White Victory in Russia; Horrible?

Possibly a Chiang Kai Shek style figure could unify Russia, but that’s a big maybe.

Even Chiang-Kai-shek had to deal with the Communists and the left-wing of the KMT after the Northern Expedition, so I don't think a White Russia would be out of the woods even if a Chaing-kai-Shek figure came to prominence. Any number of civil wars could break out after Russia is 'united'.
 

Deleted member 143777

There are the people who died in famines engineered by Stalin, repatriated Soviets who were executed, etc.
If's not like they could tallied how many died in those events.

And something like this couldn't happen under the Whites? While Stalin (collectivization, sending Ukrainian food to Russia, etc.) certainly holds primary responsibility for causing the famine, don't pretend that there weren't underlying weather factors either. It's unlikely the famine would be as serious as IOTL, but with warlordism and moderate levels of conflict likely continuing after the civil war "ends", you're probably gonna see the 1921 famine drag on for a lot longer, only for the 30s to see another bout of famine...

Soldiers and civilians murdered by Germans can indirectly be attributed to Stalin.
The Great Purge is what weakened the USSR to the point that OP Barbarossa became so successful for the Germans.

...so WW2 deaths and domestic killings by the Nazis from 1939-1941 can be attributed to the United States because they failed to intervene?

Wasn't nearly every non Bolshevik group represented in the Whites, from SRs to liberals to conservatives. I'd imagine after the reds are defeated, there would be a huge power struggle between these different elements.

The people with guns were almost all reactionary quais-Fascists. Any socialists or liberals in the coalition were very quickly sidelined. If there was a power struggle, the likes of Denikin and Kornilov would certainly win.
 
A white Russia is unlikely to be a good place at all, but it's kinda hard to match the horrors of Stalin.

Pretty much where I am as well. White Russia is one part Warlord Era China and one part Apartheid South Africa, don't get me wrong, but as others pointed out it would take real effort to be more brutal than Stalin was.
 
Pretty much where I am as well. White Russia is one part Warlord Era China and one part Apartheid South Africa, don't get me wrong, but as others pointed out it would take real effort to be more brutal than Stalin was.

Exactly. it wouldn't be Utopia and it probably wouldn't be a full fledged democracy but it would be hard to see it as worse than Leninist/Stalinist Russia.
 
And something like this couldn't happen under the Whites? While Stalin (collectivization, sending Ukrainian food to Russia, etc.) certainly holds primary responsibility for causing the famine, don't pretend that there weren't underlying weather factors either. It's unlikely the famine would be as serious as IOTL, but with warlordism and moderate levels of conflict likely continuing after the civil war "ends", you're probably gonna see the 1921 famine drag on for a lot longer, only for the 30s to see another bout of famine...



...so WW2 deaths and domestic killings by the Nazis from 1939-1941 can be attributed to the United States because they failed to intervene?



The people with guns were almost all reactionary quais-Fascists. Any socialists or liberals in the coalition were very quickly sidelined. If there was a power struggle, the likes of Denikin and Kornilov would certainly win.
It is mentioned by many scholars that one of the reasons Hitler chose to invade the USSR in 1941 was because he thought their military was still in disarray after the 1930s Great Purge.
And it was.
Many of the USSR's best commanders, most experienced veterans from the SCW, and their best intelligence personnel were all murdered in the Great Purge.
And then OP Barbarossa happened, which means the Soviet defeat in the early stages of OP Barbarossa can be attributed to the Great Purge orchestrated by Stalin.
 
Depends on the PoD, Nikolai Yudenich (Russia's second best WWI general) seizing Petrograd in 1919 with his wacky coalition of Socialists and Tsarists could be the foundation for a "Nordic model with Russian Characteristics" or it could implode into a second civil war the second the Bolsheviks are out.
 
An old post of mine:

***

The Whites would have to govern dictatorially, whether they wanted to or not. Yes, they paid lip service to a Constituent Assembly. They kept on saying that everything--the status of the monarchy, the land question, etc.--would ultimately be determined by such an Assembly. (No doubt this was largely because they knew that such questions as monarchy versus republic would divide them, so talking about the Constituent Assembly was a convenient way of putting them off until the future. As Denikin wrote in 1918, "If I raise the republican flag, I lose half my volunteers, and if I raise the monarchist flag, I lose the other half. But we have to save Russia." "For this reason, the army's slogan was not any specific form of government, but 'great Russia, one and indivisible.'" https://books.google.com/books?id=NAZm2EdxKqkC&pg=PA209)

