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Abstract
Recent decades have seen a conspicuous flowering of counterfactual or ‘virtual’ history, nurtured by a fecund mulch of post-modernist critiques of empiricism, the vulnerability of Marxist history (as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union), and the genre’s voguish allure to the general public. Never immune from such challenges, both exogenous and endogenous, the history of the Russian revolutions and civil wars has long felt their impact, and they have sprouted anew, if somewhat weakly, in some publications linked to the revolution’s centenary. This article examines the roots of these inherently thistly but straggling scions of the counterfactual thicket, as well as explicit dystopias and utopias found in earlier White émigré and Soviet dissident fiction (notably the works of P. N. Krasnov and V. P. Aksenov), before proceeding to test the ‘alternatives to Bolshevism’ suggested more implicitly in Western histories of the period. It finds that these proffered alternatives have been, for the most part, insubstantial but that counterfactual history is not necessarily devoid of utility.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Paul Dukes, Bob Henderson, Jeremy Hicks, Geoffrey Swain and James D. White for their suggestions and encouragement regarding the writing of this piece.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jonathan D. Smele is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary, University of London. He has recently published The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926 (London/New York: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2016) and the Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916–1926, 2 Vols (Langham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). He also edited The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921: An Annotated Bibliography (London/New York: Continuum, 2003), wrote ‘The Study Group on the Russian Revolution: The First Thirty Years’, Revolutionary Russia 18, no. 2 (2005), and is the former editor of Revolutionary Russia. He is currently joint editor (with Michael Melancon, Auburn University) of The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia and is also on the Advisory Committee of the Russia’s Great War and Revolution project.
Notes
1 Of course, this assertion is open to debate – and not only by those of an arch conservative or neo-liberal stamp (the doyen of which, of course, was Richard Pipes, in, inter alia, The Russian Revolution, 1899–1919 and Three Whys of the Russian Revolution), who view socialist projects as inherently doomed and regard totalitarianism as the deliberate (but covert) aim of nefarious Bolshevik conspirators. However, many socialist and libertarian critics of Bolshevism, for example, also argue that the roots of Stalinism can be perceived in the actions of Lenin’s government in the first weeks of its existence (the rejection of coalition government, the foundation of the Cheka, restrictions on freedom of the press, the suffocation of factory committees, etc.). See, for example: Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control.
2 On the Bolsheviks’ attenuated victory, see: Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 240–4.
3 Frankel, ‘1917: The Problem of Alternatives’, 3.
4 Stove, ‘A.J.P. Taylor is History’.
5 We should discount those who are only in it for the money and practitioners of ‘alternate history’, who write works of fiction quite divorced from reality (but not necessarily fiction itself, which can sustain rich strands of counterfactuality). For an insightful analysis of this genre’s popularity in contemporary Russia, where it has taken on a supernatural gloss in a country inured against handbrake turns in historiography by years of clumsy Soviet maneuvering, see: Laurelle, ‘Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia’.
6 Squire, ed. If it had Happened Otherwise, in which each contributor’s title begins with the words ‘What if’. One could, though, cite an earlier but less celebrated volume: Chamberlin, The Ifs of History. Of course, numerous less scholarly examples could be adduced. Notable for our purposes are the often lurid propaganda pieces inspired by contemporary opponents of the Bolsheviks’ revolution: for example, Cournos, London under the Bolsheviks, in which, comically to modern ears, the post-revolutionary British currency is named ‘The MacDonald’! In the United States, the First Red Scare inspired a similar wave, including Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Moon Men (1925), which was first submitted to publishers in a more explicitly anti-Bolshevik form as Under the Red Flag. Such works might be regarded as an extension of the scaremongering invasion literature popular in Britain since Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking of 1871, crossed with a virulent strain of technophobia only annealed by Lenin’s futuristic 1921 pronouncement that ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’: Lenin, ‘Our Foreign and Domestic Position’.
