I read about the Russian Revolution and came away fundamentally depressed by the whole affair: on all sides, it was just a testament to arrogance, pride, and stupidity—the totality of which ended in immense cruelty, suffering, and the practical destruction of Russian civilisation. The aristocrats and the Tsar were arrogant; the Tsarina was advised by her grandmother, Queen Victoria, to cultivate the love of her people—she arrogantly shot back that it was quite unnecessary in Russia (the Tsarina kept a portrait of Marie Antoinette over her writing desk; she magically willed herself to occupy the same position—complete with the same type of sexual rumours, threesomes with Rasputin and so on). The Tsarists and the aristocrats were all arrogant like that.
The Whites in the civil war were arrogant. There were multiple chances for them to win—they could have enlisted Finnish aid, but no Finland had to be subordinated to Russia; they could have given the Cossacks autonomy, but no the Cossacks had to be subordinated to Russia; they could have granted concessions to the peasants…It just went on. They had multiple chances to beat the Bolsheviks but squandered them all through rigid thought and arrogance. The liberal politicians and social democrats similarly wasted multiple opportunities to avert the Bolshevik coup by playing around with imaginary constitutions and committees while the peasantry cracked on and seized the land. Meanwhile, they talked about notional land redistribution deals and political reform. Kerensky ponced about pretending to be Napoleon.
The Bolsheviks themselves repeatedly almost ballsed up their own rule and, of course, ploughed ahead even when it was obvious their idea to skip Russia to socialism would end in disaster. All sides in this conflict were arrogant, vain, and stupid. Worse, they’d actually read all about the history of revolutions—but they missed who the real Napoleon would be, Stalin. Empires last about 250 years; the Romanovs reached 300 years of rule in 1913—the Russian Empire was rotten, just like America today.