I think one has to ask what the alternative to "October" is. A continuation of Kerensky's by-then-extremely-unpopular government? Unlikely. A right-wing coup? Hard to do after Kornilov's failure. A peaceful transfer of power to a socialist governnment backed by all the parties in the soviet? Even some Bolsheviks (Zinoviev and Kamenev) wanted that, but it is hard to see such a coalition lasting, because of disagreements about the war--Lenin had a hard enough time getting even the Bolsheviks to agree to Brest-Litvsk--see my post at
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ever-happened-in-russia.470714/#post-19264454
(One can argue however that the refusal of a socialist coalition government--including some Bolsheviks as well as the Menshevik and SR "social patriots"--to agree to Brest-Litovsk would not be such a disaster. Sure, the Germans can take Petrograd and even Moscow without much trouble. But they are just not capable of occupying all of Russia. In OTL, "General Max Hoffmann, the German commander on the Eastern Front, noted bitterly in his diary that despite the fact that his forces faced no opposition whatever, he would have to call an end to their advance. 'I should have no objection', he wrote, 'to pushing farther and farther eastwards. I should like to get to India except that the distances grow more immense, and our army does not.'"
http://web.archive.org/web/20030310182535/http://scottreid.com/lenin.htm#anchor244115 So theoretically, a socialist coalition government could simply retreat to the Urals or beyond and wait for the German puppet government in European Russia to collapse after the German defeat, and then return after that collapse. There are of course a few problems with that. First of all, in the spring of 1918 it was far from clear that there would
be a German defeat. Second, maybe the German puppet government tries to come to terms with the victorious Allies ("we were only pretending to back Germany to mitigate the harshness of its occupation. We were really hoping for your victory all the time, and surely we will be preferable from your viewpoint to those awful socialists.") Finally, even if the socialists make it back to Moscow, in the meantime Russia may have largely disintegrated, with Ukraine and other areas having declared their independence.)
As for the effects on Hitler: yes, there will still be a right wing in Germany that will be afraid of working class revolution and seek a dictatorial regime. But it is hardly inevitable that Adolf Hitler will ultimately become the leader of German "anti-Marxism" or that he will come to power in 1933. Those things depended on a huge number of contingencies, some of which would likely never have happened with a non-Bolshevik Russia.
First of all, saying there will still be a far right in Germany does not mean its level of popular support is predetermined. To quote an old post of mine:
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Yes, the German Right would have hated the Social Democrats with or without the Bolshevik revolution. But the extent of the German Right's popular support was not predetermined, and direct and indirect effects of the Bolshevik Revolution may have been one of the things affecting it. In January 1919 a large portion of the German bourgeoisie was willing to vote for a genuinely liberal party, the DDP, which got 18.6 percent of the vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_German_federal_election I think it's clear that some portion of the bourgeoisie did not look with alarm on the Republic or on a coalition government including Social Democrats. By 1920, there was already a clear swing to the Right among the bourgeoisie (and to a lesser extent a swing to the Left within the working class):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_German_federal_election Maybe a reaction to the Spartacist Uprising and the Bavarian Soviet Republic had something to do with it? (Of course part of it was a reaction to Versailles, but the DDP after all had refused to sign the Treaty.)
Now you might say, "the leftward course of the German Revolution in 1919--and its suppression by the Majority Social Democrats and the Army--would have come about with or without the Bolshevik Revolution." But it might not have taken such extreme forms. For example, Rosa Luxemburg herself thought the Spartacist uprising premature. But much of the far left felt "we can seize power, just as was done in Russia." Without the example of "October", cooler heads may have prevailed. As for the Bavarian Soviet Republic, well, it did after all call itself a soviet (council) republic, and it's pretty odd to claim that it wasn't influenced by the examples of the Russian and Hungarian Soviet Republics.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...appened-in-russia.470714/page-5#post-19303127
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Second, "there would still be a powerful far right" =/= "Adolf Hitler would have come to power in 1933." To quote another post of mine:
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Two propositions:
(1) "Even without the Bolshevik Revolution and the German events it helped to inspire--the Spartacist Uprising, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, etc.--the German far right would still have hated the Social Democrats and longed for right-wing authoritarian rule." This is obviously true.
(2) "Without the events in (1) the German far right would have gained just as much popular support as it did in OTL." This is far from obvious. (Note: I am not saying the far right would have
no popular support--that's a straw man. But I do think that the fact that far-left socialists had seized power in Russia, that they had inspired far-left attempted revolutions in Germany in 1919, etc. did lead some people to support the far right who would not have supported it simply out of discontent with the moderate Social Democrats.)
