Were the revolutions of 1917 in Russia inevitable, and if so, when did they become inevitable?

by JordanVTheWorld

Myself and a friend are doing some research on the topic and would love some insight or even just some pointers of where to look on the topic of whether or not the revolutions were inevitable or if there was an alternative/peaceful transition to democracy possible.

ironweaver

This question is tricky, because it essentially requires counterfactual thinking, which historians dislike.

The problem is that there are a thousand unknowable factors in play that all influence one another.

There are countless events that led up to 1917. It's not just the Bolsheviks and the winter palace... it's the earlier revolution that same year. It's 1904/5. It's a hundred other things, small and large.

Put another way, if you undo something large enough to change the outcome at the end, you immediate go off the map.

Let's take 1904/5 as an example. Change that event, and you completely change a decade of complexity in the changing ways the Russian populace viewed the tzar. That feeds back on domestic and foreign policy... Which impacts war readiness... Which potentially changes Russian performance in the first world war. Or, given the state of Russian (lack of) heavy industry, they may have still had the same problems.

No data on any of that exists, because it never happened. In every car, "what if" quickly veers into endlessly arguable territory.

History is the study of many inter-related and complex systems interacting through time toward an event. It is a study of causality: constructing evidentiary arguments of how A and B led to C. But as any mathematician will tell you, !A+!B do not equal !C, they equal an unknown.