Could A White Russia Have Stopped A Militant Germany?

Faeelin,

Tenner's text is erudite but I wonder why he doesn't address different financial sectors that would be huge in capitalist Russia, namely mining, energy (oil, coal, natural gas etc.) and forestry and wood industry. In short, Russia had the best resources for growth exactly in the areas he's forgetting in this piece. And these are resources were well-suited to form a basis for building a strong heavy industry in many other things than mere "railway building", like Soviet industrialisation goes to show. If even a part of the industrial potential of Russia IOTL used for manufacturing weapons for domestic use would be export-oriented (cars, aircraft, farming and industrial machinery, ships, etc.) that would be great for growth.

Also, why not contrast potential Russian growth rates with those areas that were parts of the Russian Empire that went capitalist etc., Finland, the Baltics and Poland for 1918-1940 and Finland since WWII? These nations did considerably better than what is predicted in the text for Russia in terms of GDP growth. Comparing Russia with Finland has many problems, sure, but even if Finland was among the most developed parts of the Empire in 1913, it was still a poor, highly agrarian formerly Russian area that industrialised and reached a Western European level by the 1990s. Let us add that Finnish conditions (being sparsely populated, forested, logistically difficult) are somewhat similar to Russia, with the distinction that Finland has considerably less minerals, metals, coal and oil.
 
White Russia means no militant Germany, arguably a Turkish people who would not be very numerous or ruling any kind of independent state, and a Russia which is larger and which has ties with the democracies from the first. The Soviet Union needed Rapallo to re-arm, White Russia can simply negotiate with the democracies on such terms. Without Rapallo, Germany has to re-arm starting in the late 1930s if the political trends at all resemble OTL *by building up armor in the first place, not already having the equipment and doctrines*.
 
This assumes OTL's war takes place with a more agrarian White Russia instead of an industrialized Red Russia.

OTL's war might be far more limited. Heck, White Russia and "aggressive Germany" might even be allies in a more limited "undo Versailles" war that leads to Poland being dismembered, the Baltics being swallowed, etc.

Without the Nazis, there isn't a lebensraum ideology requiring German invasion of Russia proper.

This assumes that a White Russia would trust Germany one damned bit given they remember it was Germany that propped up the Bolsheviks in the first place and can negotiate with the Allies and potentially even with Poland if they find someone of Machiavellian degrees of canniness. The Whites knew very well that Lenin was a German proxy, this is going to incline them to trust Germany as much as a lamb does a drooling wolf.

Without Nazism, will the "Drang und Ost" (however it's spelled) reach its most insane peak?

A less psychotic Germany might be satisfied with western Poland and some nibbles off the Baltic.

With a Red Russian failure the Whites will see Germany as the big enemy of WWI and the one that stabbed them in the back by propping up the Bolshies as opposed to fighting a fair fight. This will incline them to treat Germany well.....why? :confused:
 
With a Red Russian failure the Whites will see Germany as the big enemy of WWI and the one that stabbed them in the back by propping up the Bolshies as opposed to fighting a fair fight. This will incline them to treat Germany well.....why? :confused:

The Nazis and Soviets hated each other on ideological (and on the Nazis' end, racial) grounds and yet were willing to divide Eastern Europe between them.

By your logic here, Molotov-Ribbentropp would be IMPOSSIBLE!1!1!
 
The Nazis and Soviets hated each other on ideological (and on the Nazis' end, racial) grounds and yet were willing to divide Eastern Europe between them.

By your logic here, Molotov-Ribbentropp would be IMPOSSIBLE!1!1!

The Soviets, however, had reasons to deal with the Germans and expected to get more out of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact than the Germans did. Reality had other plans, however. The key point, though, is that this is the very Soviet regime that the Imperial Germans created. White Russia would be extremely nationalistic and would know what the Germans had been doing against the Tsar in the World War. So why would White Russia 1) avoid its own Dolchstosslegende, and 2) what's its motivation? The Soviets predicted that any war between the democracies and Nazis would be a protracted bloodbath, the Whites would be dealing with the democracies, not with Rathenau.
 
The Nazis and Soviets hated each other on ideological (and on the Nazis' end, racial) grounds and yet were willing to divide Eastern Europe between them.

By your logic here, Molotov-Ribbentropp would be IMPOSSIBLE!1!1!
It was only a temporary division, and as history shown, they were both planning to change the status-quo in Eastern Europe they had created as soon as possible. The strange circumstances that made even this possible may not exist ATL, so assuming some sort of long-term alliance between 2 groups that have every reason to hate each other is a stretch.
 
