Unfortunately, I believe that at the time of the Russian Revolution, there were (and still are) very few ideologies that didn’t see violence as an acceptable means to an end. That includes most of the 18/1900s socialist revolutionaries. I think there were a lot of those socialists who viewed violence as an acceptable means of revolution (unlike thinkers such as Tolstoy and Orwell) but who did not see intentional, ongoing systemic violence to maintain said revolution as a good thing (unlike statists such as Lenin, Stalin, et al.). Continue reading The Problem of Using the USSR to Condemn Socialism