Quote:
Originally Posted by nikimcbee
It would have been interesting if the Russians managed to stay out of WWI, thus the Bolsheviks never come to power. Just think how powerful Russia could be today!  |
That's still a big "if"! While I think some forward-thinking Russian industrialists definitely deserve credit, I don't think mismanagement was a purely communist trait. And the fact that so much money and property was in the hands of aristocrats who had more interest in clinging to their status than moving the country forward really wasn't helping. There was, I think, a revolution still in the works - but it could've been a much more peaceful, gradual and liberal one. There needed to be a transition of power and some measure of transition of wealth and status.
Otherwise, in the late Tsarist Russia, corruption was as rife as ever. Nicholas II's weak, nervous government had only made it worse. Rasputin (who near the end of his life was selling ministerial titles on the Tzar's behalf) was just one of the many examples of how wrong things could go.
Likewise, the Bolshevik government DOES deserve some credit for management. You might not agree with their methods, but they did, at least initially, solve a whole bunch of problems... and then created a myriad of new ones, that eventually led to mass starvation, repression, etc. etc. What they did have, though, was big cojones to tackle economic and social issues that nobody before them - neither Nicholas, nor Stolypin, nor Kerensky - would touch with a 40-foot pole. And while collectivization was largely a mass disaster, many of the Bolshevik industrial programs were a resounding success. WWII showed the fruits of that success. Tzarist Russia started and fought WWI on much better geographic, political and military terms than Stalin did WWII, but they lost spectacularly. I think some credit IS due to Soviet industrial planning and ability to manage diverse, disparate populations that WWII went very differently.
If WWI didn't happen, it'd be a very interesting world we'd be living in indeed. But Russia would probably not even be the biggest difference. Russia would still be facing many of the same choices it faced after the war - to Westernize or cling to its own way of things; to embrace capitalism and liberal democracy, or experiment with socialism; to keep its imperial ambitions or develop its vast resources and territories at home. Those choices were still being made in the 1920s by the Soviet government, which was a much more fluid, pragmatic body than most give it credit for - it was only after the rise of Stalin that the whole system clapped shut and the choice for totalitarianism, vast central planning, and focus on developing a socialist system within Soviet borders was made. Even after the Bolshevik revolution, the Stalinist Soviet state we know of today wasn't a guarantee (and Stalin's own rise was itself a big fluke). So WWI wasn't what decided everything either, although it did change everything in a big way. And of course, WWI wasn't something that showed up on Europe's doorstep overnight - took decades to get there.