A White Russia changes the entire political and diplomatic landscape of Europe. France would still have a powerful ally against Germany in the east and Eastern Europe would not be faced with an expansionist Bolshevik state, consequently the French would not establish the Cordon Sanitaire alliances with Poland and Rumania to contain Russia, remaining instead allied with Russia.
In the first decade of the twentieth century French investors had pumped enormous amounts of money into Tsarist Russia, and this had seen Russia’s economy attain the fastest growth rate in Europe in the years leading up to the First World War. Then during the war the French loaned the Russian government more than US$2.5 Billion. The Bolsheviks refused to repay both the private French investments as well as the massive war loans. They also published secret diplomatic cables that had been sent between the Allies and Tsarist Russia that were highly embarrassing to the allied governments. This permanently soured relations between the two great powers and resulted in hostility and mistrust between them when they later tried to form a united front against Hitler.
A non-Bolshevik Russia would have been intent on remaining integrated to the international economy and diplomatic community. I say non-Bolshevik rather than White Russian because if the Greens had won their civil war against the Reds the result would have been the same; the Green parties drew their inspiration from French Liberalism, saw the value of foreign financial investment and were not intent on exporting a Leninist revolution to the world. So depending on how quickly they won the civil war, a White Russia could possibly have had representation at the Paris Peace Conference, but even failing that they would certainly have been a founding and active member of the League of Nations, strengthening that institution.
A White Russia means no Communist International, at least not one directed from and operating principally to the benefit of Moscow; the fear of the ‘Red Menace’ would be enormously reduced. It was fear of Bolshevik revolutionaries under every bed that gave the various violent reactionary movements (fascist and ultra-nationalist) such an enormous boost.
Another thing to consider; prior to World War One Russia was one of the world’s main wheat exporters. When Turkey closed the Dardanelles Straights, that export was halted, that combined with the destruction and disruption from the World War followed by Civil War devastated Russia’s wheat exports and because Russia was no longer integrated with the global financial system they were unable to attain loans from their former allies to allow for rapid recovery; Russia lost their major position in the world wheat market for decades. The consequence if this was a massive increase in the world price for wheat during World War One and in the 1920s; this saw an enormous increase in wheat farming in the United States, especially in areas that had previously been considered too climactically poor for anything but cattle grazing. Huge areas of grassland in Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska were turned over by ploughs for the first time. When at the start of the Great Depression the price of wheat collapsed, the wheat farmers in these areas responded by increasing production, hoping to make up for the drop in the value of what they were producing by producing more overall; so at the start of the 1930s an enormous area of very marginal grassland had been turned over to wheat production. Then drought struck. The drought combined with terrible agricultural practices saw the topsoil blow away and resulted in a huge region of the American heartland being relabelled ‘The dustbowl’. It is worth considering that with recovering Russian wheat exports in the mid-1920s, the price of wheat would never have reached the heights it did and the demand for American wheat would not have been as great; cattle grazing country would not have been turned over to wheat and the topsoil would not have been consequently destabilised; when drought came there would not have been the devastating dust storms of the 1930s.
Lenin said that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ and in a very real sense he was right.