7 From Livy’s occasional imaginative embellishments in his History of Rome (27–9 BC), via Pascal’s 17th-century digressions on Cleopatra’s nose (see below, n. 22), to Gibbon’s 18th-century musings in The Decline and Fall on the Islamization of Oxford after the Arabs’ victory at Poitiers in 732. However, the first volume fully devoted to a recognizable counterfactual history may be Louis Geoffroy’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde 1812–1832, of 1836, in which Napoleon defeats Russia in 1812, invades Britain in 1814, and relaunches the conquest of Egypt before conquering India, China and Japan to become ‘Emperor of the World’, prior to his death in 1832. Although the author, the son of a French officer killed at Austerlitz, presents all this as a panegyric, ‘a satirical reading imposes itself’, as two French scholars note, ‘depicting a world desolated by Napoleonic tyranny and by the standardization of a universal monarchy’. Deluermoz and Singaravélou, ‘Explorer le champ des possibles’. This, interestingly, suggests a direct line to the works of Zamiatin and Bulgakov discussed below.
8 See, especially, Ferguson, Virtual History; Cowley, What If?; Clark, Our Shadowed Present; Gallagher, Telling it like it Wasn’t; Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds.
9 Dukes, ‘The Problem with Counterfactualism’. After all, as Dukes implies, decisions and actions by individuals tell us little of the origins and impact of the ‘Great Acceleration’ of agricultural and industrial production and population (and associated climate change) – the most serious challenge facing mankind today.
10 See, especially: Tucker, ‘Historiographical Counterfactuals’; Evans, Altered Pasts. Also: Evans, ‘“What if” is a waste of time’. One researcher found, indeed, that fully 32% of 500 historical works sampled that were devoted to so-called ‘turning points’ involved subjects that were explicitly military (if a war or battle had gone differently), 25% were political (if a close election or legislative decision had gone differently), and 15% concerned individual leadership (if a key actor had died earlier or lived longer): Brian Lowe, ‘Paper delivered at Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Association’, cited in Collins, ‘The Uses of Counter-Factual History’.
11 Nove, Political Economy and Soviet Socialism, 219.
12 Carr, What is History?, 127. Carr’s influential work was largely written in response to Isiah Berlin’s published 1954 lecture on Historical Inevitability, in which he (to some degree unfairly) castigated Marxists and determinists for their failure to recognize the role of the accidental, free will and the individual. Read today, Carr’s book can be viewed as an unstated attempt, in an undeclared (and very un-British) Historikerstreit, as the Cold War froze, to defend the inevitability of the Bolshevik victory against those who might suggest, however implicitly or obliquely, that alternative outcomes were possible.
13 ‘The Dead Cow, the Turbulent Priest, and the Russian Revolution’.
14 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 300. This, of course, is a play on the allegedly more respectable Geschichtswissenschaft (‘historical science’).
15 Authors here took their cue from Robert Harris, Fatherland – a best-selling 1992 thriller set in the Third Reich twenty years after Hitler had won the Second World War. They might have been better advised to consult Tolstoy’s thoughts on the powerlessness of ‘great men’ in war and history offered in the second part of the ‘Epilogue’ to War and Peace (1869).
16 Ferguson, Virtual History. This seems to me to be a self-belittling nomenclature, almost akin to the more popular adherents of Marxism in Russia accepting Lenin’s unjust denigration of them as mensheviki (‘minoritarians’).
17 This is doubly odd, as possibly the most heated debate among historians of Russia concerns an unadorned counterfactual question: was tsarist Russia capable of sustaining and deepening its post-1905 experiment with constitutionalism and progressive reform, and thereby avoiding revolution, but for the intervention of war in 1914? This debate was sparked by the negative (‘pessimistic’) answers suggested by Leopold Haimson in the 1960s: ‘The Problem of Social Stability in Tsarist Russia’. It is best summarized in McKean, The Russian Constitutional Monarchy. McKean deemed himself to be ‘an optimistic pessimist’ and was, therefore, unusually well-qualified to referee this debate.
