@Meshakhad This story is excellent. When do you think there will be a continuation? A couple of months? Hiatus? Take as much time as you need though, if your personal life takes you away from writing.
Last edited:
The Fire Never Dies, Part II: The Red Colossus
- Thread starter Meshakhad
- Start date
It'll be a while. I've prioritized editing Part 1 for publication, and I just started a new job.
What's up with Lenin? He lost Russia to the Whites, and I suspect his ideology took a big hit. Will the Bolsheviks turn to America and sideline Lenin? Will we see democratic socialist Russia?
Lenin is currently in Belarus with the Bolshevik remnant. He has enough followers that they are still convinced of his ideology, blaming their defeat on the Anarchists and Kropotkin. Russia is definitely not going socialist, and will soon be dropping democracy as well.
Oof. What do they think of America, given its the opposite of Lenin's "democratic centralism" and with no vanguard parties?
Their views on America are all over the place. Lenin has described the IWW and SLP as a vanguard party (like many, he sees them as essentially the same entity) but he criticized them for not embracing centralism and tolerating bourgeois politicians like Rayburn and Johnson. A lot of Belarusian socialist writings will be about explaining the comparative success of DeLeonism while still favoring Leninism.
Oh, oh, I can answer this one!
DeLeonism is secretly a Bourgeois ideology presented as a Socialist one and then propped up in order to undermine Leninism, the TRUE SOCIALISM.
Meanwhile Leninist Belarus who's working with the German Empire. I'm curious but is Belarus just gonna stay as Germany's pet Socialist Republic?
Belarus isn't socialist. They're a bourgeois republic in which the Bolsheviks are just one party, contending with liberals and conservative nationalists. They are effectively part of Mitteleuropa, Germany's buffer zone in Eastern Europe.
I like the joke.
On a more serious level, though, I think the whole frame of reference underlying the joke will probably not work, given how it evolved IOTL in the context of Comintern orthodoxy (and mirroring Trotskyite orthodoxy, Hozha's orthodoxy etc.).
Lenin was a very flexible thinker, probably one of the most flexible ones among convinced Marxists in his time (and that says a lot, given how colourful and lively Marxism was pre-Comintern).
IOW, there is a high likelihood of an openly Leninist party in the German Riech which the powers at be merely sigh in annoyance over.
The question I have is why didn’t Lenin or any of his crew visit America yet? Even with the war reconstruction, it feels like outside of bad health Lenin would be interested to see the new socialist republic in person. Does the time it takes to maintain a party in Belarus consume him that much that he wouldn’t be able to make the trip?
Last edited:
He probably doesn't want to risk being murdered by some anti-communist who identifies him as Lenin.
If they even notice. Germany has a strong socialist establishment of its own, so a German Leninist party would be very small. Leninism's influence ITTL will be comparable to Trotskyism IOTL, and it will be strongest in Eastern Europe, particularly countries that were formerly part of the Russian Empire. I've already mentioned that Stalin heads up the Bolshevik party in Georgia, and we will also see Bolshevik parties in Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, and Baltica. Most socialist organizations that existed prior to 1917 will lean more towards New York in their thinking, especially once Wall Street starts doling out the cash.
He probably would visit, actually. When I do get back to updating this TL, one of my planned entries will be an update on Belarus. Whether or not the Bolsheviks win the first Belarusian elections, Lenin would want to visit the ASU. And if his health is in decline... well, the ASU has superior medical care.
Why would they even bother with Lenin when people like Liebknecht and Luxembourg were already offering parallel alternatives to mainstream Socialism?
Honestly given that Luxembourg and liebknecht tried to do the revolution in post war Germany otl, they very well may have tried to get to America themselves, either due to government pressure or the desire to learn from the revolutionaries. Or perhaps just to see the experiment in action
Pretty much every socialist leader of the time made at least one trip. However, the ASU actually discourages foreign socialist leaders from moving permanently to the US for fear of creating a socialist brain drain. Of course, if they are facing active persecution, the ASU will be the default destination.