By CARLOS SAPIR
The end of October on the Julian calendar this year has brought with it a Russia-and-socialism-focused expansion pack for Paradox Interactive’s imperialist history simulator. Workers’ Voice is thus ready to rise to the challenge and decisively answer, “What do Leninists think of State and Revolution“?
What is Victoria 3?
State and Revolution is the fifth “immersion pack” and the ninth overall expansion pack for the computer game Victoria 3 by Paradox Interactive. Victoria is the developer’s grand strategy video game series dedicated to simulating the 19th and early 20th century, alongside similar franchises devoted to other time periods such as Europa Universalis (from the beginning of European colonialism to the French Revolution and Napoleon), Hearts of Iron (a World War II-focused game) and Crusader Kings (covering the Middle Ages). As in these other games, the player starts play by choosing any country on the map during the time period, and then guiding that country forward through the succeeding decades and centuries of history.
Although it is never explicitly stated as such, the player is essentially playing the role of their chosen country’s guardian angel of history, dictating policy, forming governments, and even interpreting events outside of human control while heads of state and political parties shuffle in and out. Undergirding that rather fantastical premise, however, is a meticulous commitment to modeling a century’s worth of history, which in the case of Victoria 3, meant building a compelling model of the global economy 1836-1936. Its lead developers have essentially conceded that what they built is a historical materialism simulator.
While the player has a variety of political and diplomatic levers to pull at, the core gameplay loop involves planning and placing infrastructure to industrialize and expand the economy. In turn, a global population of simulated people (called “pops” in-game) reacts to the new job opportunities, commodities, and markets while trying to meet their own needs. Depending on the legal superstructure of a country in game, pops will have independent economic agency, and ruling-class pops will invest in their own infrastructure above and beyond the player’s diktats. Layered on top of the modeling of markets and classes, the game also keeps track of pops’ nationalities and religions in order to also present a simulation of assimilation and discrimination on a global level: pops facing discrimination are locked out of economic opportunities, but are also less liable to assimilate in most circumstances.
Pops will also identify with and lend support to an “Interest Group” that represents the collective political leadership of a social class: at game start in 1836, most countries are dominated by reactionary Landlords with support from the Clergy and Military, while the Peasants represent the broad layers of society, and a tiny Intelligentsia stands on the ideological margins. As the economy shifts towards industrialization, Industrialists, the Petit-Bourgeoisie, and the Trade Unions enter the scene. The Interest Groups are then influenced by political movements, which draw support from different pops depending on the appeal of their ideological program to that pops’ social position.
At the beginning of the game, most countries are home only to traditionalist movements (although societies with severe oppression will immediately generate national and/or religious liberation movements), but the growth of bourgeois and proletarian society will spark Radical, Liberal, and later Anarchist and Socialist movements that then dialectically influence the outlooks of the Interest Group leaderships.
This isn’t to say that their simulation of history is flawless: the mechanical implementation of countries’ legal superstructure can frequently feel a bit ham-fisted in terms of its representation of a vast variety of social arrangements (although significant efforts to improve these systems have been made in subsequent expansions and updates since the game’s initial release). The game’s at times spectacularly detailed modeling of historical demography also has some major blind spots that may or may not ever be corrected: Jews (carefully split between Ashkenazi and Sephardi) and a few other stateless peoples are represented, but Roma are entirely absent, and the game makes no attempt to represent the Zionist movement and its incipient colonization of Palestine despite portraying the colonization of the Americas, Africa and Oceania by Europeans. Prior centuries of Chinese colonization of Indonesia are also essentially missing from the demographic map, with Indonesia’s population represented as entirely non-Chinese peoples. Mechanics for modeling caste in South Asia are rather underdeveloped despite having been the focal point of a prior expansion pack, and the list goes on.
There is also the other, politically unsavory element, which is that in its attempt to accurately portray history and to put players in control of states, a lot of the game’s core gameplay involves effectively carrying out imperialism (in addition to in some cases perpetuating slavery, among myriad other crimes against humanity). One dissatisfied customer review states plainly, “Great, now I can imagine my ancestors colonizing the Europeans before they get genocided themselves. No thanks.”
