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 From Moscovy to Contemporary Russia I have wanted to do this thread for a while, but I have just never gotten around to it. Essentially, the idea behind this thread for serious discussion of Russian and Soviet history and historiography from early Muscovy to Putin. In addition, discussion of present-day Russia is also allowed. The Mueller investigation has its own thread, and this isn't the place to post your videos of dashcams, there is a GBS thread for that type of posting. Essentially this is a thread for effort posting, questions, and useful discussion on the topic ie making an effort will be rewarded, trolling and shitposting will be punished. There will be 3-day minimum probations for thread-making GBS threads. Obviously, it is a contentious subject and there is plenty to talk about but there is not going to be a lot of lee-way for garbage posts or personal vendettas. If you got a problem with a poster, take it elsewhere. This op will likely be updated with any useful information or links as needed as well as a bibliography if this thread takes off. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 11:49
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To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable?
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Nov 13, 2018 11:58
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Could somebody recommend any writings on the 1920s USSR and/or the implementation of socialist values in the peripheral Soviet Union? Interested in learning more about the clashes between the conservative social status quo and the enforcement of a radical progressive social agenda.
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Nov 13, 2018 12:20
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so that means I can be a cheapskate and post about posting instead of having some wit or spending any more on comedy avs for people. Which I'm also incapable of. Comedy.
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Retarded Goatee posted:Could somebody recommend any writings on the 1920s USSR and/or the implementation of socialist values in the peripheral Soviet Union? Interested in learning more about the clashes between the conservative social status quo and the enforcement of a radical progressive social agenda. If you are interested at all in Central Asia during the 1920s, Adeeb Khalid has written a ton on the subject. Also, Ronald Suny has a fairly recent book on Georgia that covers the 1920s and the aftermath of the Civil War. As for the 1920s as a whole, it probably needs to be on a specific issue since it is a broadly a very understudied period (along with the post-war Soviet Union and the 1970s).
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Nov 13, 2018 12:46
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Ardennes posted:To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable? The monarchies in Europe were great at self owning by ensuring all of their kids were hemophiliacs. Also Tsar Nicholas predecessor was a big bad dumb moron who sent the Russian monarchy into a death spiral. By the time Rasputin came around Russia was already a constitutional monarchy. So yeah things weren't going great before that.
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Nov 13, 2018 14:09
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Why end at 2014 when Russian invaded and annexed territory from its neighbour?
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Nov 13, 2018 15:11
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Significant Ant posted:The monarchies in Europe were great at self owning by ensuring all of their kids were hemophiliacs. I would saw after the second Duma and especially by the third that Russia was effectively already back to an absolutist regime. Also, I guess you mean Alexander 3rd? Personally, I think there was always a small chance for reform, it just clearly did not happen. Wistful of Dollars posted:Why end at 2014 when Russian invaded and annexed territory from its neighbour? It is less that Crimea didn't matter but there needs to be a break from current events (which are going sent to the Eastern Europe thread) and history. If it is necessary I can make this simply "the Russia thread" but honestly I wanted a more historical focus to it, nevertheless, some discussion of present-day Russia is allowed. Also, if there is also Russia-Trump chat in this thread it is going to just get silly especially since there is a designated thread for that as well. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 15:13
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Ardennes posted:To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable?
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Nov 13, 2018 15:35
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Flayer posted:If Russia hadn't declared war on Germany and then got trounced at Tannenberg, White Russia would have trundled on for a bit longer. Ultimately what history shows us is that the defeat of the Central Powers in WW1 ended the reign of royal families over continental European countries and the Tsars of Russia would inevitably fall with them. Admittedly, Russia eventually declaring war on Austria (and then in term Germany declaring war) was fairly locked in. If Russia hadn't, Serbia would have been crushed completely but it would have likely only been a couple more years until another crisis brought war again. In another universe with a completely different Europe, they might have held on longer but there were pretty severe issues with the Tsarist economy that weren't getting fixed. Tsarist Russia really didn't have a reforming mechanism that could really handle them. That said, there is a take that the Stolypin reforms might have held, but it wasn't going to be enough on its own.
