...the Bolsheviks, well, can't shoot out of hand or drive into exile, the *Revolution - and, as a result, the Reds of the Civil War - being much broader and incorporating the leftist elements of OTL White side (thus, Kerensky ending up head of state).
I notice that only I have brought up the word "soviet." Are you leaving yourself wiggle room to avoid unnecessary retconning, or is it firmly established that actually the small-s soviets did not form, or at any rate did not play the crucial role they did in the February-October interim of what Trotsky called "Dual Power" OTL?
I must admit I am very strongly influenced by the accounts Trotsky, Reed, and other partisans of the Bolsheviks wrote about that period. Thus it is my perhaps exaggerated understanding that actually the so-called "Provisional Government" had no particular legitimate basis, other than being something that foreign powers and the desperate former ruling classes clung to as something of a familiar form and at any rate less dangerously radical than the soviets. It was just a sort of club of old regimists and opportunistic more or less visionaries whose class bases of power were vanishing or non-existent, save insofar as they could bring up some strong man or other to seize power more or less for them. Whereas the soviets, particularly the Petrograd Soviet, were clearly representative bodies of the actual populace, albeit without any written constitutional basis. Russia just didn't have any sort of constitutional basis at that point, but the soviets did have the people, most of them.
Because soviets were councils of workers, formed at various workplaces, under a purely soviet form of government, however federated, people who were not in recognized categories of at least somewhat proletarian workers would have no representation whatsoever.
As things were in Petrograd throughout most of 1917, the Provisional Government could make proclamations and give orders, but the only ones enforced and carried out were the ones that the city Soviet countersigned, because only they had any organized forces at their disposal--the people had, according to Trotsky at any rate, risen up and massacred all the old regime's police they could find, and the Army's soldiers obeyed the Soviet.
The soviets first emerged in Russia during the 1905 rebellions--they were by no means a Bolshevik creation. In the October Revolution, IIRC Lenin's forces seized power over the city Soviet in exactly the same way they seized the institutions that obeyed the Provisional Government. Earlier, in the July Days I think, they had some hope of commanding solid electoral majorities in the Soviet (and the smaller factory/shop soviets that the city Soviet was constituted from).
So far, it seems to me that your backstory could go either way--either the soviets did form, and the Bolsheviks never attempted to seize complete control of them and so they remain at this point (late 1920s still, right?) the real form of government--it's just that a combination of strong-arm tactics and legitimacy won by both recent results and the legacy of Lenin make the Communist alliance by far the dominant faction.
Or the soviets never did achieve the sort of sweeping power they did OTL, not in 1916 (wait, that is when the March Revolution took place, isn't it--it isn't easy for me to track back through the whole thread right now...apologies if I misremember!) anyway. And so Lenin and crew had to pretty much make nice to a Provisional Government that ITTL did enjoy a much broader esteem than OTL.
Frankly either way it is a matter of detail and not really necessary to resolve at all. I imagine a form of "dual power" persisting and institutionalized, with both the soviets and more traditional Western-style parliamentary bodies, presumably called the Duma, existing side by side; perhaps their relationship gets formalized in some constitution or other which defines the Duma as being kind of like a senate or House of Lords, with the soviets serving as Commons/Representatives on a more strictly working-class basis.
What this means is that they *have* to negotiate tolerantly with other factions, simply because they aren't in the dominant position they were in OTL. It is only later, when things go a bit sour after the Civil War, that the Bolsheviks are able to exploit the situation and become the core of a 'Radical' opposition and, finally, government. Due to the circumstances, they still end up being a bit broader than the OTL counterpart, however, which is one reason why they have to be a bit more tolerant - it is harder to build up a coalition for purging any one faction.
I want to stress, since I'm obviously a leftist, that that strikes me as a Good Thing...provided...
... I will note that one factor that speaks in favour of the peasants is that the SR, sans the right-wing, is one of the factions incorporated into the Communist Party (oddly, the thought strikes me that CPR might be explicitly less Marxist in TTL, even if its dogma is not all that much more different from Marx's ideas than Marxism-Leninism was).
Right, they were part of the October Revolution coalition OTL, but thrown out quite unceremoniously shortly thereafter. Or rather, IIRC, they found the way the Bolsheviks high-handedly dominated every proceeding intolerable, and along with more rightist groups left the Bolshevik-ruled Soviet in a huff after the Bolsheviks shut down the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to draft the new constitution. They were intending to make their own revolution...and this was part of the Civil War.
