It resulted in such strong social cooperation that the majority of the population (the workers) succeeded in a revolution in 1917 and then for decades drastically improved their material conditions.

There are of course other factors than climate.

You do realize that "the people " marching towards Moscow demanding change never happen? Instead it was apathy from the people that caused the revolution to be a success.

Where you literally had guards not caring if the revolutionaries took over the position or building?

And the material conditions did not drastically improve, the USSR struggled with living conditions until it's demise.

If anything the blatant corruption made social cooperation impossible.

The October Revolution didn’t involve the majority of the population (workers). The Bolsheviks had strong support from railroad workers and the army specifically, and with key infrastructure captured they were able to eventually win the day, albeit after a famous civil war with working-class people fighting on both sides. Many successful revolutions throughout history were won by minority groups.

The October Revolution also wasn’t Russia’s first revolution that year. The tsar had already been ousted in the February Revolution, and considering that Russia had already begun to industrialize significantly in the final years of tsarist rule, it is certainly likely that Russia would have enjoyed rising prosperity even if Lenin had not returned from exile and made his coup.

Debatable whether that was the workers and the extent to which material conditions improved. Certainly, the political conditions were atrocious, and there was the whole Holodomor thing that pro-Soviet narratives like to leave out. Was killing millions an improvement?

And then Russia today has very low social trust, which is less surprising when you look at them being a totalitarian dictatorship for so long.

> In an alternate timeline where Norway has no oil

Norway was already the richest European country back in 1938, decades before oil was even discovered in the North Sea.

Russia had serfdom and dictatorship for most of its history.

Isn't that much of Europe?

If we compare with the northern latitudes, which my comment was a response to: For Norway / Sweden / Finland, no not really. Serfdom did not exist in a similar form after medieval times, and neither did autocracy from late 18th / early 19th century onwards. Finland, even though part of Russia for much of this time, did not have serfdom.

Serfdom disappeared almost 500 years or so earlier in Western Europe that it did in Russia (or most of Germany for that matter..)

Because in russia one bad word in good environment with some kgb buddy might get you a trip to gulag. So everybody was very careful choosing conversation partners and topics. That’s not the way to build strong social cooperation.

It sounds like a form of strong social cooperation to me, just one that no one likes. And since strong social cooperation sounds so good to some people, they start to look to separate it from the strong social cooperation they like, either knowingly or unknowingly, and we end up with a similar situation to the stereotypical "ah, but that wasn't real socialism" socialist, where it just can't be admitted to be anything similar.

I'm a libertarian so I'm already suspicious of such things, makes it easy to spot.