If only the German revolution had succeeded shortly after the Russian. We'd likely live in a very different world.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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I've thought about this before. If Germany went communist then it's almost certain that the rest of Europe would too. There wouldn't have been a second world war, and the US would've remained an isolationist power. In fact, the US itself had a strong labour movement back in the 1930s, and it would've been significantly boosted by Europe being communist.
Yep, it would have destroyed or severely weakened imperialism, giving socialist countries far more room to breathe and carry that momentum forward. Germany was also ripe for socialism as it was heavily industrialized and state run, just with bourgeois control.
Instead, socdems gave us fascism and the world we have today.
Truly the left wing of fascism.
Yeah the war and its aftermath propelled the US into superpower status. Superprofits were instrumental in the crushing / buying-out of domestic labor.
A communist Europe takes a lot of pressure off the USSR. Doesn't have to exist as the sole communist power in the world, doesn't have to worry about imminent invasion. Industrialization can happen more carefully, purges aren't as urgent and messy. Potentially reduces the legitimacy of destalinization and other factionalism.
Stalin likely lives a decade or two longer. Maybe no sino-soviet split.
Still would have been plenty of realpolitik nonsense I'm sure. But worlds better.
For sure, and also USSR would've moved much quicker ahead too not having a huge chunk of infrastructure destroyed and population murdered in the war. If it was able to keep up technologically with the US during the Cold War after the devastation, imagine what would've been like without the war.
People ignore the global impact the dissolution had. Socialist parties everywhere either rebranded to a neoliberalized form of social democracy or lost their traction. Entire labor movements collapsed and capitalist governments backpedaled on lots of welfare reforms that the working classes fought for with their blood, because there was no more a socialist global power to compete with.
Parenti wrote a great article on the subject https://www.marxists.org/archive/parenti/2002/global-rollback.pdf
Minorities oppression, and colonialism was a thing in USSR; some tsarists institutions were kept, and the nationalism of Stalin did not help. Sure it do not lead to war, but this this is not the point you wish to make.
Though, they is some devastation due to the post-USSR liberalization that is largely underestimate