So, if my hypothesis that one reason things are more balanced, diverse, and tolerant ITTL in Russia (because the Civil War/Intervention, while being far more catastrophically costly in terms of amputated territories the CPR has absolutely no claim to control (for the moment!), it was far less traumatic in terms of body count (particularly of more or less educated and ideologically committed leftist cadres) and devastation of infrastructure)--if that is the case, another dimension, and indeed a reason the war was relatively short and bloodless, is that the Bolshies and their other rivals in a spectrum that might even go as far right as the Kadets, managed to avoid factional infighting. Thus the much larger number of more or less educated, industrially competent workers includes people who never were Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, any kind of Marxist at all, and all the varieties of Marxists. (OTL, reading not only Trotsky but the works of Mensheviks whose names elude me for the moment, it was a truism that left of the actual Tsarist nobility itself and the Kadets ("CD's--Constitutional Democrats," an explicitly bourgeois party)
everyone (among the intelligentsia anyway) was some kind of Marxist. Even, perhaps only by a stretch, the SRs). Anyway. If all these diverse ideolouges could cooperate on practical matters without killing each other, we'd have both a possible basis for faster and more effective rebuilding (of infrastructure and industry less damaged to begin with) and for a lasting balance of power that would protect out-of-power factions from being silenced completely.
Cue "Odd Couple" theme.
Well, technically the United Provinces - Southern China, that is - is quite happy to receive help from anyone that gives it, and the RSF isn't the only state to give aid to Sun's federation, just the biggest source. Of course, the Russian aid will have an influence on the United Provinces, so the Germans' assistance might prove problematic in the end...
Right, at this point Sun seems pretty much like Chiang Kai Shek.
One reason (probably not the only or even most important reason, but it was something Trotsky raged against) that Third International Communism did not spread more than it did between the wars OTL was that once Stalin took control in Moscow, he asserted control over the international movements as well, demanding a form of Party discipline that was above all loyal to and not threatening of him. It was not that Stalin didn't want a successful revolution in Germany or China or elsewhere, it was just that he defined "successful" as first of all being under his control, not a bunch of loose cannons who might (even inadvertently) undermine his own reputation as the indispensable Boss. So the conditions he put on indigenous movements elsewhere, including purging people he did not trust and dictating certain strategic policies that perhaps the locals would never have tried on their own, tended to limit their actual revolutionary potential. Note that no nation went Communist OTL (ie Leninist) until WWII fostered such guerrilla leaders as Mao and Tito, who benefited not only from the eradication of the governments they rose against, but also out of range of Stalin's effective control. Mao rose to leadership in China mainly because the leadership Stalin chose obeyed his instruction to join with Chiang's Kuomintang, and Chiang very predictably turned on the Communists, executing most of the leadership. Only mavericks like Mao were left standing to organize resistance both the the KMT and the Japanese. Similarly Tito, who was much more inclined to obey orders from the Kremlin than Mao initially, was left pretty much on his own resources under Axis occupation, and what aid he got he got more from the Western Allies than Moscow. He was in a position to order the Red Army to merely transit through Yugoslavia rather than stay and occupy it. Even so he was quite loyal to Stalin, bullying other "fraternal" socialist bloc leaders at Moscow's behest, until Stalin turned on him--at which point he took his country his own way.
Elsewhere also--wherever the map was Red during the Cold War, you had either a regime that owed its very existence to occupation by the Red Army--or else, one such as Castro's Cuba, or Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, that was entirely a do-it-yourself project that (we now know from post-Soviet disclosure of Soviet internal memos) upset the applecart as the Kremlin was trying to push it. They were often able to put a brave face on international socialist solidarity, but all these spontaneous regimes were headaches.
Whereas, ITTL, there is as you have pointed out the incentive to trade with the West and also a lack of rigid ideological unity to weigh against bold and sweeping pronouncements of World Proletarian Revolution now--but at the same time, the more successful the RSF is, especially if it is successful on even modestly socialist terms--avoiding the rise of a capitalist ruling class, and especially if the standard of living of both workers and peasants does rise without a severe cost in the form of terror--the more inherently polarizing it must become overseas. As things were OTL, the notion that the Soviet Union was indeed a new Workers Paradise that the workers of other nations, including developed ones, could aspire to, was widespread and provocative enough, and this despite the strong evidence that progress was in some doubt there and also came at a severe price. If the progress were real and Russia a place foreigners could visit freely and leave to tell whatever tales they might have a mind to, the leadership of the capitalist nations might have no choice but to silence their own masses.
