Well "likely" candidates have to overcome the concrete institutional realities. Stalin didn't come to power because he was extremely well liked by every section of the Party. If that was all that would be needed then Bukharin would have become the leader of the party. He also didn't come...
Kirov was only a candidate member of the politburo at this time and whilst he was popular in Leningrad and amongst certain sections of the party it would be doubtful that he would be a likely candidate for general secretary. Molotov would be the continuity of the "Stalinist centre" of politics I...
By 1910, there wasn't a single radical left newspaper still in print in Russia, and the Social Democrats, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks together, numbered only around 10,000 members. By 1917, the average Bolshevik member would have spent at least four years in jail and they generally faced constant...
This is the wrong way of looking at things and you're putting the horse before the cart. The landowners in England in the 16th and 17th century didn't have Adam Smith zapped through time into their brains to suddenly be coerced by the market imperative. Capitalism developed due to the distinct...
But Adam Smith didn't write Wealth of Nations and then suddenly there was capitalism, his writing was an analysis of the economic trends around him that had been developing for over a century within England.
That's the general issue with most of these sorts of questions. There might be very...
In November 1919 the Bolsheviks and the Polish whites concluded a ceasefire (talks that would go on largely in secret due to the Polish alliance with France) and, whilst the focus was on the last remnants of the Russian Whites in Ukraine, many of the Red Army detachments were turned into "labour...
Here's some quotes from "The Finnish Civil War 1918", a collection of essays edited by Tuomas Tepora and Aapo Roselius:
"Military governors were appointed to the occupied towns whose tasks included, among other things, organizing prisoners’ interrogations. The prisoners were divided into three...
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the politics of communists and specifically internationalism but that's besides the point.
Soviet Russia didn't invade Finland despite the Finnish Whites massacring the working class and despite being on the literal border with Petrograd, the...
Trotsky was actually against the invasion into Poland because he thought the Red Army lacked the logistical capability to pursue the war and wanted to focus on Wrangel's forces in Ukraine. Ultimately, Pilsudski's invasion of Ukraine gave Wrangel's forces enough time to regroup in Crimea - the...
Victor Serge, a revolutionary in OTL who was expelled from the Communist Party and then fled Russia due to Stalinism, wrote a book called "The Case of Comrade Tuliev" essentially fictionalising the assassination of Kirov and the resultant Purge as at the time much of the events around Kirov's...
What's the citation here? Some website you found talking about Japan and the US? Seriously, the website isn't even spellchecked: "In fact, accroding to Kennedy, a breakdown of total global warmaking potential in 1937 looks something like this ". What does, "warmaking potential" even mean in this...
Why do people have this bizarre image that Trotsky would suicidally seek to expand the Soviet Union at the tip of the bayonet or something? That's in fact the Stalinist propaganda that was levelled against Trotsky.
This just feels in poor taste. Traveller folk find themselves facing a lot of bigotry and hatred up to and including neonazis murdering Roma minorites in Hungary and the ruling party in the UK including in its campaign literature assurances that they'll confiscate the homes and property of...
Tried going the left wing route of Russia. Very interesting that they have Solomon Lozovsky as an option, Frunze never really made much sense. Kornilov coup threw me out of power but started a General Strike event which gives you an option to stall the negotiations, partially satisfy their...