Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina [peasant-village; commune], though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

Karl Marx, 1882

An impossible dream of our grandfathers...[the Constituent Assembly]...what have we done with it?

Zinaida Gippius, November 1917

Although I am skeptical of an inevitable event, we can consider the timeline of the Revolution and revolutionary ideas in Russia, the tenability of the Tsarist government, and the legitimacy of the revolutionaries' charges. I find several significant precursors to the revolution, including the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin in 1911, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the Boxer Rebellion, and so on; we might turn earlier to the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, his attempted assassination in 1866, and the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

As for the timeline of the revolution, the First World War is a major precipitating event, but I might turn more to the 1905 Revolution that led to the establishment of the Duma and the Constitution. Sergei Witte, a significant statesman, became the first prime minister, but resigned in disgrace after falling out of favor. The loss of skilled politicians and fracturing of goals within the bureaucracy are important aspects of the decline of the monarchy; Stolypin is often read as the last major Imperial political figure, but the Tsar still trudges along for six more years. So it doesn't seem that the Revolution was destined to happen in the manner it did, or necessarily even at all had the liberalization been more effective, with the Tsar preserved as a figurehead. Kotkin does imagine these worlds, but these sorts of what-ifs are difficult to provide answers to - and the way Kotkin presents them is one my problems with Stalin.

Could things have gone differently in, say, 1908 or 1914? Absolutely. Could they have gone differently in 1917? Probably - we still have the provisional government, it is not at all clear the Bolsheviks will win, there remains strong support for the monarchy among key political figures.

Many figures, including Lenin and Trotsky, were active outside of the centers of the Empire; Georgy Plekhanov, Pyotr Kropotkin, Lev Chernyi, all were major revolutionaries, going all the way back to Mikhail Bakunin. As Akhmatova writes - something was going to happen. Much of the social criticism during the reign of Nicholas II resembles the English aspidistra, however, rather than revolutionary injunctions. And even into the 1920s the permanency of the new state was thrown into question, so I don't read the revolution as a historical inevitability much in the same way I wouldn't look at the Soviet Union in 1970 or 1985 and say its collapse was imminent.