However, whether they would really allow such an Assembly to be freely elected is doubtful. Kolchak's testimony seems to indicate the Constituent Assembly the Whites had in mind (or at least that he had in mind, but I doubt that Denikin would think differently) was not the democratic one elected in 1917 (and which was overwhelmingly dominated by self-described socialists of one sort or another, as IMO any democratically elected Constituent Assembly in Russia at the time would be):

"The general opinion...was that only a government authorized by the Constituent Assembly could be a real one; but the Constituent Assembly which we got...and which from the very beginning started in by singing the 'Internationale' under Chernov's leadership, provoked an unfriendly attitude...It was considered to have been an artificial and a partisan assembly. Such was also my opinion. I believed that even though the Bolsheviks had few worthy traits, by dispersing the Constituent Assembly they performed a service and this act should be counted to their credit." (Quoted in Orlando Figes, *A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924*, p. 588) https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-RQllnGEcV4J:https://erenow.net/modern/a-peoples-tragedy-russian-revolution/41.php

Any free election would give a victory to socialist parties (and the Whites hated the moderate socialists almost as much as they did the Bolsheviks) and to non-Russian parties (also largely socialist) advocating extensive autonomy if not outright independence for the groups they represented. This was against everything the Whites believed in. (On the national question, there was one exception, Kornilov, who was even willing to accept a self-governing Ukraine, https://books.google.com/books?id=irWQQCXwhwwC&pg=PA42 but the other Whites considered him hopelessly naïve where politics was concerned, and anyway he died early in the civil war.)

You don't even have to look to the OTL Constituent Assembly elections to show that free elections in Russia were likely to produce results unsatisfactory to the right, even the center-right. Look at the election to the Second Duma in 1907...

***

To that post I would add that of course to say the Whites would govern dictatorially is not necessarily to say that they would be as violent as the Bolsheviks. It may be that after an initial wave of pogroms they would settle down to the level of violence of a "normal" authoritarian state. Or they might not--let's not forget that Russian emigres played an important part in forming the ideology of the NSDAP in Germany. And the initial wave of violence could be pretty brutal. Richard Pipes has argued that the White Terror cannot really be compared to the Red because the former was largely spontaneous whereas the latter was planned from the center. But might not precisely this fact make the White Terror harder to stop?
 

Deleted member 143777

It is mentioned by many scholars that one of the reasons Hitler chose to invade the USSR in 1941 was because he thought their military was still in disarray after the 1930s Great Purge.
That being said, you're still talking about the actions of an external party, so it's not particularly relevant when comparing the relative brutality of Red and White regimes.
 
I've read enough. There's not much point in repeatedly pointing out post-archival scholarly research to someone who thinks biggest is bestest and that ten million preventable deaths is somehow not unspeakable.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn estimated 60 million and he knew first hand the conditions in a gulag.

Individual primary sources who are poets who have a specific purpose (Orthodoxy triumphant) tend to have certain biases. Hystrionic ones. Solzhenitsyn produced a mythopoesis. He is most useful when he is writing from direct immediate experience (Cancer Ward, A Day…), he is slightly useful when writing from direct reports (First Circle, the account of prison strikes in Gulag in the 1950s). His large speculative claims are not useful, unless you're conducting a psychohistory of the contemporary russian right.

And are the Soviet archives really a reliable source?

This isn't wikipedia. No source is "reliable." All sources are biased. (I never thought I'd have to do a first year tutorial). The specific bias of soviet archives is towards actual truth that would assist the party to maintain control. This is as opposed to corporate archives in the soviet union which were directly self-serving for managers. The bourgeois state apparatus that the geographic soviets colonised was developed and enhanced by a state that valued information as its only viable means of control. It really fucking cared about public opinion. So when Soviet archives have been opened, or party archives, they have been a fucking gold mine. For example, Archival research has shown that the party attempted to ameliorate the 1932-1933 famine, sending what supplies it could as soon as the data reached Moscow (and that early). But that the collectivisation had destroyed the rural small trader networks that could have done so…. A perfect storm of pathetic state policy, both a lesser and uglier gross failure of state action than claimed by hysteric nationalists like Solzhenitsyn. If you can't read this as worse than the "holodomor" claim for a party whose justification for existence was the orderly (ie: disciplinary) humanisation (ie: punishment) of economic processes, and they couldn't even organise a mass murder by starvation of a peasantry—they *accidentally did so* by eliminating the supply chains and logistics networks that allowed a peasantry to autonomously avoid starvation, then you have a severe problem with reading hubris and irony in a self-appointed Marat.

The archives are fucking fabulous because the biases are consistent, forced to be consistent by competence, and that the state authorities valued truth highly. Not *publicly*, but *highly.* You don't keep torturing people without breaking them unless you're actually interested in truth. You break them and move on.

