What if Lenin was assassinated at the Finland Station in 1917?

[Robespierre's Jaw]

I was reciently reading 'What Might Have Been', and one scenario that stuck in my mind was, What if Lenin was assassinated at the Finland Station in 1917? What do you think would have happened? Would there have been a democratically elected government? Would the Bolsheviks had been able to continue their cause? Discuss.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Lenin served more as a catalyzing figure for the Bolsheviks than anything else.  The real organization and force behind the October Revolution was Trotsky.  It is likely that without Lenin the Russian Civil War would have lasted longer due to a greater degree of infighting among the Red than was the case in OTL, but there would not have been a White victory and the Romanovs would still have died.  I'm strongly doubtful that a more democratic Soviet Union would have resulted.  However, it is possible that the exhausted Reds would have enabled a Polish led Międzymorze to include more or all of Belarus and the Ukraine and/or the Trans Caucasian Republic to have kept its independence.

Only to the degree that more infighting within the Reds would have led to a smaller Soviet territory would any significant change in history be realized.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Lenin served more as a catalyzing figure for the Bolsheviks than anything else.  The real organization and force behind the October Revolution was Trotsky.  It is likely that without Lenin the Russian Civil War would have lasted longer due to a greater degree of infighting among the Red than was the case in OTL, but there would not have been a White victory and the Romanovs would still have died.  I'm strongly doubtful that a more democratic Soviet Union would have resulted.  However, it is possible that the exhausted Reds would have enabled a Polish led Międzymorze to include more or all of Belarus and the Ukraine and/or the Trans Caucasian Republic to have kept its independence.

Only to the degree that more infighting within the Reds would have led to a smaller Soviet territory would any significant change in history be realized.

But even under this scenario Trotsky succeeds to power and the whole Stalin fella becomes history forgotten man.. Perhaps if so, the USSR would have avoided the worst of the army purges and might have even defeated Germany in 1944 and overtook some more of Western Europe (ie. Austria and Northern Italy) aswell. This of course presumes that all things outside the USSR occur as in OTL, which is unlikely.

[ag]

Trotsky was not really a Bolshevik. When the old Social Democratic Workers' Party broke up into Bolsheviks (Communists) and Mensheviks (Social Democrats), Trotsky (and his personal circle) remained outside either one. He only definitively allied himself with the party during 1917, he did not have his own powerbase in it and Lenin fully controlled the party apparatus, funding, and had undisputed loyalty of the core of the members.  Hard to see the party not splintering in Lenin's absence, but if it did survive it would likely not have been led by Trotsky: most party leaders would have viewed him as an interloper and a threat.  Without Lenin I'd conjecture the power eventually passing to some faction of (or coalition of factions of) the Sociallist Revolutionary Party - a non-Marxist, agrarian-sociallist party with a strong military wing, a long terrorist tradition and undisputed advantage in voter preferences (they did win the elections to the Constitutuent Assambley).  Trotsky would have, likely, still been a major player, around whom some of the more radical Marxists would gather, but I don't believe he could have mastered the sufficient organization in time to lunch the successful coup in October 1917. Most likely, in today's textbooks you'd be reading about Chernov, Spiridonova or Savinkov (Sociallist Revolutionary figures), not about Lenin, Trotsky or Dzerzhinsky.  How different that regime would have been is quite another matter, though.

[GMantis]

I mostly agree with ag. I would also like to add that Lenin was practically the only member of the Bolsheviks that believed that the Bolsheviks could and should take power. Without him they might not be a revolution or it might be attemted when it was too late.

[Robespierre's Jaw]

Thank you all for your thoughts. In the book, which I got the inspiration to create this topic, It said that the Bolsheviks continued but it ended in a lost cause. In the end, a Government was formed by Alexander Kerensky and he held the post until 1938. It also suggested that with a Democratically elected government in Russia, that it would have ended WWII quite quicker.

[Hash]

Why would World War II end quicker with a democratic Russia? The only possible reason I can see is that there are no Stalinist purges of the 1930s that killed off the best officers in the Russian army, thus giving them a slight strategic advantage over Hitler.

Also, would Kerensky keep Russia in the Great War until the end or would he agree to sign a treaty with Germany?