The Soviets, however, had reasons to deal with the Germans and expected to get more out of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact than the Germans did. Reality had other plans, however. The key point, though, is that this is the very Soviet regime that the Imperial Germans created. White Russia would be extremely nationalistic and would know what the Germans had been doing against the Tsar in the World War. So why would White Russia 1) avoid its own Dolchstosslegende, and 2) what's its motivation? The Soviets predicted that any war between the democracies and Nazis would be a protracted bloodbath, the Whites would be dealing with the democracies, not with Rathenau.

All right.

Say the Whites win the civil war somehow, but are too weak to take or maintain control over Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Bukovina. Germany loses in the West per OTL.

Both parties have the same geopolitical interest in "revising" Eastern Europe as the Nazis and Soviets did in OTL.

If the Allies are hostile toward Russian ambitions in this regard--which they might not be, since without the USSR there's less reason for a "cordon sanitaire"--the Russians might turn toward the Germans, even if they view Lenin's entry into Russia as something equivalent to the "Stab-in-the-Back."
 
All right.

Say the Whites win the civil war somehow, but are too weak to take or maintain control over Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Bukovina. Germany loses in the West per OTL.

Both parties have the same geopolitical interest in "revising" Eastern Europe as the Nazis and Soviets did in OTL.

If the Allies are hostile toward Russian ambitions in this regard--which they might not be, since without the USSR there's less reason for a "cordon sanitaire"--the Russians might turn toward the Germans, even if they view Lenin's entry into Russia as something equivalent to the "Stab-in-the-Back."

They do not have the same interests because White Russia will not be the Soviet Union. It will be either a military dictatorship or some kind of Neo-Tsarist state based on one of Idiot Nicky's surviving relatives, and will most likely attribute Russian defeats not to the incompetence of its generals but due instead to the Germans stabbing Russia in the back from 1915 onward.

There is no reason for White Russia to raise a German army that is weak, there is every reason for them to say "We get the Straits? Gee, thanks. Now we get the Balkans too."
 
I do not find this argument convincing.

This is what the German Dolchstosslegende did with their own Leftists, the Russian version just does so with more of a basis in fact than the German one ever had. Don't underestimate the political need of the Whites to ignore that the Left would have ever had points or real political pull.
 
This is what the German Dolchstosslegende did with their own Leftists, the Russian version just does so with more of a basis in fact than the German one ever had. Don't underestimate the political need of the Whites to ignore that the Left would have ever had points or real political pull.

You're conflating creating a myth to attack internal enemies and setting up an external enemy.

The "Stab-in-the Back" was the Nazi claim that Germany only lost WWI due to internal treachery by left-wingers, Jews, etc., not due to battlefield defeat.

In this case, the White Russians would blame the Bolsheviks (and if they want to be really oppressive, left-wingers in general) for Russia's defeat and the calamities that followed. And as you said, that would be much more truthful than the Nazi version.

Since Germany was Russia's EXTERNAL enemy, claiming this was a "stab in the back" isn't going to work, since the enemy in your face is not going to stab you in the back. The Bolshevik Coup was treachery from a Russian, not an external attack by a German.

And claiming that the Bolsheviks were an entirely Germanic plot isn't a stab-in-the-back myth at all and it would be very difficult to get anyone to believe it in the aftermath of an overt Russian Civil War, as opposed to a suppressed Red coup involving a relatively small number of combatants.

Plus denying significant Russian involvement in favor of blaming the Germans for the whole thing denies the Whites the ability to score propaganda points and/or justify the repression of domestic leftists.
 
You're conflating creating a myth to attack internal enemies and setting up an external enemy.

The "Stab-in-the Back" was the Nazi claim that Germany only lost WWI due to internal treachery by left-wingers, Jews, etc., not due to battlefield defeat.

In this case, the White Russians would blame the Bolsheviks (and if they want to be really oppressive, left-wingers in general) for Russia's defeat and the calamities that followed. And as you said, that would be much more truthful than the Nazi version.

Since Germany was Russia's EXTERNAL enemy, claiming this was a "stab in the back" isn't going to work, since the enemy in your face is not going to stab you in the back. The Bolshevik Coup was treachery from a Russian, not an external attack by a German.

And claiming that the Bolsheviks were an entirely Germanic plot isn't a stab-in-the-back myth at all and it would be very difficult to get anyone to believe it in the aftermath of an overt Russian Civil War, as opposed to a suppressed Red coup involving a relatively small number of combatants.

Plus denying significant Russian involvement in favor of blaming the Germans for the whole thing denies the Whites the ability to score propaganda points and/or justify the repression of domestic leftists.

