And I can't disagree with anything you wrote. I still thought the merits of the article and the discussion around it would be worthwhile.
I think perhaps the goal was a noble one - reminding people of the Russian Revolution and helping to educate those who don't know much about it - but the article was just a mess of misstatements, oversimplifications and ultimately, a waste of space with respect to its overall premise: "what if?".
The "what if?" premise seemed just to have been inartfully nailed to a recitation of facts. What if Kerensky took up the Reichstag on its offer? Well, the author already mentioned that Germany was a military dictatorship at the time.
The author also further conceded that his entire farce of shoving history into the subjunctive mood was largely a useless endeavor: "Perhaps the German High Command would have ignored the offer and continued fighting (as it did when the Bolsheviks offered the same terms after the October Revolution at the end of 1917)." Hmm. Yes, oh there was that. But maybe, just maybe, the Germans would have conceded more earlier on, when they thought their chances of winning outright were greater...oh, wait, that's not very logical now, is it?
If someone wants to write an interesting "what if?", I have one: what if Wilson had his massive stroke in 1917? Perhaps the world would never have had to fight a second world war. Germany might have negotiated a peace with war-weary European powers who saw no end in sight on terms that would not have seen the dismemberment of Germany or Austria. Italy's irredentist movement might have arisen anyway, but if the war were a draw the indignity of the failure to win the Alto Adige or Fiume for the Kingdom of Italy would not have cut quite so deeply. Lots of things might conceivably have changed. The world might be radically different today.
Sadly, this what if article is useless. But is that a surprise? The Times went out of its way to get an economics professor from Australia. How about a Russian history professor? How about a professor of something remotely related to Russia or, you know, an actual Russian?
I'm looking forward to their retrospective "what if" on apartheid in South Africa, written by the senior professor of theoretical mathematics from Tsinghua University in Beijing.
I did wonder why thy the NYT chose this particular author. It seemed extremely odd that it wasn't someone whose expertise is Russian or German or even European history. But then I thought about it some more and wondered if an outsider's view was something good on this subject. I am still mulling it over but generally think this was a mistake to have him write this piece.
Speaking of your thoughts of What Ifs, there's a certain article you may or may not have seen by Richard J Evans. It's from a few years ago but I follow his reviews of books in The Guardian (yes I know). RJE is quite cantankerous in this review. But it seems to be an appropriate tangent to the main discussion.
*NM*
- 14/03/2017 11:54:45 PM
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