British any more control of the north pacific. So Russia was looking to become a larger power already, and that tends to cause international stress. So, that is part of my question - was there any pre-existing rivalry or other reason for the east-west division we saw in real history?

Why are we still having proxy fights in places like Syria with Russia? Is it real politic level regional rivalries, or is it just cold war leftovers?

I have often read the quote “We have always been at war with east Asia” so my question here is, if China had not gone Communist, would it have still been so isolationist from 1950 to 1974ish? China was recovering from a bloody war with Japan, and needed to rebuild it self. Those were going to be rough years any way, but the cultural revolution really messed things up worse.

Were there other ideals that could have taken hold if Communism was not there? Would most of these nations that went communist have become dictatorships anyway?

4

[QUOTE=DagNation]
I watched, Thanks!
[/QUOTE]

No worries. :slight_smile: Probably just you and me in this thread, as I think we did a similar one to this a year or so ago. You might want to do some searching if you want some other opinions on the question.

Many of the conflicts post WWII were proxies that were fought mainly because of the Cold War with the Soviets, yes. Not all though. There would still be a series of anti-colonial type wars or wars of independence from the colonial powers at some point. But without a communist USSR they would be seen and progress in entirely different ways, IMHO anyway. It’s possible that neither the British or the French colonial empires would have folded if there wasn’t a WWII, and there might not have been a WWII if there wasn’t a Nazi Germany, and there might not have been a Nazi Germany if there wasn’t a communist Russia. It’s all a house of cards when you start playing what-ifs, or maybe a line of dominoes…move one and the pattern of the fall changes in often unexpected ways.

Well, that quote is a paraphrase from 1984 (if you didn’t know that), so it’s not really applicable to the real world. :stuck_out_tongue: Certainly if the Nationalist Chinese had stayed in power China today would be vastly different and much closer to the US and the west. They WERE much closer to both, and one has but to look at Taiwan to see that this relationship continues to today. There would have been no reason for them to turn ‘isolationist’. Even assuming that the war with Japan happens exactly the same (and it might have), the US was one of the allies that stood behind the Chinese and helped them by providing weapons, material and even people to assist them…and, of course, ultimately entered the war and were instrumental in defeating the Japanese. Now, without a Nazi Germany there probably wouldn’t have been a Pearl Harbor or most likely the general attack from the Japanese against the European colonial possessions in Asia, so it’s possible that the fighting would have been more limited to China. The US and others had already pressed an embargo on the Japanese though, and it’s possible without a strong ally like Nazi Germany that Japan might have pulled in it’s horns wrt China…or it might have sparked a war anyway. Assuming China survived as an independent power, though, it’s most likely that the Nationalist would have survived and if that’s the case they would have had close ties to the US and most likely the other western European powers as well.

Some would have, undoubtedly. Maybe Fascism would have been more wide spread and without all of the Nazi baggage. I personally think socialism would have been bigger and more wide spread, as it’s a much softer side to hard line communism and would have had an appeal. Certainly Nationalist China was a dictatorship, but as with Taiwan perhaps it would have morphed into something more democratic over time. Korea, once freed from Japanese occupation would have certainly been much stronger today than at least the North Korean half…maybe the entire peninsula would have been like South Korea today. Vietnam might still have rebelled against the French, but it would have been a unified country from the start, not two halves fighting against each other as well as the French and later the Americans. America probably would never have gotten involved there at all, since without communism there wouldn’t be anything that interested us in the region and it would have been France’s problem to deal with or not.

5

The Russians (Provisional Government?) offered to send the Romanovs to England, but the English government refused, fearing domestic unrest if they were seen to be protecting a fellow who didn’t get on well with the lower classes.

