wire2k said:
As for the Soviets, they were never democratic, ever. The "Constituent Assembly" which was the result of the one election held was broken up after one day (the survivors formed the Komuch).
Yes, but the Bolsheviks did
hold the election, didn't they? After several months of being in power? Not to mention the fact that the whole basis of the Soviet system was one of self-governing, elected local councils. (That is, after all, what 'soviet' means). I'm certainly not claiming that this was genuine democracy - but that's why we have a sliding scale of 1-10. Lenin was often surprised and upset by the results of the "democratic" process in Russia, and took action to overrule its effects - but that's a different thing to not having a process at all. Soviet Russia drifted gradually towards the Authoritarian sie of the scale, with occasional jumps back to Democratic. It didn't reach 1 and stay there until Stalin seized power several years after this mod ends.
As for in-game effects, the Dem/Auth scale really determines how well captured provinces are assimilated - i.e. terror. And if you want to argue that the Whites terrorized areas and the Reds didn't... um, OK. Most would disagree, including Lenin and Dzerzhinsky.
Please don't set up straw men. I never claimed the Reds didn't use terror - of course they did. But I would argue that they did so less consistently and less brutally than many of the Whites did, especially Denikin's forces. For empirical proof of this, you only have to look at the level of popular support (even if it was
faute de mieux) the Reds generally enjoyed and the Whites didn't.
As far as open/closed scores for the Sovs, there was a short period of relative freedom (the "New Economic Policy") which took place after the Civil War. During the war there wasn't much tolerance for opposing points of view save within the Party itself.
That's too simplistic - there was movement within the period of the war as well..
People like Kamenev were in favour of an alliance with other left-wing groups like the SRs, and it wasn't fore-ordained that his perspective would be defeated by Lenin's. In December 1918 the survivors of the Directory after Kolchak's coup opened talks with the Bolsheviks, and Lenin re-legalised the SR party and allowed it to hold meetings. In January 1919 the Mensheviks were allowed to publish their newspaper, which was openly critical of the Soviet government and had a circulation of 100,000. (Admittedly, it was banned again a few months later).
Ironically, the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921-22 introduced economic liberalisation (permitting a free market in grain) at the same time that the Bolsheviks finally began to crack down in earnest on their political opponents, holding mass arrests and staging show trials of the SR leadership and others.
I don't think lumping in all the White armies on the same tag would work too well, as there was no coordination at all between them. Kolchak could probably be made SIB without too much trouble (although there was also a puppet "Siberian Republic" set up by Japan - Siberia was split about 5 different ways), but making Iudenich Estonia means that the Soviets basically get a free excuse to invade/annex Estonia, which is ahistorical.
It was a question of practicality, since for one, we didn't want to use up all the spare tags, and for another if you make the Whites too disjointed and split up, they'll stand no chance against the Soviets. If you do a mod (or battle scenario) based
solely on the Russian Civil War without needing to cover 1914-18 as well, you would have more leeway.
