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Revolution in Russia - the defining catastrophe of the ХХ century

The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia 100 years ago last week, as numerous commentators havenoted. The fact that Vladimir Lenin and his comrades pulled it off was nothing short of a miracle. In September 1917, Leon Trotsky was in jail, while Lenin was hiding out in a barn in Finland — after the Bolsheviks’ first attempt at overthrowing the provisional government in July had flopped. The inept provisional government, set up in March following the tsar’s abdication, could have easily used the July fiasco to eliminate the Bolsheviks for good. It squandered the opportunity.

The odds, in short, were stacked heavily against a successful bid for power by the Bolsheviks. That’s why it’s all the more remarkable that this band of utopian revolutionaries managed to take humanity off of one historical trajectory and plop it down on another. It has become something of a cliche to compare Russia’s current strongman regime, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, to its authoritarian tsarist predecessor. But that comparison is false because it fails to acknowledge how the very existence at all today of a powerful and unified Russian state derives from the Bolshevik revolution.

Amid all the memorializing of this revolution, one basic point has gotten lost: the Bolshevik coup was the defining event of the 20th century. This claim stands at odds with conventional wisdom, which holds that it was World War I that sparked the most important later developments, including the Bolshevik putsch itself. George F. Kennan, the historian and diplomat, famously called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century. According to this argument, the perceived injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war with Germany, led to the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War. World War I likewise brought down the tsarist regime in Russia, paving the way for communism and, in turn, the Cold War.

There is no denying the importance of the First World War. But the Bolshevik coup was at least as pivotal as World War I in shaping the 20th century, and it did so in several ways that get little notice today. World War I is often credited with laying the groundwork for European fascism. But the Bolshevik takeover did just as much, if not more, to spawn fascist regimes. Fascism’s birth took place amidst the intense ideological polarization that marked European politics during the interwar years. Violent street battles between radical right- and left-wing agitators helped establish fascist movements. Economic elites, fearful of leftist unrest, turned to fascist parties for protection.

Such ideological friction would have proven considerably less intense and alarming had it not been for the existence on Europe’s doorstep of a great power espousing a communist ideology. The very presence of the Soviet state both inspired support among communism’s sympathizers and paranoid fear among its detractors.

One of those detractors was Adolf Hitler. Although Hitler is mostly remembered for his anti-Semitism, the main enemy, as he saw it, was not international Jewry per se but Judeo-Bolshevism: international Jewry backed by a powerful state in the form of the Soviet Union. That, to him, is what made the Jews an existential threat to the Aryan race. Had it not been for the Bolshevik putsch, Hitler would not have been Hitler. There may well have been no Nazi party and, consequently, no Second World War.

Even if there had been another war, Russia would not have defeated Germany. The only reason it was in a position to win was because from 1928 to 1941, Josef Stalin, at horrific human cost, engineered one of thefastest large-scale industrialization drives in world history. Some scholars dispute whether Stalin’s feverish industrialization campaign was necessary, and his policies surely doomed the Soviet economy in the long run. But they were probably needed in order to give Russia the heavy-industrial base required to win World War II and to supply that base with a labor force.

Even after the herculea­n industrial transformation Stalin oversaw, by December 1941 the Soviets were on the brink of losing Moscow to the Germans. Had it not been for Stalin’s dizzying industrialization effort, it is unlikely that Russia, still overwhelmingly agrarian by the late 1920s, could have successfully countered a German invasion. Nor would it have possessed the economic heft to emerge by war’s end as one of two global superpowers.

Neil A. Abrams