Were the Romanovs worse than the government that replaced them? Lenin/Stalin

So much, thank you so much, I hate to do that but it’s like a blister on my brain. I do it all the time too, but I’ve gotten so sensitive about it.

That’s totally good, and honestly I’m glad you asked. Little things can get to me too, even though they shouldn’t.

I feel like this kind of gives the Soviets a free pass on their immense management of everything.

Well, you can’t really say that it was well-managed before the Soviets, or that it has been after.

Nah, the Soviets were terrible, but once you get past one level of hell, the rest of the bolgias are just different flavors of perdition. Whether the Soviets mismanaged things worse than the Tsarists, though, that’s a tough one. On the one hand, the Communists dragged Russia into the industrial 20th century, at an astronomical cost of course. On the other hand, the Communists pretty much dragged Russia into the industrial 20th century in the worst possible way at the maximum unnecessary cost! Whereas the Tsarists, well, they managed to sustain a string of fuck ups dating back hundreds of years, so while slower paced, they were pretty good at being bad. They were definitely worse at wars!

I think you’re thinking of the Holodomor, where Stalin starved a huge percentage of the Ukrainian population since he viewed the area as a potential source of unrest and rebellion:

It’s difficult to compare atrocities, but it was as bad as anything else that we’ve ever done to each other as a species.

In the big picture, I would say the Soviets were worse than the Romanovs, but the Romanovs were also really bad, and it’s also true that without the Soviets, the 20th Century would have been dramatically different both negatively (less resistance to the Nazis, most likely) and positively (less atrocity / mass starvation within the Russian Empire).

I believe it is also true that the failings of the Romanovs prepared the ground for the Soviets in important ways.

As to the issue of production in the Ukraine my understanding is that is complicated. I have a recollection that during the 1941 invasion there was a concerted effort by the Soviets to move key industries from Ukraine and European Russia to east of the Urals, and that that relocated production was in fact key to the war production that enabled Stalingrad and the later Soviet successes. So the idea that production in the Ukraine was massively reduced is believable to me but I also believe much of that was relocated to Asian Russia (and maybe the 'Stans). One specific thing that the Soviets accomplished which the Romanovs did not was a massive expansion of Russian industry, particularly heavy industry, although it came at extremely severe cost with a high level of atrocity. But the Soviets vastly outproduced the Nazis in tanks for example, and that was a big deal in WWII.

So, it’s complicated.

Where would China be now under the pre-communist government? Kinda the same argument.

Isn’t that easier to answer? They’d look like Taiwan and we’d all be better off?

That’s also complicated. On the one hand, the world would be vastly better off without the many abuses and atrocities of the Chinese Communist Party, just as with the Soviets. On the other hand, the “pre-Communist” government in China was a real mess, in all senses of the word. In the big picture, much as in Russia, the Chinese Communist government was worse than what came before but what came before also had serious problems. Also I don’t think we can assume that a non-Communist China would have followed the path of Taiwan. The sheer size of the territory and population make that unlikely in my view.

No. The Chinese government supplanted by the Communists was as rotten as the Russians under the Tsar. Maybe not out right killing people but definitely not a government of the people.

Taiwan is arguably only the way it is because of opposition to Communist China.

A whole nation run by Chiang Kai-shek wouldn’t have been great given stuff he did, but odds are it would be better than the CCP. That’s a pretty low bar what with the genocides though.

I know almost nothing about the history here, but China Mievillle’s narrative account of the October revolution certainly makes it seem like tyranny under Stalin afterward was not inevitable. The Bolshevik revolution was a revolution mostly through endless committee meetings. The small s “soviets” were local councils where people argued for hours and power shifted by degrees. And it wasn’t inevitable that the Bolsheviks would win either. Kerensky’s provisional government probably could have retained political power if not for the clusterfuck of the Kornilov affair.

Oh, there were actually multiple times when Russia fucked over Ukraine.
Aside from Stalin actually trying to intentionally murder them with starvation, there was ALSO a decision by Lenin to just ignore them and ship all their food over to other parts of Russia during the FIRST Soviet induced famine.

But what I was talking about Russian production of grain dropped from around 80 million tons of grain in 1913, to only 40 million tons in 1921. Now, no doubt a huge part of this was due to the civil war itself. But then the collectivization process in the late 20’s under Stalin resulted in even more disruption of their agricultural systems, leading to even more famine.

That was separate from Stalin actually intentionally causing mass starvation to murder millions.

Yeah, nothing is inevitable. The question (unanswerable) is whether any of the other possible alternatives would have been able to play out in ways that would have been more positive than what did happen. Impossible to know. Which is why I just sort of limit myself to acknowledging that what did happen sucked.

The USSR always gets the credit for the Five Year Plans, but I don’t think there’s much reason to think that, say, a Russian constitutional monarchy wouldn’t have been just as industrialized in 1941. The Russian industrial revolution was already in progress (e.g. iron and steel production increasing by around 8 times in the 25 years leading up to 1913, total length of rail track increasing from 30k miles to 51k miles from 1905 to 1917). The Russians relied on inward investment to sustain that kind of development, but given the surprising amounts of foreign investment that even the Soviets were able to attract in the 20’s, there’s no reason to think that wouldn’t have been available.

Bonus: without the GULAGs, the mass starvation and the mass persecutions.

I don’t know, it seems to me the post-Soviet Russia largely abandoned industrial might in favor of, well, ‘financialization’ at best and kleptocracy at worst. The aspirational ethos of the Soviet society was as a nation of factory workers, building the future one tractor at a time. It’s not clear to me that Russian industrialism would have been the same without that.

That’s a completely different era. In 1914, coal, steel, oil and railways were where the money was.

Most of the nations that went through massive jumps in industrial output at approximately the same time as Russia did so without much in the way of government direction, and obviously none had Soviet style central planning. And as I already implied, Russian industrialization wouldn’t have had to be a new development conjured up by whatever government that Russia ended up with; it would have been the continuation of an existing trend.

Yeah, maybe? I don’t feel strongly about the point, it’s a counterfactual and ultimately the answer is unknowable.

The thing that seems more clear to me is that a radical post-Czar government was probably unavoidable. Too much pent-up social unrest for too long, facing too many intractable problems. You’re not going to get Jeffersonian democracy out of that situation.

To me, the Russian Revolution is like the French one in that way. It isn’t going to produce pretty government. It’s going to produce violent social and economic upheaval.

There’s probably a good book to be written about the comparative outcomes of various revolutions over time and the historical antecedents that contributed to those outcomes. Or maybe it was already written; my history reading isn’t what it used to be.

It definitely appears that some revolutions produce better outcomes than others, but how are those outcomes tied into the historical setup and real situation in those countries at the time of the revolution versus decisions made during and after the revolutions? I suspect what came before is a very strong influence but is it determinative? Hard to say.