Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917

I should preface this by saying that this game (and the game it’s a sequel to, set in Germany) are fantastic educational tools. My school’s IB history teacher plans on using them for assignments next year.

This game is a card-based simulation game where you take control of one faction of the new Russian government directly after the overthrow of the aristocracy.

You track stats like party support for all the parties, resources and budget, and so on. You can place ministers in different positions. You can affect food supply, propaganda, the war effort and more. You also react to frequent new events.

I think this is a fantastic game. My only reason for four stars instead of five is that even on easy setting the game is pretty overwhelming; with the German game I had some idea of the background and events but coming into this cold I felt confronted by a mass of new people and parties and policies, and it was hard to know what to do. My people starved and revolted and the Bolsheviks won.

I feel like the game is fair, and that repeated play would make what’s going on apparent, but I did like the emotional impact of seeing my empire crumble and it made me imagine the stress and fear early Russian officials must have felt.

The Duma was formed after a great massacre: the embittered Tsar wanted to see if we could do it better. Now that a catastrophic world war has annihilated our countrymen on an unprecedented scale, we’ve demonstrably proven we can do it better, so the Tsar is deposed.

Now the question of awkwardly reorganizing our state affairs, given that the Tsar can no longer be blamed for them. There are several areas of concern. First, of course, the catastrophic world war annihilating our countrymen on an unprecedented scale. The soldiers are complaining, which only shows they were not the soldiers who should have been complaining. We must give them something, I suppose, since we’re running out of rifles. What are the proposals? “There will be elected soldiers’ committees, which will control the distribution of weapons.” This will be a disaster. The army will collapse if the distribution of weapons is the charge of those who discharge them. Soon, they’ll be demanding control of the distribution of orders! What happened to the patriotic old days, when you told such and so a village, go forth into their main column and all of you die, so the cavalry can achieve a victory? These revolutionaries profess they believe in collective action, yet not one of them is willing to join the great unifying slaughter in No Man’s Land. “Soldiers can no longer be verbally abused by the officers, and they must be addressed by respectful terms.” This will be a disaster. The utter indignity of politely being asked your opinion regarding the upkeep of the latrine. Aleksander Ivanych, please dear heart, you know that by every hair of my moustache I am fond of your kisses, could you please beloved one crawl like a worm rooting round hell under mortars and machine guns through the mud and wire and corpses, and should you then still breathe, launch yourself into their nest with this grenade? “Soldiers will have the same rights as ordinary citizens when off-duty, including the right to participate in elections.” Yes, of course, this is fine. Soldiers ought to be guaranteed every right that should pertain to when they are no longer soldiers, we all take immense solace in the afterlife.

Now onto labor. The people are convinced they’ve seized power, so we must convince them of this. “Support the strikes rhetorically.” This will be a disaster. For workers to have rights, they must first become workers. We will never emancipate the proletariat if there is no lower class to emancipate. “The Soviet should support the workers’ demands for higher wages and improved working conditions.” This will be a disaster. The wages are fine, of course, every year we will raise everyone’s wages by precisely the increase in prices, so the Soviet will become a champion of economic progress, dramatically increasing the supply of rubles. It is rather the improved working conditions that are intolerable, because these cannot be increased universally, but only through individualist seizures of collectivist efficiencies into petit demesnes of production according to one’s own rights. Improving working conditions is a counterrevolutionary subversion of dialectical materialism, which states that material conditions can only improve by improvements to the material of conditions, and it is this material foundation which we must improve to improve conditions, which is in fact the Soviet, so that we must all expend our patriotic energies to the utmost to improve the Soviet, which is identical to the improvement in working conditions. “The Soviet should convince the workers to stop striking.” This will be a disaster. Any dialogue between the Soviet and the workers would imply a separation between the Soviet and the workers, which is not the case. It is the radical embodiment of the Soviet that is the strike as dialectic, such that we, as workers, must radically, through the power of our Soviet, collectively empower ourselves to proceed beyond the strike towards our goal, which has already been achieved, as indeed it is through our collectivization of the means of production that we’ve realized our greatest advancement in labor: “Give women equal legal rights to men.” Now we may all victoriously return to the factories.

Finally, the most pressing matter. Now that the Tsar is gone, who is to blame? The easiest answer: “The only enemies should be the Germans!” This will be a disaster. If our only enemies are the Germans, then we will have to win the war, which is impossible, then who do we blame for that? “The Kadets and other bourgeois parties.” This will be a disaster. If we declare the bourgeois to be the eternal enemy of our revolution, then yes, we can kill the Kadets and the like, but then we must blame the bourgeois, and who then is the bourgeois? Fine, they are all killed, but then who is the bourgeois? We must learn from Robespierre. “Counterrevolutionary forces, Black Hundreds, and the like.” This will be a disaster. These revolutionaries grow in the thousands, and they’re each compelled to some kind of creed. We’ll have to inquisitate every heresy every time, which will only expose the damned to options. We’ll allocate our precious resources endlessly explaining which revolution is the revolution that properly revolves, by the very thought I’ve become dizzy. “Bolsheviks and anarchists, who seek to subvert the revolution from within.” Excellent, only when we can blame the revolutionaries will the revolution truly go unquestioned.

The situation settles nicely. We flatly refuse to join the government: first the Provisional Government, then we storm out of the Soviet. We flatly refuse to allow any ideological resolution among the SRs. We allow conditions to develop naturally: a quarter of a million die in the latest offensive, the workers and peasants are in constant revolt, the economy is collapsing. The only effort we make in response to the prevailing distress is to organize among the peasants and crack down on all the black markets supplying the cities with food. The situation deteriorates. General Kornilov besieges Petrograd to stage a coup, we flatly refuse to assist in the defense. “The war continues unabated. / Over the course of the war and revolution, the problem of hunger has worsened.” Russia enters another civil war. Chaos reigns under heaven, the situation is excellent.

Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917 starts with a quote from Kropotkin that states that individuals have almost no power to change the course of history, and while political parties have some, it is “far less than is usually thought.” This being the case, I assume the fact that playing the game felt like beating my head fruitlessly against a brick wall was entirely intended.

My party (the Mensheviks) had no money. The Provisional Government had no money. The people were starving and constantly on the verge of rioting about it. I raised taxes on businesses, then on everything else. I enacted austerity like three times because I kept getting in trouble for being in debt, which of course only made everyone angrier. I managed to get considerable sway in the Provisional Government, but I didn’t have the resources to actually do anything with it. Meanwhile, I had thrown my lot in with the internationalists, but never had any real opportunity to stop the war, which dragged on as my armies were continuously beaten to a pulp despite being nominally on the winning side. Which, to be fair, is how World War I went for original-timeline Russia.

I’ve never been of the impression that the October Revolution could have been easily avoided, but if I had been, this game would certainly have disabused me of it. I did feel like it was perhaps a bit more repetitive than I remember the original Social Democracy game being, but maybe that’s just because I was too broke all the time to see most of what it had to offer. Nevertheless, I do feel like the two games have very different vibes. In Social Democracy, you start out in a deceptively good position; it feels so feasible to stop the Nazis, until party infighting and rising unemployment take their toll. In Petrograd 1917, you start out in the pit and vainly try to scrabble your way out of it. Being consigned to the dustbin of history always feels more likely than not.

Maybe I’ll play as the Bolsheviks next time—although if there’s a way to stop the almost-inevitable revolution, maybe having me at the helm is it.