DBWI:Communist Russia

samcster94

Banned
There were several revolts in the late 19th and early 20th century that were very left leaning by Russian standards, but they ultimately failed. What if these revolts in Russia had succeeded, especially with Vladimir Lenin at the head???
OOC: I don't want a 21st century reference point, I want something more like an interwar reference point, but the Tsars still sit on the throne.
 
It would be completely nonsensical for any type of Marxist revolution to succeed in Russia. It would be like trying to get a Catholic President in the United States. Perhaps one of the agrarian republican-populist Narodniki rebellions succeed in the late 1800s, but that's the furthest I can imagine it going. Maybe if the Alliance of the Three Emperors had been dissolved, then maybe, maybe, a later joint German-Austrian invasion might've been enough to cause the instability necessary for a republican revolution. But that's a lot of maybes.
 
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Even the Germans were only giving VERY lukewarm support to the Communist movements in Russia. Likely because they knew that, were the Communists to actually win there, they'd immediately come running cap-in-hand to Berlin.
 
I don’t know. Just can’t see any country as insanely conservative and right-wing as *Russia* (you know, pogrom and secret police capital of the world?) going in for anything left of a military dictatorship.
 
It would be completely nonsensical for any type of Marxist revolution to succeed in Russia. It would be like trying to get a Catholic President in the United States. Perhaps one of the agrarian republican-populist Narodniki rebellions succeed in the late 1800s, but that's the furthest I can imagine it going. Maybe if the Alliance of the Three Emperors had been dissolved, then maybe, maybe, a later joint German-Austrian invasion might've been enough to cause the instability necessary for a republican revolution. But that's a lot of maybes.
I don’t know. Just can’t see any country as insanely conservative and right-wing as *Russia* (you know, pogrom and secret police capital of the world?) going in for anything left of a military dictatorship.

You really hit the nail on the head here: Russia's insistance on maintaining its post-Napoleonic role of "Gendarmie of Europe" (Including policing itself); maintaining rather than disrupting pre-existing orders rather than pursuing further national expansion or any push that might take her bayonets off of potential rebellion against other monarchs after the disaster at Crimea really locked the Czars into their throne both by crushing any possible base of dissent from forming and building for itself an indispensable role in the eyes of the international community. You'd need St. Petersburg that takes a more aggressive, proactive forgien policy in a similar vein to their European counterparts; geography prevents her from joining in the Scramble for Africa, but maybe she takes another crack at trying to undermine the Ottoman control of the Balkans (Suicidal as that may be, given the Tanzimat Reforms are really starting to show their effects by the late 60s and by 76 or so you window is basically gone) or seeking a sphere of influence in Asia? Invest in a Pacific Navy, and she could have a real crack at being the one to conquer Nippon, or could take a sledgehammer to the old homeland of the crumbling Qing.
 
Umm, what is communism, exactly? Looking it up, it seems communists believe(d) in a "stateless society". Isn't that just anarchism, like in Britain?
 
Umm, what is communism, exactly? Looking it up, it seems communists believe(d) in a "stateless society". Isn't that just anarchism, like in Britain?
Yeah, communism is basically Anarchism's forgotten step-child. Everyone knows Bakunin as the great revolutionary thinker of the 1800s, but another guy named Karl Marx proposed this convoluted idea of Hegelian Dialectics mixed with class consciousness or something that would lead to a socialist (what we call societist) state, which would in turn lead to a post-scarcity utopia called communism. The Anarchist movements decided to cut out the middle man of societism, while most societists today don't really associate with Marx as much as Blanqui (if they're Red Societists) or Eduard Bernstein (if they're Democratic Societists).
 
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Yeah, communism is basically Anarchism's forgotten step-child. Everyone knows Bakunin as the great revolutionary thinker of the 1800s, but another guy namedKarl Marx proposed this convoluted idea of Hegelian Dialectics mixed with class consciousness or something that would lead to a socialist (what we call societist) state, which would lead to a post-scarcity utopia called communism. The Anarchist movements decided to cut out the middle man of societism, while most societists don't really associate with Marx as much as Blanqui (if they're Red Societists) or Eduard Bernstein (if they're Democratic Societists).

The OP himself mentions one of Marx's more famous disciples, Vladimir Lenin, who I think more of us would recognize. Even the Anarchists, as much as they disagree with his conclusions, applaud and have broadly adopted his thoughts on the "Worker-Aristocracy" and the parallels he drew between the capitalist-company structure and global geo-economic system of free international trade, specialization of production/primary vs. secondary vs. tertiary good productions based economies, and colonialism to build up the autarky/local self-sufficiency plank of their philosophy. I've read that his writings inspired many of the leaders of the Decolonization faction in Syndicalist Britain during the great debate in the 1920's and 1930's between them and the "Vanguard Country" philsophy that wanted to keep the economic unity as sister-republics.
 
Come on guys, this isn't too hard.

What you need is for the British monarchy to fall to a communist rebellion, rather than an anarchist one, and then to serve as nesting grounds for future communist revolutionaries. Russia has the oppressed population needed for a rebellion, but lacks the leadership: Britain could provide the leadership and the manpower required to get the revolution rolling. If you imagine something like a German-Austrian-Ottoman alliance fighting a Franco-Russian one, and then the British communists staging an uprising in southern Russia (with tacit Ottoman support) could be pretty successful.

I mean, I wouldn't bet on it or anything, but it's not that complex. They just need the backing and a war going bad.
 
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