While the game also lets you play as revolutionary dictatorships of the proletariat, in order to get to the revolution the player will generally need to play through several decades of semi-feudal and capitalist development first, which will almost always include violently suppressing unsuccessful initial attempts at progressive revolt before the masses are ultimately organized enough to fight and win. The game is very equal opportunity about its description of political paths to follow in-game, using the same faintly triumphalist rhetoric to describe in-game goalposts corresponding to pursuing various ideologies to their fullest conclusions, whether communist, fascist, monarchist, liberal, or otherwise.
The game’s commentary on the question of reform and revolution similarly evades a clear answer. Both are viable in game (although the new expansion does complicate this question more), and a skilled player that understands the in-game economy and follows the path of least resistance will generally end up pursuing reformist socialism. This is only possible, however, because the player, as a nearly all-powerful angel of history, can force the state to repeatedly make policy decisions that undermine ruling-class authority and provide a foothold for the proletariat to advance. If the player chooses to instead faithfully represent a self-interested ruling class, reformism is impossible and a revolutionary confrontation is inevitable.
Despite its shortcomings and its at times politically objectionable gameplay, it would be a mistake to overlook a game that makes the best attempt to date of actually simulating history writ-large, and doing so on a mostly materialist basis. The fact that the game spontaneously sent legions of gamers to online forums to conspire about how to defeat the evil Landlords dominating society, preventing them from modernizing the economy and improving standard of living, as well as the fact that the game more or less establishes via its mechanics that socialist economies provide the highest standard of living for their people, should not be overlooked either. Paradox, for their part, seems to know their audience when they decided to promote the State and Revolution expansion pack with Lenin (“Bolshevik”) keychains.
State and Revolution
So, with Victoria 3 now introduced, what about its latest expansion pack? State and Revolution carries a $15 price tag but was accompanied by a free update that included significant changes—arguably ones that overshadow the paid DLC itself. In addition to quality of life improvements for various areas of gameplay and the addition of a new commodity (copper), the free update includes a major overhaul of Victoria 3’s representation of socialism as a political movement.
At the game’s initial release in 2022, the split between Socialist and Communist movements in-game would appear out of nowhere: the movements would pop up fully formed, side by side, in eternal opposition, and would represent ideological packages of policies that broadly align with a Stalinist understanding of the different tendencies of Marxism. Anarchism would similarly arrive and was only slightly differentiated from the other two leftist movements, as was a “Labor movement” that was intended to represent ideologically anti-socialist trade union tendencies. Anarchism was given more flavor and mechanics in a prior DLC devoted to Spain and Portugal (specifically, it was given an ultraleft death-spiral mechanic, where the movement will be much more likely to pivot towards terrorist tactics and alienate its own base if left to its own devices), but the overhaul to the socialist and communist movements in update 1.15 goes much deeper.
Now, instead of showing up as separate movements from birth, there is only one Socialist movement initially, arriving on the scene in the mid-to-late 19th century depending on the pace of economic development and technological advancement. Once the socialist movement has appeared in countries representing 25% of global GDP in game, it triggers an in-game event titled “Reform or Revolution,” representing the crisis of the Second International. Every socialist movement in the world then contributes to a political power struggle between the two tendencies: joining bourgeois governments or having a reformist Trade Union leadership in a country tips the scale towards reform; leading insurrections, presiding over revolutionary governments, and having a revolutionary Trade Union leadership pushes towards revolution, with the scale further weighted by the size of the socialist movement in each country.
As in real life on the eve of World War I, a major war between countries home to socialism rapidly calls the question on reform or revolution and brings the event to a close. Victory for the reformists results in the bifurcation of the movement into revolutionary Communists and social-democratic Socialists; victory for the revolutionaries leads to the socialist movement staying united and cementing its internationalist revolutionary character.