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Nov 13, 2018 15:41
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Ardennes posted:To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable? https://global.oup.com/academic/product/was-revolution-inevitable-9780190658915?cc=us&lang=en&
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Nov 13, 2018 16:24
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Flayer posted:If Russia hadn't declared war on Germany and then got trounced at Tannenberg, White Russia would have trundled on for a bit longer. Ultimately what history shows us is that the defeat of the Central Powers in WW1 ended the reign of royal families over continental European countries and the Tsars of Russia would inevitably fall with them. Spain’s still got a king, so do Belgium and the Netherlands Ardennes posted:That said, there is a take that the Stolypin reforms might have held, but it wasn't going to be enough on its own. One of the chapters in that book I posted says that if Stolypin reforms had happened 20 years earlier they could have worked, but IRL there simply wasn’t enough time, which seems right to me
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Nov 13, 2018 16:28
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icantfindaname posted:Spain’s still got a king, so do Belgium and the Netherlands
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Nov 13, 2018 17:03
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icantfindaname posted:https://global.oup.com/academic/product/was-revolution-inevitable-9780190658915?cc=us&lang=en& I don't know it but I may get around to reading it. I don't know Benton or Sixsmith, but Lieven is fine, I don't care for Pipes and Figes has a very ify reputation (the scuttlebutt is he doesn't actually know Russian). As for Stolypin, the big issue is that while his plan over time may have improved yields, it wasn't going to fix the issue of overcrowding and poor working conditions in Russian cities. It would provide more masses of cheap labor by consolidating fields (essentially) under richer peasants but wouldn't really fix the broader issues Russia was having. Also, Russia's issue at that point was so much of its trade was agriculturally dependent on the first place and they were lagging too fare behind industrially to be competitive internationally.
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Nov 13, 2018 17:11
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Glad this thread got made! I'm making my way through Stephen Kotkin's series on Stalin, specifically the 2nd volume that covers 1929 to 1945. I'm at about 1934 at this point and it's quite good, I'd recommend people check it out. Kotkin uses primary sources like diaries from key figures, official party documents, etc. It really gets into how Stalin's paranoia crippled him and how everything that wasn't 100% in line with his vision was "rightist deviation", even if it was something that Lenin originally cooked up. The tighter he gripped to power, the more paranoid he got and thus, the more purges he conducted. It's fascinating and very detailed. https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Waiting-1929-1941-Stephen-Kotkin/dp/1594203806 Ardennes posted:To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable? I'm honestly not sure. I'd love to read some good writing on the events of 1917 and how everything shook out as I only have a very basic understanding of things (Nicholas II is forced out, interim government toppled, White-Red civil war, Bolshevik triumph) axeil fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 17:24
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axeil posted:Glad this thread got made! It is considered a well researched but a fairly divisive book (that honestly does come off pretty polemical from what I have seen and heard of it, including from the man himself.) Kotkin is from much from the "totalitarian" school of thought, nevertheless, it is clearly a huge undertaking. That said, feel try to cite the sources he is using and his arguments. As for the motivations of what was happening, the Soviet Union was exciting a trade crisis by the 1930s which fed into much of what was going behind the scenes. Collectivization and dekulakization (for example) was primarily about grain exports and lot of the trade issues the NEP was having. Often enemies were cooked up, less out of paranoia and more for simple distraction over fundamental economic issues. This spiraled out of control by 1937-38 but it was fed by a lot of the "blame game" that had been passed around during the late 1920s to the mid-1930s for what was going wrong. I would say certainly by that period the paranoia had taken over. From what I have seen, he seems to focus on Stalin himself. quote:I'm honestly not sure. I'd love to read some good writing on the events of 1917 and how everything shook out as I only have a very basic understanding of things (Nicholas II is forced out, interim government toppled, White-Red civil war, Bolshevik triumph) One book that I think gives at least a good idea of the broader events of the period is the vol 1 and 2 of The end of the Russian Imperial Army by Allan Wildman. It gives I think of a useful perspective on how the unhappiness of soldiers and the general state of the war had on the rest of the rest of the country. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 17:47
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Ardennes posted:It is considered a well researched but a fairly divisive book that honestly does come off as polemical from what I have seen and heard of it, including from the man himself. Kotkin is from much from the "totalitarian" school of thought. That said, feel try to cite the sources he is using and his arguments. Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll add it to my list! Yeah I'm still in the early phases of Stalin purging people so I can't comment much on the total poo poo-spiral things got into in 37. The power struggle between him and Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky was interesting, so far that's the only thing where he's seemed rightfully paranoid and his power seemed legitimately at risk. Obviously the Trotsky stuff isn't in this volume as that all happened prior to 29, but I'd be interested in reading more on that. What do you mean by "totalitarian" school of thought? If I get a chance when I get home I can look up the citations in the back of the book, if I recall they're fairly extensive though.
