"Experiment" (was Re: Great Cockburn/St. Clair piece on Seattle)

Alexandre Fenelon sfenelon at africanet.com.br
Fri Dec 17 16:39:58 PST 1999


At 14:40 17/12/99 -0500, you wrote:
>ChuckO,
> Well, the more serious question here is "what
>was the alternative?" That is very far from clear. The
>immediate alternative was probably the SR's, who,
>after all, won the Duma election of December, 1917,
>the one that Lenin overturned. It is very far from clear
>what kind of a regime they would have run, if they had
>been in charge. They probably would have given the
>land to the peasants, and maybe that would have been
>nice.

Are you talking about Left or Right wing SR's? The Samara government (Right SR's) gave back part of the land occupied by peasants to their former owners. Left wing SR's tried an alliance with The Bolsheviks until March 1918 when they broke it due to Brest-Litovsky treaty. Then, in Jun 1918 they tried an upsiring against the Bolsheviks and were crushed.


>But they were also violent authoritatrians and
>very likely would have offed a bunch of their political
>opponents. Hard to say how they would have dealt with
>the Whites, who would have come after them too.
> Maybe a continued Kerensky regime would have been
>better, but it is hard to say.

Kerensky government was dead even before October remeber that the Provisional government collapsed under a limited attack and no one in Russia tried to save it. I think you've forgot another important alternative. What about a socialist coalition (defended by left wing Mensheviks , left SR's and right wing Bolsheviks, like Kamenev)?


> The Kadets? Not likely they
>would have lasted.

The Kadets had 5% votes in the ellections, not enough to rule a country


>Very likely an alternative would have
>failed to defeat the Whites and one would have had Denekin
>or some other equivalent of the military dictators who ran
>Central Europe between the wars. Maybe such a dictator
>would not have helped Hitler as much as Stalin did. OTOH,
>maybe he would not have resisted him as vigorously either.

Why not? All the Central Europe dictators helped Hitler. Stalin was the only who tried to resist the Nazism until he realized the the West had no will to help USSR against Hitler.


>In any case, I fear that Russia would have faced a lot
>of dead, no matter who came out on top of the turmoil of the
>late teens and early 20s in Russia.

Here I agree with you. A failure of the Bolsheviks to seize power wuld led to the disintegration of the country, with a very high death toll.

Alexandre Fenelon


>Barkley Rosser
>


>



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