You’re arguing this as though Finland was a continuation of the Russian Empire and thus serves as some sort of control against which the progress of the Soviet Union can be measured. In reality, both countries underwent civil wars that resulted in regime changes. That one regime may have been better than the other isn’t in dispute; I’m only saying that the new one (or the two new ones, if you want to include Finland) was arguably better than the old one.
That’s why I mentioned opinion polls of people who did live through them rather than shrugging at and relativizing them. There have at least been some sort of organized, wide-scale efforts to find out what (former) Soviet citizens thought about the regime. (Which isn’t to say that individual anecdotes, of which there are plenty, should be ignored.)
If we want to know whether the Russian Revolution was a net benefit, comparing 1991 Finland to the 1991 Soviet Union makes far more sense than comparing life in the late-era Soviet Union to “being a peasant under the Tsar.” Of course life in the USSR was a lot more developed 70 years later – as life was in every other country!
It certainly didn’t lead directly to a long-term democratic egalitarian republic. It was succeeded by a series of monarchies/dictatorships alternating with republics for the next 80 years. It established some aspirations for government that were often not followed by succeeding regimes.
Why? 1991 Finland is itself a product of the Russian Revolution: the February Revolution sundered the personal union between Russia and Finland, and the Bolshevik declaration in November 1917 paved the way for the Finnish Declaration of Independence that December. Finland and the Soviet Union followed different paths AFTER 1917, but without the Russian Revolution neither would have followed those paths.
That’s a good point. I would certainly agree that the Russian Revolution was a net benefit for Finland.
I’ll also concede that Finland is not a perfect control case for measuring the progress of the Soviet Union. There is no perfect control case for that. However, it’s fair to say that Russia would have experienced a dramatic modernization between 1917 and 1992 regardless of who was in power.
You mean it didnt turn out well for the Northerners who didnt care for slavery? Look, only about half the states supported slavery.
No, that is false. Yes, there is like one line in it about what % of “other such persons” should count for assigning seat in the House. In fact, the South wanted it to be 100%. The fact that they settled on 3/5th was a good thing, as otherwise slave states would have had undue power in the House.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Slavery and the Constitution
Not only does the Constitution not mention blacks or whites, but it also doesn’t mention slaves or slavery. Throughout the document, slaves are referred to as persons to underscore their humanity. As James Madison remarked during the constitutional convention, it was “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”
Although these circumlocutions may not have done much to improve the lot of slaves, they are important, as they denied constitutional legitimacy to the institution of slavery. The practice remained legal, but slaveholders could not invoke the supreme law of the land to defend its legitimacy. These formulations make clear that slavery is a state institution that is tolerated—but not sanctioned—by the national government and the Constitution.
*Reading the original Constitution, a visitor from a foreign land would simply have no way of knowing that race-based slavery existed in America. …
*One could go even further and argue, as Frederick Douglass did in the lead-up to the Civil War, that none of the clauses of the Constitution should be interpreted as applying to slaves. The “language of the law must be construed strictly in favor of justice and liberty,” he [argued]… Because the Constitution does not explicitly recognize slavery and does not therefore admit that slaves were property, all the protections it affords to persons could be applied to slaves. “Anyone of these provisions in the hands of abolition statesmen, and backed up by a right moral sentiment, would put an end to slavery in America,” Douglass …
Not to mention a restoration of the original monarchy, and its later replacement by a different line.
France was only a republic for about 15 years between the Revolution and the founding of the Third Republic in 1870, and was virtually a dictatorship at times when it was nominally a republic.
No they didnt. “right there in the party name” was a lie, just like Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or National Socialist German Workers’ Party .
Why the 5th Republic after WWII, because the 4th co-operated with the Nazis after being defeated by Germany? What were they supposed to do after they lost the war, become partizans? Flee to England and have a government in exile?
Revolutions upturn the old order and that sometimes includes anyone who had a major stake in said order. Meddling by foreign powers who had a stake in the old order was a major concern. Purges could mean anyone with more than a grade-school education, or semi-marginalized ethnic groups who had a specialized (aka “privileged”) place in the old order. Meantime, people who lost ground in the revolution try to roll it all back, and sometimes succeed. Not always by direct military action, but violence and economic maneuvers of various sorts.
I’m not as well-educated as other posters here. My most recent forays into revolutionary history were actually Haiti, and then the American Civil War, which wasn’t a “revolution” per se, but there was plenty of resistance to change and a lot of rollbacks after Emancipation, that eventually restored the old order in a new guise.
I’m super cynical this morning. I would die in a revolution here, BTW, because I still have an apartment which makes me privileged.
Yes, but without the revolution, who knows how long the monarchy would have held on? And then France might have been more like Germany, or, god forbid, Spain. Instead, the alternation of republics and Empires led to modern France. Which is not all that bad.
The French Revolution helped promulgate the ideals of democracy and freedom throughout Europe it’s true. However, the fact that the Revolution had been so violent, resulting in regicide, The Terror, and the ultimate rise of Napoleon scared the piss out of other regimes in Europe and may actually have retarded liberalization of other countries. If France had somehow managed to establish a constitutional monarchy without a violent revolution it might have been far better in the long run.
Of course, Napoleon helped initiate the unification of Germany by establishing the Confederation of the Rhine, which didn’t work out all that well for France in the long run.
I might argue that the Russian Revolution (the Bolshevik one) was better for the world simply due to the rapid industrialization that was done through Stalinist brutal dictatorship may indeed have been the reason the Nazis lost WW2. A Russian Empire in the 1940s may have fallen far more easily than the USSR did, allowing Germany to reallocate it’s troops.
It’s more complicated than that. The Third French Republic ended in 1940, when the parliament handed over full power to Marshal Pétain and essentially dissolved the republic; Pétain then formed what is usually known as the Vichy regime (officially, “The French State”). After liberation, a provisional government gave way to the Fourth Republic, modeled on the Third as a parliamentary democracy with most power concentrated in the prime minister, but the fact that so many senior figures of the Third had been collaborators indeed discredited the political classes. The Dutch and the Luxembourgeois governments, for example, had indeed fled to England and formed governments-in-exile, but not France. (The Fifth Republic came about in 1958, as a result mostly of the Algerian crisis and an inability to form a new government; it’s a “strong president” system.)
Every one of the framers understood slavery would continue if not abolished, and yet they did not abolish it. Every state ratified the Constitution understanding that it permitted slavery to continue. This is no different from supporting it, just by an act of omission. By the 3/5th compromise, they agreed that slaveholders would get an extra 3/5th representation for themselves for every slave they owned.
They supported it by allowing it. End of story. Unless you want to argue that they didn’t actually know they were allowing slavery to continue, which strains credulity.