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Nov 13, 2018 17:53
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axeil posted:What do you mean by "totalitarian" school of thought? There was basically a split in Western academia (especially among Anglo-American academics) towards the Soviets/Soviet history in the 1970s between the "totalitarian" school that viewed the Soviet Union through a more "traditional" totalitarian lens and the more moderate "revisionist" school which tried to focus on other issues (cultural, social, environmental history) besides political terror. It became a bit more complicated after the archives opened in the 1990s, and now the field is in a weird transition phase. Leftwing/Marxist historians were pretty much already pushed to the relative margins by that point.
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Nov 13, 2018 18:00
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Ardennes posted:To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable? I would say no, nothing in history is inevitable and any number of things could've gone differently to either prevent the revolution from occurring or prevent it from succeeding. I think a more pertinent question is, why did it happen, and why did it succeed?
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Nov 13, 2018 18:03
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Ardennes posted:To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable? No, w/o WWI 1917 wouldn't have happened
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Nov 13, 2018 18:09
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Lightning Knight posted:I would say no, nothing in history is inevitable and any number of things could've gone differently to either prevent the revolution from occurring or prevent it from succeeding. I guess it is a question of degrees but you could make the argument it would have taken quite a bit to change 1917 from happening. I mean you can say without the WW1 it wouldn't have happened (I actually doubt that as well), but even then how do you get around WW1 considering the direction European politics was taking by the 1890s. Bismarck was eventually going to die, and at some point, Wilhelm was going to take the throne. The February revolution succeeded in large part due to the fact by the end of 1916, Russia was both clearly losing the war and that even liberals had grown tired of the burden presented by the Tsar. Arguably, the October Revolution's success was built on the back on the failures of Kerensky who had effectively had politically isolated himself by cutting both his connections with the military (and therefore the proto-Whites) and the Bolsheviks, effectively leaving him a minuscule base of support. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 18:10
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Ardennes posted:I would saw after the second Duma and especially by the third that Russia was effectively already back to an absolutist regime. Also, I guess you mean Alexander 3rd? For my money, the last real chance the Tsarist state had of surviving died with Peter Stolypin in 1911. Ardennes posted:The February revolution succeeded in large part due to the fact by the end of 1916, Russia was both clearly losing the war and that even liberals had grown tired of the burden presented by the Tsar. Arguably, the October Revolution's success was built on the back on the failures of Kerensky who had effectively had politically isolated himself by cutting both his connections with the military (and therefore the proto-Whites) and the Bolsheviks, effectively leaving him a minuscule base of support. Kerensky and the provisionals probably wouldn't have been able to manage the balancing act between Duma and Soviet even if they hadn't decided to continue the war against the Central Powers, but having done so absolutely set the stage for the October Revolution. Even with the brief upsurge of revolutionary enthusiasm among the frontline troops, the military calculations of why they'd been getting beat so badly by Germany's eastern armies hadn't changed one bit. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 18:25
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Captain_Maclaine posted:For my money, the last real chance the Tsarist state had of surviving died with Peter Stolypin in 1911. Why? Stolypin's reforms were failures.
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Nov 13, 2018 18:37
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Typo posted:Why? Stolypin's reforms were failures. Ignorant here, what were Stolypin's reforms and why were they failures?
