5 ms·

>Ultimately, I think the Tsar's Russia was a deeply sick system that had to go, one way or another Note that it already went away by the time the Bolshevik's s

by yyyk 5y ago

>Ultimately, I think the Tsar's Russia was a deeply sick system that had to go, one way or another Note that it already went away by the time the Bolshevik's staged their 'Revolution'. Also, there's an argument (ironically mirroring yours) that had Russia avoided WW1, the Tsar's system would end up evolving towards a constitutional monarchy, but without the piles of corpses.

pasabagi 5y ago
> Note that it already went away by the time the Bolshevik's staged their 'Revolution'. Sure. But that's also very normal in revolutions, to have a multiple-stage affair with different conceptions of what the revolution is for emerging throughout the duration. Karensky has often been portrayed as a sort of mini-Napoleon figure, so it's hard to see his overthrow as a pure 'palace coup'. To be honest, I feel like the history here is very murky, full of misleading names and conflicting accounts, and the best you can do is to try and get a grasp of the characters of the people involved. With the old Bolsheviks, most of whom Stalin had killed, you tend to get the feeling of ruthless, dedicated, but ultimately idealistic people. Pretending that they were always just an evil clique is basically anarchonism: you're taking the fate of the USSR, and putting it on to the people who formed its early days.
- yyyk 5y ago
  >With the old Bolsheviks,... you tend to get the feeling of ruthless, dedicated, but ultimately idealistic people. Pretending that they were always just an evil clique... Idealistic is not an antonym to evil. Ruthless and idealistic is a very good way to justify evil to oneself. I do agree evil clique is not the right way to consider the start of the revolution. The USSR was poisoned from the start by the Bolshevik contempt to democracy and anything that was standing in the way of their ideals. They had to experiment on their society no matter how many people died. Eventually after a long paroxysm of violence it morphed to a clique, which was actually less evil than what preceded it despite being less idealistic.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    I don't see them as having contempt for democracy. Lenin's slogan, after all, was 'all power to the soviets'. That was the basic unit of democracy in Russia at the time, far more relevant than stuff like the constituent assembly. I also think that it's normal to have a democratic deficit during an extremely chaotic situation, and a lot of the people 'standing in the way of their ideals' were also trying to kill the Bolsheviks. German armies were literally rolling through Russia at the time. All of these guys were raised on the history of the french revolution and the paris commune, both events in which the far left had an almost complete mortality rate. It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals. They would call what we call democracy an oligarchy, an 'bourgeois democracy', etc. So, obviously, they wouldn't have any patience for its trappings. I don't think you can simply call them anti-democratic on the simple grounds that their idea of democracy differs from yours.
    - yyyk 5y ago
      Soviets had no power by design. 'Democratic centralism' and banning all opposition when Lenin was still alive show how meaningful their democracy was. >It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals. Their 'definition' of democracy is not a democracy. e.g. the various People's Democratic Republic of X, like say North Korea.
      - pasabagi 5y ago
        > Their 'definition' of democracy is not a democracy. I think people are way too black-and-white about these things. Democracy is supposed to be a mapping of the people's will to the people's living conditions. It's very obvious that some states are way better at this than others. The amount of control the US voter has over the specific policy regime they live under is almost nonexistent. That's quite normal in western democracies. To put it in context, an Athenian democrat would call every one of our modern democracies an oligarchy, and we in turn would call their democracy an apartheid state. I don't think you're right about the Soviets, but my observation is that a large part of western misunderstandings of the Bolsheviks come from failing to understand them on their terms. In my eyes, a state based on soviet sovereignty, even with a strong executive in emergency situations, would be a very democratic state. That's what the Bolsheviks said they wanted to deliver, and I don't see why we shouldn't believe them.

by yyyk 5y ago

pasabagi 5y ago

> Note that it already went away by the time the Bolshevik's staged their 'Revolution'. Sure. But that's also very normal in revolutions, to have a multiple-stage affair with different conceptions of what the revolution is for emerging throughout the duration. Karensky has often been portrayed as a sort of mini-Napoleon figure, so it's hard to see his overthrow as a pure 'palace coup'. To be honest, I feel like the history here is very murky, full of misleading names and conflicting accounts, and the best you can do is to try and get a grasp of the characters of the people involved. With the old Bolsheviks, most of whom Stalin had killed, you tend to get the feeling of ruthless, dedicated, but ultimately idealistic people. Pretending that they were always just an evil clique is basically anarchonism: you're taking the fate of the USSR, and putting it on to the people who formed its early days.

yyyk 5y ago
>With the old Bolsheviks,... you tend to get the feeling of ruthless, dedicated, but ultimately idealistic people. Pretending that they were always just an evil clique... Idealistic is not an antonym to evil. Ruthless and idealistic is a very good way to justify evil to oneself. I do agree evil clique is not the right way to consider the start of the revolution. The USSR was poisoned from the start by the Bolshevik contempt to democracy and anything that was standing in the way of their ideals. They had to experiment on their society no matter how many people died. Eventually after a long paroxysm of violence it morphed to a clique, which was actually less evil than what preceded it despite being less idealistic.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  I don't see them as having contempt for democracy. Lenin's slogan, after all, was 'all power to the soviets'. That was the basic unit of democracy in Russia at the time, far more relevant than stuff like the constituent assembly. I also think that it's normal to have a democratic deficit during an extremely chaotic situation, and a lot of the people 'standing in the way of their ideals' were also trying to kill the Bolsheviks. German armies were literally rolling through Russia at the time. All of these guys were raised on the history of the french revolution and the paris commune, both events in which the far left had an almost complete mortality rate. It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals. They would call what we call democracy an oligarchy, an 'bourgeois democracy', etc. So, obviously, they wouldn't have any patience for its trappings. I don't think you can simply call them anti-democratic on the simple grounds that their idea of democracy differs from yours.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    Soviets had no power by design. 'Democratic centralism' and banning all opposition when Lenin was still alive show how meaningful their democracy was. >It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals. Their 'definition' of democracy is not a democracy. e.g. the various People's Democratic Republic of X, like say North Korea.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      > Their 'definition' of democracy is not a democracy. I think people are way too black-and-white about these things. Democracy is supposed to be a mapping of the people's will to the people's living conditions. It's very obvious that some states are way better at this than others. The amount of control the US voter has over the specific policy regime they live under is almost nonexistent. That's quite normal in western democracies. To put it in context, an Athenian democrat would call every one of our modern democracies an oligarchy, and we in turn would call their democracy an apartheid state. I don't think you're right about the Soviets, but my observation is that a large part of western misunderstandings of the Bolsheviks come from failing to understand them on their terms. In my eyes, a state based on soviet sovereignty, even with a strong executive in emergency situations, would be a very democratic state. That's what the Bolsheviks said they wanted to deliver, and I don't see why we shouldn't believe them.