AH Challenge: A Democratic Lenin

Speak not of what you know not. His father was actually all for the democracy.

Ah, another case of a disgruntled child embracing something his father disaproves of.

So all we need to do is make daddy a Marxist and viola! A Democratic Lenin. :p
 

DISSIDENT

Banned
Difficult, despite his image as a democratic socialist revolutionary leader whose ideas and life's work were hijacked by Stalin the Paranoid Photograph Altering Sociopath.

Lenin was a pretty brutal man in his own right. Many of Stalin's police state tactics were just a continuation of Lenin's usual playbook for proletarian revolution lead by the educated children of the elite who guided the class struggle from on high.

The Red Terror during the Russian Civil War was Lenin's idea.

The Cheka was founded by Lenin. Shorter leap than you'd think to the NKVD under Lavrentii Beria.

People point out Lenin's suspicion of Stalin, but all the revolutionaries were generally suspicious of one another and his testament is pretty hard on Trotsky too.

I mean this as of Lenin's particular method of revolutionary activity and ideology. The Russian Revolution would probably have happened to some similar degree with less involvement from Lenin.

If say, Julius Martov or other prominent early Bolsheviks retained more power, or the peculiar conditions under which he returned are different, the revolution could take a more inclusive less savage course by the time he's back in Russia to take the reigns. He could just end up one more person in a collective leadership with less prestige and influence, with the Bolsheviks a fringe group sharing power with the Mensheviks.
 
Wait, how is he to be democratic in this challenge? Is he supposed to be a supporter of a democratic government in Russia? A democratic revolutionary? Or is he supposed to still be a Communist but instate a Democratic-Marxist state instead of the dictatorship?
 
If say, Julius Martov or other prominent early Bolsheviks retained more power, or the peculiar conditions under which he returned are different, the revolution could take a more inclusive less savage course by the time he's back in Russia to take the reigns. He could just end up one more person in a collective leadership with less prestige and influence, with the Bolsheviks a fringe group sharing power with the Mensheviks.
Martov was never a Bolshevik.

[/nitpick]
 
I was always under the impression that lenin was a power hungry tyrant who used communism as a way to seize power in russia. Either way, I think you would need a different personality for lenin for him to be a democrat, either that or the regime he ushers in is a democracy in name only.
 

Hnau

Banned
If all we are changing is that Lenin is democratic, then he fits in with the rest of the RSDLP of the early 20th century. There's no What Is To Be Done? and thus no Menshevik-Bolshevik split. The RSDLP stays as a united party, but a much less radicalized one. Lenin becomes a charismatic leader, probably taking over Julius Martov's position after the Russian Revolution. He is never shot at, and thus lives much longer.

You've taken away much that was unique about Lenin and why he became so important. Now, the only unique idea that he could provide Marxism is that Russia was already a capitalist society, and thus there was no need for a bourgeois transitory period between Tsarist Russia and Socialist Russia. But there will be no vanguard of the revolution, no core of professional revolutionaries... he'll want to win democratically and keep democracy. In that sense, he'll lead the RSDLP away from the position of simply being pro-labor to actually creating a socialist, soviet government that will revoke capitalist ideas. It won't be a serious enough break with the rest of the RSDLP that he'll lead a split, but those ideas will become more and more popular.

After that, simply follow my timeline, A Lenin-less World, and it'll be mostly the same. This POD effectively kills the Lenin we all knew, too. What does that involve? A successful anarchist-led putsch against the Provisional Government in July 1917, an All-Russian election by August or September, a Constituent Assembly organized by the end of 1917, the triumph of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, an earlier and more successful Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a slightly longer and bloodier Great War, a harsher peace, a smaller Poland, a larger Hungary, a democratic federal Rossiiskaya including the Baltic countries...
 
I think you get a democratic Lenin in an sufficiently democratic Russia. Maybe something as simple as a sucessful 1905.
 
Lenin was a pretty brutal man in his own right. Many of Stalin's police state tactics were just a continuation of Lenin's usual playbook for proletarian revolution lead by the educated children of the elite who guided the class struggle from on high.

Please. This is a myth that has been long put to rest. Though the newer treatment of Lenin by Lars T. Lih is enlightening.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kritika/v004/4.1lih.html
http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm


The Red Terror during the Russian Civil War was Lenin's idea.

The Cheka was founded by Lenin. Shorter leap than you'd think to the NKVD
I think it is a mistake to extrapolate the same response to a totally different set of conditions- it just doesn't make any sense to say- ah there was a secret police and terror during the unstable beginnings of the state, so it must continue throughout the state's existence? It's wishful thinking.

Stalin metamorphosed the nascent soviet state into something else entirely, I do not see how this can be disputed- it is not difficult to compare the arrangements and potential arrangements of state power in the two cases and draw the conclusions. It does not require a totally identical set of conditions, of course, to create a very repressive Soviet Union (unless you subscribe to a Great Man theory) there were very nasty people in the party after all, but you have to find a person who will create not emergency terror but permanent terror.

As the ideal counter-example: Russia under undead Lenin would not turn into a totalitarian state because he was a deeply ideological man, and you can read his writings to guess at his responses. He may have laid what were the necessary foundations for a continental death factory, but he would not have built that himself. Why would he? It is not a question of being a good or bad character, he had different ideas.

I am sorry bringing the thread off topic, but the thread was kind of doomed to that from the start.
 
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