AHC: Russia has a revolution in a world where the Ottomans never join WW1

The Ottoman Empire joining WW1 was a key part of how the war unfolded. It closed the Black Sea off for Entente shipping at a time when Germany had cut the Baltic off. The inability of Russia to get sufficient supplies would cripple her economy and her armies. The result would be a weak Russian performance and eventually economic collapse and revolution.

If the Ottomans had not joined the war, it is very likely that the straits would never be closed, since such a move would almost certainly pull them into the war. That in turn would mean Russia would perform much better and her economy would not collapse.

I've always been interested in how the Russian Revolution might have unfolded if the Ottomans had been able to intervene in it. However, I can't think of any plausible way to have an interventionist Ottoman Empire exist at the same time as a collapsing Russia.

Such a thing might be possible in a CP victory TL. Most likely, the Ottomans would be focused on trying to survive their own post war exhaustion in such a scenario though, not spending blood and money in Russia.

So how might we get a Russian Revolution in a world where the Ottomans stay out of the war? The only idea I've come up with is perhaps if the US took the side of the CPs.

fasquardon
 
If Russia wins, but not by much, and her economy goes through the same immediate- postwar depression as most of Europe, there still might be the seeds of revolution in there.

I'm not convinced Russia could or would perform much better with open or more or less open trade links; many of her problems were of her own making, many of the things she needed were not particularly plentiful in her co- belligerents anyway (would there really be that much more artillery ammunition, say, to send to Russia than the allies spent trying to blast open the Dardanelles- which turned out to be wildly insufficient?), and you can't ship common sense to the Russian general staff. They either have it or they don't.

If it is a long, bloody stalemate, where the tzarist armies take considerable punishment but the front line breaks in the west, and the Germans lose the war there, it could be seen that they have sweated and bled for nothing but the convenience of the French and the ever perfidious British, and a government already no unsteady foundations might still crumble.
 
One of the advantages of being able to ship directly to the ports in the Black Sea is that Russia's own industry can then turn the raw materials into useable weapons and munitions. Mind you, Russia, as all the powers, did not have an arms industry nearly large enough to sustain her army for a long war.

It does make me wonder though... How close were the Entente to using all the world's nitrate supply? i.e. - was there enough slack in the nitrate supply for the Russian arms industry to crank at full speed at the same time that the British, French, Italian, Belgian and (eventually) American arms industries were also going full tilt?

fasquardon
 
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