‘If Grandma had Whiskers … ’: Could the Anti-Bolsheviks have won the Russian Revolutions and Civil Wars? Or, the Constraints and Conceits of Counterfactual History

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a conspicuous flowering of counterfactual or ‘virtual’ history, nurtured by a fecund mulch of post-modernist critiques of empiricism, the vulnerability of Marxist history (as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union), and the genre’s voguish allure to the general public. Never immune from such challenges, both exogenous and endogenous, the history of the Russian revolutions and civil wars has long felt their impact, and they have sprouted anew, if somewhat weakly, in some publications linked to the revolution’s centenary. This article examines the roots of these inherently thistly but straggling scions of the counterfactual thicket, as well as explicit dystopias and utopias found in earlier White émigré and Soviet dissident fiction (notably the works of P. N. Krasnov and V. P. Aksenov), before proceeding to test the ‘alternatives to Bolshevism’ suggested more implicitly in Western histories of the period. It finds that these proffered alternatives have been, for the most part, insubstantial but that counterfactual history is not necessarily devoid of utility.