Comment by vkou

4 days ago

> 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.

  • Without a cold war you'd have had some other imperial imbalance. The only reason the Anglosphere and the EU are in alliance is because of a rival superpower. Without the commies to scare the shit out of them, they'd still all be squabbling with each other over colonies, and we'd all probably be working 70 hours a week, as our owners would not feel any pressure to make concessions to labour.

    Or, alternatively, there may have well been a communist revolution in the industrialized countries, as opposed to the agrarian backwaters that actually got them.

    And China going communist can be blamed as much on things like the Opium wars, or Japan's imperialism, or the international repression of the Boxer rebellion or any of the other things that fueled a reactionary nationalistic fire in it. There's only so long you can keep kicking a country of nearly a billion people before someone gets it in their head to drive out the foreigners, and they usually aren't the type to be winning any peace prizes, if you get my drift.

    It's all just a bunch of what-ifs. The only thing that we can know for certain is that the Soviet empire sucked, a lot, especially for its European subjects. Empires tend to. But its existence probably played a major role in decolonization - and wrecking other empires.