The game’s overhaul continues during and after the revolution. Whereas previously, the socialist government form, “Council Republic” was treated much as any other government reform, now support for the government type is directly tied to support for the formation (and the actual formation) of workers’ factory councils, now represented by a separate labor policy in-game.
Pursuit of a dictatorship of the proletariat, even by reformist means, now essentially requires the trade-union movement to participate in a revolutionary uprising, and participating in such an uprising pushes the trade unions towards continuing towards socialism. The update also adds new events and challenges following the revolution, representing both the absolute hostility of the capitalist and feudal regimes against any advance of socialism, and the pressures toward bureaucratization present in the dictatorship of the proletariat. While the game does not use the term “Stalinism” (although Iosif Stalin himself does have a chance to appear in-game), it does directly tangle with the material conditions that led to its emergence and does an adequate job presenting this political struggle within a dictatorship of the proletariat, even though it fails to represent the subsequent bifurcation of the communist movement following Trotsky’s expulsion.
Overall, this free reworking of the game’s representation of the history of socialism is a massive improvement, and one that devotes significant attention to the betrayal of the Second International’s ideals. It would easily justify the price of the expansion pack, which thus makes it awkward that the content that is actually exclusive to the purchase of the expansion pack is much less substantial.
Where the free update focused on revolution, the paid DLC focuses on Russian, adding various events to the game invoking Russian history, and particularly its literary tradition. It includes a long series of events allowing the player to decide the fates of several generations of the Russian Empire’s literati, from the well-known Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the more obscure Chernyshevsky and non-Russian writers like Taras Shevchenko and Konstanty Kalinowski.
Key figures of the Russian Revolution like Lenin and Trotsky are added to the game, although the game’s societal and materialist focus makes these individuals’ in-game role relatively insignificant (they were also previously available with the much maligned Voice of the People DLC that had focused on French history).
There are a handful of new events and mechanics specific to the Russian Empire, including a “Favorite” mechanic that is transparently intended to allow the player to hire Rasputin for court intrigue. In confronting the Bolshevik Revolution, however, the game developers faced a difficult quandary: forcing the seminal communist revolution to actually be communist despite it occurring in 1917, toward the end of the game’s timeline, presents a contradiction with respect to the game’s dynamism. Ultimately, the developers decided that the specter of revolution haunts Russia no matter what, but the nature of that revolution depends on the state of Russian politics in-game. In practice, that means that if Russia makes it to the 20th century as anything other than a brutally autocratic monarchy, the revolution awaiting around the corner is as liable to be a pro-Tsarist anti-liberal revolt as it is a Communist one.
Even relatively modest reforms will tip the scale of what Russia “is” and put reactionaries at the head of the uprising against it. Thus, playing a successful communist Russian Revolution in State and Revolution requires playing through several decades of intentionally arch-reactionary policy, rendering a lot of the socialist mechanics and flavor inaccessible to most play-throughs as Russia. If a revolution does spark with the Tsarists on the throne, however, the subsequent in-game mechanics pertaining to the provisional government following the February Revolution and the struggle between the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Left SRs are well-done. Additional content representing the flourishing (or suppression) of Ukrainian and Belarusian literature is nice, but feel more like window dressing than fully-fledged mechanics (in-game achievements also encourage the player to attempt a play-through as a revolutionary socialist independent Estonia as a maximal challenge). There is also a disappointing lack of attention to the transformation of the former Russian Empire into separate Soviet republics, nor is there any attempt to represent shifting Soviet nationality policies, whether on a social or administrative level, in the following decades.
Thus, it’s hard to recommend purchasing State and Revolution unless you are particularly specifically invested in Russian literature, minutiae of Russian history, or seeking to add one additional game mechanic to a Polish, Ukrainian and/or Byelorusian national liberation play-through. Nevertheless, the update as a whole is well worth playing for anyone that already has the game, and the new overhaul of socialist gameplay mechanics may be enough to intrigue those who have yet to try Victoria 3.