(Obviously I mean a restoration of a proletarian dictatorship in the case of the USSR/former constituent states)
Just from what I can quickly gleam from my limited knowledge of the reign of Louis XVIII and Charles X it sounds decently similar to what occured with post soviet russia.
counter revolutionary ruler is incompetent and authoritarian
conflict between reactionary ruler and progressive legislature
reactionary ruler rigs elections and gets involved in foreign wars
reactionary ruler dissolves progressive legislature and appoints their own loyalist legislature
But why was it that the French restored the Bourgeois dictatorship under the citizen king but the Russians and other post soviet states (save for Belarus if you follow the same line of thinking of Cheng Enfu) were unable to? Was it size? Foreign interference?
I’m seeing this post much very late, and I’m not exactly answering the question but rather noting that Marx himself has a different view of the class nature of the Bourbon monarchy and the July monarchy.
Indeed, he sees both as dictatorships of one faction of the bourgeoisie: the former is “merely the political expression of the hereditary domination of the landowners, just as the July monarchy was the political expression of the upstart bourgeois’ usurped domination. What separated these factions was not thus proclaimed principles, but the material conditions of their existence, that is two different sorts of property, the old antinomy of city and countryside, the rivalry between capital and landed property.” (translated from my copy of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter III). He then adds that: “If [under the republican government] each fraction aimed to realise the restoration of its own dynasty, this amounted to saying that the major interests that the bourgeoisie shared – landed property and capital – looked to restore its own supremacy and restore the subordination of the other.” [Marx’s emphasis].
In fact, it was under the parliamentary republic that the bourgeoisie united to exercise to the fullest its dictatorship over other classes. It was “the only form of government where the two great fractions of the French bourgeoisie could unite and put on the agenda the supremacy of their entire class instead of the regime of a privileged faction.”
I’m not going to pretend I can answer your actual question to a satisfying degree, but I will try to give my perspective. While I do think you are right to point to foreign interference, it is in my opinion only part of the issue. The USSR’s collapse wasn’t simply caused by foreign agents, it was the destruction of a Socialist state and its vanguard party from the inside. After all, the CPSU did fall so low as to elect so inept a leader as Gorbatchev. I find it hard to call such a party a vanguard party, and it certainly doesn’t seem to me that it was capable of waging class struggle at the time against a bourgeoisie which went all in in their offensive against the Soviet state.
