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From: gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: The myth of Allied invasion of Russia after the revolution
Message-ID: <544@qantel.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 31-Oct-85 20:38:13 EST
Article-I.D.: qantel.544
Posted: Thu Oct 31 20:38:13 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 12:19:27 EST
References: <531@talcott.UUCP> <50400001@hpcnof.UUCP>
Reply-To: gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642)
Distribution: net
Organization: MDS Qantel, Hayward, CA
Lines: 39

In article <50400001@hpcnof.UUCP> Larry Bruns wonders if the Bolshevik 
revolution has been good for us after all, given that it made the USSR 
weak and inefficient. If it never happened, they would be just as 
expansionist but infinitely stronger, says the theory:           

> The combination of this economic power AND the expansionist tendency would
> pose a far greater threat to the West than the USSR does today.  If this guy's
> theory holds water, then we should be GRATEFUL for the 1917 revolution.

The problem with this kind of Realpolitik is that it is not real enough.
Is it really in our national interest to have a politically and economically
backward Russia facing us? Are we really better off because millions
'over there' live miserable and stunted lives? Posing the question in such
a narrow ethno-centric fashion seems quite ugly to me; but even on these
tunnel-vision terms the answer is clearly no.

The unproven assumption here is that Russia would be just as expansionist 
under any conceivable political system. What this assumption ignores is
that the expansionist policies of the past and present have been 
possible only because their true cost is not visible to the decisionmaking 
elite. Remember that the Soviet political system is run by people who operate 
in a vacuum with no effective feedback mechanisms.  One of the disadvantages 
of sitting atop a hierarchical police state is that it takes decades for news
of many policy disasters to filter through the system. This is the reason for 
the paranoid irrationality of their internal and external colonization drive
which is far more menacing than your garden-variety expansionist power
that could be bought off with agreements on spheres of influence, buffer
states and similar well-tried 19th century techniques. 

Another cost to us of the 1917 revolution is that facing such a centralized,
militarized and ideology-driven rival has distorted and coarsened our
political system in obvious ways: it made us more centralized, militarized 
and ideology-driven than we would be otherwise. Overall, I think we would
be far less menaced if the USSR has evolved into a country with twice
its current economic strength but with a populace that could demand and get
a measure of control over its political institutions.

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Gabor Fencsik               {ihnp4,dual,hplabs,intelca}!qantel!gabor