How plausible would it be for the Socialist Revolutionaries to successfully win the Russian Revolution, while the Bolsheviks, while beaten, are not decisively destroyed amd entrench themselves on Ukraine or Belarus or another important but not quite central piece of the former Russian Empire?
 
The Bolsheviks were unpopular in Ukraine in 1917--they got only 10 percent of the vote there in the elections for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly: "In Ukraine the 7,580,000 votes cast were divided in the following way: the national groups (non-Russian parties) won 61.5 percent (among them the Ukrainian SRs won 45.3 percent); the Russian SRs, 24.8 percent; the Bolsheviks, 10 percent; and the Kadets, 3.7 percent." http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.co...=pages\A\L\All6RussianConstituentAssembly.htm They would need a Bolshevik Great Russia to gain or keep power in Ukraine. (The Bolsheviks tried to call an All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kiev to seize power, but the Central Rada flooded the Congress with its own supporters. https://books.google.com/books?id=Z0mKRsElYNkC&pg=PT685)

The Bolsheviks did much better in Belarus due largely to what Oliver H. Radkey called "the influence of the front with its milling mob of Bolshevized soldiers." But the soldiers and workers of Minsk could hardly sustain a Red Belarus with both Poland and Russia controlled by anti-Bolshevik forces.
 
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