Stephen Kotkin

So to take the land away from the land magnates and give it to the peasants is to go through this risky path where you're losing one political support, the landowners, before you've fully gotten the new political support.

So you're going to go through this valley of hell potentially where all bets are off and you're not sure if it's going to work.

So the peasants don't really get the land as they could have

in the 1860s, and it becomes a problem that's not resolved right through 1917-18.

So the peasants have their own revolution in 1917-18, which is not about the socialist parties, it's not about the Bolsheviks, it's not about Lenin, it's about the peasants seizing the land.

But that creates an intense radicalism

that becomes the platform for the socialists in the cities to gain and hold power in the system.

So you don't have that in the German case.

In the German case, you have strikes and seizures of power in a few places, like Bavaria, for example.

You have a Bavarian Soviet socialist republics.

But they're easily put down by the forces of order or the army.

And guess who's in the army?

the peasants.

So you don't have a peasant army ready to put down the revolt in the Russian case because the peasant army is the one seizing the land.

It's the one doing the radical revolution.

So you lack the forces of order

to destroy the leftist movement in the Russian case, because it is the leftist movement in the Russian case, which should be the forces of order.

And in the German case, and to a certain extent the Italian case, which happened simultaneously, and there's also a Hungarian case here, where you have leftist revolts in the cities,

seizures of power, like the Paris Commune of 1870-71, which happens in Paris, not in the rest of France.

And you need a peasant army that has a stake in the existing order to undo the city leftist revolution.