6

Well…sort of. IIRC, initially George V actually offered sanctuary when asked. I think that unrest in the UK turned that down a bit, but I think the UK was still on board with offering sanctuary but were overtaken by events. The Bolsheviks started to gain support and power by the time the Brits were ready to bring them over, and then they took control and basically the family disappeared. We all know what happened now, of course. But my thought is if the PG managed to halt the war and remain in charge (and popular) there would have never been a rise for the Bolsheviks at all, and a path would have been open for the UK to have eventually taken in the Czar and his family. If not them then certainly someone would have allowed them to come over. Since the Czar had abdicated the throne completely, there was really no reason for the PG (or whatever they became) to not allow him to go into exile, and without the more violent October Revolution I’m pretty sure the UK would have been ok with him and his family coming over…especially since the then King was in favor of it and had blood ties to the Russian royal family.

7

Victoria had blood ties with most of Europe. :slight_smile:

8

Many of them did before they became Communist. Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all came under authoritarian dictatorships or regimes between the wars. These were mostly Fascist, and it’s hard to say how many of these would have happened in the absence of the Soviet Union next door fighting to keep them under Russian rule after the end of the Empire or providing an ongoing Communist threat/bogeyman between the wars.

9

A !ot of things would have been different along the way, but I think it very likely Russia was always bound to end up roughly where it is now: ruled by a nationalistic strongman.

10

Are you saying that Putin is a modern Alexander III ?

Was Nicholas II such a weenie as he is usually portrayed? “He would have made an excellent fire or police chief”.

11

I’d have said Nicholas I, but same principle.

12

He was the one who stopped to see to an injured footman, and was killed by another bomb, was he not?

13

No,that was Alexander II, the liberal tsar who freed the serfs.

14

I think Russia would have realised that it wasn’t sufficiently advanced to have an American- or French-style President and gone for a constitutional monarchy like Britain or the Netherlands. I think that WW2 would still happen - Fascism would still arise, and Hitler was an adventurer. The real changes are in the aftermath to WW2. China stays Nationalist, and Europe is not divided as in our timeline. There’s still the Vietnam War that ejected the French and other oustings of colonial rule (e.g. Indonesia). Britain still gets shot of its empire, but Africa still devolves into a hell-hole because national boundaries still do not map with tribal boundaries. Central America would be rather different with no communist insurgencies.

15

Nicholas II grandfather, thanks.

16

You are assuming, it appears, that the February Revolution happens in 1917 but the October Revolution does not. The Provisional Government the FR established was dominated by the Socialist Revolutionaries – a party with a peasant base; to them, “socialism” mainly meant land reform, i.e., breaking up the landlords’ estates and distributing them to the peasants. The Constituent Assembly that (in our timeline) was elected after the October Revolution, and which the Bolsheviks allowed to meet for only one day before sending in troops to break it up, was 52% SR. Peasants made up by far the majority of the population. So, we may presume the SRs would have predominated in any non-Bolshevik Russia. The country would have developed a yeomanry of small family farmers, or perhaps of autonomous farming collectives – I’m not clear on those details of SR doctrine and the Wiki article does not clarify. In either case, it probably would have led to a much more efficient and productive agrarian sector than the Bolshevik policy of land-nationalization, and Russia might well have had an exportable surplus of food. But its industry, being de-emphasized, would not have developed anywhere near as rapidly or vigorously or extensively as it did in OTL under Stalinism. We can be reasonably certain of that, because no agrarian country post-WWII has managed such rapid industrialization without resorting to some form of Stalinism; that is why China is so much more highly industrialized than India – even by the time China turned its back on Stalinism, it was more highly industrialized than India and had a base on which to build further.

Whether any of this would have led to animosity with the West is a more difficult question. Perhaps no Western power would have seen any reason to object to or fear the new Russian system – or perhaps just the word “socialism” would have been enough to boil their blood.

17

How could fascism arise without Bolshevism-in-power being there for it to react against?

18

No, in fact, before WWII, the Soviet Union was a bit less extensive than the Russian Empire had been, having lost Poland and Finland and the Baltic states, and never having ruled any other parts of Eastern Europe. There were some Communist uprisings in Germany and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWI, but none succeeded, so the question of Communism as such expanding westward remained dormant until Stalin won his part of WWII.

19

Fascism would pick another opponent.

20

What do you base that on? The February Revolution happened mainly because the Romanov Dynasty was so very thoroughly discredited. There were several political parties active at the time and hardly any of them were in any sense monarchist.