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Nov 13, 2018 18:51
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Typo posted:Why? Stolypin's reforms were failures. Sure, but he was about the only one of Nicholas' appointees who had the capacity to even understand the agricultural problems that were foundational to so much of why Russia hadn't modernized (at least after Witte exits the scene), and make any attempt to reform them that wasn't farcical. axeil posted:Ignorant here, what were Stolypin's reforms and why were they failures? In very brief, he attempted to reform land ownership in the countryside and foster the development of what you might call a Russian yeomanry out of the existing peasant class, who at that time farmed in the old communal strip system. He wanted to consolidate land ownership in individual hands, who would then operate in cooperatives with one another to modernize agricultural production and, he also hoped, give the now-independent farmers a greater stake in the economy and thus in preserving the regime.
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Nov 13, 2018 18:56
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Ardennes posted:To start things off: was 1917 truly inevitable? 
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Nov 13, 2018 19:02
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Captain_Maclaine posted:In very brief, he attempted to reform land ownership in the countryside and foster the development of what you might call a Russian yeomanry out of the existing peasant class, who at that time farmed in the old communal strip system. He wanted to consolidate land ownership in individual hands, who would then operate in cooperatives with one another to modernize agricultural production and, he also hoped, give the now-independent farmers a greater stake in the economy and thus in preserving the regime. This sounds like a way better idea than "serfdom in all but name" that they had going on earlier. Why'd it fail though?
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Nov 13, 2018 19:08
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Typo posted:No, w/o WWI 1917 wouldn't have happened but then the question is was WWI inevitable? i would say yes, especially for russia. late imperial russia became obsessed with pan-slavicism, from nicholas ii and downward, and was hoping to annex large chunks of what was then austria-hungary and the ottoman empire. even if the franz ferdinand had survived, there would have been a pretext for the war sooner or later, and the russian economy would have failed in the same way.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:11
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axeil posted:Ignorant here, what were Stolypin's reforms and why were they failures? It was basically an attempt at copying the enclosure movement in England, Russian agriculture in the 19th century looked superficially like English agriculture 300 years ago. Much of it was owned by a landed gentry but the majority was owned by "Communes", which were land held in common by a village. So the land actually got "assigned" from year to year to different household (if you for example had a couple extra kids this year you might be allocated some of your neighbor's land for the year). The problem with the Communes is that they were ran by a council of village elders, who more often than not behaved as petty tyrants who will literally rape your bride because she's hot and they can get away with it. More important (to Stolypin) is that land held in common means there's little incentive to increase productivity of the land or invest capital in it. And the village elders were deeply reactionary against things like modern agricultural techniques. So his idea was to at first rely on the landed gentry to improve their land (which is basically what happened in England) but that failed because the Russian gentry have being able to draw on serf/quasi-serfs for their labor for so long that they never needed to develop the business sense necessary to run a profitable agricultural enterprise. So he tried to create a class of yeoman farmers out of ambitious young men in the villages. The problem is that this involved privatizing commune land which led to lots of (very violent) resistance not just from village elders whose powers are threatened but ordinary villagers as well for taking away land which could have gone to them. So the reforms led to a bunch of small farmers being given unproductive/marginal lands the vast majority of which were failures. And even the successful ones tended to get murdered down the line. So the reforms were failures in changing Russian agriculture but it was kind of a predecessor to the peasant's revolution and the NEPmen of the 1917-1920s.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:14
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GoluboiOgon posted:but then the question is was WWI inevitable? WWI was circumstantial, the mid 1910s was already seeing the end of multiple contentious issues like the Anglo-German naval race drawing to a close with Germany admitting they lost, and even some detente between France/Germany. The idea that WWI was inevitable is a long held view seriously challenged by modern scholarship. See Christopher Clark's "Sleepwalkers". And even had the war happened the Tsarist regime would have really good chance of survival if they made peace in 1916, or if the Tsar's brother accepeted the throne after Nicholas II abdicated. What we think of as historical inevitability was a lot more circumstantial than commonly presumed.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:17
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Either way it wasn’t a solution to Russia’s political ills or its radicalized working class. Also much of the issue with grain during the war was due the rail network being too over saturated to readily move around that grain around. Eh I am not really that convinced that WW1 was avoidable, Germany was actively preparing for it by 1910. Also, if the war had ended, the monarchy most likely would have still fallen, way too much radicalization was already happening. It might have bought them a couple years. You would have still a bunch of pissed off veterans and workers and massive economic issues to sort out. Also, the monarchy would have had to given up many of its wealthier Western provinces, Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 19:20
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Typo posted:It was basically an attempt at copying the enclosure movement in England, Russian agriculture in the 19th century looked superficially like English agriculture 300 years ago. Much of it was owned by a landed gentry but the majority was owned by "Communes", which were land held in common by a village. So the land actually got "assigned" from year to year to different household (if you for example had a couple extra kids this year you might be allocated some of your neighbor's land for the year). Thanks, this is a really good explanation and I agree that you can see a lot of shades of what was to come with the NEP reforms in the early Soviet era. Not sure if this is on-topic but I've always wondered about whether communism as a government started in the "wrong" country. If I recall correctly, I think Marx always thought the revolution would come in Britain or Germany first given their industrialization. That it instead came in Russia, a country only slightly out of the shadow of serfdom probably was not what he intended and I imagine it caused a lot of issues with implementing a communist system. Do people think the revolution would've worked out "better" if it had instead come in Britain/Germany? Or if Russia was more industrialized and urbanized than it was?
