October 2026 "The Complexities of Real-World Politics: Part 1" by Wyatt Tomlinson
Ideological competition can flatten out the complexities of history, and likewise, the flattening of history’s complexities can contribute to ideological competition, with the additional potential to catalyze events that conclude with the limiting and narrowing of possibilities in the present. The outcomes of the Russian Revolution exemplify this pattern, first practically and ideologically demonstrated by the perceptions from and actions of the First Red Scare, whereby the people involved in the revolution and their ideas were cast as foreign or categorically separate and therefore not worth understanding. Consequently, alternative organizations of society were dismissed as being equivalent. The Russian Revolution, however, is not tied to later events in the union it helped create, and its internal complexities reveal a series of occurrences with far-reaching implications.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, one of the many political revolutionaries of his day, believed the working class—the proletariat—could not gain the intellectual and collaborative potential for carrying out revolution on their own, and thus a small group of intellectuals, the vanguard party, must carry out armed social revolution,[i] extending to how the RSDLP should be closed and comprised of professionals. It was this group of the RSDLP overthrew the Provisional Government, leading to the early policies of the Soviet Union, such as a one-party state, suppression of dissent, and centralization of political and economic power.
Fourteen years earlier, at the RSDLP’s Second Congress in 1903, the party split into the Mensheviks, led by Pavel Axelrod and Julius Martov, and the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin. The Mensheviks, in contrast to the Bolsheviks, believed in a broad party and a parliamentary process to socialism comprised of and led by the working class to achieve a bourgeoisie democracy. This construction was similar to the contemporary German Social Democratic Party. The Mensheviks, as known in history, did not take power in the October Revolution. However, on both points, the situation was quite the opposite not far from the Russian border.
Georgia, one of the three countries in Caucasus region, up until 1917 was part of the Russian Empire. Months after the February Revolution, in which Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his position, leading to a fracture of the Empire, the country declared its independence in May 1918. Unlike Russia, however, the country was governed for its three-year existence by the Georgian Social Democratic Party, a branch of the RSDLP and, after 1905, of the Mensheviks.[ii] Noe Zhordania, their intellectual leader and future Prime Minister of what would become known as the First Democratic Republic of Georgia, wrote after the 1905 revolution, which in Georgia had failed to produce any results, the proletariat were a purely destructive force, and thus no effective revolution was possible without the bourgeoisie.[iii] Since the working class in Georgia was heterogenous and thus did not match earlier conceptions of what the socioeconomic group should look like, the petty bourgeoisie—traders, artisans, and other people who could be referred to as the lower-middle class—was incorporated into socioeconomic goals.[iv] It was these sets of differences that set the Mensheviks, and most directly those in Georgia, apart from theBolsheviks—a more evolutionary path to socialism including the bourgeoisie while still retaining its inherent radical goals, with an open party comprising of both the working and lower-middle classes, as well certain members of the intelligentsia.[v] All of this extended to land reform, which, at the time, focused on turning land over to peasants, in contrast to municipalization, what the Russian Mensheviks supported, or nationalization, Lenin’s position.[vi] As a result, in total, the democratic national political program including multiple classes and encompassing the same set of principles when it comes to policy was the full weight of the differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Within Georgia, possible programs arose from its own national situation in combination with the Mensheviks’ broadly shared principles.
As such, to attribute an entire socioeconomic program to the actions of one country’s policies is neither historically accurate nor how contemporary solutions are developed. For that, options need to be known and open, since, just as the solutions of yesterday don’t automatically mean those will achieve similar results today, the failures of yesterday do not mean failure will automatically result, at least if those ‘failures’ are lacking nuance and complexity. Every set of ideas not only has poor or well-done sets of implementations, but every set of ideas has its own subset of ideas that may be more applicable to situations than what is realized.
In short, politics is complicated. But those multiple possible paths can be its greatest opportunity offered. It is precisely navigating these characteristics of politics, as demonstrated by events halfway around the world over a century ago, that make Associated Student Government on this campus a rewarding and fulfilling endeavor to partake in.
[i] Zickel, Raymond E. Soviet Union: a country study (Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1991), 283-284, https://www.loc.gov/item/90025756/.
[ii] Stephen F. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Rosd to Social Democracy: 1883-1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 105.
[iii] Ibid, 195
[iv] Ibid, 49, 182
[v] Ibid, 212
[vi] Ibid, 214
Bibliography
Jones, Stephen F. Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Rosd to Social Democracy: 1883-1917. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Zickel, Raymond E. Soviet Union: a country study. Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1991. https://www.loc.gov/item/90025756/.
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