George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, over at The Volokh Conspiracy, makes the point that May 1 should be a day to honor victims of Communism. I agree.
So to honor that day, here are some questions. First, some background. I carry old Wall Street Journal puzzles with me when I travel and I was doing one on the way from LAX to Newark last Wednesday. Here’s the clue: “Pre-October Revolution rulers.” The answer is a word with 5 letters.
The answer is literally correct, but fundamentally misleading, and in a very bad way.
Question 1: What is the answer the Journal editor, Mike Shenk, wanted you to answer? (I’m not saying that he did this on purpose; he might simply be ignorant.)
Question 2: Why is it misleading?
Bonus question: Why is it misleading in a bad way?
READER COMMENTS
john hare
May 1 2019 at 1:28pm
Would #1 be Czars, #2 because it misses the interim government of Menshevics and the interactions that lead to the Bolsheviks taking over?
Mark
May 1 2019 at 2:06pm
Yes, and is the bonus that it is misleading in a bad way because it implies the alternative to communism was tsarism and not liberal democracy?
The thing is, I don’t think liberal democracy was a viable alternative to communism in Russia in 1917. When they held elections, the liberals got 5% of the votes, with a supermajority going to the Bolsheviks and only somewhat more moderate socialists, many of whom sided with the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. The provisional government relied on foreign support because of its lack of support at home, and as a result made the terrible decision to continue fighting World War I, one of the main causes of the October Revolution.
The relatively quick communist victory in the October Revolution and following civil war likely benefitted Russia. One can compare to China, where the Qing Dynasty was overthrown by democratic nationalists in 1911. Instead of a flourishing liberal democracy, however, China got 40 years of warlordism and foreign domination. Ultimately, this left China far worse off than Russia. If Russia had a similar experience to China, it would have been easy prey for Nazi Germany and it’s not clear that fewer people would have been killed. Russia might have been invaded by Japan too (notably while the Russian Army was easily defeated by Japan in 1905, by the 1930s, the Red Army intimidated Japan enough that Japan turned its sights on China instead).
I used to believe the narrative of communism as pure evil, but now I view that narrative as overly simplistic and think most evidence suggests that there was no better and viable alternative to communism in either of the two big communist powers, the USSR and China. These were both desperately poor countries when communists took over, and it’s not clear that communism in those two countries was more deadly and impoverishing than the most likely alternative.
Mark Z
May 1 2019 at 5:19pm
First of all, there’s a lot of daylight between liberal democracy and Bolshevism, and on the spectrum of good, through tolerable, to the worst possibly outcome, I think Bolshevism is pretty close to ‘worst possible outcome.’ Virtually any alternative would’ve been better, and I think that definitely includes something like the Kuomintang. I think China would’ve been decidedly worse off – not better off – had Mao come 25-30 years earlier (I can’t find any data comparing their relative economic performance around that time, so can’t say for sure; China was, though, much poorer to being with I think). Additionally, I disagree that communism made Russia more able to face the Nazis. If anything I think it did the opposite. The Soviets were pretty unprepared for the invasion, and they repelled it only with the aid of their climate and the fact that Germany was fighting a war on three fronts. China was easy prey for Japan because 1) Japan was fighting only China when it invaded, and 2) There was a much larger gap to begin with in technological and military sophistication between Japan and China than between Germany and Russia.
Finally, I don’t think communism was remotely inevitable, nor an improvement over Tsarism. The early purges alone make that clear imo. I think Stolypin and Kerensky governments were definitely on shaky footing (the former might have ultimately evolved into constitutional monarchy; the latter into a some form of social democracy) but the early Bolshevik government was also very fragile. Why the latter survived and the former two didn’t does not seem like it was inevitable to me; it seems like a great deal of chance went into it.
Nick R
May 1 2019 at 11:19pm
Between the alternatives of Bolshevism and Czarism, the answer would seem a no-brainer. Lenin and his successors were more repressive and murderous than the Czars by an order of magnitude. It took over 30 years–until after the death of Stalin, for any softening in repression to take place. One can, on the other hand, easily imagine liberalization on the part of the Czars, who at least weren’t driven by ideology to create massive famines in their own dominions, or to institute murderous purges of their country’s elites on a monstrous scale.
Kurt Schuler
May 3 2019 at 8:08am
The crossword puzzle clue reminds me of Woody Allen’s quip that the Russian Revolution erupted when the serfs finally realized that the Czar and the Tsar were the same person. It would have been more accurate had it said “Pre-February Revolution leaders.”
Christopher Evans
May 3 2019 at 2:42pm
Vermont just recently re-named Columbus Day. Perhaps we could re-purpose May Day for the memory of all victim’s of Communists. What if a group of homeless VT citizens were to take over one of Bernie Sanders’ houses…..
Theodore Lopez
May 5 2019 at 10:06am
Tsars or Czars. The Karensky Government aka The Provisional Russian Government. It was bad because the Karensky Government might have resulted in something approaching a liberal demo ratic republic if not for the Bolshevik coup.
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