One hundred years ago Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending 300 years of Romanov rule of Russia, and this so-called February Revolution presents one of the great what-ifs of history:
If this revolution — which actually took place in early March 1917 according to the West’s Gregorian calendar (Russia adopted that calendar only later) — had succeeded in producing a constitutional democracy in place of the czarist empire as its leaders hoped, the world would be a very different place.
If the leading figure in the provisional government, Aleksandr Kerensky, had seized on an opportunity presented by a now-forgotten vote in the German Reichstag, World War I might have been over before American troops reached Europe. In this alternative history, Lenin and Stalin would be obscure footnotes, and Hitler would never have been more than a failed painter.
What is surprising, to anyone who has absorbed the standard victor’s view — according to which the Allies were fighting a defensive war to liberate small states — is that Britain was disingenuous about its war aims, while France declined to state them at all. The reason is that those aims were too discreditable to avow openly. In a series of secret treaties, they agreed in the event of victory to carve up the empires of their defeated enemies.
From the Russian viewpoint, the big prize was the Turkish capital, Constantinople, now called Istanbul; this was promised to Russia in a secret agreement in 1915. The subsequent publication of this and other secret treaties by the Bolsheviks did much to discredit the Allied cause.
Kerensky could have repudiated the deals made by the czarist empire and announced his willingness to accept the Reichstag formula of peace without annexations or indemnities. Perhaps the German High Command would have ignored the offer and continued fighting (as it did when the Bolsheviks offered the same terms after the October Revolution at the end of 1917). But the circumstances were far more favorable in July than they were at the end of 1917. As the Kerensky offensive demonstrated, the Russian Army, while demoralized, was still an effective fighting force, and the front line was far closer to the territory of the Central Powers. Moreover, Kerensky commanded credibility with the Western Allies that he could have used to good effect.
Kerensky’s determination to continue the war was a disaster. Within a few months, the armed forces were in open revolt. Lenin, who was transported across Germany in a sealed train with the High Command’s acquiescence in the hope that he would help to knock Russia out of the war, seized the opportunity. The provisional government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. This Bolshevik Revolution consigned the February Revolution to historical oblivion.
After accepting a humiliating treaty imposed by the Germans, Russia was soon embroiled in a civil war more bloody and brutal than even World War I. By its end, the Bolshevik government, launched as a workers’ democracy, was effectively a dictatorship, enabling the ascendancy of a previously obscure Bolshevik, Joseph Stalin, who would become one of the great tyrants of history. On the other side, the German High Command’s rejection of peace similarly led to defeat, national humiliation and the emergence of the 20th century’s other great tyrant, Adolf Hitler.
We cannot tell whether a positive response from Kerensky to the Reichstag peace initiative would have achieved anything. But it is hard to imagine an outcome worse than the one that actually took place.
Boys will be boys.
This could be said of all the decisions leading up to our major wars. Looking back, almost anything would have been better.
If Lincoln had allowed the southern states to secede, slavery would have persisted, but the 700,000 men who died in the war would have lived out their natural lives, and the 300,000 former slaves who died of disease in refugee camps after manumission would have done the same. It’s difficult to imagine a worse outcome that what happened, since slavery would have ended eventually, even without a war.
Same with World War Two. If Germany had conquered Europe and Russia and Japan took Asia without resistance, it’s doubtful that whatever horrible outcome that entailed would be worse than the deaths of 50 million people over a period of six years, the Holocaust (which took place in the middle of wartime, and which I maintain would not have occurred outside of a total war situation) the rise of Mao’s China and the tens of millions of deaths he presided over, and all else we got from that conflict.
Wars, which are ostensibly fought to prevent catastrophe, inevitably become the catastrophe themselves.
If Lincoln had freed the slaves slowly enough that Fredrick Douglass and the Secret Six got mad and killed him, that would have been worse. Hard lefties and blacks wanting freedom would have doubled down on killing Lincoln, the Confederates would be reaffirmed in their opinions of both, and people in the middle would cringe. Another US Civil War, this time with ten times the butcher’s bill, by WWI, might have happened.
The Tsar who freed the serfs was killed by Jews and lefties about that time frame, and Russia was screwed for a century. If the D Party had admitted JFK was shot by a Communist, it might have broken the party. Things can always get worse.
“I have witnessed history as it is being made and it bears no resemblance to what is written in the history books.” — Max Hoffman.