18 Brenton, Historically Inevitable?
19 Sebag Montefiore, ‘What if the Russian Revolution had Never Happened?’.
20 Cunliffe, Lenin Lives! Prior to Cunliffe, excursions into the counterfactual have been rare among Leftist historians. Towards the end of his career, the life-long Marxist Eric Hobsbawm expressed a cautious interest in it in a chapter entitled ‘Historians and Economists II’ (‘Unlike some other historians I am also ready to welcome its excursions into imaginary or fictional history known as “counterfactuals” … All history is full of implicit or explicit counterfactuals.’), but by the time he wrote the Preface for the volume in which that chapter was collected he seems to have changed his mind (‘In short, I believe that without the distinction between what is and what is not so, there can be no history’): Hobsbawm, On History (compare pages 150 and ix).
21 See: Hatherley, ‘After the End of the World’.
22 What might be termed the ‘Cleopatra’s Nose Syndrome’, after Pascal’s notion that had Mark Anthony not been so enraptured by the pharaoh’s beguiling proboscis there would have been no affair between the two and, consequently, the Second Triumvirate would not have disintegrated and the Roman Republic would have endured. His point was to emphasize the role of chance in History: ‘Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed’ (Pensées, 1669). But, as E. H. Carr archly noted, the male’s weakness for female charms is one of the most predictable and most common causations in History: Carr, What is History?, 99.
23 Unlike those famously cracked in James Thurber’s ne plus ultra of the genre, ‘If Grant had been Drinking at Appomotox’. The American Civil War has been another favourite battleground of counterfactualists, and here Thurber was lampooning a piece by Winston Churchill in Scribner’s Magazine (December 1930) entitled ‘If Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg’, in which the future prime minister artfully writes from the point of view of an historian in a world in which Lee had won both the battle and the entire war he famously lost. Humour, then, has traditionally provided an important facet of the counter-factual.
24 Less diverting – indeed, quite tasteless and potentially open to charges of antisemitism, given the manner of his death and the mercantile occupation to which his Jewish ancestors had often been confined – is one fate-of-the-revolution counterfactual having Trotsky ending up as a chandler of mountaineering equipment in Mexico: Roberts, What Might Have Been. Roberts, it might be said, is a proponent of the ‘If only’ rather than the ‘What if … ’ school of counterfactuality and his works are as revealing of their author’s ideological anxieties as they are of historical contingencies.
25 Almarik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?
26 For an English translation, see: Chaianov, ‘The Journey of my Brother Alexei’. In a typically surreal Stalinist twist, the name of an organization imagined by Chaianov seems to have inspired the designation of members of the equally fanciful organization arraigned in Moscow at the Trial of the Labouring Peasant Party in 1930. Among the defendants was Chaianov himself. See: Shanin, ‘Chayanov’s treble death’.
27 On more recent exponents, see: Dalton-Brown, ‘Signposting the Way to the City of Night’.
28 Lesser, more unadulteratedly utopian and po-facedly pro-Soviet science fictions of the immediate post-revolutionary era (one during which the genre mushroomed) are less well-remembered. Self-explanatory examples of such works, which are often crudely derivative of H. G. Wells, include: Iakov Ukenev, The Coming World (1923); Innokenty Zhukov, Voyage of the ‘Red Star’ Detachment to the Land of Marvels (1924); Viktor Nikolskii, In a Thousand Years (1925); and (a riposte to Zamiatin) Jan Larri, The Land of the Happy (1931). More substantial, but far from entirely satisfying are the works of Aleksei Tolstoi: Aelita (1923); and Engineer Garin’s Death Ray (1926). Also those of and Aleksandr Belaev: Battle in Ether (1928); and The Air Seller (1929). On the Soviet science fiction boom see: Stites, Revolutionary Dreams.
