as far as Japan is concerned. But in the West, in the absence of Fascism, war might have been avoided although its danger would not have been dispelled. A democratic Russia in the League of Nations from the very beginning would have been a natural ally of the Weimar Republic, and the worst features of the Versailles system would have been obviated. A reconstituted socialist and labour international might perhaps have emerged from the carnage of the first war, mindful of the opportunities it missed in 1914 and powerful enough to prevent the settling of economic issues by the trial of arms.
Some historians admit that the victory of the October Revolution was not determined, in the sense that it was the sole historical possibility in the situation. But they maintain that if there had not been an October, or if it had failed, the only other alternative was the restoration of Czarism: “The alternative to Tsarism was not constitutional monarchy or liberal republicanism, but Bolshevism…. The alternative to Bolshevism, had it failed to survive the ordeal of civil war… would not have been Chernov, elected according to the most modern rules of equal suffrage and proportional representation, but a military dictator, a Kolchak or a Denikin….”[1] This is a very widely entertained view, but we believe it to be mistaken.
The counter-revolutionary movement of Kornilov before October dissolved like snow in a hot sun. What made it possible for Kolchak and Denikin to resume? Foreign support—a foreign support that would have been completely absent if a democratic regime had continued to exist in Russia. The Bolshevik dictatorship was in fact strengthened by foreign intervention. Many who were hostile to the Bolsheviks’ political rule fought side by side with them because they regarded the civil war as a national war against invaders. The Czarists in fact had very little social support in Russia, and what they had was drawn from the large landlords and their dependents. The peasants kept their fists on the land. When they had a choice, they preferred the Bolsheviks, who promised to let them keep it, to the counter-revolutionists, who took the land away from them. There would probably have been no new insurrection from the right if the Constituent Assembly had been permitted to enjoy its legitimate authority. And in the improbable event that
- ↑ William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. I., p. 371, New York, 1935. In many respects this book is the most objective account of the period so far written.
