I'm just anxious to see what kind of development will Germany have in this timeline. Even if Russia loses all of her allies due the shows of force against the Poles, there is nothing Britain andFrance can really do if Germans and Russians form a joint spehere of influence over Central Europe. I wonder if the Nazis would be such Slavophobes if there was a genuine path for a Russo-German alliance.Given the discussion that goes on in this thread, you're definitely not in the minority here. I for one definitely want to see the gritty details of statesmanship, it is in those details where states succeed and fail. Even the greatest transformation or revolution, whether technological, political, or otherwise, has tiny seeds it can be traced back to.
On the discussion of the evils of bolshevism, I'd add the note that the atrocities of the soviet union had many seeds from before the revolution.
Premier among them, I'd say, is the fact that a revolutionary, conspiratorial, underground organization, making use of terrorism as part of its political arsenal, is exactly the sort of environment where beasts of men like Jughashvili could prosper, and is not at all suitable for organizing a culture of democratic debate, but rather an opposite culture of outright paranoia. Moreover, Russia already suffered from a political culture where sycophancy and political appointments were common, and it certainly didn't get better once sycophants could use the charge of ideological deviation as a bludgeon against peers whose competence posed a threat.
Another seed, tied to the first in some ways, is the history of the use of secret police - when the Okhrana made it a habit to play with fire, embedding agents provocateur like Azef and Bobrov, they ended up outright supporting the growth of violent, extremist wings of the organizations they were watching. Frankly the history reads like a cautionary tale of hubris - their scope of operations, and the risks of blowback, make me think that they just didn't account for the possibility that they might inflame the situation too much for them to handle. They organized collaborationist unions to pull people away from revolutionary rhetoric, and then one of their unions attempted to petition the Tsar and were rebuffed in the Bloody Sunday massacre. The Okhrana outright printed revolutionary leaflets, perhaps in an attempt to get subversives to show themselves, and their embedded agents engaged in some cases directly in planning or executing political terrorism. They were so unaware of the inherent societal instability of a Russia with developing mass movements and a political structure unable to effectively take in the populace's feedback, that they continued to directly harm the stability of the country out of what I can only assume was a misguided assumption that it would never get bad enough for outright revolution. And then WWI came along and they had to redirect their efforts to foreign counterespionage, and all the revolutionary fervor and organization that they fed was now largely free to operate, in a social milieu that steadily got more and more angry due to the stresses of the war. And then, of course, with the February revolution came the wholesale dissolution of the Okhrana, as they had completely bled all legitimacy in the eyes of the new government thanks to their many abuses, and thus all their secret puppets, independent and dangerous at the best of times, were free of even the barest hope of being reined in somehow, should the puppetmaster somehow have come to its senses at the eleventh hour.
I alluded above already to the problem of the government being unable to respond to the development of mass politics, thanks to growing literacy and urbanization. If workers, peasants, etc had an effective way to petition the government without being met by the bayonet, if the people had a better ability to influence their government's priorities, then most would have tried those methods, and the revolutionaries would never have amassed as much support as they did. If only Nicholas had the foresight to cooperate and compromise more with the Duma, rather than shutting it down when inconvenient, denying it any power over ministerial appointments, and arbitrarily tipping the electoral rules in his favor, making it clear that Russian democracy operated only at the emperor's pleasure, then it could have grown into an institution that gives the people the feeling that they have a voice, and that their benevolent emperor's rule is indeed benevolent.
ITTL a lot of these contributing factors can have been mitigated - there's certainly been more effective government under the enduring Stolypin than OTL, the Okhrana could have somehow been reined in and made to kill its pet projects for the good of Russia, the organs of government maintain a stable continuity, and hopefully, hopefully, there will be further reforms, since the current state of Russian governance is nowhere near capable of ruling without frequent oppression. On that last one though, I'm not holding by breath - Stenkarazin has hinted that Tsar Nick is retrenching in autocracy now that the war is over, and so while I think that a liberal constitutional order would be the best scenario for Russia right now, I currently don't see that happening.
Also, without Marxist principles being baked into Russian society, the advancement of women's rights in the country would have been way slower, since that was a core template of the leftist movements during the twentieth century. Giving women education and prospects in the labor market is the perfect recipe for bringing down birth rates, though. So, if Russians birth rates had a more organic decline, instead of the acute dip they had during Stalin's era, then we might very well see a situation where other ethnicities of the Russian Empire are driven into reservations in order to make room for more East Slavs (poor Kazakhs and Uzbeks).
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