100 years on: What If the Russian Revolution Had Never Happened?

[Trajan]

One hundred years later, as its events continue to reverberate and inspire, October 1917 looms epic, mythic, mesmerizing. Its effects were so enormous that it seems impossible that it might not have happened the way it did.

And yet it nearly didn’t.

There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik revolution. By 1917, the Romanov monarchy was decaying quickly, but its emperors may have saved themselves had they not missed repeated chances to reform. The other absolute monarchies of Europe — the Ottomans, the Habsburgs — fell because they were defeated in World War I. Would the Romanovs have fallen, too, if they had survived just one more year to share in the victory of November 1918?

By 1913, the czar’s secret police had dispersed and vanquished the opposition. Just before the fall of the czar, Lenin reflected to his wife that revolution “won’t happen in our lifetime.” Ultimately, it was a spontaneous, disorganized popular uprising and a crisis of military loyalty that forced Nicholas’s abdication. When that moment arrived, Lenin was in Zurich, Trotsky in New York and Stalin in Siberia.

Lenin initially thought it was “a hoax.” He was lucky that Germany inserted him like a bacillus (via the so-called sealed train) to take Russia out of the war. Back in Petrograd, Lenin, aided by fellow-radicals Trotsky and Stalin, had to overpower erring Bolshevik comrades, who proposed cooperation with the provisional government, and force them to agree to his plan for a coup. The government should have found and killed him but it failed to do so. He succeeded.

Even the “storming” of the Winter Palace — restaged in a 1920 propaganda spectacular as a people’s triumph — was no storming at all. Lenin rages as it took days to seize the main buildings of the government, while the palace itself was taken by climbing through unlocked windows, undefended except for adolescent cadets — followed by a bacchanalia, with drunk Bolsheviks slurping the czar’s Château d’Yquem 1847 out of the gutters.

without Lenin there would have been no Hitler. Hitler owed much of his rise to the support of conservative elites who feared a Bolshevik revolution on German soil and who believed that he alone could defeat Marxism. And the rest of his radical program was likewise justified by the threat of Leninist revolution. His anti-Semitism, his anti-Slavic plan for Lebensraum and above all the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 were supported by the elites and the people because of the fear of what the Nazis called “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

Without the Russian Revolution of 1917, Hitler would likely have ended up painting postcards in one of the same flophouses where he started. No Lenin, no Hitler — and the 20th century becomes unimaginable. Indeed, the very geography of our imagination becomes unimaginable.

The East would look as different as the West. Mao, who received huge amounts of Soviet aid in the 1940s, would not have conquered China, which might still be ruled by the family of Chiang Kai-shek. The inspirations that illuminated the mountains of Cuba and the jungles of Vietnam would never have been. Kim Jong-un, pantomimic pastiche of Stalin, would not exist. There would have been no Cold War. The tournaments of power would likely have been just as vicious — just differently vicious.

Opinion | What If the Russian Revolution Had Never Happened?

 

[Shogun]

Well, I suppose the Romanovs would have been represented as equals at the Congress of Vienna, and probably retained most of their central European Empire. I'd have to guess that the "successor states" created from the Treaty would look different. There would have to be some compromise between Russian and the west where this is concerned, seeing that Russia was always making a play for control of the Balkans. The western half of the successor states probably would have remained (western Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc.)

Long term, you could probably make an argument that the Wiemar State would have been a bit more stable, and less susceptible to Nazism. A major propaganda tool for the Nazi's was their ability to blame and demonize the "Judeo-Bolsheviks" for all of Germany's post-WW1 problems. And, not for no cause, as the Leninist USSR was actively trying to export communist revolution in Germany prior to Stalin's Socialism in One Country policy.

In an even larger sense, without Communism Russia would never have risen to world power status so quickly. With no Cold War, then, you could go in all sorts of directions....no nuclear attack on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, no Korean War, no Vietnam War, no space race, no JFK assassination, no internet, no clear generic video-game and movie bad guy ethnicity? You could go crazy with the Butterfly effect...

 

[dennis roadman]

Without the Russian Revolution of 1917, Hitler would likely have ended up painting postcards in one of the same flophouses where he started.

This fukking slander as if this were not one of MANY factors related to Hitler's rise, and look how he draws a straight line through an unbelievably complex web to make sure we know to blame left wing politics for scaring the nazis into power

The Russian Revolution(s) was one of the greatest events in modern political history. yeah Lenin went Tony Montana and Stalin unfortunately took up the mantle, but the idea and execution itself was beautiful and should be cherished by anyone who hates tyranny (just as Stalin should be hated for being who he was)

edit: and the writer's family fled the czar, too? this fukking guy, his ancestors should be ashamed of him