29 According to one authoritative account, Bulgakov could not bring himself – probably in the interest of self-preservation – to publish an earlier draft of the work, in which the giant birds, snakes, etc. that had been unleashed by unwary, production-minded Soviet scientists ultimately lay waste to Moscow and the Soviet dream: ‘Rokovye iaitsa’.
30 Although its title was quite widely used in émigré circles in inter-war France and Germany to describe the Soviet Union. On Krasnov’s work and its contemporary resonance, see: Aptekman, ‘Forward to the Past’; Maguire, ‘Spectral Geographies’. On the influence of Krasnov’s novel on the contemporary Russian writer, hoaxer and fantasist Eduard Limonov, see: Rogatchevsky, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’. On Krasnov’s fetishism of modern technology, particularly with regard to the mobilizing potential of communications, see: Krasnov, Dusha armii. Krasnov got to experience for himself the no less painful realities of the land ‘beyond the thistle’ after he was incarcerated by British forces in Austria in May 1945 and then sent back to Russia with other White and Cossack leaders of the civil-wars era. There he was subsequently tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, found guilty of treason and other crimes, and executed (on 17 January 1947). For biographical details of individuals mentioned in this text, see the entries in Smele, Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars.
31 Aksyonov, The Island of Crimea.
32 Guryanova, ‘The Island of Freedom’.
33 It would be tempting here to make comparisons – as Aksenov probably intended – with adherents of the Smenovekhostvo (‘Change of Signposts’) movement among inter-war émigrés, who dreamed of the ‘Russification of October’, unaware that their noble cause was being covertly financed by Moscow. See: Hardeman, Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime. More likely, though, is that he had in mind his generation’s shattered dreams about the possibility of the peaceful coexistence and the potential for convergence of capitalism and socialism, as voiced by such diverse figures as Pitirim Sorokin, Andrei Sakharov, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Herbert Marcuse: Matich, ‘Vasilii Aksenov and the Literature of Convergence’.
34 It is uncertain whether this character is intended to evoke the memory of the British intelligence officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Bailey, whose derring-do, anti-Bolshevik adventures in Central Asia in 1918 involved joining the local Cheka to assist in hunting down ‘the British spy Bailey’ – Bailey, Mission to Tashkent (Chapter 18) – but the comedic potential of that story would surely have appealed to Aksenov.
35 That said, even as I write plans are apparently afoot in Riyadh to dig a canal that will effectively turn Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, peninsular Qatar, into an island: The Guardian, 1 September 2018. Thoughtfully, the ‘Salwa Island Project’ will incorporate a nuclear waste facility. This follows a widely mocked petition to the Ukrainian president in 2017 requesting that the Perekop isthmus be severed by the construction of a canal: Sputnik News, 9 January 2017.
36 Bizarrely, following the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, the former head of the German foreign intelligence service (BND), August Hanning, is reported to have suggested to the BBC in April 2016 that Crimea might be turned into a ‘free economic zone … like Hong Kong’, by agreement of Russia, Ukraine, the USA and the European Union: Sputnik International, 29 April 2016.
37 Górecki, The Peninsula as an Island; Petrov, ‘Crimea’.
38 Stove, ‘A.J.P. Taylor is History’.
39 In February 2017, Moscow’s independent Levada Centre (its credentials for trustworthiness reinforced every time that the Kremlin labels it as a ‘foreign agency’) reported that some 46% of respondents to a recent survey viewed Stalin positively, with 32% averring that they regarded him with respect, ten per cent declaring that they held sympathetic views towards him and four per cent pledging their admiration, compared to 21% who said that they hated or feared the former leader and another 22% who viewed him with indifference. This marked a 16-year high in Stalin’s popularity, according to the Centre: The Moscow Times, 15 February 2017. A Levada poll later in 2017 placed Stalin first in a list of the most ‘outstanding’ figures in Russian history, ahead of both Putin and Pushkin: Newsweek, 26 June 2017.
