Et si Lénine avait été fusillé ? Réflexions sur l’offre politique des années 1917­1 921

The author makes an incursion into the field of alternative history : if the Bolsheviks had been eliminated in July 1917 , how would the other parties , once in power , have taken up the challenges facing Russia at the time ? For if the period of revolutionary troubles had brought them to power , they would have been at any rate confronted with the need to urgently start the accelerated industrialization of a backward rural country , where only 18 % of the population were city dwellers . The revenues of such modernization were not so numerous . On the one hand , there was the authoritarian confiscation of the added value produced by peasant labor and , on the other hand , the betting on foreign investment and the massive purchase of foreign technology , financed by the export of agricultural products . The author tries to demonstrate that a non­Bolshevik government (whether social democratic or right wing ) would probably also have used forms of violence against the peasantry (but – and this is essential – it would not have imposed total collectivization ). All the more so because " it was the spirit of the times " : had the Imperial Government in November1916 and the Provisional Government in March 1917 not already adopted (without success ) measures of forced requisition of grain ? Whatever the outcome of the period of revolutionary troubles , agrarian Russia was condemned and the leap towards the industrial era was indispensable . Otherwise , Russia would have been transformed into a colony­reserve of raw materials by western imperialism . This was the " roadmap " of any Russian government in the early 1920s : forcing a huge country to urgently form its enclosures.Comte Philippe. Et si Lénine avait été fusillé ? Réflexions sur l’offre politique des années 1917­1 921. In: Revue Russe n°49, 2017. Autour de 1917 : la Russie, de guerres en révolutions (1914-1921) pp. 13-28