DBWI: The bolsheviks had won russia in 1917

I was looking though an old history book and reading about the instability in russia after the end of the first world war. Those poor bolsheviks, thinking they could win - though I suppose had the support for the government had not been so strong from the UK, USA, and France the bolsheviks could have won.

I can tell you one thing, had they won things would have been different. For one thing, the great war (you know, the one that started in 1939) would have played out in a radically different way...
 

Germaniac

Donor
Well, for one thing Russia would not have been the economic powerhouse it is today. Socialism never would have lasted in Russia, I'm telling you a "Worker's State" never could have survived. Just look at Union of German Socialist Republics. It was Crushed by the onslaught of the Russian army in the second great war.
 
Bah, a country as big as Russia getting taken over by unorganized and largely unarmed peasant rabble is ASB, and if they did take it over it would probably have fallen apart into chaos just like the Second Paris Commune did.
 
Hm- a Bolshevik government would probably be even shakier than the Republic was in the 1920s- Japan could have gotten the entire Russian east coast, and not just Vladivostok...
 
Yeah, I doubt the Communists could have held onto power long. For one thing too many great powers would have been against it.
 
Yeah, I doubt the Communists could have held onto power long. For one thing too many great powers would have been against it.
Hm- perhaps a massive alliance of the Allies, Japan, and the US against the Communists? I realize the powers would still be struggling with the effects of WW1, but I really don't think they would allow a Communist nation to exist.
 
Hm- perhaps a massive alliance of the Allies, Japan, and the US against the Communists? I realize the powers would still be struggling with the effects of WW1, but I really don't think they would allow a Communist nation to exist.

That sounds about right. Russia can't survive that.
 
Industrially, Russia still was an underdeveloped country. That poor bolshevic fools, trying to impose Karl Marx' principles on a nation of uneducated peasants... - Rosa Luxemburg was right, that Uljanov character was an dangerous monomane.
But at least Leon Bronstein got away; without him the German Red Army would never have held out so long against the Russian hordes and inflicted the tremendous casualties that finally forced the Russians to accept western mediation.
 
I never understood why the bolsheviks gets so much attention in AH. They where so late, Lenin wasn't even in the country when the revolution happened. The odds are higher Rasputin or Sternberg become Tsar.
 
International politics aside, there's no way the Bolsheviks could've come to power over all the other revolutionary groups in Russia. In large parts the military (if not the rank and file, than certainly the officers) still supported the monarchy; there were splinter nationalist groups in many countries; there was Makhno's Black Army; and of course the peasant 'Green' Armies, which had no particular ideology and just wanted to get more land for the same current lifestyle.

The transfer of power to Communism would never come peacefully; and I don't think that the Bolsheviks had either the numbers or the influence to beat all comers in any kind of post-WWI Civil War. Also, the reforms that liberalized Russia were really what saved that country's economy. I'm perhaps not as anti-communist as some people in this thread, but Russia wasn't the right country for it at all.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
I don't believed they would have been able to hold on to power, remember how many strong Rebel groups frequently rebelled against the socialists in Germany, in Russia there would be even more anti- socialists. They would never have been able to last even a decade.
 
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