40 Nove, ‘Was Stalin really Necessary?’. Nove, of course, was an economic historian, and (although their works will not long detain us here) it should be mentioned that some western historians of that breed (unlike Nove himself) have long been and are still attracted to building models of what the Russian economy might or might not have achieved without the revolution and/or Stalin’s Five-Year Plans. (They draw upon the broader cliometric and counterfactual tropes in economic history inspired by Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth.) Recent examples, with good bibliographies, include: Cheremukhin, et al., ‘Was Stalin Necessary for Russia’s Economic Development?’; Chermukhin, et al., ‘The Industrialization and Economic Development of Russia’. Also: Koroloev, ‘Evaluating Russian Economic Growth without the Revolution of 1917’. For the non-econometricist, more intriguing and digestible is an unpublished piece by Geoffrey Swain: ‘What would the Soviet Union have been like if Trotsky had defeated Stalin?’. Swain concludes that one-party rule under Trotsky would have been less arbitrary and paranoid but in other key respects (peasant policy, foreign policy) ‘would not have been very different’ to one one-party rule under Stalin, thereby mostly seconding Nove’s aside to the effect that a pock-marked, withered-armed ‘Georgian with a long moustache’ was not a necessary ingredient in the Stalinist soup – a haughty and tough, lapsed Jewish journalist would, in the circumstances, have served just as well.
41 Andrew Roberts (What Might have Been) compares such overstretch to an attempt to predict what Ball H will do when Ball A is struck by the cue ball in a game of billiards, apparently forgetting that billiards is played with only three balls.
42 Trotsky, My Life, 312.
43 More ribald versions, substituting the word ‘balls’ for ‘whiskers’, are available, in Russian and other languages – and, given the impotency of anti-Bolshevism, might well be regarded as more appropriate.
44 Hobsbawm, ‘The Present as History’, in Hobsbawm, On History, 307.
45 Duncan, ‘Contemporary Russian Identity’, 277.
46 Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is within You.
47 Most recently: Lieven, Towards the Flame.
48 We shall not attempt to estimate how many authors of such efforts were by tempted by the double-bubble impact of marking two centenaries in one volume, but the best of them certainly were not: Engelstein, Russia in Flames; Read, War and Revolution in Russia; and the volumes contributed to the ‘Russia’s Great War and Revolution’ series (http://russiasgreatwar.org/index.php).
49 Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars.
50 See above, n. 17.
51 On Witte, see Harcave, Count Sergei Witte. On Rasputin: Radzinsky, Rasputin, 326–41.
52 ‘The Durnovo Memorandum’, in Dmytryshyn, Imperial Russia, 491–509. This theme was revived in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Red Wheel.
53 McMeekin, The Berlin–Baghdad Express; Jenkins, ‘German Orientalism’; Schwanitz, Germany and the Middle East.
54 The promise of which was realized through the inter-Allied Constantinople Agreement of 18 March 1915: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constantinople_Agreement. On the devastating economic consequences for Russia of the Turks’ closure of the Straits for just a few weeks during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 and the First Balkan War of 1912–13, see: Spring, ‘Russian Foreign Policy’. The precariousness of Russia’s position was emphasized by the fact that these closures were not even aimed directly at Russia but, rather, at Italy and Greece respectively.
55 Steinberg, ‘Old Knowledge and New Research’.
56 See: Stone, The Eastern Front; Jones, ‘Imperial Russia’s Forces at War’.
57 Jones, ‘Nicholas II and the Supreme Command’.
58 Riha, A Russian European, 281–90.
59 Gleason, ‘Alexander Guchkov’, 64–70; Kulikov, ‘Tsentral′nyi voenno-promyshlennyi komitet’; Lyandres, The Fall of Tsarism, 116–31, 146–51, 187–8, 235–7, 271–85.
60 Riha, A Russian European, 266–70.
61 Although, much to the White leadership’s embarrassment, renegade officers were apt to force orchestras to perform it at gunpoint. See: Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 82.
