The What Ifs of History

Economic historian Niall Ferguson opens a recent column with a question: could the world have stopped the Bolsheviks before they took over Russia and launched a catastrophe that ended up killing more than 100 million people? What would have happened if our leaders were more capable, had seen the pending danger and had acted accordingly.

The opportunities were there. Those who had power missed them. Politicians did not take the threat seriously. Intellectual elites did not much care. After all, Bolsheviks and Communists were intellectuals. They belonged to the thinking class. As long as that class functions like a cult, it excuses the sins and crimes of its members.

Ferguson explains how Communism could have been stopped:

Could more have been done to halt the Communist pandemic after it broke out in Russia in 1917? Yes. After all, the only reason Lenin was able to get from Zurich to Petrograd in 1917 was that the imperial German government paid for his ticket — and more. An estimated $12 million was channeled from the Kaiser’s coffers to Lenin and his associates.

The provisional government thus had every right to arrest Lenin and his 19 associates on arrival. They were German agents. And Alexander Kerensky, who took control of the provisional government in July 1917, had even better grounds to round the Bolsheviks up: By then, they had attempted a coup and failed.

The problem was that people underestimated Lenin & Co. They seemed an unruly bunch of intellectuals. No contemporary Western observer thought for a moment that their crackpot coup would last. Naive American bankers completely failed to appreciate that the Bolsheviks meant exactly what they said about defaulting on the entire czarist debt. No one foresaw that hereditary nobleman Ulyanov (to give Lenin his original name) was equally capable of ordering mass murder.

Foreign intervention, incompetent liberals, clueless bankers: That makes three reasons the Bolsheviks weren’t stopped. Let me not forget the fellow travellers. John Reed, with his risible glamorizing of the revolution, would have many, many heirs.

Not many went quite as far as the Cambridge spies, who shamefully betrayed their own country to Stalin. But how many intellectuals between 1917 and 1991 turned a blind eye to the crimes of Communism? Too many to count.

Applying the same reasoning to our current war against Islamic terrorism, Ferguson suggests that we are making similar mistakes:

Ask yourself how effectively we in the West have responded to the rise of militant Islam since the Iranian Revolution unleashed its Shia variant and since 9/11 revealed the even more aggressive character of Sunni Islamism. I fear we have done no better than our grandfathers did when the virus spreading around the world was Bolshevism. It is, indeed, the same old story.

Foreign intervention — the millions of dollars that have found their way from the Gulf to radical mosques and Islamic centres in the West. Incompetent liberals — the proponents of multiculturalism who brand any opponent of jihad an “Islamophobe.” Clueless bankers — the sort who fall over themselves to offer “sharia-compliant” loans and bonds. Fellow travelers — the leftists who line up with the Muslim Brotherhood to castigate the state of Israel at every opportunity. And the faint-hearted — those who were so quick to pull out of Iraq in 2009 that they allowed the rump of al Qaeda to morph into ISIS.

A century ago it was the West’s great blunder to think it would not matter if Lenin and his confederates took over the Russian Empire. Incredible as it may seem, I believe we are capable of repeating that catastrophic error. I fear that, one day, we shall wake with a start to discover that the Islamists have repeated the Bolshevik achievement, which was to acquire the resources and capability to threaten our very existence.

Of course, Ferguson is practicing counterfactual history. It’s less about what happened and more about what might have happened. I have occasionally opined along these lines, asking this question: what would the twentieth century have looked like if Theodore Roosevelt had been elected president in 1912?

Compared to the cowardly Mr. Wilson, TR would have intervened far more quickly and decisively in the Great War. He might have ended it before it became what it became. He wrote countless op-ed columns explaining his plan. If such had been the case, we might not have had Bolshevism or even World War II—the latter having been incited by Wilsonian diplomacy. 

Ferguson is striking a blow against theories of historical inevitability, namely we could have done nothing to stop what was going to happen from happening. The latter theory neatly absolves many people from responsibility for their role in guiding history. It's a good reason to be skeptical about it.