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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Communism as historical tragedy
Message-ID: <384@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Dec-85 22:54:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.384
Posted: Wed Dec 11 22:54:43 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Dec-85 20:07:57 EST
References: <364@ubvax.UUCP> <28200354@inmet.UUCP>
Reply-To: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Organization: Ungermann-Bass, Inc., Santa Clara, Ca.
Lines: 80

Jan's last article was a very knowing and good description of
the Tsarist disaster.  Since I'm writing this response informally,
please understand if a little black humor comes out.  Russian
history tends to bring out the black humorist in me.

In article <28200354@inmet.UUCP> janw@inmet.UUCP writes:
>So my bet is that - without the  war
>-  the Empire would have fallen, but the Bolsheviks wouldn't have
>come to power. They were a tiny group by March 1917.
>My bet in the center would be on the Socialist-Revolutionaries,
>on the periphery - various nationalist groups mostly with some
>Socialist flavor: the way it happened in Poland.

Bad bet, I think.  I usually think that the problem of Russia
was first, Tsarism, but second, the lack of an indigenous
bourgeoisie, pointed up by the substitution of foreign for
domestic investment in industrial development.

But I think Tsarism could have held on by its fingernails for
a long time without the war.  After all, Rasputin might be
a little wacko, but the Okhrana was solid.

Eventually, the more industrial development without a corresponding
bourgeoisie, the more leverage workers would have in a revolutionary
situation.  Hence in the long run a workers party like the Bolsheviks
or Mensheviks would have succeeded, and it would have had similar
problems to the Bolsheviks as it tried to extend its control beyond
the cities.

So my point is a paradox:  the only chance the Social Revolutionaries
had was in 1917, because of the war!  The war made revolution come
too early for its success to be more than an iffy prospect for
the working class parties.  For them, the later, the better.

The peasants could never be the force of the revolution, so their
party, the Social-Revolutionaries (which never even existed anyhow
before the February revolution, unlike both the Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks), could never have ended up taming it.

Where I do think the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks differed was in the
greater centralist orientation of the Bolsheviks, which was reinforced
by the success of the genius Lenin into a centralist myth.  But then
you can't separate the Bolsheviks from Lenin anyways; it's not as
if were he never born the Bolsheviks would ever have been more than
another exile group.  Lenin started and built *Iskra* (now Pravda).

What the Mensheviks would have done is hard to say.  I doubt they
could have held the country.  There would still have been a civil
war, whenever the inevitable revolution came.  Maybe the Whites
would have won.

But Social-Revolutionaries?????????   I can't believe it.  Maybe
my historical imagination needs a little more oil.  Can you provide
a plausible scenario for the rise of Social Revolutionaries in
the face of worker resistance, Jan?  By October, the workers
were perfectly happy that a putsch had taken place.  So maybe
the Bolsheviks wouldn't have done it.  Somebody would have.

Maybe they'd have to let the parliament run a few more months
to develop more incentive.  As long as soviets were alive, parliament
couldn't succeed.  And in a revolutionary situation, Social
Revolutionaries would have no Okhrana to call on any more.

>I don't think pure liberal democracy would be very likely (except
>in Finland and the Baltic states). But it did have a chance,
>because of the brief (since 1905) parliamentarian and a longer
>(since the eighteen-sixties) local self-government experience.
>
>               Jan Wasilewsky

Aha!  There we disagree.  The success of soviets in 1905 spelled
the death of liberal democracy in 1917, to me.  Democracy could
only have started if the Tsar had murdered the soviets, like the
French did to Paris after the Commune.  Even then it would have
been iffy still.

Try the Kadets next time.

Tony Wuersch
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