AHC: Bolshevik Revolution with Direct Democracy

What would be the best way for the Bolshevik Revolution to:

1.) Defeat the Whites and become the dominant political force in Russia

AND

2.) Worker self-management and soviet direct democracy survive as important elements of the new system

If this is too ASB then what would be the best way for option 2 to be the foundation of any new post-revolutionary political order in Russia?
 
Maybe if they get another communist group allied with them?

In OTL the Left-SRs were allied with the Bolsheviks from the beginning and despite Bolshevik rhetoric to the contrary most Mensheviks would have been happy to be part of the Soviet system after the Whites showed what dicks they were and it became obvious the Red Army was winning.

Not to mention the brief alliances with the Blacks..
 
Bolshevism was never democratic, it was always centralized autocracy in intention, purpose, and basic ideology. Add in the Civil War and you get the same issues regardless, the war just served to dramatically smooth the processes of replacing the Tsarist fiefdom-autocracy with the Bolshevik bureaucratic autocracy.
 
Bolshevism was never democratic, it was always centralized autocracy in intention, purpose, and basic ideology. Add in the Civil War and you get the same issues regardless, the war just served to dramatically smooth the processes of replacing the Tsarist fiefdom-autocracy with the Bolshevik bureaucratic autocracy.

This does not guarantee the new regime will stay that way. A lot of the debates in the early to mid 20s in the Soviet Union were between Stalin's bureaucratic, authoritarian faction, Trotsky's Left Opposition, and the folks who were in between trying to pick sides. The reason Stalin's side won, and later purged most of the Old Bolsheviks in the following years, was because he stuffed the bureaucracy with his cronies.

When you look at some of the early discussions, particularly instances like Trotsky's push to end War Communism in 1920 and the Declaration of the 46, it could have gone either way. It says a lot that the Ban on Factions, which effectively silenced any kind of dissent within the party, didn't happen until 1921.
 
Kill Stalin. That won't eliminate totalitarian elements, however it will get you on the road there, because it will force a less centralized state. Why? Trotsky could never have centralized the state on the level Stalin did, or for that matter, any other contender for leadership position besides Stalin.

This won't give direct democracy, however after Lenin dies, it will force the Bolshevik government to become a lot less centralized, and therefore, less bureaucratic.
 

Hnau

Banned
I've got two good names for ya: Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai. These guys were all about worker self-management and soviet democracy. You'll most definitely need to get rid of Stalin. Perhaps Lenin or, more likely, Trotsky after Lenin's death could give one or both of these figures high positions in his government, and he supports their ideas?
 
This does not guarantee the new regime will stay that way. A lot of the debates in the early to mid 20s in the Soviet Union were between Stalin's bureaucratic, authoritarian faction, Trotsky's Left Opposition, and the folks who were in between trying to pick sides. The reason Stalin's side won, and later purged most of the Old Bolsheviks in the following years, was because he stuffed the bureaucracy with his cronies.

When you look at some of the early discussions, particularly instances like Trotsky's push to end War Communism in 1920 and the Declaration of the 46, it could have gone either way. It says a lot that the Ban on Factions, which effectively silenced any kind of dissent within the party, didn't happen until 1921.

Yes, and what happened IOTL was that Lenin immediately cracked down on all this and restored authoritarian strongman rule, while Trotsky and Stalin were both advocates of something like collectivizations and the Five Year Plan, they just viewed the purpose subtly differently. Lenin did not tolerate dissent, Stalin did not invent the method of repressing dissent.
 
In OTL the Left-SRs were allied with the Bolsheviks from the beginning and despite Bolshevik rhetoric to the contrary most Mensheviks would have been happy to be part of the Soviet system after the Whites showed what dicks they were and it became obvious the Red Army was winning.

Not to mention the brief alliances with the Blacks..

A longer, stronger, alliance with the Blacks might actually be exactly what it takes.
 

whitecrow

Banned
I've got two good names for ya: Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai. These guys were all about worker self-management and soviet democracy. You'll most definitely need to get rid of Stalin. Perhaps Lenin or, more likely, Trotsky after Lenin's death could give one or both of these figures high positions in his government, and he supports their ideas?

What would worker self-management look like? Would it end up like the direct democracy in Qaddafi's Libya?
 
The most realistic direct democracy in a Bolshevik Revolution would probably be Nestor Makhno's anarcho-syndicalist faction, though they also hardly qualify as such.
 

Hnau

Banned
You can look towards Spain to get a good idea of what worker self-management would look like. As for direct soviet democracy... the Soviet Union already had it in the same way that Libya had it under Qaddafi: the citizens could vote, voice their concerns, yada, yada, but there existed a bureaucratic system above these political organs, controlled by the ruling government, that held ultimate authority on what measures to pass and what political figures to let in. Now, I really doubt the Bolsheviks will do a better job than Qaddafi in letting direct democracy run its course. But if they do, there's really no good example in history to show us what it might be like. The closest example would probably be some of the states of the USA that constitutionally support referendums, initiatives, and recalls, or maybe states in New England that still have town meetings and "home rule" laws. There's a number of pros and cons for these existing systems, but honestly soviet democracy would probably be only theoretically similar and in practice completely different.
 
the Soviet Union already had it in the same way that Libya had it under Qaddafi: the citizens could vote, voice their concerns, yada, yada, but there existed a bureaucratic system above these political organs, controlled by the ruling government, that held ultimate authority on what measures to pass and what political figures to let in.

Only (if at all) to 1921 in relation to political manners, after which it was a simple political dictatorship, and in relation to economic matters it depends, but definitely by 1946 the factory had become an economic dictatorship.

See Simon Pirani who goes over this terrain.

yours,
Sam R.
 
You have to remove the leading Bolsheviks for this to work, and even then, it's likely to fail dramatically. Direct democracy tends toward dictatorship for obvious reasons. Simply removing Stalin will not remove the authoritarianism latent in Bolshevism; Stalin simply enacted the policies Lenin developed. Lenin and Stalin (and Trotsky as well, people are kidding themselves if they think Trotsky was a small d democrat) have to be taken out of the picture.

A divided and fragmented state like this would be overrun by the capitalist powers within five to ten years. There's absolutely no chance of a decentralized communist society working when the West was actively trying to put the kibosh on the Soviets from the start.
 
This can't really be done with the Bolsheviks. If you can keep Lenin from returning to Russia, and Trotsky from being put in charge of the Red army, worker self-management and Soviet democracy are a lot more likely to survive.
 
This can't really be done with the Bolsheviks. If you can keep Lenin from returning to Russia, and Trotsky from being put in charge of the Red army, worker self-management and Soviet democracy are a lot more likely to survive.

Preventing Lenin from returning Russia would have obliterated any chance of the socialists ever establishing a Soviet state, which would lead to an even worse defeat and occupation for Russia.
 
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