Russia without Communism

I realize that this is something of a NOOB-WI, but it’s still a fascinating question. What would Russia look like if it somehow avoided communist rule and (just as importantly) the Civil War? I have no clue how to make this happen (WWI suspended indefinitely? Kerensky’s government holds on somehow? ASBs make it happen to spare me the intellectual exercise of coming up with a real POD?) and I imagine that the circumstances of the divergence would matter a great deal…but I digress.

There are two main points here. The first is that the Russian Civil War was immensely destructive. Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers points out that Russian manufacturing and production in 1920 was12.8% of what it had been in 1913, and only recovered to its 1913 baseline in 1926. Given that the Russian industrial sector had averaged 5-8% growth per year between 1890 and 1913 (though from a ridiculously low baseline…) it isn’t hard to see those thirteen years as a vast lost opportunity.

The second is that communist rule in Russia was not really all that effective in industrializing Russia. To be sure, they were good at some things (education stands out) but overall the results weren’t all that impressive relative to their means. According to Niall Ferguson (who should be taken with more than a grain of salt, because any given bit of anything he’s written in the last ten years has a 50:50 chance of having been written by a graduate student working as his research assistant while he was off doing a TV special or something), between 1929 and 1937 “when allowances are made for idiosyncratic pricing conventions, real GNP growth was closer to 3-4.9% per annum while per capita consumption rose by no more than 1.9% and perhaps by as little as 0.6% per annum” which (leaving aside the issue of intentionally killing millions of people and imprisoning as much as 15% of the population in Gulags) isn’t all that impressive compared to the growth of, say, modern China.

So, I guess the point I’m trying to get to is this—what would Russia look like if it somehow avoided the Civil War and then Communist rule?
 
Ferguson is a pile of bollocks.

My guess is Russia ends up like a super Brazil, although that's still impressive.
 
Hard to do

That's tough to do. I think you're probably going for a time-line where the Tsar is overthrown and Kerensky or somebody like him manages to hold onto power. That's difficult because without a very strong hand Russia's army was going to disintegrate, as it did historically during the period between the fall of the Tsar and the peace treaty with Germans.

Just tossing out some ideas here:

I suppose that killing off Lenin would help some on that score. Bolshevik propaganda did undermine the army to some extent, but the years of war and the turmoil of the Tsar's overthrow took their toll too. Take away the harsh discipline of the Tsarist regime and a lot of what held the Russian army together was gone.

Kerensky and company had to walk a fine line between keeping order, which meant using the army and security forces, and giving those forces too much power, which would have alienated their supporters and quite possibly have lead to a military strongman taking over effective power.

Then there is the issue of the Germans. They needed Ukrainian grain and other resources from Russia to stay in the war. That meant they were going to push further into Russia if they saw signs of weakness. A successful German offensive would weaken whatever government controlled Russia.

To be honest, I think that the best alternative for the Russians would have been a palace revolution that overthrew the Tsar in favor of someone in the line of succession--hopefully before the situation had gotten too out of control. That wouldn't have gotten rid of the Tsarist system, but it would have taken some of the edge off of the impetus for a revolution. If the new Tsar allowed some constitutional tinkering that co opted potential revolutionaries in the short term that might also ease the pressure.

The new Tsar would benefit from British and French war materials getting to the Russians in larger amounts. I'm not sure if that would have happened soon enough to save the new Tsar's regime. If a Tsarist regime survived in Russia, a lot of things would change. Bolshevik propaganda was very effective in undermining the morale of the German army historically, which would argue for the Germans staying in the war longer. On the other hand, knocking the Russians out of the war and gaining access to the Ukraine helped the Germans a lot. I'd have to think through how that impacted the rest of World War I.

The only way I see the Russians becoming a reasonably 'normal' modern state would be for Russia to lose a lot of the empire it had built up, and then have an autocrat--presumably a Tsar--gradually devolve power and become a constitutional monarch. Holding on to an empire where close to half the population was non-Russian and didn't want to be part of Russia meant that any kind of real democracy was impossible. Keeping security forces strong enough to keep those people in meant keeping them powerful enough that they could be used to coerce the Russian part of the population as well.

If Russia lost Poland, the Ukraine, ByeloRussia, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus but the Tsar didn't get overthrown, that could set things up for an eventual democracy. But losing a war badly enough to lose all of that territory would probably get the Romanovs overthrown. And if it didn't it would probably lead to calls for a war of revenge.

Hmmm. What if the Germans held their ground in the west in August 1914--no violation of Belgian territory, and no declaration of war on France, and then wins decisively over the Russians in the fall of 1914? The French might very well declare war, but the British would be hard pressed to do so. The French would only be able to attack on a narrow front unless they wanted to go through Belgium, which would put the British in an awkward position.

Does any of that help? Getting from Tsarist Russia to a more normal country is just plain hard. The Tsarist regime had centuries to mold the Russian psyche and they did so far more than most the European kings.

------------------

Dale Cozort - 11 years of alternate history e-zines at:

http://members.aol.com/althist1/index.htm

(March and May 2008 zines are now up)
 
To be honest, I think that the best alternative for the Russians would have been a palace revolution that overthrew the Tsar in favor of someone in the line of succession--hopefully before the situation had gotten too out of control. That wouldn't have gotten rid of the Tsarist system, but it would have taken some of the edge off of the impetus for a revolution. If the new Tsar allowed some constitutional tinkering that co opted potential revolutionaries in the short term that might also ease the pressure.
But what happened in February of1917 started as palace revolution.
 

bard32

Banned
I realize that this is something of a NOOB-WI, but it’s still a fascinating question. What would Russia look like if it somehow avoided communist rule and (just as importantly) the Civil War? I have no clue how to make this happen (WWI suspended indefinitely? Kerensky’s government holds on somehow? ASBs make it happen to spare me the intellectual exercise of coming up with a real POD?) and I imagine that the circumstances of the divergence would matter a great deal…but I digress.

There are two main points here. The first is that the Russian Civil War was immensely destructive. Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers points out that Russian manufacturing and production in 1920 was12.8% of what it had been in 1913, and only recovered to its 1913 baseline in 1926. Given that the Russian industrial sector had averaged 5-8% growth per year between 1890 and 1913 (though from a ridiculously low baseline…) it isn’t hard to see those thirteen years as a vast lost opportunity.

The second is that communist rule in Russia was not really all that effective in industrializing Russia. To be sure, they were good at some things (education stands out) but overall the results weren’t all that impressive relative to their means. According to Niall Ferguson (who should be taken with more than a grain of salt, because any given bit of anything he’s written in the last ten years has a 50:50 chance of having been written by a graduate student working as his research assistant while he was off doing a TV special or something), between 1929 and 1937 “when allowances are made for idiosyncratic pricing conventions, real GNP growth was closer to 3-4.9% per annum while per capita consumption rose by no more than 1.9% and perhaps by as little as 0.6% per annum” which (leaving aside the issue of intentionally killing millions of people and imprisoning as much as 15% of the population in Gulags) isn’t all that impressive compared to the growth of, say, modern China.

So, I guess the point I’m trying to get to is this—what would Russia look like if it somehow avoided the Civil War and then Communist rule?

The best scenario for that would be either a constitutional monarchy, like Britain, or a republic.
 
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