Gordon Fitch wrote:
> >I think you're mixing up two historical periods. In 1917,
> >the external threat was Germany, able to advance into Russia
> >but pretty much exhausted by the war and trying to cut a
> >deal that would enable them to concentrate on the Western
> >Front. It would be many years before aggressive fascist
> >states arrived at the Soviet border. Meanwhile, had Lenin
> >been unusually prescient, he could have proleptically imitated
> >the Korean and Taiwanese models of national capitalism. It
> >would have been tricky, simultaneously buying off both his
> >own side's radicals and foreign interventionist liberals with
> >rhetorical gestures, but he might have gotten lucky.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> Had the Russian revolutionaries in 1917 chosen to emulate Japan
> (which had already kicked the Russian asses in the Russo-Japanese War
> of 1904-1905 and emerged as a new imperial power), there would have
> been no anti-fascist power on the Eastern Front. For all we know,
> the hypothetical national-capitalist Russia might have turned to
> fascism itself in an economic crisis, joined the axis powers, and
> prolonged WW2, if not quite defeating the allied powers in the end.
Well, we don't know. A sort-of social-democratic, semi- capitalist Soviet Union might well have been anti-fascist. Without Stalin's social devastation of his own country, including its military, and his foolish attempt to cut a deal with Hitler, there might have been no World War II at all. In fact, there might have been no Nazi regime in the first place, since a different set of events would have begun to occur right away in 1917 or -18 with consequences that are impossible to determine. We can't run the universe experimentally several times to see what would have happened if.
> BTW, in 1917, the external threat was not at all limited to Germany,
> and imperial aggression against the USSR began immediately:
I rely on George Kennan's _Russia_Leaves_The_War_, which depicts the intervention against the Bolsheviks by the various Western countries as unserious and of no certain purpose. For instance, Americans occupied Vladivostok for awhile, but their purpose may have been more to keep the Japanese out than anything else. The French were convinced the Germans were going to seize the Trans-Siberian railway and somehow use it to move in supplies from Central Asia, and wanted to seize it themselves first. (No one could figure out how a German army, much less a French one, could possibly be introduced and supplied along the several thousand miles of the railway, and nothing was done.) I think the White armies gave Lenin a lot more trouble than the foreign intervention.
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com>:
> > Meanwhile, had Lenin
> > been unusually prescient, he could have proleptically imitated
> > the Korean and Taiwanese models of national capitalism.
dredmond at efn.org:
> Post-WW II S. Korea and Taiwan are models of *multinational* capitalism. In
> 1917, there was (1) no Keynesianism in the rich countries to finance
> consumption (the gold/sterling standard and fiscal austerity was still the
> rule), (2) no containerized shipping to drive an export boom, and (3) no
> booming semiperiphery to export to.
I was speaking very generically, of course. I have read that prior to 1917, some of the Bolsheviks thought that, once the Tsar was overthrown, ordinary capitalism would have to be instituted in Russia to provide the basis for building socialism (following Marx's concept of stages of economic organization). And we know the Lenin described what he was doing at one point as "state [i.e. government] capitalism". Why not liberal capitalism, then? Guided of course by the Party.... So I'm not the only person to have such ideas -- I'm in Bolshevik company. No need to get excited, it's just another what-if.
The events that happened were once as improbable as the ones that didn't.
-- Gordon