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There’s an alternate history where Russia didn’t go communist. In 1911, a man named Pyotr Stolypin was Prime Minister of Russia. Staunchly anti-war and traditionalist, he was nevertheless also an energetic reformer. He suppressed violent revolutionaries, but gave peasants their own land to farm. He was the path to a peaceful capitalist reformation in Russia. Lenin hated him, and called him the hangman-in-chief. Then he was assassinated. Historians still debate whether it was a conspiracy or a lone gunman. But three years later, Russia entered the kind of war Stolypin opposed. Six years later, it fell to Bolshevik revolution. Ten years later, Lenin and Trotsky emerged triumphant in the Russian Civil War. And then a century of communist mass murder began. The reason I bring this up is that the infighting on the American right seems to have exploded after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. That one young man was evidently the unseen linchpin keeping a fractious coalition together. I say this not to be a doomer, but to point out that the future isn’t necessarily written. Much can hinge on the efforts of one man. Had Lenin been shot, the future might have been different. Instead, it was Stolypin. https://t.co/feWn1WdTUT They built a monument to Stolypin after his death in 1911. Then the communists tore it down, once they gained power. And then today’s Russian government put a monument back up again in 2012, after the communists lost power. But that cycle took one hundred years. https://t.co/YTZT8H2crK