As if any number of soviet citizens killed by the Soviet Union in the "millions" is acceptable conduct by a state…. (The RSFSR, however, existed through chaos.)

This should inform people's views on the whites. Unlike the Soviet Union there is unlikely to be a gap followed by a paroxysm of violence. Rather a steady continuance of justificatory violence. The substantive question is whether the successful whites will be merely reactionary, or will be fascistic. Have the "old ways" been preserved, or has the nation been saved, reborn anew, and to be reborn continuously through raciality?

Reading list:
Pirani S (archival)
Fitzpatrick S (archival)
Andrle
 
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When I was younger I always had the idea a victory for White Russian forces would restore the tsar or liberal democracy and life would go on as usual.

Realistically speaking though, unless you were the owner some mine in Siberia, it would be a shitty outcome.

Liberal elements did indeed exist in the white coalition - but as always, the people with guns have the real power.

Rabid anti semites like Denikin were just the tip of the ice berg - some white army commanders had megalomania rivaling modern day takfiri groups, such as backward warlords like Avalov, Semyonov, and of course, Ungern Von Sternberg. Granted that was only a portion, but a well armed portion, and the more “moderate” elements weren’t savory either.

Assuming a white victory happens, chances are warlord fiefdoms form, with no real central power, kerensky merely being basically mayor of Moscow.

Jews would probably face rapid persecution, but the very reactionary white army would next probably target intellectuals, the middle class and the industrial class.

It’s next to impossible Russia regaining Ukraine or even Belarus, likely both being influenced by Germany and Poland.

Siberia will be essentially open for Japanese expansion.

Kaiserreich sort of downplays just how bad a White Russian victory would be in all honesty. There wouldn’t be any chance for Russia to get a Savinkov and industrialize, to day the least.

Possibly a Chiang Kai Shek style figure could unify Russia, but that’s a big maybe.
would Kerensky even be there. He might well still have disapperared...
 
Warning
Many of the actions taken during the Stalin era were brutal and often unjustified. Yet in the end they helped the USSR win WW2. By the 1950s life really had "become better, more cheerfull". Life expectancy had allmost doubled, living stadarts had increased massively, allmost everyone could read, even the poorest peasant had access to higher education if he was good enough, women had the same rights as men, ethnic minorities had the same rights as russians (I'm talking about systematic and state-sanctioned everyday racism. The deportations were something different, but they weren't conducted for ethnic or racist, but for pollitical reasons) and the USSR was the second most powerfull nation on earth (economicly, polliticly and militarily).

The Stalin era USSR had two sides:

The one of improving living standarts, becoming an industrial superpower, of equal rights to women and minorities, of alphabetization and opportunities for even the poorest peasants.

And then there was the one of purges and deportations, of paranoia even towards their own comrades.

Reducing it to either one of those sides would be incorrect. Both have to be taken into account.

Now to the actual scenario: A white victory would not have been better. As others have mentioned before, chances of a burgeois-democratic Russia after the civil war are remote to non-existent. Not only did many in the white movement itself reject democracy (not only the tsar loyalists), but a burgeois-democracy would've been hardly able to cope with the post-war devastation. Most of the elite would very likely prefer a fascist or at least very reactionary dictatorship for that reason.

You can be sure that in the 1920s there wouldn't be an 8 hour working day, a brief legalization of homosexuality, an indigenization pollicy towards minorities and a period of indirect soviet democracy from 1917 to 1936.

There were many supporters of the bolsheviks (actually the Bolsheviks had won the absolute majority of seats in the All Russian Congress of Soviets in 1917/18), and it's doubtfull that the whites would try to integrate their enemies into the new society the way the bolsheviks did (many white soldiers were given amnesty and the post-civil war purges were actually very limited compared to how they could have been). It's likely that millions of suspectes Bolsheviks and bolshevik sypathizers would be murdered or worked to death in Siberian labour camps.

And thats only where things start to go downhill. It's unlikely that the new government would be able to pacify the countryside, given that they would heavily lack popular support at least in the early years (in OTL, like it or not, most people supported the bolsheviks. And even many of those that didn't would have opposed a reactionary, potentially military, dictatorship). Bolshevik and ethnic minority insugencies would remain a problem for the Petrograd government for years if not decades. More bloody purges would follow to suppress these insurgencies, but their effect would likely be limited. Russia is huge and if the people don't support you it's hard to project power beyond the urban regions.

