It would be less apologetic if he didn't go on about how without the Bolsheviks Russia and the worldwide working class would have been at the mercy of other powers. And I edited the post to be less inflammatory--I didn't attribute motives to Shevek23 at all.
As I read and endorsed it, he said that if we make the Bolsheviks, or *Bolsheviks, less ruthless and so unwilling to participate in the inherently ruthless game of great-power politics and warfare, and don't at the same time make everyone else into nicer people, we're basically saying that the people in the Russian Empire - and, by extension, the colonised and the working classes - should shut up and take it.
If the Bolsheviks, in behaving like their enemies, get a special character of "aggression", is the implication not that the Russian Empire's peoples, the working classes, or the imperialised are somehow wrong to meet violence with violence, with no blame attaching to the other people who used violence?
There's a difference between explaining the historical context of Molotov-Ribbentropp (such as the failure of Munich) and crediting the Bolsheviks with improvements for non-bourgeois (sp?) worldwide.
I wouldn't do that. There's no point denying that the fear of revolutionary socialism that animated political developments - bad as well as good - in other countries was given a new edge; or the fascination that Russia held for the working classes in some of those countries. But that's not to say that the Bolsheviks deserve credit for the NHS or something.
How I read it was, as I say, that if the Bolsheviks and revolutionary socialism are singled out for being stripped of ruthlessness, what are the working classes going to do where they are being oppressed? Sing?
Imperial capitalism or the Czarist regime? Not every Western government was as abusive to its own citizenry as the Imperial regime in Russia, even if many of them were abusive to others (colonialism).
It's silly to say that such distinctions don't matter, of course they do. They just don't matter
morally.
The "British Empire" was a device for violently oppressing native peoples. That its structure and internal logic eventually empowered people in Great Britain who had no interest in holding up a violent empire is to its credit, but it doesn't change the oppression, does it?
Re: "imperial capitalism," Teddy Roosevelt and the Square Deal show that statement to be incorrect.
If there was any dictatorial behavior going on, it was TR imposing his will on capital and labor both, and he had a democratic mandate for that and it was done through legal channels.
What about African Americans, or people in the imperialised countries of the Caribbean basin, or women in some states, come to that? They were all disenfranchised by the American way of organising power.
I don't believe in sharp distinctions between democracy and dictatorship. There are all sorts of democratic and dictatorial ways to organise power all around the world.
But anyway America was not the top or only imperial capitalist. Its history and interests were different from those countries that were more properly the 'imperial powers'.
About the Bolsheviks causing conditions for the worldwide working class to be improved, it's true that fear of radicalizing the workers did lead to improvements in many places.
However, OTL saw the Square Deal in the United States and Bismarck's co-opting the Socialists (not the Bolsheviks) by establishing a welfare state. All of this was before Red October.
Bismarck was trying to defang the socialists, robbing their message of urgency among Germany's working class so that he could destroy their political threat. The Liberal reforms in Britain would be a better example. A note of anxiety was not absent their either, but the people carrying them out were less averse to the idea of working-class people organising themselves politically.