What if russian revolution failed

Amid all the memorializing of this revolution, one basic point has gotten lost: the Bolshevik coup was the defining event of the 20th century. This claim stands at odds with conventional wisdom , which holds that it was World War I that sparked the most important later developments, including the Bolshevik putsch itself. George F. According to this argument, the perceived injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war with Germany, led to the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War.

World War I likewise brought down the tsarist regime in Russia, paving the way for communism and, in turn, the Cold War. There is no denying the importance of the First World War. But the Bolshevik coup was at least as pivotal as World War I in shaping the 20th century, and it did so in several ways that get little notice today. World War I is often credited with laying the groundwork for European fascism. But the Bolshevik takeover did just as much, if not more, to spawn fascist regimes. Violent street battles between radical right- and left-wing agitators helped establish fascist movements.

Economic elites, fearful of leftist unrest, turned to fascist parties for protection. One of those detractors was Adolf Hitler. Although Hitler is mostly remembered for his anti-Semitism, the main enemy, as he saw it , was not international Jewry per se but Judeo- Bolshevism : international Jewry backed by a powerful state in the form of the Soviet Union.

That, to him, is what made the Jews an existential threat to the Aryan race. Had it not been for the Bolshevik putsch, Hitler would not have been Hitler. There may well have been no Nazi party and, consequently, no Second World War. Even if there had been another war, Russia would not have defeated Germany. The only reason it was in a position to win was because from to , Josef Stalin, at horrific human cost, engineered one of the fastest large-scale industrialization drives in world history.

But they were probably needed in order to give Russia the heavy-industrial base required to win World War II and to supply that base with a labor force. First, anyone with pretensions of ruling Russia had to win a civil war and establish a strong, centralized state. In this context, the legacy of the Russian Revolution obliges, one hundred years later, neither celebration nor mourning. Dreams are surely renewable, and a new world is waiting to be born, but the possibilities available to create an egalitarian, socially just, ecologically friendly, and decent society lie outside the ideas, practices and policies of the October Revolution.

But does Moscow deserve this title? C J Polychroniou. Published On 25 Oct These were epochal failings and all socialists need to learn from them. Not all did so at the time. Muted centenary commemorations in Russia suggest Russian society struggles to confront its history with the honesty that modern Germany has achieved in confronting its own.

But there are exceptions. The younger Bolshevik, Abarchuk, remains a believer in the cause of ; he is convinced he has been sent to the gulag by mistake. His older mentor, Magar, understands better. Meanwhile, North Korea, a dystopian Leninist monarchy with nuclear weapons, terrifies the world.

United States President Donald Trump is some ways the personification of a new Bolshevism of the right where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears, and the exploitation of what Lenin called useful idiots. One hundred years later, as its events continue to reverberate and inspire, November looms epic, mythic, mesmerising.

Its effects were so enormous that it seems impossible that it might not have happened the way it did. There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik Revolution. By , the Romanov monarchy was decaying quickly, but its emperors may have saved themselves had they not missed repeated chances to reform.

The other absolute monarchies of Europe — the Ottomans, the Habsburgs — fell because they were defeated in the First World War. Would the Romanovs have fallen, too, if they had survived just one more year to share in the victory of November ?

He was lucky that Germany inserted him like a bacillus via the so-called sealed train to take Russia out of the war. Back in Petrograd, Lenin, aided by fellow-radicals Trotsky and Stalin, had to overpower erring Bolshevik comrades, who proposed cooperation with the provisional government, and force them to agree to his plan for a coup.

The government should have found and killed him but it failed to do so. He succeeded. October might have heralded a short-lived interim, like so many other failed revolutions of that era.

Any coordinated attack by White armies, the other side in the Russian civil war, or any intervention by Western forces would have swept the Bolsheviks away. It all depended on Lenin. He was very nearly overthrown in a coup by rebellious coalition partners but he made his own luck, though, by a combination of ideological passion, ruthless pragmatism, unchecked bloodletting and the will to establish a dictatorship.

And sometimes, he just got plain lucky: On August 30, , he was shot while addressing a crowd of workers at a factory in Moscow. He survived by inches. Had any of these events foiled Lenin, our own times would be radically different. Without Lenin there would have been no Hitler. Hitler owed much of his rise to the support of conservative elites who feared a Bolshevik revolution on German soil and who believed that he alone could defeat Marxism.