There would be no state led industrialization and collectivization (at least not on the OTL scale). Best case is that Tsarist growth rates of around 2 to 3 percent more or less continue, though not even that is given, considering the massive devastation of the war (had the whites gotten the upper hand, the civil war would at least have gone way into 1925). It's not even clear how or wheater at all the new regime would have attacked the remainders of the feudal lords. It's very possible that feudal or at least semi-feudal relations in the countryside continue way into the 40s and 50s (like in India or Nationalist China).

Now to the treatment of ethnicities: The white movement massively propagated great russian chauvinism and it is allmost inevitably that russias ruling class continues the pollicy of russification. It will very likely double down on these efforts, way more than the Tsarist regime ever did. Vocal minorities would be sent into Siberia to die or be worked to death.
Massive deportations would take place in the other non-russian territories aswell (the scale depends on which territories the whites are able to get control over. Deportations in a white Russia with Ukraine for example would be very different from deportations in a white Russia without Ukraine). Russian would be the official languages, it's very likely that other languages get baned. These pollicies might show good results in some areas, and might bread massive resentment in others. More insurgencies are basicly guaranteed. On the jews, there would be massive anti-semitism. During the civil war of OTL, Denikins forces murdered an estimated 150.000 unarmed jews in Ukraine and Southern Russia alone. A proclamation by one of Denikin's generals incited people to "arm themselves" in order to extirpate "the evil force which lives in the hearts of Jew-Communists. Anti-semitism in white Russia would not be late Stalin era "some jews cooperate with our enemy Israel so all of them are under suspicion". It would be "The jews betrayed Jesus - now we kill them!". Russias jewish population would be either directly murdered or worked to death in Siberia. It's doubtfull wheater even a fraction of the jewish minority would survive these purges at all.

Science and education would be very limited compared to OTL. Mass alphabetization would not take place. People only have to be able to read if thats neccessary for the production process. In the cities, purely russian schools would likely be established. But the peasants don't need to read, if they can they only get bad ideas. The russian orthodox church would have a lot of influence in society, non-orthodox faiths would be brutally suppressed.

Without mechanization of agriculture, Russia remains a country of constant famine every 5 years or so. It would remain the prisonhouse of nations and one of the poorest countries in Europe if not the world.

Ok so, now to foreign pollicy:

White Russias fascist/reactionary regime would try to regain the "lost territories" (i.e. everything that belonged to Tsarist Russia in 1914, maybe even more) very aggressivly. Expect wars in Finland, Ukraine (if it's independent), the Baltics and whats left of Central Asia.

The rise of fascism in Germany had little to do with the USSR. Granted, a socialist state to the east was important to the nazis OTL propaganda, but fascism in Germany rose because the elite wanted to regain what was lost in the Great War, and even more. Additionally they wanted to get rid of the archievements of the november revolution (like basic workers rights).

In OTL, the NSdAP only got 2,8% of the votes in the 1928 Reichstag election. Yet, in the following years, they received massive amounts of money from various corporations
and individual capitalists to fund their campaign. This way they managed to gain 18,3% of the votes in the 1930 Reichstag election, only two years later. Another three years later they were the only party in the Reichstag.

One of the first fascist regime did, was abolishing all workers rights and crushing the workers movement.

The Nazis re-implemented sunday labour, re-legalized child labour, abolished the minimum wage, baned all unions and murdered it's activists. Wages in Germany were actually lower in the mid 30s than they had been in 1932 (at the hight of the great depression). That is the part of the Third Reich that is seldomly talked about. Life was miserable for germans during this time, and thats before the war had started. Life only continued to become more miserable as the war progressed.

On the other hand profits for german mega-corporations only increased. Again, any workers rights were abolished, strikes were baned and KZ prisoners were rented to them as virtual slaves (the prices were as follows: 3 Reichsmark a day for a women - 4 Reichsmark a day for a man - 6 Reichsmark a day for a skilled worker). Corporations like Krupp, BMW, Siemens and IG-Farben (which is called Bayer today) profited massively from the war, too.

The rise of fascim in Germany wasn't a reaction to the USSR. Thats cold war propaganda, claiming that "in fact the commies are responsible for everything that happened, and without them Europe would have been in a state of eternal peace". Germany became fascist for mostly domestic reasons and because the elite wanted a round two.

How this TLs WW2 would develope is uncertain, and everything I could say now would be pure speculation. What is certain however, is that white Russia could never survive an OTL-like german attack. Without the industrialization of OTL, they would neither be able to build their tanks nor to power them. There would be waaay less of anything, guns, planes, trucks, mines, amuntion, etc.

Another aspect is how the Bolsheviks and USSR affected the western leftist and workers movement. Many were impressed by the successes of socialism, especially during the great depression when the USSR was basicly the only country not affected. Without that (or with only the memories of 1917 to 1925) the western socialist and workers movement would be weakened. Thats also true for trade unions.

