Bismark is a far more reasoned and careful strategist with incredibly different goals compared to Hitler. He wanted short wars for limited strategic gains and Prussia to be dominate within the German Empire.

That is totally different then believing in a global race war.

Its not at all like Napoleon and Napoleon III. They hoped for the same thing, but were just differently capable.

> did far more damage than Stalin ever did

That's debatable.

> fairly sane if shaky revolutionary party

That is a delusional take on the Bolsheviks. Their state was fundamentally evil from the beginning. The literal first act of the Bolshviks was to do a coup against NOT THE DUMA but rather the Soviet. They first purged the other Socialist parties.

And then engaged in some of the worst economic policies in the history of humanity that lead to a mass starvation unbelievable proportions and only report that if they didn't change their policies they would soon be ruling a graveyard finally changed their minds about that.

It was Lenin who created the General Secretary. It was Lenin who gave the General Secretary an absurd amount of Power.

The constant claim by Communist that if not for Stalin the Bolsheviks would have produced some great government is so much historical revisionism.

Trosky with his amazing writing and speaking was the darling of the Western Left but he proclaimed proudly that he was pro-Finish Winter War and that killed his movement to a significant degree. The secrete is that all those guys were more the same then they were different.

> That is a delusional take on the Bolsheviks.

I don't really want to argue in detail about the character of the Bolsheviks. I agree they were extremely ruthless, and that they created a lot of the norms and institutions that Stalin later used.

Taking a bit of a step back, however, I think most of this stuff is pretty normal for the winning party in a civil war, especially a revolutionary party. It was an extremely chaotic situation, and if they were not the kind of bloody-minded, ruthless people they were, it's really unlikely they would have been successful.

If you take the Finnish civil war, for instance, there was systematic use of terrorism by both sides, and in the aftermath, the victorious whites essentially went on a political purge, imprisoned socialists en masse, etc. The 'whites' in Korea killed hundreds of thousands of 'communists' and 'suspected communist sympathizers' during the Korean war. The liberals in the French Revolution (Robespierre, etc) killed enormous numbers of people. Civil wars are like that. Revolutions are like that. As 'winners' of this kind of thing go, the Bolsheviks are really pretty mild.

Ultimately, I think the Tsar's Russia was a deeply sick system that had to go, one way or another, and if the Bolsheviks had not had Stalin, the period of violence would have turned into a normal state with a fairly normal post-revolutionary democratic deficit, that would have been resolved in a way compatible with the (actually very lofty) goals of the revolution.

After the revolution was won, the bolsheviks shut down the constituent assembly after they lost the election, and disbanded the rival socialist parties. During the revolution, they killed anarchists, most notably in the Kronstadt rebellion. They also invaded the Ukrainian free territory, an anarchist stateless territory, to bring them under the Soviet heel. The bolsheviks were against any revolution that wasn't in their own totalitarian control. They were also actively anti-democratic, which flies in the face of core socialist principles.

>Ultimately, I think the Tsar's Russia was a deeply sick system that had to go, one way or another

Note that it already went away by the time the Bolshevik's staged their 'Revolution'. Also, there's an argument (ironically mirroring yours) that had Russia avoided WW1, the Tsar's system would end up evolving towards a constitutional monarchy, but without the piles of corpses.

> Note that it already went away by the time the Bolshevik's staged their 'Revolution'.

Sure. But that's also very normal in revolutions, to have a multiple-stage affair with different conceptions of what the revolution is for emerging throughout the duration. Karensky has often been portrayed as a sort of mini-Napoleon figure, so it's hard to see his overthrow as a pure 'palace coup'.

To be honest, I feel like the history here is very murky, full of misleading names and conflicting accounts, and the best you can do is to try and get a grasp of the characters of the people involved. With the old Bolsheviks, most of whom Stalin had killed, you tend to get the feeling of ruthless, dedicated, but ultimately idealistic people. Pretending that they were always just an evil clique is basically anarchonism: you're taking the fate of the USSR, and putting it on to the people who formed its early days.

>With the old Bolsheviks,... you tend to get the feeling of ruthless, dedicated, but ultimately idealistic people. Pretending that they were always just an evil clique...

Idealistic is not an antonym to evil. Ruthless and idealistic is a very good way to justify evil to oneself.

I do agree evil clique is not the right way to consider the start of the revolution. The USSR was poisoned from the start by the Bolshevik contempt to democracy and anything that was standing in the way of their ideals. They had to experiment on their society no matter how many people died.

Eventually after a long paroxysm of violence it morphed to a clique, which was actually less evil than what preceded it despite being less idealistic.

I don't see them as having contempt for democracy. Lenin's slogan, after all, was 'all power to the soviets'. That was the basic unit of democracy in Russia at the time, far more relevant than stuff like the constituent assembly.

I also think that it's normal to have a democratic deficit during an extremely chaotic situation, and a lot of the people 'standing in the way of their ideals' were also trying to kill the Bolsheviks. German armies were literally rolling through Russia at the time. All of these guys were raised on the history of the french revolution and the paris commune, both events in which the far left had an almost complete mortality rate.

It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals. They would call what we call democracy an oligarchy, an 'bourgeois democracy', etc. So, obviously, they wouldn't have any patience for its trappings. I don't think you can simply call them anti-democratic on the simple grounds that their idea of democracy differs from yours.

> I don't see them as having contempt for democracy. Lenin's slogan, after all, was 'all power to the soviets'.

Do you usually just straight up buy propaganda served to you by dictators?

> I also think that it's normal to have a democratic deficit during an extremely chaotic situation, and a lot of the people 'standing in the way of their ideals' were also trying to kill the Bolsheviks.

