I’m watching the DNC, and it’s made me even more aware of the power of liberal bourgeois democracies to let out a little revolutionary energy whenever it gets close to the edge, through concessional policies, like New Deal policies or whatever Kamala might do if she wins, or even the act of voting and campaigning itself. Do they have to go through a fascism phase first, or has there been a liberal bourgeois democracy that has successfully had a socialist revolution? Will it take new theory to figure it out?
Czar Nicholas and his Romanov dynasty were pretty damn liberal in pre-Soviet Russia, up to and including him spending most of his time doing foreign tourism, playing tennis, and sending his soldiers off to die for trivial reasons.
The western powers saw him as some grand cosmopolitan “reform” czar that was giving them what they wanted until that Great War thing.
Russia wasn’t a liberal country, it was a feudal monarchy, and the transition was from feudalism -> socialism, with peasants forming the basis of the revolutionary army (same for China, Vietnam, DPRK, etc). See my other comment but so far there hasn’t been any historical case (besides the USSR dragging east germany into socialism) of a capitalist -> socialist transition.
I may have used the term too loosely, but at the time, the western powers did see Nicholas II as some enlightened “reasonable” cosmopolitan reformist that they could shape like clay.