To sum it all up, Russia would be a very poor, warmongering, famine-stricken, racist and murderous reactionary dictatorship. It would be a secondary power at best and nowhere near OTL in terms of development. Even if the white regime eventually falls to a homegrown revolution, say in the 50s or 60s, Russia would not be a world power today. Not even close. A white Russia would not have two sides - it would just be absolutely horrible.

This might sound very pesimistic but thats the way the white army was and planed to be in OTL, and thats what would happen in this TL.

Maybe this scenario would even end with a German Reich from the Elsace to the Urals, but again, thats speculation.
 
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They would have been infinitely better than OTL. I imagine that effects of this could include:

- No persecution of Christians/suppression of religion. No 'spread of errors' (worldwide communism/eastern bloc/misc. 3rd world strongmen)
- No Cold War
- No state enforced starvation
- No GULAGs/Red Terror
- No Great Purge
- No Cheka/OGPU/NKVD
- Germany still loses WWII
- European colonial empires break up anyway
- Possibly no Red China
- No North Korea
- No Vietnam
- No Pol Pot
- Reduced threat of nuclear annihilation
- Reduced 'Realpolitik'
- Possibly no Iranian revolution
- No NATO/SEATO et al
- Possibly no radical islam in Middle East
- Possibly no War on Terror
 
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10 M, per Timothy Snyder’s count. Let’s be realistic here—if Stalin really killed 1/3 of the USSR’s entire population, there wouldn’t have been enough people to carry guns against the Germans later.

And what Stalin did to the Ukrainians, a White regime would do to Jews and Poles. Especially after the Red movement is crushed, since both of those groups had strong representation in the leftist groups in Muscovy.
You think Whites would make to Poles something worse than Polish Operation of NKVD???

Also, White Russia would not be politically isolated like Red one. France would screw Poles and Czechs without hestitation if there was White Russia around, which would be much more valuable ally for Paris (for France Poland and Czechoslovakia served as ersatz for Russia during interwar period). That means ww2 in OTL shape is impossible.
 

Deleted member 109224

There are no good options, but it's hard to do worse than Stalin.

No Holodomor, no purges, no gulags, and no Lysenkoism is a boon.

Mechanization of agriculture occurred under the NEP no? It was when the Soviet Union wasn't as communist that development occurred. If the kulaks are able to continue to govern their own affairs, odds are some degree of agricultural mechanization and advances in those practices is bound to occur anyway. The USSR also didn't undo the bulk of the Stolypin reforms, so I would expect some continuity in that regard.
 
You think Whites would make to Poles something worse than Polish Operation of NKVD???

Also, White Russia would not be politically isolated like Red one. France would screw Poles and Czechs without hestitation if there was White Russia around, which would be much more valuable ally for Paris (for France Poland and Czechoslovakia served as ersatz for Russia during interwar period). That means ww2 in OTL shape is impossible.

Worse, maybe not. As bad, definitely. If Poland is independent, it is as much an ideological threat and source of disloyalty for Poles under Muscovite rule as IOTL. The same incentives for the Muscovites to exile Poles en masse to Siberia or even just to massacre them as separatists will still exist. It won’t be as centralized as the Polish Operation, but IMO a White Russian victory means a program of unsuppressed violence comparable to the OTL Volhynia and Galicia massacres, just done in the name of Orthodox Slavism rather than the Ukrainian nation.

And if White Russia is not politically isolated and the Entente and Germany give their blessing to a restoration of the 1914 border, the Poles are even worse off, because that brutality will extend all the way to the German border.
 
Worse, maybe not. As bad, definitely. If Poland is independent, it is as much an ideological threat and source of disloyalty for Poles under Muscovite rule as IOTL. The same incentives for the Muscovites to exile Poles en masse to Siberia or even just to massacre them as separatists will still exist. It won’t be as centralized as the Polish Operation, but IMO a White Russian victory means a program of unsuppressed violence comparable to the OTL Volhynia and Galicia massacres, just done in the name of Orthodox Slavism rather than the Ukrainian nation.

And if White Russia is not politically isolated and the Entente and Germany give their blessing to a restoration of the 1914 border, the Poles are even worse off, because that brutality will extend all the way to the German border.
Whites were very diverse bunch and only thing they had in common was the fact, that they were not Reds. After victory in Civil War they'd be way to busybto march to Warsaw, they'll fight various Pinks and Greens for generation, also, not having Ukrainians broken (like they were broken by Stalin during Holodomor) they will have to deal with Ukrainian nationalism, which was on rise and could not be ignored anymore. It may happen, that Poles would end as their partners in keeping Ukrainians down.
 
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