Yes, but many were not in the way of 'all power to the soviets' but the Bolsheviks killed them anyway.

> German armies were literally rolling through Russia at the time.

German are the ones that helped put the Bolsheviks into power. This is well known fact. And not just transport, but also money and political protection.

> It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals.

Yes, the Bolsheviks definition of democracy of 'democracy' was 'what the people want' and the way to figure that out was to consult their own opinions.

So whatever Stalin/Lenin or later Mao wanted was by definition 'democratic'.

Everybody else calls that sort of thing a dictatorship, but I guess if you are far enough left you can transform language to use all the popular words to fit whatever you want to do.

> I don't think you can simply call them anti-democratic on the simple grounds that their idea of democracy differs from yours.

Yes actual that's exactly what you should do. Because we can not allow a group of extremist to simply change definitions of words that actually had a meaning for 1000s of years.

Do you also accept the Nazi opinion that they were Socialist? Do you just accept anything violent groups say in their propaganda?

At the end of the day, call it whatever you want, all this arguments about semantics is pointless. The simple fact is, they wanted power and control. And they killed literally everybody who opposed them. Its that simple and its fundamentally evil.

Soviets had no power by design. 'Democratic centralism' and banning all opposition when Lenin was still alive show how meaningful their democracy was.

>It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals.

Their 'definition' of democracy is not a democracy. e.g. the various People's Democratic Republic of X, like say North Korea.

> Their 'definition' of democracy is not a democracy.

I think people are way too black-and-white about these things. Democracy is supposed to be a mapping of the people's will to the people's living conditions. It's very obvious that some states are way better at this than others. The amount of control the US voter has over the specific policy regime they live under is almost nonexistent. That's quite normal in western democracies.

To put it in context, an Athenian democrat would call every one of our modern democracies an oligarchy, and we in turn would call their democracy an apartheid state.

I don't think you're right about the Soviets, but my observation is that a large part of western misunderstandings of the Bolsheviks come from failing to understand them on their terms. In my eyes, a state based on soviet sovereignty, even with a strong executive in emergency situations, would be a very democratic state. That's what the Bolsheviks said they wanted to deliver, and I don't see why we shouldn't believe them.

>That's quite normal in western democracies.

Well, there are a lot of things one can say about these countries, but we're talking about the Soviets here. The Western flaws don't excuse the 'idealistic' Soviets.

>In my eyes, a state based on soviet sovereignty, even with a strong executive in emergency situations, would be a very democratic state.

A pity the Communists never ever tried to implement soviet sovereignty.

>That's what the Bolsheviks said they wanted to deliver, and I don't see why we shouldn't believe them.

Their very consistent actual record?

I have honestly no idea how Bismarck ended up with a sometimes that bad reputation. It was Bismarck's system Alliances that kept peace in Europe for a tremendously long time, it also prevented, through complex, overlapping defensive agreements between all major European powers a war like WW1. Under Bismarck's system, basically any party starting such a war would be isolated without allies. Wilhelm II changed that, first kicking Bismarck out and then by re-negotiating those alliances in a way that created the blocks that would turn into the Central Powers and the Entente during WW1, the Axis and Allies, in Europe at least, largely formed along these lines as well.

Bismarck kind of saw that coming, to me it seems he did what he could to prevent it. That Bismarck was also a true Prussian conservative, and that wars still broke out during his time doesn't prove any of the above wrong.

I was really just making a comment about the disparity between Bismark and Hitler. Bismark was a giant, in every sense of the word, while Hitler was sort of average.

> a true Prussian conservative

That's the issue. Bismark wasn't a true conservative. Conservatives of his time and place were anti-nationalist. Bismark merged nationalism, authoritarianism, and cultural chauvinism to produce a kind of new form of conservatism, that later turned out to be spectacularly dangerous. I don't particularly have anything against Bismark himself (he seems pragmatic and capable) but his legacy was extremely unfortunate.

Well, he retired in 1890 and died in 1898. He did push for the formation of the German Reich, that's true. It was the first German nation state, one that was truly formed as more than a alliance of various fiefdoms and kingdoms after WW1 with the Weimar Republic. In a way, it turned to shit when Wilhelm II took over and pushed Bismarck out. And was less Bismarck that created the feeling of a German Nation, he more rode on a wave of nationalism. Nationalism, by the way, was pretty new back then. It was also way less negative then it modern nationalism is today.

> Nationalism, by the way, was pretty new back then. It was also way less negative then it modern nationalism is today.

That's what I'm saying. Bismark was (the? a? the most successful?) creator of modern-day nationalism. He proved that you could use nationalism to enhance state power, by transforming it from a movement of oppressed peoples for self-determination, to an homogenizing ideology.

Same word, different meaning. nationalism back then meant that people started to build a common understand of nation states, as opposed to kingdoms and the like before. In Germany that meant the first step in a long journey to actual democracy. Back then France and Great Britain were unified nations already, Germany wasn't. I'd say back then nationalism was an actually good thing, it also provided the theoretical basis, e.g., for the creation of independent Poland after WW1 among other things. That almost 40 years after Bismarck died dick heads like the Nazis and other reactionists turned that concept into something really dangerous can hardly be blamed on Bismarck.

>a fairly sane if shaky revolutionary party

Lenin started the Checka. Trotsky's complaint was that Collectivization didn't go far enough. We can go on and on. This party was rotten from the beginning.

"Stalin was but a lamb compared to Lenin"

Lenin was already a murderer and brutal dictator. Stalin just followed in his footsteps.

Somebody (George Kennan? Gordon Craig?) quotes Bismarck as telling the German generals that it would be mad to fight a war with Russia: You would find no one to surrender to you, and the farther east you got, the worse off you would be.)