Damn, Son, I gave you credit for not being a blood thirsty monster like Stalin, Mao and Castro and you mount a backwater defense of their regimes! Maybe I have misjudged you after all.
But to answer your questions, no I do not think Czar Nicholas would have established a Gulag Archipelego that imprisoned and enslaved and murdered tens of millions of his citizens as Lenin and Stalin did. And no I do not think Chaing Kai-shek would have intentionally allowed 80-100 million of his own people to die a brutally painful death by starvation like Mao did. And no, as bad as Bautista was I do not think he approached (or would have approached) the brutality against his people like Castro.
Do not interpret this as my defending their predecessors, it is simply my response to your response defending their actions. Maybe you didn’t realize it but you basically said it was okay for them to kill all those people because if they didn’t their predecessors would have.
I don’t have a time frame for Norway. I said their system, which is a high tax welfare state - kind of a modified diluted form of true socialism - works very well for them, a country of 5 million people that are culturally singular and have the good fortune to be sitting on North Sea oil deposits that can finance them. So I suppose my time frame would probably start about the time the oil runs dry or the Green New Deal eliminates their oil advantage.
I appreciate your disdain for “outside forces,” I suppose. But I’m unclear what you mean by the term. I think an argument can be made that every government in human history has gained and kept control by claiming it is necessary in order to defend its people from nefarious outside forces. Enemies must be created even when none exist.