This is essentially how Trotsky defined fascism--as what happens when the classic mechanisms of liberal civil society can no longer be counted on to guarantee the capitalist order, but the capitalists are not ready to be hustled off the stage yet. They abandon the pretense of a free society in order to maintain the social order by naked coercion. By Trotsky's thesis, the reason Italy and Germany fell under fascist power was that they were each ripe for proletarian revolution. If the ideological threat is not explicitly Marxist/proletarian but has a broader form, perhaps the liberal societies could have absorbed and incorporated them somehow. But if Trotsky were at all right on this point, regardless of ideology sooner or later the masses would threaten, perhaps without realizing it, to overstep the bounds beyond which the capitalist ruling classes would be doomed.
Well, perhaps we won't have a Russia that is that successful! However, without a certain degree of success, the ruling coalition, no matter how broad, would once again face the "Scissors," and decide, if they can't deliver on Lenin's most inspiring promises, whether they will submit to an essentially capitalist order once again--and if on a strongly agrarian basis, probably under some strongman--or take the path that Stalin took OTL. (If anyone tries that ITTL, they will probably come to a nasty end!)
Perhaps a sort of staggering, muddling success--enough fitful progress to keep the peasants and workers convinced (without so much invoking of saboteur boogeymen) that this particular Rosinante is still the winning horse for them, but not enough to make the working classes of London and New York City swoon with envy?
I suppose that given the breadth of the Red coalition in Moscow, there is no definitive break with the Second International. Perhaps they just don't declare membership in any organized Socialist International and let the rest of the world muddle along without them?
But meanwhile, back in London and Berlin and Paris, what goes on with working class politics there?
A shorter, more decisive Great War would tend to glose over a lot of the bitter divisions that split the Second International parties. Actually, it tends to discredit them all completely--that's a short-term bump that according to Leninist and Trotskyite philosophy, is one of several major motivations for a capitalist power to go to war in the first place--it tends to make the Leftists shut up, and those who won't shut up will find, for a while, a less sympathetic audience and are easier to lock up or otherwise silence by force. Trotsky produced some interesting tables of rising labor unrest leading up to 1914; it plummets impressively once Russia was at war. Partially because as I said before the police rounded up all the Bolshevik agitators they could find and sent them to Siberia or the front.
But still--in both Germany and France OTL, the socialists in each country were split by the issue of "war credits," in Germany especially. The leftist dissenters who refused to support the war effort split off to form an Independent Social Democratic party which was promptly outlawed, and leaders such as Rosa Luxemberg were jailed. With a quicker and decisively victorious war, perhaps no one would be so bitter at Red Rosa to assassinate her as OTL, but neither would the regime have any reason to let her out of prison. Without a dynamic, tightly focused, internationalist-minded bunch in charge in Moscow, I guess the disgruntled radicals would not reform their radical party as the Spartacists, eventually Communists, OTL. But there would be lingering bad blood between radical and moderate leftists. If the liberal Western regimes come on hard times domestically, the radicals might suddenly get much more of a hearing, and hard-left parties might belatedly form; these would probably want to align themselves with Red Russia.
Meanwhile there is the colonial world to consider.
I think you've dropped some hints that these issues are indeed simmering away on the back burners ITTL. I want to stress, there are many plausible ways these things could play out. So far you've done great at making events seem to flow logically and in an emotionally sensible way as well.
....
{About the airship thing and Dr Hugo Eckener's prestige}
Oddly, I knew about that attempt - there's actually a relatively recent (started this year, if I recall correctly- I can be a rather slow updater at times, as you might have noticed by the dates of the posts) TL on this Board about just that thing.
Yes, I saw that when I was first joining, about a month and a half ago, but I didn't get into it because skimming from the beginning, it seemed to take all the airship stuff for granted in the background, whereas when it comes to LTA I like my wankery to be technical. I've been thinking about back-of-the-envelope sketches of the sort of integrated airplane/airship system I've talked about. I definitely have no time until sometime next month to get really into that though. Anyway, only after I've come up with something more concrete would it be possible to judge whether such a thing might ever have been commercially or even technically feasible!