When Communism took over Russia circa 1917, were Russian people as complacent as the American people are today?
It was actually the Russian people who chose the Bolsheviks rather than communism taking over. That’s why it’s called the Russian Revolution. The Russian proletariat led it and had the support of the peasantry, who were the biggest class in Russia at that time. Russia was never a communist nation as the revolution was defeated by the mid 1920’s by internal civil war and outside interference from Western capitalist. Stalin was a counter revolutionary and Russia became a state capitalist regime. Prez Obama is not a communist, he’s a liberal. Right wing governments often nationalise banks and industry in times of economic crisis. This is not for the benefit of the workers but rather to bail out the capitalist class.
Your question assumes the desirability of the Czarist government in the minds of the Russian people. At that time, communism was something untested that promised to empower the common worker. The fact that people were not complacent is why the communist revolution took place. Had the excesses of capitalism had not been reigned in by the progressives here and the suffering of the average worker not been eased, we may have had the same thing in the US, for better or worse.
The Czar regime fell due to an increased education of the working class realizing how little they received of the global economic wealth. There is an instrument called the GINI index which measures wealth disparities. The US is on the edge of what is unsustainable for a long term stability of its system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coeffi… It is well known that income disparities are sources of revolutions. The best remedy to Communism is often Socialism (cf Bismarck) as a more even distribution of wealth lowers the social unrest.
