AHC: Make the Soviet Union more Liberterian Socialist and less Totalitarian

Ellis MacVey

Donor
Your challenge, should you choose to accept, is to make the Soviet Union more like the (several) SSRs in Führerreich: Legacy of the Great War and less like the totalitarian nightmare state it was in OTL. Maybe make, well, an alliance of Soviet Socialist Republics instead of a single nation while you're at it.

Is it even really possible?
 

ferdi254

Banned
No!

Communism had always been about fully centralised control and full power. No way it could be anyway libertarian.
 

Bourbonic Plague

Revolutions rarely make things pretty after they happen. After the Russian civil war, with its chaos and famine, no state after it CAN be nice after all the destruction. Dictators come after destruction, not democracy.
 

Garetor

Gone Fishin'
Then the easiest way to do this is to make the Russian Civil War less of one, or perhaps entirely butterflied away. A less brutal civil war means a less brutalized and paranoid ruling class afterwards. There were plenty of libertarian socialists who came to the USSR in the early days and became disillusioned-perhaps give them greater success in organizing unions to create an opposing power bloc to the party itself. There's plenty of room to play with POD's, especially given that there's no minimum date stated.
 

Garetor

Gone Fishin'
So, what, 19th century? Give Bakunin a professorship and make anarchism more acceptable to the upper and middle classes of Russia?
 

Ellis MacVey

Donor
Garetor said:
Then the easiest way to do this is to make the Russian Civil War less of one, or perhaps entirely butterflied away. A less brutal civil war means a less brutalized and paranoid ruling class afterwards. There were plenty of libertarian socialists who came to the USSR in the early days and became disillusioned-perhaps give them greater success in organizing unions to create an opposing power bloc to the party itself. There's plenty of room to play with POD's, especially given that there's no minimum date stated.
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Yeah, let's go with this, then...
 

Onkel Willie

Another option would be to have Lenin's Testament come out by Stalin failing to suppress it for whatever reason, sending both Stalin and Trotsky into the political wilderness while some kind of collective leadership emerges. The USSR would most likely be a repressive place to live, but the madness of the Holodomor and the Purges are avoided and we possibly even get the NEP to persist if Bukharin emerges as "first among equals."
 
ETGalaxy

ETGalaxy

ferdi254 said:
No!

Communism had always been about fully centralised control and full power. No way it could be anyway libertarian.
Click to expand...
I would actually have to disagree with this. Don't get me wrong, communism is flawed, however, to say that that if has to be centralized and is incompatible with libertarianism isn't true. Many communist movements have adhered to democratic principles and have supported decentralization (heck, "soviet" even translates to "workers' council). Communism is also extremely broad, ranging from anarchists to ultra-totalitarians. To say that all communism is totalitarian Marxist-Leninism is like saying that all socialism is communism.

Anyway, in order for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to be democratic, you would need different, more libertarian, leaders of the pre-Russian Civil War Russian communist movement. Replace Lenin with someone who endorsed democracy and libertarian socialism. One particular idea that I like is making Rosa Luxemburg stay in Poland after forming the basics of her political views and proceeding to fall in with Russian communists. Is it the most plausible scenario? No, but it's a fun change, in my opinion.

As for what a democratic USSR would look like, I can see it being more syndicalist than communist. The means of production would be controlled by the proletariat via unions of workers (they would probably be called soviets ITTL), and I can see some mutualist elements being thrown in as well.
 
Aisha Clan-Clan

Aisha Clan-Clan

Kick
Scorpio Retindar said:
Your challenge, should you choose to accept, is to make the Soviet Union more like the (several) SSRs in Führerreich: Legacy of the Great War and less like the totalitarian nightmare state it was in OTL. Maybe make, well, an alliance of Soviet Socialist Republics instead of a single nation while you're at it.

Is it even really possible?
Click to expand...
I thought bigotry wasn't allowed on this site. The OP clearly doesn't fall within the rules unless slavs are exempted...
 

Garetor

Gone Fishin'
That's such a ridiculous thing to say that I can only assume you're trolling or joking. The whole point of this website is to examine how history might have gone if things went differently. I've seen crazy fascist Russias here and utopian leftcom USSRs. A libertarian-socialist USSR is hardly beyond the pale.
 
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