I might add that even if you accept both propositions (1) and (2), it still would not follow that without the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler would have come to power. There are effects of the Bolshevik Revolution that facilitated his rise--not speculative far-fetched "butterfly effects" but fairly clear and direct ones. Without the Bolshevik Revolution, there would have been no KPD. (Yes, I know the Independent Social Democrats had split off from the SPD, but that split was about the war, and could have been healed after the war. Most of the Independent Social Democrats were not proto-Bolsheviks and did not dream of "converting the imperialist war into a civil war." They could have once again lived in the same party with SPD moderates as they did before 1914.) Without the KPD, as I have noted, Hindenburg would almost certainly not have been elected Reich President in 1925. (Thälmann's 6.4 percent was more than twice Hindenburg's margin over Wilhelm Marx.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925_German_presidential_election Given Hindenburg's role in undermining Weimar democracy--and given that after all, he was the man who appointed Hitler Chancellor--one has to be pretty dogmatic to assert that his election made no difference. (The division of the Left into the SPD and KPD helped Hitler in other ways, too, but I am just mentioning what seems to me the most obvious.)
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...appened-in-russia.470714/page-4#post-19282226
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A couple of other thoughts:
(a) Hitler got his start in politics investigating possible subversive groups in Bavaria for the army. It's not altogerher clear to me that he would have been assigned this task without the concerns in the army generated by the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, which as its very name indicates was inspired by "October." Even if he is hired, he may never happen to come across Drexler's German Workers Party and make an impression on Drexler the way he did on the day he came across them in OTL.
(b) Without the rise of Mussolini, Hitler may never have come to power. It is arguable that Hitler would never have come to power without the Beer Hall Putsch--despite its utter failure--because of the attention it brought him (thanks to the Putsch and the subsequent trial he was no longer merely a local, Bavarian, figure) and the lessons it taught him. And the Beer Hall Putsch was modeled on the March on Rome. (As Philip Morgan writes, the Putsch "was to be Hitler's 'March on Berlin,' in the event a ham fisted and inaccurate reading of the 'March on Rome,' but a reading, nevertheless. Only after the failed coup did Hitler take on board the full sense of the strategy behind the 'March on Rome,' its compelling and effective blend of legal and illegal manouevring for power."
Fascism in Europe 1919-1945, p. 162-3
https://books.google.com/books?id=mz8hLnFiz8wC&pg=PA162 So arguably, "no Mussolini, no Hitler"--at least as a major political figure in Germamy.
Would Mussolini have come to power without a Bolshevik Russia? If you see fascism as a reaction to the
biennio rosso, it is hard to deny that the Bolsheviks' triumph played a major role in that "red biennium." Not just left-wing Socialists but Anarchists were emboldened: "This enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution even reached Individualist Anarchists like Joseph Labadie, who like many other anti-capitalists, saw "the red in the east [giving] hope of a brighter day" and the Bolsheviks as making "laudable efforts to at least try some way out of the hell of industrial slavery.""
https://anarchyinaction.org/index.php?title=Anarchists_in_the_Italian_Factory_Occupations
For both Italy and Germany I think people who say that the rise of the far left (and the accompanying right-wing backlash) would have happened anyway underestimate the extent to which (a) the triumph of the Bolsheviks induced an "anything is possible" attitude on the far left and led them to conduct they might not otherwise have undertaken, and (b) the backlash became stronger because the far right could point out to the bourgeoise "We aren't just
saying that the Left will take away your property and subject you to repression. It has
already happened in Russia and has already inspired imitators here."
One final point: While Hitler's anti-Bolshevism took time to develop, it did become an essential element of his ideology. He had not at first been hostile to Russia:
"To begin with he was not hostile towards Russia, and saw Britain and France as Germany's main enemies. Indeed, during 1919, he blamed Germany's pre-war politicians for supporting Austria-Hungary against Russia.
"But by 1920 he was arguing that 'an alliance between Russia and Germany can come about only when Jewry is removed', and, by 1924, when he came to write
Mein Kampf, he had concluded that Russia would be the target for Germany's drive to acquire
Lebensraum. So how did this change of approach come about?
"Hitler's views on Russia during these early years were strongly influenced by Alfred Rosenberg, who had joined the Nazi party in 1920 and became the editor of its newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter. Rosenberg was a Baltic German who was studying in Moscow when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, and left Russia for Germany in November 1918.
"Thus he had experienced the Bolshevik revolution at first hand and became convinced that it was the work of the Jews. Hitler considered Rosenberg an expert on Russia and became equally persuaded of the link between Bolshevism and the Jews.
"By 1922, it was becoming apparent that the Bolshevik regime in Russia was there to stay. Indeed, it is clear from an interview Hitler gave in December 1922 that by then he had decided that an alliance with a Bolshevik Russia was out of the question. Germany would be better off working with Britain and Italy, which appeared to be resisting French hegemony in Europe, against Russia, which could in turn provide Germany's necessary
Lebensraum. Hitler's views on Russia had been further hardened by his contacts with Baltic German exiles in Munich. Notable among these was Max-Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a contact of August Winnig, the German Commissioner in the Baltic provinces responsible for organising the Free Corps, and General Ludendorff, the former leader of
Oberost.." http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/hitler_lebensraum_01.shtml
So again, anti-Bolshevism was not just something Hitler adopted to catch votes. It was a real and vital part of his ideology (linked in his mind to his anti-Semitism). And it became so largely as a result of right-wing exiles from Russia who presumably would never have lived in Germany or had contact with Hitler without the Bolshevik victory in Russia.