Well, these are White Russians of the people who wanted to fight Germany and got their asses handed to them by Germany, who would remember very well Germany railroading Lenin into Russia. It's pitifully easy for them to deny that Red Russia ever existed in any serious form, attribute all of it to a German plot and develop a mirror version of the Judaeo-Bolshevik. The Germans did so from things like Leon Trotsky's ethnic background and Liebknecht and Luxemburg, this factor exists magnified in White Russia. To escape their own responsibility for defeat and in refusal to legitimize Leftism as even existing in Russia on its own is rather more typically White Russian than what you describe, they didn't even consider *politics* legitimate in any sense of the word.
 
Tenner's text is erudite but I wonder why he doesn't address different financial sectors that would be huge in capitalist Russia, namely mining, energy (oil, coal, natural gas etc.) and forestry and wood industry.

I think these are important comparisons, but is Russia of today poorer than Mexico? Mexico wasn't communist, is an OPEC member... yet it's no richer, right?

Finland, I suspect, was significantly more literate than Tsarist Russia. Or am I mistaken?

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to pretend that Tsarist Russia has to have done worse. But the Soviets did manage to do a lot right. Not too many states that were on Russia's level in 1914 were launching satellites 50 years later.

If even a part of the industrial potential of Russia IOTL used for manufacturing weapons for domestic use would be export-oriented (cars, aircraft, farming and industrial machinery, ships, etc.) that would be great for growth.

Latin America comes to mind for me again. How many cars does Argentina or Brazil export?

I used to have a book that discussed interwar European growth rates, but I don't seem to have brought it with me to Memphis, alas.
 
I think these are important comparisons, but is Russia of today poorer than Mexico? Mexico wasn't communist, is an OPEC member... yet it's no richer, right?

Finland, I suspect, was significantly more literate than Tsarist Russia. Or am I mistaken?

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to pretend that Tsarist Russia has to have done worse. But the Soviets did manage to do a lot right. Not too many states that were on Russia's level in 1914 were launching satellites 50 years later.

Finland was more literate, true, with virtually whole of the adult population able to read during the last years of Autonomy (not everyone could write, though). For Russia, this figure was circa 55%.

But Russia had more than doubled its literacy in two decades. The growth of literacy and industrialisation are mutually strengthening processes and post-WWI Russia will definitely see both, as well as growing urbanisation. I see no reason why a non-Communist Russia could not reach near-universal literacy by, say, the early 1960s, even if this process is slower than in the USSR.

Assuming this ATL non-Communist Russia is at least as adept in reducing illeteracy as the Tsarist regime was during its last few decades, of course. Even with seriously slower growth in literacy, in this field Russia would have surpassed, say, Mexico's OTL 2005 numbers several decades ago.

And even a 55% literacy (at the beginning) means that with its huge population base, Russia has the demographic resources for industrial expansion in the immediate postwar decades.

If the USSR did some things right, as is quite certain, we also should not expect that a non-Communist Russia could not do the same things or maybe other things that create similar, positive effects. There are some pretty easy examples of Communist states that have done worse than they would have as non-Communist ones. The German Democratic Republic, for one. Or Czechoslovakia. That these were the most affluent countries in the WP camp does not change this.
 
Given how the Bolsheviks successfully passing themselves off as representing the majority of the party when they didn't due to people's ignorance, a White regime might get the notion of "we must educate the people so they don't get taken advantage of by demagogues."

That'd be a realpolitik reason for literacy programs rather than the ideologial ones of the OTL Bolsheviks.

Think Bismarck stealing the Social Democrats' ideas.
 
Well, these are White Russians of the people who wanted to fight Germany and got their asses handed to them by Germany, who would remember very well Germany railroading Lenin into Russia. It's pitifully easy for them to deny that Red Russia ever existed in any serious form, attribute all of it to a German plot and develop a mirror version of the Judaeo-Bolshevik. The Germans did so from things like Leon Trotsky's ethnic background and Liebknecht and Luxemburg, this factor exists magnified in White Russia. To escape their own responsibility for defeat and in refusal to legitimize Leftism as even existing in Russia on its own is rather more typically White Russian than what you describe, they didn't even consider *politics* legitimate in any sense of the word.

Not so pitifully easy if there is a Russian Civil War lasting for months or years.

It's a lot easier to cover up the truth about a failed coup attempt than a regime that held power in significant parts of Russia for an extended period.
 
Without a Communist bogeyman, would socialist movements in Western Europe/the USA be stronger? I am specifically thinking of of the disillusionment of the likes of George Orwell when confronted with the realities of Soviet Communism. Whilst I can imagine a strong backlash against the left within White Russia itself, many of the social drivers of socialist movements in the West would remain (I am assuming the Great Depression is not butterflied away). Weimar Germany itself would seem a realistic candidate for an alternative Communist state.
 
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