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Nov 13, 2018 19:24
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axeil posted:What do you mean by "totalitarian" school of thought? Totalitarianism Theory was basically a thing cooked up by centrist liberals in the United States in the 50s and 60s that basically equated fascism with a generic totalitarianism in which the state crushes the moral autonomy of the individual, and then use this definition to say that the USSR is the same thing and therefore as bad as the Nazis. It was in opposition to a classical Marxist view that sees fascism as simply the final stage of capitalist exploitation, with no reference to Kantian-liberal moral autonomy stuff See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernization_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_history Sheila Fitzpatrick is a much better historian of the USSR, and is from a school labeled 'revisionists' because they opposed the centrist school from the left in the 70s and 80s Ardennes posted:There was basically a split in Western academia (especially among Anglo-American academics) towards the Soviets/Soviet history in the 1970s between the "totalitarian" school that viewed the Soviet Union through a more "traditional" totalitarian lens and the more moderate "revisionist" school which tried to focus on other issues (cultural, social, environmental history) besides political terror. Well the Marxists were originally a thing in the 1930s, and then they were purged after the war which led to the 50s/60s golden age of centrist consensus modernization theory stuff. The revisionists were called such because the orthodoxy in American academia was the centrist view There was a very similar course of historiographical divide/argument about Japan too during the Cold War, with the centrist-liberals presenting postwar Japan as a sort of Platonic ideal of centrist liberal progress and modernization in the 50s and 60s, then people attacking that from the left in the 70s and 80s, and then settling on a mixed view of sorts in the 90s and beyond icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 19:28
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Retarded Goatee posted:Could somebody recommend any writings on the 1920s USSR and/or the implementation of socialist values in the peripheral Soviet Union? Interested in learning more about the clashes between the conservative social status quo and the enforcement of a radical progressive social agenda. this isn't precisely what you want, but i read arthur koestler's memoir "arrow in the blue," and there is a very interesting section about his time in central asia in the 1930s, where he meets with uzbek rebels against the khanate of bukhara, afgani refugees who fled to the soviet union, a mullah turned socialist agitator, and langston hughes. koestler was a massive piece of poo poo (stalker, rapist, killed his wife in a suicide pact), but he saw some very interesting things and seems to have written a fairly honest memoir because of his obsession with freudianism.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:29
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axeil posted:Thanks, this is a really good explanation and I agree that you can see a lot of shades of what was to come with the NEP reforms in the early Soviet era. also, Stolypin himself was assassinated by, interestingly enough, a police informant within a revolutionary cell. Nobody to this day has being able to establish whether the assassin acted on orders from his police handlers to get rid of a reformist factional leader or from the revolutionaries cuz he was trying to gain street cred by assassinating an important government official. Back in the early 1900s the Tsarist secret police had a lot of agents in revolutionary groups and they actually assassinated tsarist officials to get street cred so they get to be more effective spies. This is to the point where later on revolutionaries commented that the police agents were the most hardworking/zealous revolutionaries, not to mention some of the "real" revolutionaries were on the take from the police. The line between the tsarist secret police and socialist revolutionaries was pretty thin in that era. Typo fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 19:35
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Even if you think WWI was inevitable it makes a big difference if it happens in 1916 or 1920 instead of 1914. Imagine if Germany had tanks during the first battle of the Marne.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:39
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Ardennes posted:
If the Tsar ended the war early enough they could have gotten away with giving "only" congress Poland and some of the baltics which would have meant the vast majority of the empire's territory remain intact yes, there's radicalization and economic issues: but that's true in literally every single dictatorial regime (and a whole bunch of democratic ones) in any given year and the vast majority do not collapse (see Iran, North Korea for modern day examples), the amount of stress and problems need to force a regime collapse is really really high. That being said, regimes are actually most vulnerable in periods of reform (see USSR 1985-91) so if Nicholas enacts a major series of reform programmes which fail that could lead to regime collapse too
