Comment by vkou
5 days ago
That was just the excuse everyone used to have a go at eachother. Russia didn't want its pan-slavic ambitions to get embarrassed again (as they were with the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia), France wanted revenge, Austria-Hungary wanted to remind everyone that they were still around and relevant, Germany wanted to establish supremacy on the continent, the UK wanted to curtail German ambitions, and prevent the rise of a rival empire.
Everyone was itching for a fight, all for incredibly stupid, selfish reasons, and unleashed a war that butchered an entire generation of Europe's youth. Three of the five major belligerents had their governments overthrown, and that was two too few.
I've seen it described as a powder keg waiting for a match.
To me, the Russian Revolution is The Worst Thing That Ever Happened, and I imagine we'd have a much better world if that match was never lit.
> the Russian Revolution is The Worst Thing That Ever Happened,
Worse than the war that spawned it, where 20 million people died over absolutely nothing in four years, and then when it resumed, another 70 million (with an unprecedented attempt at industrial extermination of an entire group of people thrown in for good measure)?
Worse than any of the other globe-spanning empires that plunged their subjects into decades and centuries of slavery and repression?
The Soviet empire, at its worst, only had 400 million people - a mere ten percent of the world's population - in thrall.
The world's history been awash in blood spilled by war, aristocracy and autocracy, imperialism and colonialism. It's rather hard to point at one of the middling empires and go - that one, right there, is definitely the worst thing in history.
This is of course not an exact science, and you make good arguments for WW1. The fact that it (maybe) depends on a single shot at a chance encounter makes that extra fun to speculate over.
But I think you underestimate the Russian Revolution. Without the Soviet Union, there is no Cold War, and there is no way China goes communist, stopping a number of genocides. The consequences are huge, and very hard to imagine.
You can even make an argument that without german communists, the Nazis don't take power in Germany, but I admit that's a stretch. And of course, in this alternative world other terrible things would happen.
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