alternatehistory.com

A Lenin-less World

Vladimir Lenin was a man who lived and breathed revolution. What if he was never born? What if the Ulyanov family in Simbirsk, Russia, never produced such a passionate, ambitious individual? Lenin was working towards his brand of socialism from the very beginning, splitting the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in half only a couple years after he had entered into its ranks. There he found the loyalty of radicals and zealots, the very people who later would lead to the deaths of millions, in fanatic honor for a utopian ideology. Communism was indeed fabricated by Vladimir Lenin, even Marx himself hadn’t imagined in his lifetime how such a society would work in the real world. After his famed sealed train ride across the German Empire, Lenin arrived in Petrograd and within months united the squabbling socialist factions into a fighting force that would dominate world concerns for the next seventy years. Could anyone imagine at the beginning of the 20th century that one man could transform an aging despotic empire, populated by ignorant nobles and subsidence farmers, into a power that would bring panic to every corner of the globe? Adolf Hitler may have held the attention of world leaders for a decade, and Albert Einstein might have changed the lives of the scientific community forever, but Vladimir Lenin’s legacy painted the 20th Century red. What color might have these last 100 years been painted with, if his chance prominence had never been?​
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