arnoldcabell
Banned
In the summer of 1918, the Kaiser declined proposals to militarily intervene in Russia, but notably did not rule out the possibility of intervention in the "near-mid future": the Germans would not have tolerated the Bolsheviks for long in the event of a victory in the West in 1917/1918.
In the event that the Germans did advance on Petrograd and Moscow following victory, the Bolshevists would have been toppled. After all, the July 1918 SR revolt, the March 1921 Green uprising and the advance of the White Armies had indicated that the Bolshevists were hardly invincible, with or without Lenin and the supposedly "genius" military leadership of Trotsky, especially with the infancy of the Red Army at this stage. The prospect of partisan warfare is hardly realistic: the Bolshevik call to arms in Ukraine in August 1918 against the unpopular Skoropadskyi received hardly any response from the peasantry.
A Skoropadskyi-style government in Petrograd and Moscow would no doubt have been unpopular, and would have to be propped up on German bayonets. But still, in light of the German destruction of the Bolshevist movement, the prospects for a radically leftist government would have definitively ended: Makhno's Black Army was hardly going to wrest Moscow from Germany, and the Bolshevists would literally have had nowhere to go in light of the advancing White Armies. Even if a German-backed regime eventually fails, a right-wing, or even better, a centrist government is going to be far superior to a Bolshevist regime, although that is admittedly not a high bar to clear.
Ironically enough, a post-war German intervention in the civil war would have saved Russia from the Bolshevist calamity.
In the event that the Germans did advance on Petrograd and Moscow following victory, the Bolshevists would have been toppled. After all, the July 1918 SR revolt, the March 1921 Green uprising and the advance of the White Armies had indicated that the Bolshevists were hardly invincible, with or without Lenin and the supposedly "genius" military leadership of Trotsky, especially with the infancy of the Red Army at this stage. The prospect of partisan warfare is hardly realistic: the Bolshevik call to arms in Ukraine in August 1918 against the unpopular Skoropadskyi received hardly any response from the peasantry.
A Skoropadskyi-style government in Petrograd and Moscow would no doubt have been unpopular, and would have to be propped up on German bayonets. But still, in light of the German destruction of the Bolshevist movement, the prospects for a radically leftist government would have definitively ended: Makhno's Black Army was hardly going to wrest Moscow from Germany, and the Bolshevists would literally have had nowhere to go in light of the advancing White Armies. Even if a German-backed regime eventually fails, a right-wing, or even better, a centrist government is going to be far superior to a Bolshevist regime, although that is admittedly not a high bar to clear.
Ironically enough, a post-war German intervention in the civil war would have saved Russia from the Bolshevist calamity.