Lenin's stroke 1916

WI Lenin had his severe stroke before the summer of 1917.

I believe that it was he who persuaded the Bolsheviks to mount the coup aka Great October Revolution.

I do not think that there will be a Bolshevik take over however what will happen?
 
Interesting, communism is an obscure philophy. Russia I think would have become a miltary dictatorship. I think fear of communism was a big part of Hitler' appeal, so maybe we have butterflied away World War II.
 
Hard to say. Lenin was decisive in pushing the Bolsheviks towards taking power immediately instead of building a democratic bourgeosie state, but he also made sure that the Bolsheviks did not take power too early and wait until the right moment. In either case, it's likely the Bolsheviks would not have done as well without him.

The collapse of the Kerensky government is almost assurred. His decision to continue the war, and the failure of the Provisional Government to not hold quick elections destroyed their authority and legitimacy.

Most likely the left wing of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs) will seize power. Their brand of populist socialism was better suited to Russia's agricultural base, and they were in fact much more popular than the Bolsheviks.

Like the Bolsheviks, the SR would have taken Russia out of the war. Like the Bolsheviks, they would have been confronted with the risk of accepting draconian peace terms from the Germans. Like the Bolsheviks, they would have been confronted with a hostile counter revolution as well.

In favor of the SR, their political platform would have been more acceptable to Russia's peasantry, and they likely would not have been opposed by peasant groups. Against them, they did not have the leadership the Bolsheviks had. Whatever their faults, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were a winning combination.

I think the SR would have taken power in an October Revolution. The Petrograd Soviet was moving against Kerensky after the Kornilov Affair. Even without Lenin, the government falls. The SR (perhaps in coalition with smaller parties like the Bolsheviks) would have started peace terms with the Germans at Brest Litovsk. IOTL, Lenin finally got the Bolsheviks to agree to its terms because he knew they couldn't stop the Germans. This was incredibly unpopular and resisted by everyone. I don't think the SR leadership could accept it either, and without Lenin the terms are refused.

This means the German Army takes Petrograd in March 1918 with little opposition. The SR government flees leaving Russia without any official government. Russia fragments into various petty warlord states. The SR government probably reforms in Moscow, but has much less authority throughout Russia.

Germany keeps slightly more troops in the East than IOTL, but still transfers most of its forces west. Germany loses WWI like normal.

The SRs appeal to the peasants with their immediate land reform, and they still unleash a conservative backlash. I think ultimately, the SRs will win the civil war, but unlike the Bolsheviks not be able to retain control of most of the Czariist Empire as more ethnic nationalists are able to retain power. The SR Russian state sees a larger Finland containing all of Karelia, indenpendent Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan in the south Caucasus, and likley some kind of independent Ukrainian state and even a Don Cossack state in the Kuban. Central Asia is also lost.

I think ultimately the Whites will still lose. They ultimately cannot appeal to the mass of peasants, and the SRs can. The civil war may take longer than what it did IOTL, but ultimately the SRs win.

As agrarian socialists, the SR government is probably seen as less hostile as the Bolsheviks, so the Western powers don't give as much backing to the Whites, and establish relations.

You end up with a map not too different than what we have IOTL right now. The government in Russia is socialist, but not communist. There is probably a weak kind of democracy with the SRs, some form of Makhnovian agrarian-anarchist, weaker Bolsheviks, and perhaps some right wing liberal party that appeals to the middle class and traditional conservatives. Best case scenario, the new Russian state becomes stable and acts much like the other nascent nations in Eastern Europe. Worst case, there is long term regional fragmentation much like Nationalist China at the time, where everyone theoretically obeys the SR government in Moscow but builds their own power base. Or in the chaos of civil war, we may see another coup - say by the Bolsheviks lead by a Trotsky-Zinoviev-Stalin triumvirate - take power with the end result being the two situations above.

It'll be a bloody mess.
 
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