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Nov 13, 2018 19:40
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Squalid posted:Even if you think WWI was inevitable it makes a big difference if it happens in 1916 or 1920 instead of 1914. Imagine if Germany had tanks during the first battle of the Marne. or for that matter, the alliance system was about to fall apart on the even of WWI one of the reasons why France decided "war NOW" is that the French believed that the Russian-French alliance was on the verge of falling apart and this is their last chance to use it
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Nov 13, 2018 19:41
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Typo posted:If the Tsar ended the war early enough they could have gotten away with giving "only" congress Poland and some of the baltics which would have meant the vast majority of the empire's territory remain intact It would still be a pretty big loss considering its developmental state, also North Korea doesn’t really have polarization and radicalization going on it. The more apt comparison probably would be Syria. Either way, the 1905 revolution had already happened and the the stage was set by 1913 for another act. The October revolution is a bit more debatable without the war. Iran is a bit of a different beast, since it has mechanisms for concensus in it even if isn’t a liberal democracy.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:50
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axeil posted:Glad this thread got made! I'll give this book a read but what I've read in other books on Stalin is a little more nuanced. The impression I got was that Stalin was somewhat ideologically flexible: purges were not, in the end, genuinely about ideology but more about purging independent centers of power that were not under Stalin's control or could threaten him. The purges are fascinating because it seems like Stalin both fully understood they were mostly nonsense and believed in much of the ideology or nonsense claims undergirding the purges (wreckers, etc). There's some elements where he seems to have had strong national goals rather than personal control goals - for example, causing and then ignoring the famine in the Ukraine by exporting too much grain, to try and get the hard currency for a crash industrialization program - and the terror there was geared towards ensuring that the program was successful (and then, to squelch potential dissent from the famine). The purges appear to have been a case where pretty much everyone knew there was a big nonsense component, but that Stalin had created a situation where you were on one side or the other and the penalty for winding up on the wrong side was death. None of his magnates believed the underlying ideological justifications - and it was vitally important they not believe them so they understood the need to keep themselves in Stalin's good graces. The purges also had a self-reinforcing element - once you introduce the precedent (as Stalin did) that falling from power is a death sentence, maintaining power becomes a matter of life and death. Stalin never had the option of a peaceful retirement: if he lost power he'd have died. The purges need to be understood in that context as something Stalin could never give up, because he needed to constantly divide his opposition and crush centers of power to ensure he couldn't be replaced. It's why Stalin was gearing up for a new set of show trials and purges around his death, and a reason why it has been argued that his death was actually an assassination directly (via being poisoned by Beria) or once he had a stroke his magnates ensured he would not recover (by denying medical care until it was too late): all of those magnates were going to be at severe risk in any new round of purges. To be clear, it's not settled at all that either happened (especially the medical care, where it's very easy to explain how that got delayed without needing to assume a plot). evilweasel fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 19:54
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Ardennes posted:It would still be a pretty big loss considering its developmental state, also North Korea doesn’t really have polarization and radicalization going on it. The more apt comparison probably would be Syria. Either way, the 1905 revolution had already happened and the the stage was set by 1913 for another act. The October revolution is a bit more debatable without the war. I think you've also got to draw a really important distinction between the toppling of the Czar in favor of a republic, and the Bolshevik seizure of power. I think there's no reason that the Bolsheviks had to take power, but I see no way the Czar was going to keep his throne no matter what happened. It was just too late to transform an absolute monarch into a weak constitutional monarch on the English model; he had to get toppled entirely.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:57
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