DBWI: No Tambov Revolution?

Could the RSFSR have a future?

  • Yes

    Votes: 4 44.4%
  • No, warlordism is inevitable

    Votes: 3 33.3%
  • No, some other faction would have beaten it

    Votes: 2 22.2%

  • Total voters
    9
Yes yes I know a Russia thread on the Post 1900 board, let's get all the jokes about the "absent man of Europe" out of the way now so we can actually discuss this topic seriously.

So most TLs and WIs pertaining to the Russian question deal with butterflying the 1917 revolution and the apocalyptic civil war that followed. However, until the peasants revolt of 1920, the conflict was a fairly "normal" civil war which the Bolsheviks seemed to have the upper hand in (at least that's what it seems from my reading of it, correct me if I'm wrong). The descent into total warlordism only occurred after Antonov failed to establish a government to replace the reds (again correct me if I'm wrong on that).

Since expecting an urban-industrial worker's faction to be in tune with the peasantry is perhaps asking too much, let's just say that the rebellion is more poorly organized and the Bolshevik response is swifter.

What's the shelf life for a Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic* that avoids the Tambov Revolution? Could they actually make a coherent government without shedding their ideology? How would such an unprecedented state** effect diplomacy in Europe?

*I'm actually kinda glad it collapsed just because that name is so clunky

**to clarify: by unprecedented I mean it being a communist state, not it being Russian polity with recognized borders and a cohesive government in the 20th century.

ooc: Basically the premise is that due to Russia not really recovering from the civil war (and presumably becoming something like warlord era China) the history of the Russian Civil War is a bit of a black hole of history (at least internationally) so feel free to say conflicting things regarding the events of the civil war (and that includes me and my assertion that the Tambov Rebellion is the watershed moment).
 
Realistically speaking, a hypothetical Russian Soviet would probably form in core population centres, meaning that the Far East would be lost. So, there'll probably still be Japanese Kamchatka. Either that, or American Kamchatka. It's one or the other.

A Communist state would probably be regarded as an oddity by the rest of Europe. It's never been properly implemented, after all.
 
For starters, we'd probably not have the Intermarium Union be formed by Pilsudski's Poland as the Pilsudski Regime in Poland took advantage of the collapse of Russia to forge a federation of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, and the Ukraine.
 
It's certainly POSSIBLE, at least for awhile; look at France during the first years of its Revolution just over a century earlier for an example of how a militaristic left-wing dictatorship with the support of the urban centers can properly surpress the countryside of conservative peasantry provided they're willing to be harsh enough. Such a regieme probably woulden't look too different from the warlords that actually came to dominate the region IOTL... hell, it'd probably include some of the "Anarchist" ones and those with their "Utopian City-States" who managed to get their hands on stockpiles of military-grade weapons. Hold the village hostage by keeping an artillery piece permanently aimed at it, "conscript" the urban poor into the military and factories in exchange for publicly distributed rations and state housing, ect. and they could build a large and loyal military. Now, such a state is likely going to have to make some pretty big formal border concessions and would lose alot of "marginal" territory, considering the high cost and guerrilla risk of trying to hold onto sparcely populated, low productivity per capita territory: the borders of Peter the Great or something to that effect seem the most likely.
 
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