AHC/WI: Actually functioning Soviet Democracy

How could Soviet Democracy, which functions on the principle of bottom-up democratic rule, have been instituted in the Soviet Union with some form of actual power, and what would it look like?
 
The Kerensky government could have been more practical in its armed forces, which would have been able to successfully conduct the Kerensky Offensive, and prevent Lenin from taking power. That could have led to a more or less Soviet democratic state.
 
Kerensky was committed to crushing the soviets. His government would have likely been a Weimar-style parliamentary republic, struggling to remain coherent, or alternatively succumbed to the right-wing forces used to prop it up.

The key to soviet democracy, I feel, lies in the Soviet Alliance that organised October and the Brest-Litovsk treaty that tore the alliance apart. If the Left-SRs and the Bolsheviks had remained working together, they likely would have not only won the Civil War sooner but also been forced to play off each other in the soviets in a sort of two-party democracy.
 
I think the important aspects for functioning and materially realistic soviet democracy are: 1) having the openness to tinker with democratic centralism and achieve more and fairer participation, 2) properly establishing the CPSU as an ideological vanguard party (rather than a party of governance) and giving the soviets and the Premier dominance in governing, 3) having more labor and consumer co-op representation and participation in central economic planning. Best way to go about this in my opinion is to somehow have the Worker's Opposition not be so harshly shut down and/or have them and the Group of Democratic Centralists play a long game for power (with some non-Stalin-led central committee so there's the breathing space for it). After getting into power and having achieved the above in some shape, it could allow in the future for the Soviet Union to get to the point where they have a truly bottom-up, and council-only, system.
 
How the HECK do you get Bolsheviks to allow real democracy? That's against their whole policy.

If you have someone else in control (e.g. Kerensky, above), does it count as 'Communism'.

Was there anyone in Russia at the time who was both democratic and 'Communist'? If so, who, and how do you pull off their rise to power?


AFAIK, it's a bit like 'what if Hitler didn't hate Jews'....
 
Impossible. Lenin didn't want any kind of democracy. He wanted dictatorship. That was what "democratic centralism" really meant. Debate was OK until the party made a decision, but once it did, no more debate and no more dissent. And as time went by, more and more decisions had already been made so less and less could be openly debated. Whenever Lenin and the Bolsheviks were confronted with a situation where people disagreed with them and voted the other way, their only response was to ignore the vote and impose their will by force.
 
Potentially have Gorbachev iniate more drastic political and economic reform immediatly upon coming to power combined with a more agressive ending of the Cold War (i.e. Soviets leave Eastern EUrope in 1987-1988) Thus the Communists can still transition to democracy before Yeltsin becomes relevant and before the Soviet economy fully collapses.
 
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