62 Filimonov, Konets belogo Primor'ia, 55–62; Rudnev, Pri vechernikh ogniakh, 448–9.
63 The first task would have been to unravel the Gordian Knot of the line of succession, which has occupied Romanov dynasts to preposterous lengths ever since. See: Meyer, The Quest for a Tsar. The contemporary Monarchist Party of Russia (founded in 2012), which seems at times to be a friends-and-family affair of its chairman (the politician and businessman Anton Bakov), currently supports the candidature for the Russian throne (as ‘Nicholas III’) of the German Prince Karl Emich of Leiningen, the great-great-grandson of Alexander II. Perhaps more realizable than such an investiture are its aims of recovering ‘lost’ (that is, never claimed) territories of the Russian Empire, such as Suwarrow atoll in the South Pacific, the staging of a public trial of Lenin and Stalin, and the establishment of an independent monarchist city-state (on the Vatican model) near Ekaterinburg to be called ‘All-Imperial Russian Throne’.
64 Meynell, ‘The Stockholm Conference of 1917’.
65 A marvellous animated map of the changing fronts of the civil wars was among the exhibits at the British Library’s ‘Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths’ exhibition in 2017. It is currently viewable at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpycUBpgWzU.
66 On the size, composition and activities of the main White forces described below, see: ‘Armed Forces of South Russia’, ‘Northern Army’, ‘North-West Army’, and ‘Russian Army’, in: Smele, Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars; also Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 105–40.
67 The meeting of units of the Northern Army and elements of Kolchak’s Siberian Army at an isolated spot near Pechora (700 miles due north of Perm’ and a few miles south of the Arctic Circle) on 21 March 1919 could stand as a perfect testament to the insurmountable obstacles to White unity.
68 Following their release, some of Iudenich’s more enterprising officers made their way to Poland to join the AFSR units under General N. E. Bredov interned at Pikulice and Denmby, who were then able to journey to Crimea to join General Wrangel’s Russian Army in 1920. Subsequently, officers of Wrangel’s army journeyed around the world to Vladivostok to unite with the remnants of White forces on the Pacific coast. Such, again, were the lengths – toilsome, wildering, wearying and all but insurmountable – involved in achieving White unity.
69 Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 228–38.
70 Brown, The Groping Giant, 176.
71 Burovoi, Kolchakovshchina, 20–1.
72 Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 109–10. To argue, therefore, that a unified and more powerful Allied effort to see the intervention through to victory would have facilitated an anti-Bolshevik triumph is to miss the point spectacularly. Not that this has deterred some commentators, notably: Slonim, Stillborn Crusade.
73 Churchill, The World Crisis, 234. See also: Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, 272–90; Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 237–53.
74 As Denikin almost put it at the time: Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, Vol 4, 285.
75 Radkey, ‘An Alternative to Bolshevism’; White, The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia; Lee, The Experiment. It should be recorded that another recent work is far more guarded in its prognoses: Smith, Captives of Revolution.
76 Notably: Swain, ‘Before the Fighting Started’; Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War; Swain, ‘The Democratic Counter-Revolution Reconsidered’. On Swain’s writings on the SRs, see: Smele, ‘Still Searching for the “Third Way”’.
77 The Bolsheviks won 24% of the vote. The Left-SRs, who had formed a separate party and joined Sovnarkom in coalition with the Bolsheviks in November–December 1917, won just 1% of the vote, but that was a major under-representation of their popularity, as party lists for the election were drawn up in advance of the SR schism and strongly favoured candidates from the party’s centre and right wings. On this issue and the election results, see: Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls.
78 Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 518–19.
79 Blok, ‘Twelve’. Blok was no Bolshevik, though. In fact he died in August 1921, having long since despaired of the revolution, as the Soviet government debated expelling him.
80 Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls. A recent study has concluded that even in areas where peasants voted en masse for the SRs and expressed deep trust in what they routinely referred to as ‘the muzhiks’ party’, they had no substantial interest in the finer points of party policy. See: Badcock, ‘We’re for the Muzhiks’ Party’.
