Obviously, it was not enough to save the Whites. And it probably made subsequent Soviet relations with the West even worse than they would otherwise have been. However, Churchill argued that the intervention did have at least one positive result: by tying down the Bolshevik forces for two years in fighting the Whites, it forestalled a Soviet attack on the Eastern European nations until the latter had the strength to defend themselves:
"A breathing space of inestimable importance was afforded to the whole line of newly liberated countries which stood along the western borders of Russia...Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and above all Poland, were enabled during 1919 to establish the structure of civilized States and to organize the strength of patriotic armies. By the end of 1920, the 'Sanitary Cordon' which protected Europe from the Bolshevik infection was formed by living national organisms vigorous in themselves, hostile to the disease and immune through experience against its ravages." Churchill, *The Aftermath*, quoted in Ilya Somin, *Stillborn Crusade: The Tragic Failure of Western Intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-1920* (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1996), p. 203.
https://books.google.com/books?id=X7ZHIVhazHUC&pg=PA203
(Of course, if that was the positive accomplishment of intervention, it was reversed--except for Finland--by the results of World War II, but one can argue that this reversal was the result of later mistakes by Western leaders with respect to both Germany and the USSR, and should not be blamed on the statesmen of 1919.)
Somin notes that very few historians have taken Churchill's argument seriously, and that one who has--John M. Thompson in *Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace* (Princeton UP 1966)--has rejected it on the grounds that (1) the Bolsheviks would be unlikely to invade the border states because they had enough problems at home to keep them busy, and (2) if they did, the "Allies would have then intervened actively to stop them, and the line demarcating Bolshevism from Europe would have probably remained at about the place where it was finally delimited in 1921." https://books.google.com/books?id=ukfWCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA397
Somin replies that: (1) internal problems did not prevent the Bolsheviks from making strenuous efforts to gain control of the Russian Empire's borderlands during the Civil War (or in the case of Georgia, post-Civil War) period--the attempt to sovietize Poland in 1920 (at a time when Wrangel had not been finally defeated) being a notable example. (2) "As to Thompson's belief that the Allies would necessarily have intervened in earnest to stop Bolshevik expansion, this is not the impression one gets from their relatively tepid response to the invasion of Poland in 1920. [Of course, as Somin fails to mention, one reason for the "relatively tepid response" is that the Poles had, justifiably or not, attacked first.--DT] In the absence of strong armies deployed by the border states themselves or by the Whites, only a truly massive Allied intervention would have been sufficient to throw the Bolsheviks back. And it is difficult to believe that public opinion in the West would have tolerated a major war on that scale merely for the sake of saving Lithuania, or even Poland. [I am not so sure, at least if it were a case of clear-cut unprovoked aggression against Poland.--DT] In any case, intervention in Russia clearly allowed these countries to be saved at much lower cost to the West than would otherwise have been the case." Somin, p. 204.
FWIW, William H. Chamberlain also endorses Churchill's argument:
"Had there been no intervention, had Allied aid to the Whites stopped after the end of the [First World] War, the Russian civil war would almost certainly have ended much more quickly in a decisive victory of the Soviets. There a triumphant revolutionary Russia would have faced a Europe that was fairly quivering with social unrest and upheaval.
"It is quite impossible, of course, to say with certainty what might have happened in such a case. But there were several episodes in the civil war when Bolshevik progress to the West was directly hampered by the temporary military successes of the Whites. When Kolchak made his thrust toward the Volga in the spring of 1919 he unconsciously sealed the doom of the Soviet Republics which had been set up in the Baltic States. When Denikin's Cossack cavalry pierced the Red lines in May and June, 1919, they put an end to revolutionary dreams of moving westward into Bessarabia, with a view to linking up with Soviet Hungary. The issue of the battle before Warsaw in August, 1920, might have been different if the large forces which were concentrated against Wrangel had been available on the Polish front. So, while intervention did not overthrow the Soviet Government, it did, in all probability, push the frontier of Bolshevism considerably farther to the East..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=DPj_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA171
Any thoughts about this argument?
"A breathing space of inestimable importance was afforded to the whole line of newly liberated countries which stood along the western borders of Russia...Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and above all Poland, were enabled during 1919 to establish the structure of civilized States and to organize the strength of patriotic armies. By the end of 1920, the 'Sanitary Cordon' which protected Europe from the Bolshevik infection was formed by living national organisms vigorous in themselves, hostile to the disease and immune through experience against its ravages." Churchill, *The Aftermath*, quoted in Ilya Somin, *Stillborn Crusade: The Tragic Failure of Western Intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-1920* (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1996), p. 203.
https://books.google.com/books?id=X7ZHIVhazHUC&pg=PA203
(Of course, if that was the positive accomplishment of intervention, it was reversed--except for Finland--by the results of World War II, but one can argue that this reversal was the result of later mistakes by Western leaders with respect to both Germany and the USSR, and should not be blamed on the statesmen of 1919.)
Somin notes that very few historians have taken Churchill's argument seriously, and that one who has--John M. Thompson in *Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace* (Princeton UP 1966)--has rejected it on the grounds that (1) the Bolsheviks would be unlikely to invade the border states because they had enough problems at home to keep them busy, and (2) if they did, the "Allies would have then intervened actively to stop them, and the line demarcating Bolshevism from Europe would have probably remained at about the place where it was finally delimited in 1921." https://books.google.com/books?id=ukfWCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA397
Somin replies that: (1) internal problems did not prevent the Bolsheviks from making strenuous efforts to gain control of the Russian Empire's borderlands during the Civil War (or in the case of Georgia, post-Civil War) period--the attempt to sovietize Poland in 1920 (at a time when Wrangel had not been finally defeated) being a notable example. (2) "As to Thompson's belief that the Allies would necessarily have intervened in earnest to stop Bolshevik expansion, this is not the impression one gets from their relatively tepid response to the invasion of Poland in 1920. [Of course, as Somin fails to mention, one reason for the "relatively tepid response" is that the Poles had, justifiably or not, attacked first.--DT] In the absence of strong armies deployed by the border states themselves or by the Whites, only a truly massive Allied intervention would have been sufficient to throw the Bolsheviks back. And it is difficult to believe that public opinion in the West would have tolerated a major war on that scale merely for the sake of saving Lithuania, or even Poland. [I am not so sure, at least if it were a case of clear-cut unprovoked aggression against Poland.--DT] In any case, intervention in Russia clearly allowed these countries to be saved at much lower cost to the West than would otherwise have been the case." Somin, p. 204.
FWIW, William H. Chamberlain also endorses Churchill's argument:
"Had there been no intervention, had Allied aid to the Whites stopped after the end of the [First World] War, the Russian civil war would almost certainly have ended much more quickly in a decisive victory of the Soviets. There a triumphant revolutionary Russia would have faced a Europe that was fairly quivering with social unrest and upheaval.
"It is quite impossible, of course, to say with certainty what might have happened in such a case. But there were several episodes in the civil war when Bolshevik progress to the West was directly hampered by the temporary military successes of the Whites. When Kolchak made his thrust toward the Volga in the spring of 1919 he unconsciously sealed the doom of the Soviet Republics which had been set up in the Baltic States. When Denikin's Cossack cavalry pierced the Red lines in May and June, 1919, they put an end to revolutionary dreams of moving westward into Bessarabia, with a view to linking up with Soviet Hungary. The issue of the battle before Warsaw in August, 1920, might have been different if the large forces which were concentrated against Wrangel had been available on the Polish front. So, while intervention did not overthrow the Soviet Government, it did, in all probability, push the frontier of Bolshevism considerably farther to the East..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=DPj_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA171
Any thoughts about this argument?