PC: Serbia or Bulgaria or Turkey become 1st Marxist state in the world?

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Monthly Donor
Could it be plausible for Serbia or Bulgaria or Turkey to become the 1st Marxist state in the world.

This is in the post-1900 forum, but you're welcome to suggest 19th century PoDs.

I bring up Serbia and Bulgaria, because I think they had Marxist Socialist parties before 1917, and because I think that successful external intervention to suppress such a revolution is not such a foregone conclusion here as it would be in so many other places.

I'll admit I have no specific PoD, and am lazily leaving that to others.

Here's my thinking:

If a Marxist revolution/takeover happens in Serbia or Bulgaria in the late 19th or early 20th century occurred, their geopolitical position could be such that potential interveners are more suspicious of each other than the radical revolutionaries, and they veto/deter each other's intervention allowing the revolutionaries to consolidate.

For instance, even if it's an avowedly atheist/socialist takeover, it will be "politically incorrect" for Europeans to support an Ottoman intervention against a historic Christian population.

In most times and places, Russia is also a bogeyman to Europe. Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans will always oppose its intervention and Britain will in early periods. By the time there is a Russo-British Entente that makes London tolerant of a Russian intervention, Germany will probably oppose Russian intervention.

The same applies in reverse in terms of the Russians objecting to an Austro-Hungarian intervention. Romania and Greece are too small to support regime changes on their own.

---As for Ottoman Turkey, I do not know if it even had a Marxist Socialist party. While I think external intervention and exploitation would be likely in the event of a radical Socialist revolution, I think it could easily result in amputation of fringe territories while in Anatolia and/or Thrace revolutionaries could remain in charge of a buffer state because external great powers don't trust each other intervening.

Thoughts?
 
Interesting, but unlikely.

Serbia and Bulgaria did have Marxist socialist parties. However, these parties were very weak (usually managed to get 1-3% of the vote - 5% on an extremely good day). And they were weak for several reasons:

-Reason #1: there was very little social inequality in Serbia and Bulgaria. The countryside was dominated by independent peasant land holdings; there were no great estates or serfs to fuel unrest and revolutionary socialism. And industry was still at a low enough level where Marxism couldn't firmly take hold of it; let alone use it as a base to overpower the countryside.

-Not only were Serbia and Bulgaria much less unequal and stratified than the Russian Empire*; the political systems of Serbia and Bulgaria were also much more open and democratic than the Russian Empire*.

-Having to compete with other (non-Marxist) Socialist-leaning parties, who tended to be a lot more popular and broadly appealing;

-The Marxist parties' own deficiencies: internal splits, overly narrow and dogmatic approach, out of touch leaderships...and so on.


*and than the Austrian Empire, and than the Ottomans...but Russia, as the site of a successful Marxist takeover, is the most useful one to compare with.


So the Marxists aren't going to be winning any elections, and they won't have anywhere near the popularity or institutional support to mount a revolution. Some of those reasons can be eliminated with a minimum of fuss, but eliminating others (especially the key Reason #1) requires a PoD far back, so far back it would make the region barely recognizable in fact.


The Ottoman case is somewhat different, but IMO just as unlikely. The late Ottoman Empire did have Marxist parties, but they were overwhelmingly minority parties, with Turkish/Muslim involvement ranging from "limited" to "none whatsoever".
 
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