81 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 124. In the words of one recent commentator on the events of 5–6 January 1918, the SRs ‘had won an election only to find that they had lost a state’: King, The Narodniks in the Russian Revolution, 97.
82 Swain, Origins of the Russian Civil War, 53–69; Keep, The Debate on Soviet Power, 44–99; The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution, 126–53; Bunyan and Fischer, The Bolshevik Revolution, 199–204.
83 Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, 33–5.
84 Wade, The Russian Revolution, 247.
85 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 42.
86 Medhurst, No Less Than Mystic. The author is a British trade unionist and self-confessed ‘amateur historian’.
87 Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, 294.
88 Anin, ‘The February Revolution’; Mosse, ‘The February Regime’.
89 Kochan, ‘Kadet Policy in 1917’.
90 Sviatitskii, who had in early 1919 had allied himself with the Soviet authorities, along with the Narod group of SRs, had to be careful: he had, after all, been a member of Komuch in 1918, so it was natural for him subsequently to dismiss its prospects. His memoirs were published in a leading Soviet journal, Novyi mir, but he spent lengthy terms in internal exile before his final arrest and execution in 1937.
91 On North Russia, see: Novikova, An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative. On Komuch: Berk, ‘The Democratic Counter-Revolution’. Berk’s article was drawn from the author’s superb but regrettably unpublished dissertation: Berk, ‘The Coup d’État of Admiral Kolchak’. On Siberia, see also: Smele, Civil War in Siberia: Chapter One (‘The Triumphal March of Reaction’).
92 Swain, ‘The Democratic Counter-Revolution Reconsidered’; Mawdsley, ‘November 1918’.
93 On Boldyrev, see: Hosking, ‘A Democratic White General’.
94 Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 320.
95 Millman, ‘The Problem with Generals’.
96 ‘The Disunion for the Degeneration of Russia’ might have been a more apposite appellation: Smele, ‘Mania Grandiosa’; Wells, ‘The Union of Regeneration’.
97 See, for example, the fate of Mr W. E. O’Reilly, the British consul at Vladivostok, who was implicated in fomenting the ‘Gajda Putsch’ at Vladivostok on 17–18 November 1919, during which a Provisional People’s Government of Siberia was proclaimed, together with the formation of a new People’s Army: Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 552–70.
98 Sablin, The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic.
99 Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 145–8; Avalishvili, The Independence of Georgia, 216–26. A contrast here is worth making to the very significant moral and military support offered by the Allies to nationalist Poland during the Soviet–Polish War of 1920, without which Warsaw (and subsequently Berlin) are likely to have fallen to the Red Army, with potentially critical consequences for Europe and the world. That finely balanced conflict too is not without its re-imaginers: Johnson, ‘The Fire of Revolution’.
100 Although it has to be conceded that the chances of democracy maintaining itself in inter-war Europe might have been greater had not authoritarian and fascist leaders been denied the existence of a spectral Soviet bogeyman looming in the East with which to cow their populations.
101 Collins, ‘The Uses of Counter-Factual History’, 276.
102 ‘There was nothing preordained about the collapse of the tsarist autocracy nor even of the Provisional Government’: Smith, Russia in Revolution, 375; ‘The events of 1917 were filled with might-have-beens and missed chances’: McMeekin, The Russian Revolution, 745. See also: Fitzpatrick, ‘What’s Left?’
103 Weinryb, ‘Historiographic Counterfactuals’.
104 Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 319–20.
105 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, 341. On Trotsky’s intentions in this seminal work, see the commentaries on it listed in Smele, The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 69.
106 Deluermoz and Singaravélou, ‘Explorer le champ des possibles’.
107 Talbot, ‘Chance and Necessity in History’; Flewers, ‘Marxism and Counterfactual History’.
108 Trotsky, My Life, 519.