DBWI: the Bolsheviks were more radical than the Mensheviks?

Deleted member 97083

Compared to the radical communistic parties the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which revolted and replaced the German Empire, and the Labour Party of Britain, which established the Union of Britain, the much more peaceful and moderate Bolsheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party were more focused on slow incremental change, compromise, and electoral rather than revolutionary advances.

In comparison to the revolutionary Mensheviks, a century-old paramilitary group in eastern Europe, the Bolsheviks have been considered "the world's most moderate and pacifist socialistic party", which some even call liberal. Despite winning 70% of the last 100 years' Russian elections, the Bolsheviks have not transformed the Russian Empire into a communist state, to the chagrin of the New Marxist Party. The mix of free market, public intervention, and social welfare has led to the Russian Empire having a rather high standard of living. On the other hand, the German Democratic Republic and Union of Britain have not been doing so well, falling below the capitalist state of Vietnam.

Some have said that this moderation of the Bolsheviks was inevitable. After all, they have Social Democrat in the name of their party, rather than Socialist. However, some theorists have said that the early 20th century Russian Empire was actually ripe for revolution, and its survival to the modern day was the product of luck and reformism. The success of Mao Zedong in China has led some historians to suggest that pre-industrialized or partially industrializing nations might be better at utilizing communism to develop than fully industrialized nations, which tend to have a higher GDP per capita under mixed capitalism.

What would a more radical Bolshevik party look like? What would a communist Russia call itself after overthrowing the Russian Empire? How would it develop?
 
"Liberal"

Oh look, the German Trotskyites/Stalinists with their favorite buzzword for any socialist state that doesn't adhere perfectly to their line. Bakunin and Lenin realized that the conditions for socialism needed to be built up over generations, not established in one fell swoop. Luckily Germany and Great Britain were already industrialized, so their living standards are still strong, if lacking the dynanism of Russian/Chinese/American market socialism (though American market socialism is the one case where you could plausibly argue it's capitalism by another name; the producer cooperatives are actually quite decentralized and there is still something of a capitalist investment market; hell Wall Street still exists.

The Trots need to realize that we're not going to achieve communism in 1, 2, 3 or even 10 generations; we're going to make slow evolutionary steps towards building the material conditions for communism? Remember? Materialism? The thing Marx was talking about?

Sorry for the snippy tone but I'm really sick of getting called a """revisionist""" because I disagree with one highly authoritarian strain of Marxism.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
What would a more radical Bolshevik party look like? What would a communist Russia call itself after overthrowing the Russian Empire? How would it develop?
In short: It would achieve extremely rapid industrialization but its economy would also stagnate and the Bolsheviks would have to kill a lot of people in order to prevent anyone from challenging their power (and frankly, the Bolsheviks are going to get a lot of hate among the Russian population for their radicalism in this TL).
 
The Bolsheviks achieved extraordinary industrialization as it is however. Land reform and mechanization *really* jumpstarted industrialization because it made agriculture so much more efficient than the old feudal plantations, combined with their support of literacy and healthcare (and getting more women into the workforce) so it freed up a vast amount of human potential that the pre reform Tsarist system had kept down.

Doubt a Menshevik type program (with the whole forced collectivization) thing could match that or even come close.

Also even though foreign observers still refer to it as the "Russian Empire" it's officially called "The Federation of United Socialist Commonwealths" and the Tsar isn't technically of "Russia" but "The Enlightened Tsar of the Imperial Federation". They really try to balance upholding the old symbolic traditions with making a clean break with the pre reform era.
 

Deleted member 97083

Also even though foreign observers still refer to it as the "Russian Empire" it's officially called "The Federation of United Socialist Commonwealths" and the Tsar isn't technically of "Russia" but "The Enlightened Tsar of the Imperial Federation". They really try to balance upholding the old symbolic traditions with making a clean break with the pre reform era.
Well yeah. Usually the Tsar is referred to as the First Comrade. It's only on the ceremonial buildings, and a couple speeches a year, that he is ever called Enlightened Tsar.

Every year the First Comrade "crowns the people" at the Palace of the Federal Soviets, which is the main constitutional power afforded to him.
 
Also what would be the POD? I guess Lenin is never captured and sent to Siberia as punishment for his student protests, and never meets Rasputin, who by a stroke of fate became the court doctor for the Romanovs. It was Rasputin that really helped defuse a potentially revolutionary situation between the Bolshevik worker councils and the Tsardom, as well as orchestrating the abdication of Nicholas for Olga (AND Lenin's matrilineal marriage to her; I bet he never dreamed he'd become Tsar! They were an amazingly good couple, and really became a national symbol for the melding of the Imperial past with the Socialist future, while allowing space for socialism to grow on Russia's conservatives and monarchists.). It's really funny though, turns out feudalism is actually kind of cute if you take away the material oppression aspect of it.

Without that link I'm assuming Lenin turns into more of a revolutionary like Trotsky and Stalin, who fled to Germany after the Menshevik faction lost out in Russia. Bakunin though; he never liked keeping the aristocracy even in a ceremonial role, but the fact that he got a lot of what he wanted in terms of the economic restructuring mollified him. I wonder if he would even play a big factor in a Bolshevik revolution in which Stalin and Trotsky are huge forces.

At least you'd get a more libertarian, less authoritarian German socialism; surely Rosa Luxembourg would have been the leader of the revolution.
 
Impossible. The largely agrarian state of Russia in the twentieth century essentially meant that any socialist party would have to be capitalistic, because according to Marxian theory, capitalism follows feudalism, then communism follows capitalism, and Russia at the turn of the twentieth century was feudal. And so, the majority of Russian socialists promoted moving Russia into capitalism before they could move it into communism. As it turned out, the disaster in many communist countries led Russian socialists to no longer extoll the values of communism.

On the other hand, socialists in capitalist countries supported communism, as naturally communism follows capitalism.

To get this scenario, you need the Bolsheviks to forget Marxist theory, which is ASB.
 
I think in the end, Bolshevik leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin and Sergey Kirov knew that going from the feudal-like agrarian society under the Tsars to a Communist society as described in the Communist Manifesto in one quick leap wouldn't work. That's why they "eased out" Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky, who wanted very radical and quick change. (Stalin in his autobiography published before his passing in 1958 noted that his advocacy for radical change fortunately didn't come to fruition; he realized that to get that radical change, he would have to act like radical French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre, and we know what happened in France under Robespierre.)

But it was Sergey Kirov, who led the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party from 1934 to 1956 (when he retired--he passed in 1976 at 90 years old) that really modernized that country. The land reform and mechanization of farms under his rule resulted in Russia in 2017 being the world's largest producer of wheat, oats, and several other grains. Kirov is such a revered name in and out of Russia that TIME Magazine named Sergey Kirov and Albert Einstein (the physicist who theories on Relativity created the physics we know today) co-winners of the Person of the Century award in December 1999.
 
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