Historical books are the basis of any real historical modding work. When you’re not knowing history, you can’t address the historical rightness of a game.
This point is more important for computer wargames than for boardgames. If boardgames have variants of rules, generally these efforts are rather rare and in any case made by people with strong historical knowledge ( yes, the average boardgaming player is better than the average PCgamer). Then, the Computer wargames forums and beta squads are mainly destined to offer ” improvements” devised by players who generally are more or less under the Paradox syndrome ( let’s create an unhistorical solution to fix an unhistorical outcome).
Let’s take an exampl :Â http://www.ageod-forum.com/showpost.php?p=199935&postcount=79
What’s wrong? Fundamentally the idea that a revolutionary movement is popular, especially when it promises Democracy. In reality, if it would have been the case, Humanity will live in a perfect utopian society since a few thousand years…
Komuch was maybe a sympathetic movement, but it lasted 4 months before crumbling. Peasants didn’t enlisted to support SR, simply because they were weakly politicized and as they have got by themselves land property, they just didn’t understood why they should fight for a party wanting to give them this property after the end of the civil War. All in all, Komuch got at best 30,000 men, a large part being unmotivated at start.
Bolsheviks were certainly popular from November 17 to the spring of 1918. They were, because Lenin just trashed the real political program of the Party for what the masses wanted: land property and peace. But that wasn’t the real Bolshevik program and Lennin could not postpone it indefinitely, except by destroying the Party, which wasn’t his aim… So, after these few months,mood became disillusioned about the Reds, and this was aggravated by the persistence of penuries. This opposition was treated by repression , aggravating the processus…
No side was popular,a nd the idea to give propagandist trait to military leaders ( which is insane, as most Red leaders were ex-Tzarist officers collaborating for various reasons with a new regime they despised)is just wishful thinking. Except very small minorities, most of the Russian population just hoped the war to finish without storming their house. In the end, when it was clear Civil war would storm their house, they were forced to choose. They favored the less menacing and in opportunity the winning side, ie the Reds. But ten years after, in spite of the Nep, Stalin launched the war against peasantry, because peasantry and Communism remained too much hostile to each other to maintain the compromise Lenin established, after the Civil War, and only because he faced the risk of a general rebellion against the Communist power…
A people’s Tragedy, even if depressing by moments, because his author, Orlando Figes is a little too much prone to criticize everyone, will help to understand how much all the factions were small minorities.
Modder Corner 