Contrary to Bolshevik rhetoric, the Russian Empire was not a dystopia.
----- Original Message ---- From: Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>
As Bhaskar said, many social reforms preceded the fall of the Romanov's, including for instance social insurance and the rudiments of a welfare state in Bismarck's Germany. The SPD played the crucially productive role of offering a less palatable threat to the status quo then, but it did so without the example of a successful revolution.
Most important, for most of the world, the dividing line between the rapid social progress characteristic of the modern age and the Malthusian stagnation that came before it, was right after the end of World War II, not 1917. It's remarkable how the period just before de-colonization, and then the decades following after it, brought about the first major improvements in health and living standards the darker nations of the world had yet seen. The debt crisis and neo-liberal onslaught only temporarily dampened that progress, and it has since resumed in the last decade with extraordinary vigor. Perhaps this is all due to Mao and the threat of socialist revolution in the global south, but if so, it seems the salutatory effects of the mass line have persisted and indeed been magnified well into the 21st century.
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